Instead, the United States essentially made Cuba a protectorate, insisting on the inclusion of the “Platt Amendment” in Cuba’s constitution. Nevertheless, the authorization for war from Congress prohibited the United States from acquiring the territory outright (as the country would do to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands). The country’s poet-martyr José Martí, who was killed in combat in 1895, had foreseen such impositions, asking, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive it out?” President McKinley, who had tried to purchase Cuba from Spain in 1897, interpreted “stability” in Cuba to mean that property relations would stay largely intact. intervention was soon directed at curtailing the social changes for which Cubans had been fighting along with their independence. For propaganda purposes, the United States attributed victory to its own troops, and ignored the much longer struggle of Cubans for their own independence. Army’s short campaign of ground combat was already essentially over, and Spain was forced to relinquish its claims to Cuba. When Butler landed in Cuba, he arrived at Guantánamo Bay. Together, they show the force of Butler’s critique, and some of its limitations. Sometimes they reveal how dramatically the world has changed. Sometimes Katz’s visits to Butler’s grounds reveal the ways in which empire has hardly relaxed its grasp. In Gangsters of Capitalism, Katz follows Butler through the archives and on foot, retracing Butler’s path across the globe: from Cuba to the Philippines, to Nicaragua, to Haiti. Katz’s engaging new book is an opportunity to correct for the omission. If you missed your youthful window for Butleriana-either by not being a member of the Marine Corps or by not devoting a shelf in your dorm room to the collected works of Chomsky-Jonathan M. Famous in his day, the subject of fiction and film, he retired with two Medals of Honor and a greater number of nicknames-Old Gimlet Eye, the Leatherneck’s Friend, the Fighting Quaker-that testified to his place in the culture. His military career would take him from Cuba to China to Central America, where he became a legend in the Marine Corps, representing martial valor and virtue. When he read of the explosion of the USS Maine in the Havana harbor in 1898-which the “yellow journalism” of the era painted as a Spanish attack-he decided to enlist in the Marines. “I clenched my fists when I thought of those poor Cuban devils being starved and murdered by the beastly Spanish tyrants,” he wrote later. In spite of the Quaker tradition of pacifism, Butler believed in the mission. The United States promised it was entering the fight to free the remaining Spanish overseas colonies from tyranny. He was 16 years old when the Spanish-American War broke out. Both were prominent families, but the young Butler would not pursue a career in politics. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, 1987.The name reflects Butler’s Pennsylvania Quaker heritage-his father, Thomas Butler, was a congressman in the seat once held by his wife’s father, Smedley Darlington. Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. After premature retirement from the Marines as a major general in 1931, he renounced war and imperialism, becoming the most prominent leader of the formidable veterans' antiwar movement during the isolationist era of the mid‐ and late 1930s. Winner of two Congressional Medals of Honor, “Old Gimlet‐Eye,” as he was called, promoted a warrior‐style Marine Corps mystique of physical stridency and anti‐intellectual egalitarianism, contrary to contemporary trends toward elitist, bookish professionalism.ĭrawing upon his experience organizing colonial constabularies, Butler attempted to militarize Philadelphia's police force as its director (1924–25) during the Prohibition era, and became a leading proponent of national paramilitary police reform in the late twenties and early thirties. The campaigned in expeditions and military occupations from 1898 onward, spanning the transition from colonial punitive warfare to mediatory peacekeeping: Cuba, the Philippines (1899, 1905–07), China (1900), Honduras (1903), Panama (1903, 1909–14), Nicaragua (1910–12), Mexico (1914), Haiti (1915–18), France (1917–18), and finally China again as commander of the Marine peacekeeping force (1927–29). Butler, Smedley (1881–1940), Marine officer, antiwar crusader.Born into an old Pennsylvania Quaker family, Butler nevertheless joined the Marines as a lieutenant when the Spanish‐American War broke out in 1898.
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