War Is a Racket

War Is a Racketis a speech and a 1935 short book bySmedley D. Butler,a retiredUnited States Marine Corpsmajor generaland two-timeMedal of Honorrecipient.Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses howbusinessinterestscommercially benefitfromwarfare.He had been appointed commanding officer of theGendarmerieduring the 1915–1934United States occupation of Haiti.

War Is a Racket

1935 cover from the first printing
Author	Smedley D. Butler (Major general(Ret.),USMC)
Language	English
Subject	Military–industrial complex Morality Warfare
Publisher	Round Table Press
Publication date	1935
Publication place	United States
Pages	51(first edition)
ISBN	9780922915866
OCLC	3015073
Dewey Decimal	172.4
LC Class	HB195.B8

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War Is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed inReader's Digestas a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to theReader's Digestversion,Lowell Thomas,who wrote Butler's oral autobiography, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".

Contents

InWar Is a Racket,Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly fromWorld War I,whereindustrialists,whose operations weresubsidizedbypublic funding,were able to generate substantialprofits,making money from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

It contains this summary:

Waris aracket.It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Butler confesses that during his decades of service in theUnited States Marine Corps:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Recommendations

In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommends three steps to disrupt the war racket:

1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted"before those who would fight the war:

   It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. […] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limitedreferendumto determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.
   
3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense. For the United States, Butler recommends that the Navy be limited, by law, to operating within 200 miles of the coastline, and the Army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never beone of aggression.

See also

• Arms industry
• Merchants of death
• Military–industrial complex
• Perpetual war
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

External links

• War Is a Racketpublic domain audiobook atLibriVox

• War Is a Racketat theInternet Archive
• War Is a Racket(online version)
• War Is a Racket
• Scanned copy of the original 1935 printing
• "War Is A Racket" by Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, read By Jon Gold
• "War is still 'a Racket'",Foreign Policy Magazinecolumn by David James