Haiti

  In Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, presidents followed each other in rapid succession. Some met with a violent end: Cincinnatus Leconte, who took over the presidency at the head of an insurrection in 1911, was sleeping in the National Palace less than a year later when a mysterious explosion ripped through the building, killing him and many of his followers. Other presidents, dogged by insurrections, resigned or fled into exile. Over the course of four years, from 1911 through early 1915, the Haitian presidency passed through the hands of seven different men, and the internal struggles left the government in shambles. Watching the disintegration of the Haitian state from Washington, President Wilson wrote to his secretary of state in April 1915 that “the time to act is now.”12

  The president of Haiti at the time of Wilson’s message was Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, a son of the earlier president Tiresius Antoine Sam (whose abdication in 1902 had set the stage for the clash between Firmin and Nord Alexis). Like other Haitian leaders during this turbulent period, Vilbrun Sam found himself in a nearly impossible situation. With the Banque Nationale under American control and refusing to fund the government, the Haitian state was bankrupt. The pressure to make a deal with the United States was therefore constantly mounting. But there was also loud and passionate resistance to accommodating the United States in any form—a sentiment that was shared by many members of the Haitian parliament and the larger urban elite as well as by the rebel armies in the countryside.

  Among the leaders of this anti-U.S. movement was Rosalvo Bobo, who had served in the cabinet of Vilbrun Sam’s predecessor. Bobo was widely traveled and well educated, having studied in London and Paris and earned degrees in both medicine and law. He agreed that U.S. investment in Haiti was a necessary basis for economic advancement, but he vehemently opposed any surrender of control by his government to a foreign power. By July 1915, with strong support in the countryside and the capital, Bobo was on the verge of taking control of Port-au-Prince and overthrowing President Sam. Facing imminent defeat, Sam’s military commander tried to cow the opposition with a gruesome act: he executed 167 political prisoners. Many of the victims were members of prominent Haitian families, and the city of Port-au-Prince erupted. Fearing for his life, Sam tried to take refuge in the French legation, but a crowd dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces.13

  These bloody events provided the perfect pretext for a long-meditated U.S. intervention in the country. As Haitian historian Roger Gaillard puts it, the United States simply took preexisting plans for occupation out of a file drawer and, “having adjusted them to the circumstances, put them into application.” Vivid depictions of Sam’s death cemented the idea that Haiti was in desperate need of foreign control. Lost from the story, of course, was the way in which the pressures placed on Haiti by American banks and investors had pushed the country toward chaos in the first place. As Gaillard notes, the United States had for several years helped to “ripen” political conflict in Haiti “according to its taste and its project.” All that was left in 1915 was to pick the fruit.14

  On the morning of July 28, 1915, the USS Washington steamed into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Many Haitians recognized the ship, which had been extensively described by the local press, and they were well acquainted with its specifications—its tonnage, its 20 cannon, its complement of nearly 900 men. Some had seen the ship lurking in the harbor on previous occasions. This time, however, it had come to stay.15

  * * *

  The U.S. occupation of Haiti was part of a broader sweep of American intervention in the Caribbean. In 1898 the United States had occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico, and soon thereafter it took over the construction of the Panama Canal, which was completed in 1914. These developments made the long-coveted Haitian port of Môle Saint-Nicolas even more important strategically for the U.S. Navy, which drew up a thorough plan for seizing it in case of a “military emergency.” At the same time, with the outbreak of World War I, U.S. strategists became particularly concerned about the presence of Germans in the region. They knew that Haiti’s powerful and well-established community of German merchants had occasionally bankrolled revolts in the country and had repeatedly called on their home government to back up their claims with gunboats. U.S. officials feared that it would not be too difficult for Germany to take another step and annex part of Haiti for use as a military base. Such concerns about German influence in the Caribbean helped justify U.S. involvement in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as the U.S. purchase of the Danish West Indies in 1916.16

  Fears of German expansion in the region turned out to be exaggerated: the German government does not seem to have had any plan to use its merchants to take control in Haiti. But in a time of looming war, such worries provided political ammunition for people who had a different reason to push for U.S. intervention in Haiti: businessmen interested in constructing plantations there. They found a receptive audience in the State Department, which had no in-house expertise in Haitian affairs and therefore turned to bankers and corporate leaders with experience in the country. In 1912, for instance, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan summoned John H. Allen, then president of the Banque Nationale, to explain Haiti to him—though he doesn’t seem to have learned very much. “Think of it!” Bryan exclaimed after the meeting. “Niggers speaking French!”17

  One of those tapped for advice by the State Department was the railroad magnate James MacDonald, who told them that what Haiti really needed was employment. This, he argued, was something that could be provided only by outside investors constructing agricultural plantations in the country. Representatives from the United Fruit Company, a powerful player in Caribbean and Central American affairs, offered a similar perspective, informing the State Department that only an occupation by the United States could end the political conflict in Haiti and thereby open the way for business. To become a valuable economic satellite, like Cuba, Haiti was said to require massive corporate investment; such investment required political stability; and stability, U.S. officials concluded, could come only through a military occupation.18

