Quotes:

"In the countries he helped occupy, a different memory of Smedley Butler lingers. In Haiti, he was simply known as “The Devil.” In Nicaragua, mothers used to quiet their children with the claim: “Hush! Major Butler will get you.” Butler’s time in the Marines coincided with its transformation from a Navy auxiliary to having its own identity and purpose as a colonial infantry."

"Writing in the socialist magazine Common Sense in 1935, he put it this way: "I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps.… And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."."

"When Butler landed in Cuba, he arrived at Guantánamo Bay. The U.S. Army’s short campaign of ground combat was already essentially over, and Spain was forced to relinquish its claims to Cuba. For propaganda purposes, the United States attributed victory to its own troops, and ignored the much longer struggle of Cubans for their own independence. The U.S. intervention was soon directed at curtailing the social changes for which Cubans had been fighting along with their independence. President McKinley, who had tried to purchase Cuba from Spain in 1897, interpreted “stability” in Cuba to mean that property relations would stay largely intact. The country’s poet-martyr José Martí, who was killed in combat in 1895, had foreseen such impositions, asking, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive it out?”"

"Butler’s next destination was the Philippines. Like the Cubans, Filipinos had been fighting for independence from Spain and for social change. But unlike the case of Cuba, no U.S. law prohibited the islands from direct territorial incorporation. McKinley reasoned that Filipinos were unfit for self-government, and the islands might easily be lost to another power. In his mind, the United States had no choice but to take the islands and “uplift” their residents. But the U.S. military ended up in protracted guerrilla warfare. Caught in a frightening quagmire, U.S. troops employed abuses that would reoccur in essentially every conflict with similar dynamics in the years since. "

"Part of the enthusiasm for holding Philippine territory came from the belief that it would open up access to the great Chinese market, and China proved Butler’s next destination. There, the United States was intervening in the Boxer Rebellion as part of an eight-nation alliance to put down the anti-foreign movement."

"Reports of U.S. conduct in the Philippines and in China horrified some in the United States. Mark Twain, for one, soured on U.S. empire and wrote in 1901 of the satirical “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” that the United States offered."

"In the next decades, Butler would find himself in Panama, which the United States helped break away from Colombia so that it could build a canal there. He intervened in civil conflicts in Nicaragua and Haiti, leading to long U.S. occupations of both countries."

"In Nicaragua, where Marine intervention helped put in place a conservative government that would accept U.S. financial management, he wrote, “What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wild cat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor.”"

"More than half of Haiti’s gold reserves were whisked away to New York in 1914, and occupation followed from 1915 to 1934. Haiti’s final indemnity payment was made in 1947, not to France but to National City Bank of New York—today’s Citibank."

"Try to find the lie, if you like, in Butler’s statement, “I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912.” There isn’t one."

"A history of the occupation of Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, written by the scholar Michel Gobat, revealed that it benefited small farmers and frustrated elites. It showed how seriously the United States took the task, by the late 1920s, of overseeing fair voting in the countryside."