Ep 4 – All Smedleys Considered

Alex and Ben have done their best to be fair and objective in their exploration of the coup, but one Marine objects. In this week’s episode, Smedley Butler (played by Joe Kinosian) takes the mic to tell the story from his perspective. Looking back on his career as a hard-nosed death-dealer for Big Business, Smedley wonders: What led him to this point? Where will he go next?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is an I Heeart original. I'm Ben Bullin and
I'm Alex French to bring you the story. We've done
all the research, read the book. Wait, wait, Alex, we
have to do the ads first, Smedley, you ready, I
guess three two one. Today's show is brought to you
by Dinner in a Box, you know, Alex and Bend.

(00:32):
During my illustrious military career, a hunk of hard attack
and cold cairn of Beanie Wheenie was about as gourmet
as we got on the front lines. Now that I'm retired,
I find myself hankering for elevated fair I can prepare
in the convenience of my own kitchen, delicious dishes like

(00:53):
chicken tinga tacos curry spiced chick peoples. I can't do this?
Who writes this? No? No, it was great. Let's try
it again, maybe a little slower, you know, really mel
that curry? Yeah? Your two are really trying me today.
What's got you so angry? Major General Butler? I'm just

(01:15):
so sick of this this show and you two for
three episodes. You've gotten everything about me wrong. You're calling
me corrupt. They're all corrupt. Let me tell you about
your precious FDR. His grandpa Delano made a fortune selling
opium in China. FDR is the most meschant marker out there.
And all I want to do right now is walk
across this recording studio and stick my size seven right

(01:37):
up your ass. I mean thirteen thirteen. It looks like
a seven. It's a wide seven though. Come here, let's
tick a few deep breaths, sir big inhale exhale yea good. Okay, Now,
please don't quit. We genuinely want to hear about what
you think we're doing wrong, and we can talk about
it for the entirety of the episode if you'd like.

(01:57):
Please Okay, I guess, But first, can you please finish
reading the ads? There's more? Yeah, but then we can
start the show, I promise. What the fuck is a
tinger anyway? All right? Is the engineer ready? We're rolling? Oh? Actually, yeah,
I like this one, not just saying that. Okay, here

(02:18):
we go. During my career in the United States Marine Corps,
I sometimes went weeks at a time without a bath.
That's why now, after a long day of making the
world safe for capitalism, there's no greater reward than a
long soak in a scalding hot bath. Ethel puts some
shard on the victrola. I light some candles and switch

(02:40):
off the lights. I close my eyes and immediately can
feel my problems melting away. The tub is my sanctuary
and the ultimate ingredient for a truly decadent soak is
bath in a bubbles sumptuous coconut cream bubble bath rub
a dub dub, maggots. This is not a side of
you we expected to see, Smithley. Oh what can I say?

(03:03):
I do my best thinking in the bathtub, just like
Angie Landsberry, God rest or soul. Tell us about a
heavy decision you made while enjoying a soak. We're trying
to pump me for intel at a vulnerable time. Well,
we do still have a show to produce, all right,
You really want to know? It was thirty three, Yes,

(03:23):
nineteen thirty three. You've been talking about it all season.
The shadowy cabal of filthy rich bankers and industrialist approached
me about season control of the US government. They offered money, power,
an opportunity to lead again. These tycoons come to me
on American soil and ask me to take control. Figuring
out what to do required care and thought. I sat

(03:44):
in that decision for a very long time. Well that
was a two bath bomb night, if ever there was one.
Where did you even begin by imagining what America might
look like if those cockroachers got their way. What they
wanted was to put in place a system benefiting a
precious view at great cost to the little guy. I
could see that spiraling out of control, armed malicious patrol,

(04:07):
the countryside, Jews being rounded up and forced into ghettos,
organized purges, kangaroo courts, the death of descent, tyranny. And
then I thought back on my life, all of those
years in China, in Central America and the Caribbean, terrorizing natives,
watching my marines die face down in the mud. Also,
some fat cats can get fatter. I thought about my grandchildren.

