Taking Haiti

Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940

Mary A. Renda

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780807862186
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years--and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism. At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans--including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians--responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers; the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti; and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire.

1 Introduction

The United States invaded Haiti in July 1915 and subsequently held the second oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere under military occupation for nineteen years. While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation—one more favorable to foreign investment. With the help of the marines, U.S. officials seized the customshouses, took control of Haitian finances, and imposed their own standards of efficiency on the administration of Haitian debt.¹ Meanwhile, marines waged war against insurgents (called Cacos) who for several years maintained an armed resistance in the countryside, and imposed a brutal system of forced labor that engendered even more fierce Haitian resistance. By official U.S. estimates, more than 3,000 Haitians were killed during this period; a more thorough accounting reveals that the death toll may have reached 11,500.² The occupation also reorganized and strengthened the Haitian military. Now called the Gendarmerie, the new military organization was officered by marines and molded in the image of the Marine Corps.³

An occupation is, in one sense, a temporary arm of the state created to carry out a series of specific tasks. In this case, those tasks were to bring about political stability in Haiti, to secure U.S. control over Haiti with regard to U.S. strategic interests in the Caribbean, and to integrate Haiti more effectively into the international capitalist economy. Of course, supporters of the occupation, and those responsible for it, proposed that these goals would also bring about specific gains for Haiti. They pointed, for example, to the work of the Navy Medical Corps and to the construction of roads, bridges, buildings, and telephone systems under the marines’ supervision.⁴ With these changes, U.S. policy makers indeed sought to create an infrastructure to serve as the foundation for economic development and modernization. They also professed the hope that on this basis a new Haitian democracy would flourish.

On the ground, cross-cultural dynamics complicated Washington’s script for the occupation. Some members of the Haitian elite initially cooperated with the U.S. military, even viewing their presence as potentially helpful, but other Haitians, long suspicious of foreign powers and of government in general, were less eager to play their parts. Many Haitians adopted a watchful stance in relation to the invading blan (or blancs, as foreigners were called), some engaging in varied forms of everyday resistance, while the Cacos, initially representing a small but significant sector of the population, mounted their armed rebellion. In time, the unabashed racism of many Marine Corps officers and enlisted men, and the outright brutality of the forced labor system implemented to carry out building projects, galvanized the population in opposition to the U.S. presence.⁵ Far from laying the groundwork for the hoped-for advent of democracy, material improvements in transportation and communication served to increase the efficiency of the occupation as a police state, with marines and gendarmes in command of every district of the country.⁶

This extended breach of Haitian sovereignty constitutes an infamous but crucial chapter in Haitian history. In contrast, as an exercise of military power and imperial will, the occupation has earned little more than a footnote in standard accounts of U.S. history. On one level, the relative weight given to the occupation in these national historical narratives seems to reflect objective imbalances of size, power, and influence between the two nations. At first glance, it appears that the occupation had an obvious and farreaching impact on Haiti, but little discernible effect on the United States. Whereas a relatively small number of marines fought, labored, and made themselves at home in Haiti beginning in 1915, much larger numbers of U.S. troops soon fought and died at Belleau Wood, Verdun, and Meuse-Argonne. In 1919, the year a few marines turned the tide against the Cacos by capturing and killing the rebel leader, Charlemagne Péralte, news was breaking elsewhere. Woodrow Wilson forged the League of Nations at Versailles, over 4 million U.S. workers went on strike, race riots racked the nation, and the U.S. Senate finally approved woman suffrage.⁷ In the 1920s, while in Haiti officers played polo and enlisted men baseball; stateside, business leaders pioneered the modern corporation, and mass media emerged as a new force in U.S. American culture. In short, it seems that the real stuff of U.S. history during those years was taking shape within U.S. borders and in Europe, not in a small Caribbean nation. How, then, should the first occupation of Haiti by the United States figure in the larger picture of U.S. history?

This book contends that the military occupation of Haiti that began in 1915 was no sideshow. It was one of several important arenas in which the United States was remade through overseas imperial ventures in the first third of the twentieth century. The transformations of imperialism were also effected in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, the Philippines, and dozens of other places around the globe.⁸ Foreign interventions and territorial seizures overlapped in time and personnel and built on one another to refine the techniques of imperial control and influence. Taken together, they formed a solid overseas foundation for new cultural departures in the United States. Each intervention also had its own particular character and thus contributed uniquely to the remaking of U.S. America. Like others who were the focus of U.S. imperial efforts, Haitians interacted with U.S. citizens and institutions in a manner that grew out of their own indigenous history and culture, thus contributing in unexpected ways to the matrix of an emerging U.S. imperial culture.⁹

My opening sketch of the occupation presents a stripped-down version of events in Haiti between 1915 and 1934. In its brevity, it inevitably distorts a much more complex historical record. The picture of gunboat diplomacy drawn in those first few paragraphs conveys little, for example, about how U.S. marines and sailors understood their role in Haiti and says nothing about how their involvement in the occupation changed them. Neither does it tell about the train of U.S. Americans—congressmen, businessmen, bankers, bureaucrats, diplomats, journalists, artists, activists, anthropologists, and missionaries—who traipsed through Haiti during and just after the occupation, for good and ill. When we begin to look at who went to Haiti, how they interacted with Haitians, and how they wrote and talked about what they saw and heard, a new picture of the occupation, and of American culture, comes into view.

