At the former gravesite of Charlemagne Péralte, a Haitian resistance fighter killed by the Marines in 1919, I encountered a group of young Haitian men. I was even cast as an extra in a Filipino movie about that country’s American War.Įarly in that journey, I visited my old stomping grounds in Haiti. So for much of the last seven years, I traveled the world, talking to scholars and rebel fighters, viewing pageants, exploring private archives, and touring museums. I had become familiar with the works of the great Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences”-of stories excluded from certain archives, and people and events sometimes purposefully forgotten. Unable to get Butler’s story out of my head, I decided to make it my next book-to tell the story of America’s rise to global power through the extraordinary life of a forgotten figure.īutler and the Marines in Shanghai, 1927.īut I also knew that would not be enough. But in his last decade of life, he turned into a warrior against war and imperialism, calling out the military and admitting that he had been a “racketeer for capitalism.” He even exposed a 1934 fascist plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. history, a major general with two Medals of Honor, international renown, and calls to run for president. From there he and his compatriots slashed their way across the Philippines, carved the path for the Panama Canal, crushed rebels in Honduras and Nicaragua, and blasted open the door to oil riches in Mexico and China.īutler retired in 1931 as one of the most decorated warfighters in U.S. In his first posting, he helped establish the new U.S. ![]() He had joined the Marines as a teenager to fight the Spanish in Cuba. Looking deeper, I learned that Haiti was not Butler’s first invasion, nor his last. Then he stayed on, setting up the client army that would endeavor to rule Haiti in the Americans’ stead. Butler had played a key role in the invasion, then crushing the insurgency it inspired. There, at every stage, was the Marine with the strange name. occupation forces had methodically stripped the country of its wealth and sovereignty, literally stealing half the gold from its central bank. No force, I learned, had done so much to centralize Haiti’s people in its capital. When I sat down to write my first book about the disaster, I reached back into history to understand how conditions had gotten so deadly, and to better understand the failed international response. Two years later, I was sitting on the same bed in the same house when an earthquake tore through the city, tearing apart my house along with hundreds of thousands of others. Funny name, I thought, and closed the computer. I looked once more at the Marine with the pistol. I had no idea my home country had not only invaded the one I’d just moved to, but occupied it for nineteen years. ![]() history in college, and considered myself pretty well-read on foreign policy, but all of this was new to me. It was an illustration for an article about the “Banana Wars,” a series of interventions and police actions in which the United States established dominance over Central America and the Caribbean. The painting commemorated a war I’d never heard of: the 1915 U.S. Smedley Darlington Butler in China, 1900.Ĭredit: Public Domain, Marine Corps History Department
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