[On April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his position as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. MacArthur is one of many U.S. Generals who have a great deal to tell us about our wars, our military histories, and many other political and social contexts, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of other famous generals, leading up to a complex layer of our current military and American moment.]
For Veterans’ Day back in 2023, I dedicated a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column to the legendary military and (subsequently, but at the same time still very much part of his military roles as he framed it) activist career of Major General Smedley Butler. Mostly I wanted for today’s post to direct your attention to that column, but once you’ve checked it out come on back for a couple quick follow-up points on Butler.
Welcome back! Much is made, rightly, of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 1961 Farewell Address and his warnings there about the military-industrial complex (a term he coined). But Smedley Butler had Eisenhower beat by nearly three decades in identifying and critiquing those trends—and while he didn’t use that precise term, describing his role as a military man (in his 1935 book War is a Racket) as “a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism” is pretty clear-cut and compelling. Butler wasn’t president, but by the 1930s he was one of the most famous individuals in the nation, and we should credit him for these early and evocative warnings.
He was also a phenomenal example of veteran critical patriotism, something I wrote about in this Considering History column on an organization founded nearly four decades later, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). As I discussed there, far too often our collective narratives connect the military (and thus support for it) to the more celebratory forms of patriotism, entirely distinct from more critical patriotic perspectives. But there’s really no way to maintain that false dichotomy when we see one of the most decorated soldiers and generals in U.S. military history telling veterans (in his stump speech “You’ve Got to Get Mad”) that “it’s time you realized there’s another war on. It’s your war this time. Now get in there and fight.”
Next General Studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Generals or other military histories you’d highlight?
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