My account of the occupation will center, then, on the marines who implemented U.S. policy. The intervention that began in 1915 was a coordinated attempt to transform Haiti, and marines were a crucial part of the machinery established to carry out this task. Yet, unlike Gatling guns and heavy artillery, marines themselves were men who brought with them their own ideas, desires, fears, and ambitions. They could not simply be placed in Haiti; they had to be conscripted into the project of carrying out U.S. rule. To be sure, the fundamental military value of obedience to the chain of command—necessary for the creation of efficient fighting forces—also helped to keep enlisted men and junior officers in line. Still, the exigencies of operating in a foreign land required marines, at various ranks, to exercise judgment as well as to follow orders. How, then, did the occupation position U.S. American men in Haiti, and how did they, in turn, negotiate their relationship to the nation they were sent to occupy? How did they respond to the forces that attempted to fix them in a particular relation to Haiti?

Paternalist discourse was one of the primary cultural mechanisms by which the occupation conscripted men into the project of carrying out U.S. rule. The traces of paternalism can be found in evidence left by marines of varied ranks and experiences. Private Paul Woyshner expressed its importance in a cartoon for the Marines Magazine, in which a marine wags his finger at a recalcitrant Haiti, admonishing “Listen, Son!” (Figure 1).¹⁰ Sergeant Faustin Wirkus emphasized it in his detailed memoir of Haiti, in which he described the strain of “being father and big brother to . . . our Haitian friends.”¹¹ Yet, the role of paternalism in the cultural conscription of marines in Haiti is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the testimony of General Smedley Butler before a special Senate committee investigating the occupation in 1921 and 1922. A key player in the opening years of the occupation, Butler claimed, “We were all embued [sic] with the fact that we were the trustees of a huge estate that belonged to minors. That was the viewpoint I personally took, that the Haitians were our wards and that we were endeavoring to make for them a rich and productive property, to be turned over to them at such a time as our government saw fit.”¹² These examples show some of the ways that paternalist discourse infused marines’ accounts of their work in Haiti. They also suggest the possibility that paternalism helped to shape their understanding and experience of the occupation they were sent to carry out.¹³

Yet what conclusions may be drawn from the prevalence of paternalist images in marines’ self-representations? Surely, the Marine Corps as an institution and marines as individuals would have wanted to show themselves in the best light. Can we take such self-representations seriously as a basis for historical analysis? U.S. historians have generally answered this question in one of several ways. One tradition has seen interventionist paternalism as a genuine reality. Historians writing in this tradition point to the social and material improvements marines attempted to bring to Haiti: hospitals, roads, bridges, public buildings, telecommunications, and so forth. Violence was part of the picture, they readily admit, but should not dominate our perception of what was intended to be a constructive enterprise, undertaken by U.S. Americans who were, in one historian’s words, “determined to implant a sense of community in the tropics.”¹⁴ Another tradition has emphasized the violence of U.S. rule and has pointed to economic or strategic motives. In this version, paternalism was little more than a transparent veneer of rhetoric. Historians must see through such rhetoric, it is supposed, to get at the truth of violence and imperialism in U.S.-occupied Haiti.¹⁵ At least one historian has taken a middle course, identifying paternalism as a mitigating factor in a largely coercive and racist intervention.¹⁶

Figure 1. “The Missionary,” a cartoon by Private Paul Woyshner, published in the Marines Magazine, April 1917. Courtesy of History and Museums Division, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C.

Treating paternalism as an obvious good, a mitigating factor, or a transparent veneer to be “seen through,” historians have failed to notice its importance and complexity as an element of U.S. foreign policy. Paternalism was not merely a justification laid on after the fact in order to pretty up American wrongdoing. It was, instead, a whole constellation of meanings, images, ideas, and values that helped to shape and direct U.S. relations with former European colonial possessions. Paternalism was an assertion of authority, superiority, and control expressed in the metaphor of a father’s relationship with his children. It was a form of domination, a relation of power, masked as benevolent by its reference to paternal care and guidance, but structured equally by norms of paternal authority and discipline.¹⁷ In this sense, paternalism should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one among several cultural vehicles for it.

The implementation of U.S. foreign policy in Haiti depended on such cultural vehicles as thoroughly as it depended on the USS Washington and Tennessee.¹⁸ Paternalism, we might say, was the cultural flagship of the United States in Haiti. It served practical military purposes, including, but not limited to, announcing the identity of the invading force. As such, it must be understood as thoroughly as any military technology. To that end, we must turn our attention to the cultural terms and categories out of which paternalism was constructed and through which it functioned.

Most obviously, age, class, and race provided the building blocks of paternalism. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth, the valence of these terms shifted as the discourse of paternalism developed in relation to changing family structures, emerging class formations, and novel racial ideologies. The institutional origins of paternalism in the United States included, for example, the master craftsman’s workshop, in which an established artisan apprenticed boys and younger men to the ways of his trade.¹⁹ Yet the slave plantation and the Indian reservation were perhaps its most significant institutional crucibles.²⁰ In those contexts, age came to function as a metaphor and mechanism for racial subordination. Later, white, native-born men in business and government figured themselves as fathers to a racialized immigrant work force.²¹ Finally, as paternalism moved overseas its racial and class codes were further elaborated.

In crucial but perhaps less obvious ways, paternalism was also structured by gender and sexuality. Just as the father was (and remains) a gendered figure, so paternalism invoked gendered meanings associated with men, women, and families to naturalize and normalize the authority it asserted. It constructed male and female bodies and positioned men and women in particular ways. Moreover, paternalism constructed a given social space in terms of racialized (and class-specific) codes of masculinity and femininity. U.S. American workingmen, for example, rejected turn-of-the-century industrial paternalism as a patronizing denial of manhood.²² Paternalism invoked sexual discourses on various levels as well. In relation to Haiti, it mobilized a variant we might call the discourse of paternity, which explicitly linked legitimacy, heritage, and identity to norms of female sexuality.

Smedley Butler’s characterization of Haitians as wards of the United States provides one among many possible entry points into the complex web of meanings embedded in U.S. paternalism toward Haiti. Butler’s use of the term “wards” called on a Pr...