MAVERICK MARINE:
General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History

Hans Schmidt

University Press of Kentucky, 1987, Naval Institute Press Edition. F/F, as new. Dust jacket in mylar protector. Photographs, extensive notes, index, 292 pp. "[Two-time Medal of Honor winner] Smedley Butler won renown as a Marine battlefield hero, campaigning in most of America's foreign military expeditions from 1898 onward: Cuba, the Philippines, China, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France (AEF), and finally China again in the late 1920s. Butler also achieved fame for taking charge of Philadelphia's city police in a notable push for militarization in the 1920s, and he was the leading national advocate for paramilitary police reform analogous to Marine pacification in the Caribbean & Central America. In some of the boldest peacetime military intrusions ever into domestic American life, he launched annual Marine expeditionary maneuvers from Quantico into surrounding states, culminating in football games & popular on-site Civil War battle reenactments. Butler's post-military career is as fascinating as his military. After a rescinded court-martial and premature retirement in 1931, he dramatically renounced war & imperialism, thereafter devoting his considerable energies & prestige to various dissident & leftist political causes, such as the WWI veterans' Bonus Expeditionary Force & labor union insurgency. He was a major spokesman for the League Against War and Fascism, and the most prominent leader of the veterans' antiwar movement of the 1930s... This is the story of a fascinating individual whose life & career epitomize the contradictory nature of American military policy through the first third of this century." Hardcover Out of Print.

$55.00