(04:29):
How would they see me? I considered my place in history. Yes,
my ego is just that wide as wide is my
super wide sized sevens. I think about legacy. But answering
that question boiled down to another more difficult question. What
kind of man do I want to be? Hold on,
Hold on, stop, stop, Smedley. This is all well and good, dude,

(04:54):
but you spent the entirety of your career as a
died in the wool imperialist. You held the Haitian Assembly
at gunpoint and forced their citizens into slavery. You enforced
apartheid in Animal for Pete's sake. You know that is
absolutely true, jack hole, And that's not the half of it.
I did the same shit in Mexico, ad Nicaragua and

(05:14):
the Dominican Republic. The people who suffered most were the
common folks. I knew this decades, decades before I hung
up my spurs. I kept going along with it all anyway.
I don't dispute that any of it. I don't dispute
that if there is a Hell, I'm probably headed there
for an eternity of chicken tinga tacos or whatever the
Dinner in a Box is trying to sell. I'm just

(05:35):
trying to tell you there's more to me. You're focusing
on the wrong thing. Okay, explain, please, Okay. So I
understand your fixation on Haiti, sure on the things I
did while wearing the uniform, and what all of that
might reveal about me. What I'm asking you to consider
is my second act in life, the perspective I earn
I want you to talk about the man I became.

(05:58):
You want to know the full picture of me and
all my mysterious forgotten glory. We gotta get a little deeper. Kids,
join me in the tub. Well Scooch over Smedles. Let's
start the episode from my heart, Originals and School of Humans.
This is let's start a coup. I'm Ben Bolden and
I'm Alex French to bring you this story. We've done

(06:20):
all the research, read the books, interviewed historians, but still
there are some big gaps in the historical record and
we'll never know exactly what happened. So in those gaps,
we've had some fun. This is episode four. All Smedley
is considered. Let's think back to episode two and what

(06:46):
we learned about our dear Major General Smedley Butler. He
was in Haiti dissolving an independent country's national assembly at gunpoint.
He forced the country to adopt a new constitution, enslaved
thousands of Haitian peasants, sent them to this again. What
did we just discuss? Yeah, focusing on what you're about

(07:07):
to do, not what you did. But what you did
isn't something we're just gonna forget. I get it. I
did bad things. But fast forward a little bit. The
Great War. Okay, fine, we're talking long before the Great
Depression and all this coup business. When Smedley was a
younger man. The war to end all wars, I call

(07:29):
it the show World War One. Remember. After three years
of brutal fighting in Europe, the US finally officially entered
the free in nineteen seventeen when Uncle Sam declared war
on Germany and what the Kaiser called no one fact
checked me here, a real dick move. Around five million

(07:51):
American civilians were gold to military service, but Smedley never
made it back to the trenches. He arrived just a
few months before the war ended and ranked campont Tennyson
in France, where his staff nurse meant through constant outbreaks
of the flu and spinal meningitis. He managed sixteen kitchens,
each capable of feeding five thousand men at a time.

(08:12):
He secured, by any means necessary, that supplies his guys needed.
And to be clear, this was one of those by
any means situations. Scores of men missing limbs, badly burned
and blinded from chemical weapons, suffering the invisible wounds of
psychological trauma, with all the rain and the muck and
the deaths surrounding American forces. This is the place where

(08:34):
Butler secured, at least in part, the reputation for caring
deeply about the rank and file. Gather round, troops. I
know you're hurting, but I've got something you're gonna love.
A bootleg copy of some French poetry. And from the
looks of it, it is trey Franz Saiyah. I thought

(08:54):
you'd like that. He identified his service in the Great
Wars one of the most trying periods of his life,
and the years after the war ended were difficult ones
for the country were fatigued by the war. They were
beaten down by the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. The United
States was a deeply fractured, horrifically violent place. There were

(09:15):
race riots, white mobs even attacked black veterans returning from Europe. Yeah.
In the nineteen twenty presidential election, American voters overwhelmingly rejected
Woodrow Wilson's internationalist approach in favor of an America First
isolationism pitched to them by Warren Harding and his running

(09:36):
mate Calvin Coolidge. To be clear, America First was one
of their campaign slogans, does that sound familiar? America? Pandemic fatigue,
the rise of nativism and white supremacy, totally unprecedented. There's
never ever been a period in American history like the
nineteen twenties, and never will be ever again. I guarantee it.