  One of the most persuasive and forceful advocates for intervention was Roger Farnham, the vice president of the National City Bank in New York and the Banque Nationale d’Haïti. As of 1913, Farnham also assumed the presidency of the National Railroad Company, which took over MacDonald’s earlier railroad projects. As Farnham saw it, Haiti’s problem was that an uncaring elite were oppressing and ignoring a poor population, which desperately needed U.S. assistance. He explained to Secretary of State Bryan that the political system in Haiti “constitutes a certain form of slavery for the masses, and no helping hand has been stretched out to the common people in an effort to improve their condition.” In March 1915, Farnham warned that unless the U.S. government did something to tamp down the chaos in Haiti, American companies would no longer do business there. He urged Bryan to take control of Haiti’s customs houses as a way of establishing a climate of financial stability conducive to economic development. Bryan was convinced, and helped convince President Wilson, who in any case had already decided that “the United States cannot consent to stand by and permit revolutionary conditions constantly to exist” in the Caribbean nation. Wilson did have a few misgivings after the fact: shortly after dispatching the marines to Haiti, he expressed concerns that the United States did not have “the legal authority to do what we apparently ought to do.” But, he concluded, in the end there was “nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns and restore order.”19

  The strategic and economic arguments for the intervention were accompanied by a constant drumbeat of claims that Haitians were incapable of self-governance and needed to be saved from their own barbarism. The historian Hans Schmidt sums up the attitude: “The United States, as the self-appointed trustee of civilization in the Caribbean, was obligated to maintain minimal standards of decency and morality.” For Haitians, of course, such claims rang rather false. As the Haitian intellectual Dantès Bellegarde would pointedly note in 1929, during
the years of the occupation, lynching was commonplace throughout the American South. The butchery of World War I, meanwhile, represented a mass display of savagery that made the civil wars of Haiti look comparatively mild. And as a U.S. congressman later observed, the United States was also hardly a model when it came to political violence: like Haiti, it had seen three presidents assassinated since 1862, not to mention having had its own cataclysmic civil war.20

  In 1915, though, U.S. critics of intervention were an isolated minority. Indeed, many in Washington were barely aware that it was happening: Wilson had ordered the marines to Haiti without consulting Congress. It would take several years before opposition to the occupation gathered steam in the United States. In the meantime, U.S. plans went ahead with a clarity of purpose rooted in racist certainty. As Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who replaced Bryan in 1915, explained in a letter: “The experience of Liberia and Haiti show [sic] that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature.”21

  In July 1915, after the violent death of President Sam finally gave the U.S. government the pretext it had been waiting for, Lansing would effectively become the next ruler of Haiti. It was under his watchful eye that, as an article in Time magazine strikingly put it, the marines came ashore from their armored cruiser and “began forcibly soothing everybody.”22

  * * *

  “It hurt. It stunk.” So Private Faustin Wirkus, who later wrote a popular account of his time in Haiti, described his first moments in the country. “We were not welcome. We could feel it as distinctly as we could smell the rot along the gutters.” The Haitians lining the streets watched the marines with impassive expressions, taking stock of the new arrivals. “There was not a smile in sight. The opaque eyes in the black faces were not friendly. They seemed as indifferent as the lenses of cameras.”23

  The first marines to step off the USS Washington—330 of them—disembarked at Bizoton, to the south of Port-au-Prince, with orders to enter the capital and secure the port and commercial district. The marines were unsure what awaited them, but they were lucky: neither the Haitian army nor the general population tried to fight back as they took control of the city. A man who saw the Washington arrive off the coast later recounted to the historian Roger Gaillard how he had watched boats carry the Americans ashore, “rifles in hand.” “Everyone fled,” he recalled. “Me too. You just had to see them, with their weapons, their swaggering and ostentatiously menacing attitude, to immediately understand both that they had come to hurt our country and that resistance was impossible.” The next morning the man returned to the harbor, where he saw more troops disembarking. “I understood then that a new phase of our history was beginning. I could have nothing to do with these people.” He fled to the woods, one among many who decided that if they couldn’t fight they could at least disappear, becoming a new kind of maroons.24

  As the marines filtered from Bizoton to central Port-au-Prince, gunshots echoed throughout the city. But they weren’t directed at the intruders: gunfire was the traditional way of celebrating the arrival of a new president. Residents of the capital who were unaware of the U.S. invasion under way assumed that with the death of Vilbrun Sam, the popular Rosalvo Bobo would soon arrive and take over the National Palace. Two marines did die that night, one of them the nephew of the prominent labor leader Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor; according to their captain, they were victims of “fanatics” who had fired on them from behind bushes and trees as they approached. In fact, though, as Haitian witnesses reported and the U.S. military later confirmed, the two marines were victims of friendly fire. Other U.S. troops, nervous in the dark, unfamiliar with the surroundings, had shot them by mistake. As for the Haitian army, there was one soldier, a young man named Joseph Pierre, who refused to either retreat or surrender when confronted by the marines. He was gunned down at his post, becoming a legendary martyr: the only one to stand up against the United States that night.25

