| War Is a Racket | |
| Author: | Smedley D. Butler (Major general (Ret.), USMC) |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Publisher: | Round Table Press |
| Pub Date: | 1935 |
| Pages: | 51 (first edition) |
| Isbn: | 9780922915866 |
| Oclc: | 3015073 |
| Dewey: | 172.4 |
| Congress: | HB195 .B8 |
| Notes: | [1] |
War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient.[2] Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the 1915–1934 United States occupation of Haiti.
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 in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas, who wrote Butler's oral autobiography, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".[3]
In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering.
The work is divided into five chapters:
It contains this summary:
Butler confesses that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps:
In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommends three steps to disrupt the war racket:
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.