I have no idea who the Talbot Players are, but I can guarantee you that I would have read a lot more history as a youngster if it looked like this and had a title like Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America.
From the catalog copy:
Smedley Butler took a Chinese bullet to the chest at age eighteen, but that did not stop him from running down rebels in Nicaragua and Haiti, or from saving the lives of his men in France. But when he learned that America was trading the of Marines to make Wall Street fat cats even fatter, Butler went on a crusade. He threw the gangsters out of Philadelphia, faced down Herbert Hoover to help veterans, and blew the lid off a plot to overthrow FDR.
A erjack cover, a great title, a main character named "Smedley," and it's all true? Well played, Talbot Players. Well played.
Gen. Butler was way ahead of Eisenhower in warning about the "military-industrial complex." Butler took a line in keeping with the '30s-era consciousness of crime and just titled his memoirs "War is a Racket." It was told-to Lowell Thomas, who made Lawrence of Arabia a household name. Best quote: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
ReplyDeleteI guess Marines are just more plain-spoken.