  In the next weeks, more U.S. troops arrived from the mainland and from the nearby base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. By late August, when a 300-strong artillery unit disembarked, there were two thousand American soldiers in the country. Having taken control of Port-au-Prince and Le Cap, they proceeded to occupy the other port towns. In each one, they seized the customs houses and began to disarm and disband the Haitian army units. Haitians had no way to get clear information about the precise intentions of the U.S. government, but it was clear that the marines were embarking on something much more extensive than just a simple operation to reestablish order and to protect U.S. interests after the unrest surrounding President Sam.26

  Among those who watched the influx of marines were two young boys, part of the generation who would grow up under U.S. occupation. The poet Carl Brouard, who was thirteen at the time, later recalled how “melancholy widened our eyes” as he and his friends saw their country occupied. And the politician Roger Dorsinville, looking back on the arrival of the marines many decades later, remembered similar emotions. “I understood the newness of their presence by the stupefaction on the faces and the silence suddenly all around me,” he wrote. Dorsinville watched the adults he knew sink into “stupor” and then “resignation.” “The white soldiers had come to defile our independence: where were the ancestors? Finally the ancestors were no more.”27

  While much of the population watched and waited, unsure what was happening, Haiti’s political leaders began trying to figure out a way to negotiate with the Americans. The historian Roger Gaillard summarizes their cautiously hopeful perspective: “‘It’s only a punitive expedition,’ they thought. ‘All in all, we probably deserved it. Now we just need to tread softly, demonstrate goodwill, promise not to do it again, and these gentlemen will leave.’”28

  But who, precisely, was in charge of Haiti? Rosalvo Bobo, who commanded large armies throughout the country, was Sam’s obvious successor, and a committee of prominent Haitians in Port-au-Prince was already preparing to name him the next president. But on August 6, Admiral William Caperton, the commander of the American forces in Haiti, had summoned Bobo to a meeting aboard a U.S. ship in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. The admiral’s chief of staff, well aware that Bobo had opposed U.S. control over Haiti during the previous years, had informed him that Bobo was an “idealist and a dreamer” and “utterly unsuited to be Haiti’s president.” Caperton commanded Bobo to give up any intention of taking power by force and to disband his troops. If Bobo did so, Caperton said, the United States would allow him to become a candidate for president in a new election.29

  Bobo agreed to the conditions, assuming that given his widespread popular support, he would not have trouble winning an election. Caperton, however, had other plans; he had already begun looking for an alternative candidate who would be more tractable in office. His first contact was J. N. Léger, a prominent political leader who had previously served as minister to the United States. But Léger refused to become a mere figurehead. “I am for Haiti, not for the United States,” he declared. “Haiti’s president will have to accept directions and orders from the United States and I propose to keep myself in a position where I will be able to defend Haiti’s interests.” Undeterred, Caperton approached another Haitian politician, Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, who proved to be more pliable. As Caperton reported to Josephus Daniels, the secretary of the navy—who, along with Lansing, was overseeing Haitian policy—Dartiguenave understood that his country must accept all the conditions set by the United States, and he was willing to use his influence to make sure that others agreed.30

  Having secured his candidate, Caperton went to work pressuring the National Assembly delegates to select Dartiguenave rather than Bobo. As an enticement, he declared that the U.S. military would stand behind those congressmen who worked with them, capturing and executing
any rebels who attacked them. In a special session, the senators and deputies elected Dartiguenave with a large majority. His appointment was celebrated symbolically in August by a call-and-response cannonade between a U.S. gunship and a Haitian coastal battery. Many among the elite in fact welcomed the prospect of a bright new beginning after decades of turmoil, seeing the occupation as an opportunity to end Haiti’s perpetual civil wars and pursue economic development. In mid-September, marine officers and Haitian political leaders came together for a cordial lunch at a prestigious club, the Cercle Bellevue.31

  With Dartiguenave in power, the U.S. government rapidly proceeded to the next order of business: drafting a convention between the United States and Haiti that would establish an official basis for the marine presence in the country. The document they came up with had many familiar elements: the United States was to take control of Haitian customs houses and the state treasury, and the Haitian government was to promise not to cede or rent any portion of its territory to another foreign power. But the new proposal also included some additional stipulations. The marines were to create a new military structure that would replace the existing Haitian army. And the convention specified that appointments and nominations for all major Haitian state offices would be subject to approval by the president of the United States.32