(09:58):
You should be grateful and neither of you will ever
have to live through anything like it. M I'm not
even going there. Yeah, it's better that you don't anyway.
Harding's isolationist approach to foreign policy meant that Smedley, after
twenty plus years of invading foreign lands, suddenly found himself

(10:20):
on the bench. At the same time, the city of
Philadelphia was in a state of total lawlessness, overrun by
organized crime, illegal liquor, and banitry. So Smedley was brought
in at the new Director of Public Safety. You put
down that Chase steak, you can hurt somebody with that thing.
Smedley brought the same counterinsurgency philosophy to Philly that he

(10:42):
deployed in places like Haiti. Prohibition had gone largely ignored
in Philadelphia, so Smedley's drive to clean up the streets
started with saloons. His cops raided and shuddered eighty percent
of the city's booze joints in just forty eight hours.
I'm the biggest success in Philadelphia since let's see, Rocky

(11:04):
doesn't come out till seventy six, Since Benjamin Franklin. Yeah,
let's go with him. The success was deceptive, though, because
the places Butler shutdown reopened twenty four hours later, or
they just disappeared further underground. My plan to transform the
city was brilliant. I wanted to set up armed guard
stations at points of entrance into the city. Nothing says

(11:26):
welcome to brotherly loves Bill like you know that. I
designed new uniforms from my officers, and mine had a cape.
You guys picture it, scarlet lining so cool? But cool
or not? Smedley's impact on crime in Philadelphia was overall

(11:46):
pretty marginal. Yeah. I blame it on the political machine
that runs the city, specifically the shady congressman named Boss Vair.
And let me tell you that guy makes everyone a Vair,
that he's the boss if you understand word play, which
I doubt. And the click that the politicians were most
intent on protecting was the city. He's nauseating elite. Oh

(12:09):
those were hurry Jays Philadelphia in the mid nineteen twenties.
We all used to hang around in hotel lobbies competing
for who did the best of Lionel Barrymore impression. Oh
your multa crook la doesn't sound like Lionel Barrymore at all. Well,
I guess we know why I didn't twin. Then Oh hey, Alex,
look it's Lucious and Beauregard, our favorite plutocrats from earlier.

(12:31):
We were having such a nice time until Smedley showed
up to take all of our booz boos. Once he
got against the rich, we're fun, we got cocaine, we
do the Charleston. Eventually Smedley rated posh who tells like
the Ritz, just doing his job, but he pissed off
the wrong people, which is to say, some of the
city's wealthiest boozehounds. He was let go. Well he deserved it.

(12:53):
Fun police and like you know, actual police. I'll never
forget the raid on the Ritz. I was halfway through
doing the Varsity drag with legs Diamond when the music stopped. Yes, devastating.
Down on the heels, up on the tooth, You're under
I rashed. That's how it goes, day Spedley, that was fun, man,

(13:14):
Thank you disagree anyway, when they fired me, I went
back to the Marine Corps. Soon they shipped me off
to Shanghai. Chen Kai Sek's nationalist forces were purging communists
or anybody who had even a hint of radical sympathy,
and he was doing it with a level of barbarity

(13:35):
that was hard to fathom. I remember Chang Kai Shek
put together a murder squad to purgeing neighborhood in Shanghai.
Chang's forces did what they said they were gonna do.
They killed and killed. They killed women with bobbed hair
and unbound feet because those were signs of radicalization. Hung
them from the city gates as a warning. They murdered

(13:59):
children too. I just let it happen. Spent that day
inspecting new campsites from my guys, because well, what business
was it of ours? But it was a horrible thing
to witness. Was this some kind of turning point for you?
Let's just say that for years I'd been having misgivings,
doubts about what we were doing. Started around nineteen twelve

(14:21):
or so, and they hit me like the spicy bite
of dinner in a box's chicken hall opinion. God damn it,
don't hand me add copy while I'm pouring my heart out. Nah. Sorry, Yeah,
I struggled mightily with our decision to stand aside in Shanghai.
Standing aside signaled that we approved of the killing. And
when he was done in Shanghai, Chang took that brand

(14:42):
of slaughter all over the country. The truly fucked up
thing about the scenario. If you had any kind of
sense about you, you knew that the Western powers who
carved up China for profit, had everything to do with
what was happening and to make matters worse around that time.
And then what was that I said around that time?

