Haiti

  In some towns, the marines were welcomed. The Cacos fighting against them, after all, were often the same bands who had been active in a given region over the previous years, attacking local farms, robbing women on the way to town, and looting shops for supplies. Many Haitians were tired of war. One merchant wrote in strong support of the U.S. troops, declaring that it was necessary for them to attack the Cacos and “massacre them to the last.” When marines arrived in the town of Pignon, an officer recorded, they were greeted as “liberators” and told by local leaders that they were “freeing the Haitians from slavery.” The words may have been heartfelt, or simply strategic: in the new order, the marines controlled the salaries of local employees, so the officer in charge of any particular town became “the paymaster for the loyal Haitians.” And some U.S. commanders did make an effort to win over hearts and minds in rural Haiti by explaining what they saw as their mission. At Fort Liberté, for instance, marine officer Adolph Miller “sent for natives & held audience.” Miller told them about the “American Idea in Haiti,” which included using revenues from the customs houses to “employ several thousand natives to clean and pave the streets, put in sewers, a water supply system,” and even an “electric light plant.” “We will pay the natives daily so that they can accumulate a little money and get the wrinkles out of their belleys [sic],” he promised. In addition, Miller said, the marines would also provide villagers with protection, for they would “not stand for the [Haitian] Generals confiscating their farms, stealing their cattle,” and “enforcing them into the army.” Once the Haitians saw that the United States offered jobs, infrastructure, and security, he predicted, “they will be for us.”53

  But despite such reassurances, resistance to the occupation was widespread enough in the north of the country that the marines were forced to mount a coordinated campaign there against the rebels. The task was given to an experienced officer named Smedley Darlington Butler. A Quaker from Philadelphia who apparently saw no contradiction between his faith and a military career, Butler had previously fought in several campaigns, including the occupation of the Philippines and the repression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. Like many other officers, he carried strong racist attitudes to Haiti. He understood the Cacos to be “bad niggers, as we would call them at home,” and described their leaders as “shaved apes, absolutely no intelligence whatsoever, just plain low nigger.” He spoke of his Haitian domestic servant, Antoine, as an “ape man” and a “faithful slave.” But he found the country exhilarating: “Oh the wildness of it all, the half-clothed, vicious natives, the wonderful scenery and fine clean air, there is no country like it that I have ever seen.” And he had faith in the righteousness of his mission. “We were all embued [sic] with the fact that we were trustees of a huge estate that belonged to minors,” Butler later said, “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.” Still, he saw those Haitians who resisted the occupation less as children than as animals, and felt that he knew better than his higher-ups what was necessary to win against the Cacos. He derided the high-ranking U.S. military men, products of “a million dollar war college,” who were “endeavoring to defeat an ignorant, treacherous crowd of niggers by ‘constructive’ warfare”—that is, through a combination of combat and negotiation with the enemy. Butler, by contrast, was an adherent of the “old-fashioned school” of war, which “believes the way to end a row with a savage monkey is to first go into the region or territory occupied by that monkey and find out how savage he is. If the monkey attacks you, return the compliment but only to a degree necessary to impress him with the danger he runs by repeating his attacks.”54

  The Cacos who confronted Butler’s forces sought to draw on Haitian military traditions that stretched back to the slave insurrection of 1791. Like Haiti’s original rebels, they avoided open and direct engagements with the superior firepower of their opponents, opting instead for guerrilla warfare. “The technique of the Cacos,” one of them later recalled, was “to never stay more than twenty minutes on the battlefield once the outcome had been decided.” They attacked suddenly, by surprise, then rapidly retreated into the hills to prepare for another engagement. Even their most successful raids usually involved occupying towns only long enough to seize guns from the local garrisons and take money and food to support themselves. Such guerrilla techniques had worked to startling effect in the eighteenth century, and the Cacos drew inspiration from the memory of those victories. In 1915, however, the dynamics were quite different. The marines had arrived as a modern army with the newest rifles and machine guns, while the outnumbered Cacos were primarily operating with the relatively antiquated weaponry of Haiti’s regional conflicts: pikes, machetes, and a few old rifles. (These limited weapons partly explain why Haiti’s constant civil wars seem to have produced far fewer casualties than the U.S. Civil War or European conflicts of the period.) Indeed, the last Haitian leaders to put substantial money into the defense infrastructure of the country were Dessalines and Christophe. And it was to their crumbling, century-old forts that the Cacos fled as they found themselves increasingly surrounded by the marines.55

  In early November 1915, a few hundred Cacos under the command of Josaphat Jean-Joseph took refuge in Fort Rivière, not far from Christophe’s Citadel. The rebels realized they were probably making a last stand, and they sent their families—who traditionally traveled with them—back home before preparing for a siege. But under the command of Butler, marines crawled through a small tunnel that led into the center of the fort, taking the Cacos by surprise. Other marines scaled the walls surrounding the fort and began firing from above with machine guns. Soon it was all over. In the wake of the battle, the marines burned sixty houses in the area surrounding the fort and then dynamited the structure. The corpses of the Cacos were still inside, so the ruins became a tomb, long seen by local inhabitants as a sacred and haunted place.56

