This book on Smedley Butler by Jonathan Katz looks interesting. Here’s part of a longer excerpt in “Rolling Stone”:

….Late in 1935, Butler would go further, declaring in a series of articles for a radical magazine: “Only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria, and the African attack of Mussolini.”

Butler was not just throwing stones. In that article, he repeatedly called himself a racketeer — a gangster — and enumerated his crimes:

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 in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street….

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

Butler was telling a messier story than the ones Americans like to hear about ourselves. But we ignore the past at our peril. Americans may not recognize the events Butler referred to in his confession, but America’s imperial history is well remembered in the places we invaded and conquered — where leaders and elites use it and shape it to their own ends. Nowhere is more poised to use its colonial past to its future advantage than China, once a moribund kingdom in which U.S. forces, twice led by Butler, intervened at will in the early 20th century. As they embark on their own imperial project across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Chinese officials use their self-story of “national humiliation” to position themselves as an antidote to American control, finding willing audiences in countries grappling with their own histories of subjugation by the United States.

The dangers are greater at home. Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-20th-century imperial chestnuts — militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood — with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made, by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.

To those who did not know or have ignored America’s imperial history, it could seem that Trump was an alien force (“This is not who we are,” as the liberal saying goes), or that the implosion of his presidency has made it safe to slip back into comfortable amnesias. But the movement Trump built — a movement that stormed the Capitol, tried to overturn an election, and, as I write these words, still dreams of reinstalling him by force — is too firmly rooted in America’s past to be dislodged without substantial effort. It is a product of the greed, bigotry, and denialism that were woven into the structure of U.S. global supremacy from the beginning — forces that now threaten to break apart not only the empire but the society that birthed it….

rollingstone.com

It’s theme is how Butler blew apart a coup plot against FDR by corporate interests in 1934.