(15:04):
I did? Did you say you're dead? Died? Oh h yeah,
since you brought it up, Yes, Pops died while I
was still in China. But it's fine. Is it really fine?

(15:25):
Because you know you can talk about it. Well, yes, basically,
Pops was chairman of the House Naval Offish Committee, so
you know she only made me the man. I became
no big deal. Every time I came home from a deployment,
there was always a huge parade with a marine Corps
band and a big old speech from the Secretary of
the Navy. He made that happen. Ah, he was so proud.

(15:50):
But it's fine. What's next, Smedley? Man, I'm sorry? Is
it time for another ad any mattresses we got to promote?
Or still with the food? It sounds like you want
to move on? Smedley, Well, what was your first clue? Genius?
My obvious discomfort? God damn, these labs always with the feelings.
The episode's already running over. Let's move it along. Smedley's

(16:13):
return to the State's roughly coincided with his promotion to
major general, making him one of the highest ranking officers
in the Corps and, at the tender age of forty eight,
the youngest major general in the entire US military. The
promotion also should have put him next in line to
be commandant of the Marine Corps, but the Butlers were broke,

(16:35):
so to supplement the family income, Smedley decided to try
his hand at punditry. He wrote magazine and newspaper stories
about his adventures overseas, and he hit the Speaker's circuit
during his weekend leaves. Is this on? Whoa guess? So
he gave talks all over about his exploits, making the

(16:57):
world safe for American business, what he saw in Haiti
in the Philippines. Here's our pal, Smedley Butler biographer Jonathan Katz.
He doesn't realize the disc connect between what he's been doing,
what he's actually been doing, and what Americans know about
what he's been doing. They know this sort of media package. First,
the terrorists, you know, the Boxer bandits and the Nicaraguan

(17:19):
bandits and the Haitian bandits, the dastardly cocos of Haiti
are you know, threatening American lives, threatening American women. You know,
they're doing all these horrible things, and the Marines are
going to save us. And Butler knows that that's not
really what's going on. In December of nineteen twenty nine,
he got up before a crowd of seven hundred in
the ballroom of the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

(17:42):
The story they heard that night was, let's just say,
not what they expected. Hi, folks, thanks for having me.
You know, parking around here is really crazy. How about
those bridges, because Pittsburgh's got a whole lot of bridgish

(18:04):
going on. Yeah, this guy knows what I'm talking about. Okay,
So yeah, how's this? I'll tell you about Nicaragua. My
Marines and I supervised a mighty fine election back there
in nineteen twelve. The fellow we had in power there
nobody liked, but he was useful, so Uncle Sam wanted

(18:26):
to keep him. We just didn't know how to keep him.
So here's what we did. All of the other candidates
were fellows we didn't like so much, so we labeled
them as banditos. And then we kept the polls open
us long enough for a few hundred voters handpicked by us,
of course, to make sure that the election came up
the way we wanted it to. Mission accomplished. Baby, Oh

(18:49):
you like that one. Let me tell you about this
one time in Haiti. Okay, they say, what happens at
the National Assembly ought to stay at the National Assembly.
But since it's trust us and his audiences are just
like floored, they're like, what, like, what what are you
talking about? We did what? Wait, you all didn't know

(19:10):
America was doing this, but you do know it's a
two drink minimum, right, So like, the more incredulous the
audiences are, the more outspoken, he gets and he kind
of like he really sort of becomes like an early
thirties version of honestly, like I would just describe him
as a troll. To be clear, Smedley didn't do stand