  The attack on Fort Rivière was widely celebrated in the U.S. press, especially because the victory was gained without a single marine casualty, and Butler and another officer received the Congressional Medal of Honor. In a 1917 visit to Haiti, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, accompanied Butler on a tour of the site. In the wake of the Cacos’ defeat, Roosevelt was optimistic about the possibility of U.S. investment in Haiti. On the way to the fort, the group stopped at the ruins of Sans-Souci palace, which Roosevelt imagined could be an attractive place for American tourists to visit before they headed up to Fort Rivière to enjoy the “cool nights” there. At the fort itself, Butler narrated the battle for Roosevelt and declared that he and his troops had killed at least two hundred Cacos. He later included a swashbuckling and self-congratulatory account of the campaign in his memoir, which was published in 1933. In the book, Butler claimed that among the dead Cacos was the leader Josaphat Jean-Joseph, whom he described derisively as decked out in looted jewelry, including a gold watch chain.57

  Haitian accounts of the event tell a different story. They describe fifty Cacos killed during the fighting, with perhaps the same number escaping and disappearing into the nearby hills. Indeed, while the battle at Fort Rivière represented a decisive victory for the marines, convincing the remaining Cacos to disband, few of them disarmed. As one man later recalled, the Cacos who had escaped from Fort Rivière went home, greased up their guns, wrapped them in palm leaves, and hid them in their attics, keeping the weapons ready for another day. And Jean-Joseph had not been killed. He escaped the fort and went to the Dominican Republic for a time, then returned to Haiti when he heard that U.S. troops had arrested his wife and his mother. Imprisoned for seven years, Jean-Joseph was released in 1922. In 1934, the year after the publication of Butler’s memoir describing his gold-bedecked corpse, Jean-Joseph was living in Le Cap and working as a mason.58

  * * *

  Back in Washington, reading reports of the Haitian campaign,
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was both pleased and a little alarmed. “Department appreciates excellent work done and gallantry displayed,” he telegraphed to Admiral Caperton. But “in view of the heavy losses to Haitians in recent engagements,” Daniels asked that the “offensive be suspended in order to prevent further loss of life.” The war, he realized, could easily come to look like a massacre. Caperton replied reassuringly that most Haitians supported the marines and that the fighting had been “purely of defensive character,” aimed at the “suppression of revolutionary activity against present Government and military intimidation of people, and for protection of life and property of innocent farmers and tradesmen, who form by far [the] majority population in these districts.” The Cacos, he added, were “bandits pure and simple, owing no allegiance to the Government or any political faction, but organized under petty chiefs for sole purpose of stirring up strife against [the] Government and robbing, pillaging, and murdering innocent people.” Caperton argued that the marines were not so much at war as simply protecting the Haitian population from bandits. Eventually, the U.S. Marines even issued an official order regarding terminology, instructing soldiers to stop using the term “Cacos” and to replace it with “Bandits” in all official correspondence. They were also to try to get the Haitians to follow suit, apparently: the order explained how the word “bandits” should be pronounced in French and in Kreyòl.59

  The fact that the Caco resistance had often been led by officers from the Haitian army reinforced the determination of occupation authorities to disband that army and replace it with a different kind of order-keeping organization, a centralized one overseen by marine officers. In early 1916, they announced that all Haitian military officers would be removed from their positions. The new Gendarmerie, as provided for by the U.S.-Haiti convention, would have Haitian soldiers but American commanders. Smedley Darlington Butler, fresh from his successful campaign against the Cacos, was placed in charge of training the new units, and he eagerly took on the task of civilizing those he called “my little chocolate soldiers.” “I am beginning to like the little fellows,” he wrote as he worked with the new recruits. He styled himself a defender of the mass of rural Haitians, whom he described as the repressed, shoeless class, “the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people” he had ever met. They were only dangerous, Butler said, when the elites, the one percent of the population who wore shoes, stirred them up with “liquor and voodoo stuff.” Then they were “capable of the most horrid atrocities: they are cannibals.” Still, Butler was convinced that his work would help create “a real and happy nation out of this blood crazed Garden of Eden.”60

  The Gendarmerie largely proved to be an effective tool in the war against the Cacos, and it also became the main institution for policing throughout the country. Butler recruited junior officers for the Gendarmerie from among career marines, inviting them to remain in Haiti as long as they wished, which allowed some to develop close ties to the Haitian soldiers they worked with. A young marine named Lewis Puller later recalled being particularly impressed by the drilling of the gendarmes, which he said made the cadets at Virginia Military Institute look “like amateurs,” and by the commanding demeanor of their Haitian sergeant major. He found the gendarmes to be committed and dependable allies in the campaigns they participated in.61

  An attempt to construct a viable coast guard for Haiti, however, met with a set of failures that read like a parable of early-twentieth-century Haitian history. One boat, La République, went up in flames in 1917 after a fire was accidentally started by a U.S. sailor; the next year, a ship called Le Progrès foundered on a reef. The ship L’Indépendance exploded in the harbor at Guantánamo Bay in 1922. The only vessel to survive the experiment, the ship Haïti, did so because it was sold in 1920.62

