War Is a Racket

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War Is a Racket
1935 cover from the first printing
1935 cover from the first printing
Author Smedley D. Butler
(Major General (Ret.), USMC)
Country United States
Language English
Publisher Round Table Press
Publication date
Pages 51 (first edition)
ISBN 9780922915866
OCLC 3015073
LC Class HB195 .B8
Website War Is a Racket

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. Based on his career military experience, Butler frankly discusses how business interests commercially benefit, such as war profiteering from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the United States occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps, 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 praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".[2] Thomas had written Smedley Butler's oral autobiography.


In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidised by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, 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:



In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended 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:


  2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited referendum to 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 be one of aggression.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ "Item Information - War Is a Racket". United States Library of Congress. Retrieved 1 July 2018. 
  2. ^ Thomas, Lowell (1933). Old Gimlet Eye: Adventures of Smedley D. Butler. Farrar & Rinehart. 

External links[edit]