(19:31):
up that you know of, but his comments that night
in Pittsburgh got him in some serious hot water. Soon after,
a newspaper in Reading, Pennsylvania quoted him calling American involvement
in the Caribbean hypocritical and oppressive, a policy imposed by
force and fraud. The Hoover administration is pissed. What the

(19:52):
actual Smedley? Yeah, this isn't the sort of information they
want out in the world. So the Secretary of the
Navy choose Butler route, and for the next few months,
during his speaking engagements, Smedley does his best to play nice,
Hi folks, Fine, whatever, America's flawless. We're not doing anything wrong,

(20:12):
no charife. Oh, I need a bath. But then the
sitting commandant of the Marine Corps died and it really
seemed like it should have been Smedley's turn to be
the boss. He had the support of a bunch of
DC heavyweights, but for some reason, they picked this Naval
Academy guy who never had dirt under his fingernails, much
less blood on his uniform. Train you imagine a uniform

(20:34):
with no blood like what? Getting passed over for the
role of commandant only served to become angry and bitter
and more willing to say whatever he wanted. Oh my god,
did you see what Clara Bow wore to the Fourth
Academy Awards. Clara, you may be the itch girl, but girl,
that ain't it? Anyway? Back to America's fucked up tactics? Yeah,

(21:00):
how's that for a transition. Smedley bided his time as
commander at Quantico, the largest Marine Corps base of the day.
Remember he was still a young man, not even fifty.
Yet he plotted his retirement, planned his future. How many
more years till they built Disneyland? Twenty five? Oh, I

(21:21):
guess I'll have to write a book or something. And
he did a memoir called Old Gimlet Eye. Then he
hit the road and made more speeches too. Yet he
did well financially too. But it must have stung. I mean,
if you'd have told him just a few years earlier
that he'd never be Marine Corps commandant, history may well
have spun in a different direction. After the break, Major

(21:44):
General Butler reaches a turning point, and this lauded hero
of the system becomes an existential threat to the powers
that created him. In the beginning of nineteen thirty one,

(22:07):
Mussolini is one of the most respected leaders in the world.
A second renaissance seemed to be afoot in Italy. I'll
duj gave fascism a good name. Both Presidents Hoover and
Roosevelt expressed their approval of Mussolini's regime, So did dozens
of American newspapers and magazines. They were basically saying, what

(22:29):
isn't there to love about Mussolini? The guy gets stuff done,
created a social safety net, called for a disarmament conference.
At that very moment, Smedley hits the stage at the
Philadelphia Contemporary Club and tells the story. Okay, who wants
to hear one about Mussolini? I know, right, okay, okay, okay. Sure,

(22:50):
he's all the rage of these days, and it's like
impossible to find any of his countrymen who disagree, except
for maybe, you know, the eight year old child he
ran over. H that was a weird reaction. He's sure,
you guys swear to dog. A friend told me about this,
and you tell me if you're such a fan of

(23:12):
Mussolinguini after you hear this. Okay, okay. So he was
driving through the Italian countryside and his fancy Fiat and
just plows over this child in the street, and then
apparently all right afterward, turns to his buddy in the
passenger seat and it's like, oh, hey, what's one life
compared to affairs of a state? I mean, yeah, so

(23:36):
I knew who. That's my Mussolini story. Awkward ending note.
I guess night, folks, what Smedley's describing actually happened. Mussolini's
actually accused of running over a child in the Italian countryside.
Smedley's source about the hit and run was Cornelius Vanderbilt Junior,
as in the Vanderbilts. The Italian Foreign Office conceded that

(23:59):
Vanderbilt and Mussolini spent time together in nineteen twenty six,
but insisted that no such car ride ever took place,
even though in two later books Vanderbilt confirmed the story.
Smedley told that story to a crowd of the Philadelphia
Contemporary Club in nineteen thirty one, and word got back
to the big bosses, the Secretary of the Navy, the president.