  With the Haitian army officers who had served as regional governors removed from their posts, the U.S. marines essentially became colonial administrators. Each town and rural district was now overseen by a marine officer leading units of Haitian gendarmes, and these officers took over most of the tasks that had once been in the hands of the Haitian commanders, from tax collection to public works projects and judicial affairs. These marines exercised near-absolute power, but they did so with almost no knowledge or understanding of local conditions. Few spoke either of the languages of Haiti. When the U.S. Senate conducted an inquiry into the occupation in 1922, the chairman of the inquiry confided to the secretary of state that he was “amazed” to find that “not a single officer” in either the Navy or the Marine Corps in Haiti “spoke French with perfect accent and fluency.” In time, some officers and soldiers did learn Kreyòl, with a few becoming quite proficient in the language. But misunderstandings between marine officers and the populations under their control represented a continuing source of tension.63

  Like colonial administrators elsewhere, marine officers depended heavily on the collaboration of Haitians in local communities. In addition to the Haitian soldiers whom they trained and deployed to battle Cacos, the marines also cultivated a network of spies. Paid in cash based on what they reported, these informants worked independently, finding out where Caco groups were camped and then leading marines to them, or infiltrating the ranks of the rebels as double agents. More broadly, the marines sought to make spies out of all the Haitians: they commanded that anyone who saw Cacos passing their farms or villages had to go immediately to the nearest Gendarmerie post and report what they had seen. Anyone who didn’t do so would be suspected of sympathy with the rebels: their houses, and in some cases an entire village, could be burned as punishment. In time, the marines began issuing certificates of good conduct to locals who proved helpful, providing them with documents that they could show to occupation forces when they were stopped. But such enticements were counterbalanced by a harsh judicial system in which residents could be arrested for many crimes. The marines began strictly enforcing regulations against the practice of Vodou, for instance, jailing many oungans and manbos (priests and priestesses) during the occupation simply for conducting religious rituals. The punishment for cursing the U.S. occupiers, meanwhile, was nine months in prison.64

  In larger towns the marines operated under the scrutiny of local town councils and judges, who sometimes complained to the authorities in Port-au-Prince about abuses, though rarely to much effect. In more isolated rural districts, however, marine officers had broad leeway in how they governed, and indeed acted with broad impunity. Faustin Wirkus, perhaps inspired by a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, described three Americans in one outpost who looked “unlike any marines, officers or men, I had ever seen … Their eyes were sunken in their heads. They had bedraggled, untrimmed whiskers; their uniforms hung about them, slack and creaseless.” One of them, Wirkus wrote, had developed a particular hobby: on a pole in front of the garrison, he stacked the “native hats” of all the local rebels he had killed. Some marine officers broke down completely: one in Les Cayes, for instance, was relieved of duty after randomly killing a local resident; he later committed suicide by jumping out a porthole of the ship taking him home. In fact, as the military itself later admitted, officers frequently abused their power, executing captured rebels or prisoners without trial and in some cases killing residents of the towns they commanded for refusing to provide information about the Cacos, or for no clear reason at all.65

  Women were particularly vulnerable to abuse by the marines who controlled their communities. A Methodist Episcopal pastor working in Haiti who reported on the occupation for the Chicago Defender accused the marines of widespread rape, including the rape of young girls. He had also observed, he wrote, marines pressuring the Haitian gendarmes under their command “to procure native women for the use of the whites as concubines.” Haitian women were said to be universally immoral and promiscuous; after just a day in the country, one soldier had confidently asserted that “all native women are of easy virtue and all its accompanying vices.” Such attitudes helped justify a
nd normalize coercive sexual relationships. Looking back on the occupation, one marine later wrote that “rape, I believe, implies a lack of consent. I never heard of a case where consent was lacking in Haiti’s black belt.” When it came to longer-term relationships with Haitian women, marines sometimes talked about such liaisons as being strategically useful—a mechanism for learning about the local culture—and occasionally referred to sexual partners as the “sleeping dictionary.”66

  The historian Roger Gaillard, who gathered oral testimony from many Haitians about the occupation, heard from a number of residents in Haiti’s central plateau about one particularly sadistic local commander, Dorcas Lee William, whom they referred to by the Kreyòl name Ouiliyanm. One story described how Ouiliyanm had humiliated the family of a local Haitian general by riding his horse into their house, having it shit on the floor, and then ordering the general’s daughter to clean it up in front of him. A man remembered how Ouiliyanm used to walk into the local market and stare at people; if he determined they “looked Caco”—“based on clues only he knew”—he would beat them up. Two market woman died from the beatings they received from him. Another resident recalled how his sister-in-law had died at Ouiliyanm’s hands. The marine commander had encountered her on a path outside the town and demanded that she tell him where the Cacos were hiding. When she replied that she didn’t know, he shot her on the spot.67