Summary: War Is a Racket

The GIST

War Is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler is one of the shortest and angriest books ever written about war, and what gives it its force is the man who wrote it. Butler was no pacifist professor. He was a major general in the United States Marine Corps, the highest rank the Corps then had, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient, and at his death the most decorated Marine in American history. After he retired in October 1931, he toured the country giving a speech with this title. Crowds responded so strongly that he expanded it into a short book, published in 1935, and a condensed version in Reader's Digest carried it to a far wider audience. The broadcaster Lowell Thomas, introducing that version, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage."

The argument is simple enough to fit in its title. War, Butler says, is sold to the public as defense and patriotism, but it is run as a business. A small group of insiders collects the profits, and everybody else pays: in taxes, in debt, and above all in the bodies and minds of young soldiers. He wrote in the uneasy years between the two world wars with one clear aim, to keep his country out of the next one. Nearly a century later, his five brief chapters are still argued over, because the question he asked has not gone away: who actually benefits when a nation goes to war?

The Big Ideas

War is a racket

Butler opens with the lines that made the book famous: "War is a racket. 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."

He then defines his term with care. A racket, he writes, is "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." The word was a pointed choice in the age of gangsters. A racket is not just a crime; it is a con, a thing dressed up as something respectable. In Butler's telling, the respectable costume of war is national security and honor, and underneath it, "out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

What made this more than a slogan was Butler's willingness to indict himself. Looking back on his decades in uniform, he described his own career as muscle for American business abroad. He said he had helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914, made Haiti and Cuba decent places for National City Bank to collect revenue, helped purify Nicaragua for the banking house of Brown Brothers, brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests, and seen to it in China that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Then came the comparison nobody forgot: "Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

He also looked ahead. Drawing on what he had seen in the First World War, he sketched how the next one might arrive: Americans would be stirred up to hate Japan, and the country would march into a war costing tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, with many more men left "physically maimed and mentally unbalanced." And for that loss there would be a compensating gain, he added with bitter irony. Fortunes would be made. "By a few."

Who makes the profits?

The second chapter names names and counts money, mostly from World War I. Butler starts with a baseline: "The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits—ah! That is another matter—twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent—the sky is the limit."

He fills the chapter with figures of this kind. During the war, by his account, more than twenty-one thousand Americans became new millionaires and billionaires. Companies such as DuPont and US Steel saw their earnings multiply many times over their peacetime levels. And the winners were not only the makers of guns and powder. Bankers and financiers, shipbuilders, manufacturers, meatpackers and speculators all prospered. Much of this, he stresses, was paid for with public money: industries were handed government contracts and subsidies and turned mass suffering into private gain.

The deeper point is about incentives. If a war multiplies your profits ten or twenty times, you have every reason to welcome one, and none of the people making those returns were in any danger of being shot. Butler also saw the machinery staying in place between wars, with supply arrangements being lined up for future conflicts and a standing appetite for ever more armaments. A business that profitable does not close down when peace is signed.

Who pays the bills?

If a few collect the profits, who covers the cost? Butler's answer comes in two parts.

The first is the taxpayer. Wars are financed by debt that can take generations to repay, by heavy taxes, and by the economic turmoil that follows large conflicts. Even the patriotic act of buying a war bond, he argues, ended up benefiting banks and markets at ordinary people's expense. Meanwhile money that could have met needs at home goes to maintaining a large military, including a costly navy.

The second, and to Butler the far heavier, is the soldier. Here the general's anger is plainest. "Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die," he writes. "This was the 'war to end all wars.' This was the 'war to make the world safe for democracy.' No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits."

He describes what came back. Men who had been ordinary civilians returned unable to resume ordinary life. He writes of veterans in hospitals who looked physically whole and were mentally broken beyond repair, of death rates among former servicemen far above those of civilians, and of families left to carry grief and upheaval for years. The soldier's reward for all this was about thirty dollars a month, a figure Butler returns to again and again. It becomes the measuring stick for everything else in the book: thirty dollars a month in a muddy trench, against eighteen hundred percent in a boardroom.

How to smash this racket

Butler was a commander, not a theorist, and his fourth chapter gets straight to orders. The racket, he argues, "can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war." He proposes three measures.

First, conscript capital before men. Before the nation drafts its young men, it should draft its industry, its money and its labor. The officers, directors and executives of the armament factories, steel companies, munitions makers, shipbuilders and airplane builders, along with the bankers and speculators, should all be put on the soldier's wage of thirty dollars a month. "Why shouldn't they?" he asks. "They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!" He is confident about the result: Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war.

Second, let those who would fight decide. Butler accepts that a war may sometimes be necessary. But the choice should go to a limited vote, and the only people entitled to cast a ballot should be those who would be called to the front. Not the public at large: the young men eligible to be drafted. As he puts it, "Only those who suffer should have the right to vote."

Third, limit the military to defense. By law, the Navy should be kept within 200 miles of the American coastline, planes allowed out to 500 miles for reconnaissance, and the Army never permitted to leave the country's territory. "Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go farther than 200 miles from the coastline." A force that cannot reach anyone else's shores can still defend its own, and it cannot be lent out to protect investments overseas.

To hell with war

The final chapter is a short, fierce closing statement. Butler has no patience for the idea that war can be made civilized or that the next one will be the last. He rejects the notion that armed forces exist to impose a nation's will on other peoples; their one legitimate job is protecting the homeland. Throughout, he keeps his respect for the ordinary enlisted man and saves his contempt for those who direct the machine and profit from it. His verdict is the chapter's title.

Did anyone listen? In part. The resentment Butler voiced was widely shared, and it helped push Senator Harry Truman to champion the Renegotiation Act of 1942, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, which let the government require contractors to renegotiate their wartime contracts and costs, and which did much to curb corporate abuses during the Second World War. Butler did not live to see it. He died about five years after the book appeared, having spent his last years campaigning against wars he considered heartless and driven by greed.

Putting It to Work

This is a polemic, not a handbook, but it leaves a reader with some lasting habits of thought.

• Follow the money. When a war is proposed, ask who stands to profit and whether those people share any of the risk.
• Listen for the slogans. Butler heard "the war to end all wars" and "safe for democracy" and later decided they had hidden the real motives. Noble language is not proof of noble purpose.
• Count the whole bill. The cost of a war includes the debt, the taxes, the economic aftershocks, and the veterans and families who pay for decades.
• Tie the decision to the sacrifice. His reforms rest on one principle: those who decide on war and those who benefit from it should bear what the soldier bears.
• Separate defense from adventure. A military built to guard the homeland is a different thing from one built to project power abroad.
• Weigh the other side. Critics answer that many businesses lose in wartime, that real security threats exist, and that not every conflict is fought for profit. Butler's case is strongest as a warning about incentives, not as an explanation of every war.

Who Should Read It

Read this if you care about history, politics or foreign policy and want to hear the anti-war case from someone who could not be dismissed as naive about combat. It suits readers who like their arguments short, plain and furious; you can finish it in a sitting. Veterans, students of the years between the world wars, and anyone curious about where today's debates over defense contractors began will find that this retired general still has plenty to say.

This has been a summary of War Is a Racket by Smedley Butler, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.