(24:23):
This went over like a lead balloon. Here's Jonathan Katz.
Butler's saying, like, you can't trust this guy. This is
a guy who will run over a child and not care, Like,
do not trust him. Do not trust Hitler. Do not
trust these fascists. It doesn't matter what they say, doesn't
matter what deals they make with you, which, by the way,
was really good advice. So you know, he's like, you know,

(24:45):
he's speaking the truth, but he's doing it out of turn.
The Italian government protested, calling the anecdote insolent, ridiculous. Il
Duce issued a denial. Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State, Henry Stimpson,
issued a formal apology to Mussolini. Anytime you're in any
kind of bureaucracy, the worst thing that you can do,
in terms of maintaining your place in the bureaucracy is

(25:07):
to make your boss's job like ten percent harder. Right.
That was what he was doing. He was making their
jobs just like a little bit harder. And they didn't
like that, and so they don't like, get the hell
out of here. You're done, those motherfuckers. Hoover and Stimpson
ordered up a court martial and put me under a
house arrest. I was running the joint and then all
of a sudden, I'm in the joint, alert the papers
to this injustice, and while you're at it, mailed me

(25:30):
some cross words. A huge public breuhaha ensued. It was
all over the papers, and it seemed like most of
America took Smedley side. One paper called him a quote blunt,
outspoken devil dog, the ace of our marines, but the
Hoover administration wanted Smedley punished severely. Hoover and I had

(25:53):
a history. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion
and immediately proved himself to be a chicken shit coward.
You say coward, I say, yeah, I guess cowards the
right word, but I'm still alive, thought. Smedley never faced
his court martial, and he also never apologized to Mussolini,

(26:14):
but the incident did result in Smedley retiring from the
Marine Corps at the age of fifty. Try to imagine
Alex how he must have felt on the day of
his retirement. For Smedley, being a marine wasn't just a job,
It was his identity. He'd been at it since he
was a kid. Imagine the sting of knowing that's all
over with. Imagine the bitterness you'd feel towards the people

(26:37):
who took it all away from you, the uncertainty and purposelessness.
You know, I'm still here, right And it brought back
some old questions about what he'd done abroad, what it
all meant, and what he was really doing for decades
that no at all historian cats can tell you about this,
since apparently he went through my mail. Take it away,

(27:01):
your vulture. I think that I've read at least as
many of Butler's letters anyone has ever read, and you know,
I never found one letter where he was like, this
is it today? I change everything. I'm no longer. I'm
no longer Smedley Butler the Marie and I'm now Smedley
Butler the anti war critic. But you see pieces of this,

(27:22):
you know, come into place over the course of his life,
Even as far back as his time in Nicaragua. Smedley
wrote a letter to his parents in which he grappled
with what he was being asked to do. He wrote,
the blood will be on our hands. The people who
are going to suffer from what we're doing here are

(27:43):
going to be the poor of Nicaragua, and we're going
to ultimately bear the responsibility for it. He's having doubts.
They're not doubts strong enough to keep him from doing
the things that he's doing, but he's having doubts about it.
And of course retirement gave Smedley all kinds of time
to really examine his life's work. One of the things
that I think really influences him is he goes through

(28:06):
some strong goals in his time. He has what I
would definitely describe as PTSD, and he's also experiencing what
is now known as moral injury, essentially the condition of
having done something or witnessed something, or feeling like you
were in a position to have influenced something that violates
your moral code, your core being. CATS in some very

(28:29):
important ways identifies with Smedley and with this concept of
the moral injury. The reason why I sort of into
it at a certain level. The way that these things
are connected is because I've experienced it to a certain
extent in my own life. I was a foreign correspondent.
I covered the second into Fata, I covered a lot

(28:51):
of civil unrest, I survived a lot of natural disasters,
especially at the earthquake in Haiti in twenty ten. You know,
I have PTSD. I can understand that there are sort
of subtle ways in which going through something traumatic, going
through something that's really really real, just you know, it

(29:14):
kind of heightens your bullshit detector and it lowers your
your tolerance for bullshit. I see that in Butler. He's
he's struggling with this. He's he's going and he's killing people,
and he's and his friends are dying, and his friends
are you know, turning to alcoholism and you know, dying
young and dying on the battlefield. He's getting shot and

(29:35):
he's and he's just asking himself, what is this for?
Why am I doing this to these other people? Why
am I doing this to myself? And he starts asking
himself like really, you know, I think hard questions about it.
And Butler works through these difficult questions on a nightly
basis on stage as he's talking to pack to VFW halls,
he works with them, writing his magazine and newspaper articles.

(29:56):
He's transformed from being a man who went dutifully along
to a voice of opposition who starts asking hard questions
about imperialism, war in gangster as the early nineteen thirties
turned into the mid nineteen thirties. Smedley takes a long,
hard look back on his career. During his time in Philadelphia,

(30:18):
he went head to head with bootleggers and loan sharks,
actual associates of al Capone, and Smedley began to see
troubling similarities between his assignments abroad and the way criminals
like Capone conducted their businesses at home, and in nineteen
thirty five we got to hear it all in his
own words, the zappoly named pamphlet wore as a racket.

(30:41):
This is what he wrote, with only some small trims
for clarity. I spent thirty three years and four months
as a member of the Marine Corps, and during that
period I spent most of my time being a high
class muscleman for big business, for Wall Street and for
the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

(31:03):
I suspected I was just part of a racket at
the time, how I am sure of it. Like all
members of the profession, I never had an original thought
until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in
suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher ups.
Thus I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests.

(31:24):
I helped make Haitian Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues. I helped in
the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for
the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for
the international banking house of Brown Brothers. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped
make Honduras right for American fruit companies in China. I

(31:46):
helped see to it that standard oil went its way unmolested.
Looking back on it, I feel I might have given
al Capone a few hints. The best he could do
was to operate his racquet in three city districts. We
marines operated on three continents. So, Smedley, what you're seeing

(32:07):
is you're not going along with this coup. Did you
listen to a word I just said? I mean, granted,
I didn't publish those words until after the whole coup
thing was over with, but that's how I was feeling
at the time. And you want to know why I
don't want to read a stupid ads Ben Alex, because
I never ever want to be a sellout a shill

(32:28):
ever again. So, why would those bankers think that Smedley
was the guy to lead their coup? Here's Jonathan Katz again.
I can't put myself in the mind of Gerald maguire
hello or the plotters, but I think that it was
because he had this really ideal for them, or at
least what they thought was an ideal recipe of a

(32:48):
history of you know, using anti parliamentary, anti democratic violence,
and so I think they thought, like, this guy's the
perfect guy, Like he's a celebrity. People love him. You know,
he doesn't give a fuck, like he doesn't care. He
would just go out there and do whatever, and so
you know he'll be perfect. He'll be perfect to use
that military expertise and that sort of just rampant independence

(33:11):
streak to do what we want him to do. Huh.
Sounds like those coup plotting fat catch don't know me
too well after all, do they? Now? Next time, Smedley
Butler has the goods on the story of a century
A cabal of the country's richest men want to take
over the White House, but does he have the courage

(33:32):
to take them down. Old Gimlet Eye has one last
surprise left for the Powers that beat. Hello, There's just
the Philadelphia record. Tune in again next time for Let's
Start a Coup. Let's Start a Coup is a production
of School of Humans and I Heard Podcasts. Our hosts

(33:52):
are Alex French and Ben Bolan. This show was written
by Alex Brench, with additional writing by Joeken Ocean. Original
music and scoring by Joeken Ocean. Character voices by Joeken Ocean,
Nah talk about a Stagehog. Anne Lisbetis is our producer.
Emilia Brock is our senior producer. Sound design, additional scoring,

(34:13):
mixing and mastering by Alexander Overington. Our story editor is
Lacy Roberts. Fact checking by Austin Thompson. The head Fraser
is our recording engineer. Recorded at the iHeart Studio in
New York. Executive producers or Jason English, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr,
and Elsie Crowley. If you're enjoying the show, help us

(34:34):
get the word out by leaving a rating in your
favorite podcast app. Give it five stars and then write
a comment below that something like, oh mgdd, those rich
jerk characters are so funny. Oh whatever, you know what
to do. You're good with technology. Tune in again next
time for Let's Start a Coup School of Humans.