Haiti

  The activists were confident that they were now in a position to protect the constitutional ban on foreign land ownership, which they saw as an essential element of Haitian sovereignty. They underestimated the determination of the U.S. authorities, however. After the elections, as discussions about a new constitution began, the Americans informed Dartiguenave that if the Haitian parliament did not agree to remove the ban on foreign land ownership, he was to dissolve the legislature. If he refused, he would also be replaced, and a direct military government—similar to that which had been put in place in the Dominican Republic—would be installed in Haiti. Aware of the threat, the deputies worked furiously to wrap up a new constitution, with the ban preserved, and vote it into effect. But not quickly enough: the U.S. authorities in Haiti were determined to prevent the constitution under consideration from being enacted. Selected for the task, Smedley Darlington Butler marched troops into the legislature and, at gunpoint, ordered the deputies to disperse. He also seized all the papers of the constitutional commission in order to leave behind no trace of their work. Dartiguenave justified the action by declaring that the deputies had refused to “offer foreign capital the guarantees it deserves,” and therefore had “stood in the way of the realization of the work of regeneration being carried out in concert by the two governments” of the United States and Haiti. Butler himself, though, later looked back on what he had done in Haiti (and elsewhere) with a more jaundiced eye. He described himself as having been little more than a “racketeer, a gangster for capitalism,” a “high-class muscle-man for big business,” who had “made Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”86

  Deprived of its parliament, Haiti now found itself without any obvious path forward for putting a new constitution into place. The United States proposed an innovative solution, one for which there was no existing provision in Haitian law: in consultation with Washington, occupation authorities would draft a new document and then submit it directly for the approval of the population through a national referendum. Dartiguenave celebrated the idea, arguing that the foreign ownership ban did nothing for small farmers but only benefited large Haitian landowners who enjoyed a monopoly in some parts of the country. A referendum, he said, would finally sideline the politicians who “talked about sovereignty” merely as a way of “enriching themselves from the sweat of the workers.” Now, the populace would have a chance to speak directly. “The sovereign power is you, the people. You are the nation,” Dartiguenave declared. A State Department memo later made clear that from Washington’s perspective, the advantage of the plebiscite was that it would skirt opposition from elected representatives while providing a pretense of democracy. “The people casting ballots would be 97% illiterate, ignorant of what they were voting for,” the memo explained, and could certainly be pressured into casting their ballots as desired.87

  Indeed, the United States took no chances with the election. Vocal opponents of the new constitution were arrested before the vote. Throughout the country, the referendum took place under the watchful eyes of U.S. marines backed up by Haitian gendarmes. As voters lined up at polls on June 12, 1918, they were offered a white ballot that signified a “yes” vote in favor of the new constitution, which they then dropped into the ballot box. Those who wanted to vote “no” had to request a different ballot. The result? 98,294 “yes” votes to 769 votes against. The proceedings were clearly a sham, involving no more than 5 percent of the population, but even those who tried to abstain faced reprisals: six leading professors at a medical school were fired when they refused to participate in the voting.88

  The new constitution enacted by this process was largely a copy of the previous ones, but it made the key change to the ownership regulations. “Foreign residents” as well as “foreign companies” now had full rights to the ownership of property in Haiti. It had taken a military occupation, a dissolution of parliament, and a manipulated referendum, but American corporations had finally secured the clause they desired. Over the coming years, they would use it to transform Haiti’s economic landscape.89

  The 1918 constitution also included sections that sought to preemptively protect the occupation regime from accusations that the United States seemed to know would be coming. The document provided for the automatic “ratification of all the acts of the U.S. government during its military occupation of Haiti.” It also declared that all Haitians who served under the authority of the occupation were exempt from any future legal action, civil or criminal. And while the new constitution nominally maintained the bicameral legislature, it also allowed the Haitian president or the U.S. government to defer legislative elections at will. Indeed, for the next twelve years the occupation authorities would refuse to hold any elections to replace the dissolved legislature. As a result, President Dartiguenave and his successor served with essentially no limits on their power except those imposed by the United States itself. In effect, the occupation propelled Haiti’s political system backward by a century, returning the Haitian government to the days of 1806, when there had been no parliament at all.90

  * * *

  On September 3, 1918, Charlemagne Péralte escaped from forced labor in Le Cap. He had at least one accomplice: his Haitian prison guard fled the city with him. Péralte made his way back to his home town of Hinche, traveling—according to one account—disguised as a woman on a Vodou pilgrimage, singing religious songs and telling anyone who asked that he was going up into the hills to carry out a ranvwaye nanm, or “sending the spirit,” a ritual for a recently departed family member. Setting up camp outside Hinche, he began to make contacts with friends and family, to gather guns, and to collect bullets and powder, which he stored in calabashes. Ever since the defeat of the Cacos at Fort Rivière in 1915, military resistance to the occupation had been sporadic and poorly organized. Péralte now set about creating a new movement, an insurrection aimed at ending the occupation’s abuses once and for all by pushing the United States out of Haiti altogether.91

  The first order of business was to seek out recruits. One man later recalled how Péralte came to visit his father, explaining that he was going to “fight a war against the Americans” and looking approvingly over the weapons the man had hidden in the house, including a Remington rifle and a .48 caliber pistol. Another Haitian remembered that his father, Dolciné Pierre, once hosted the rebel and two companions on his farm. The group sat together for a long time, and Pierre joyfully shook hands with them when they left. He then explained to his family that “a serious civil war was about to begin, a revolutionary war.” Pierre, who had maintained his position as the local chief of the rural district where he lived, had told Péralte that he couldn’t join the rebels himself. But he promised to help them get food and other supplies.92

  Not everyone was ready to support Péralte. The man with the Remington and the .48 pistol, for instance, took his family away from the area rather than get involved in the war. And a trusted friend of Péralte, the godfather to one of his sons, met with him one day—the two talked at length under an avocado tree in a cane field—and then warned the local marine commander of Péralte’s presence. (The officer didn’t seem particularly concerned, replying: “Let him come, and he’ll see who he has to deal with!”) But there was one group that was particularly ripe for recruitment: the corvée laborers. In an isolated area near the village of Pignon, Péralte presented himself to a large group of workers building a road; he called on them to join him in revolt, and three hundred men followed him into the hills. Later, he located a house where corvée laborers were locked up at night by the marines and broke open the doors. “I’m fighting for liberty,” he announced, inviting those who wished to “fight and die with me.”93

  By the fifteenth of October, Péralte was ready for his first attack, storming the town of Hinche with about a hundred soldiers. But the engagement ended poorly for Péralte’s forces, who lost as many as thirty-five dead without inflicting much damage on the marines. And it came
at a steep personal cost for Péralte himself: three of his brothers were in prison in Hinche, and in the days after the attack, all three were killed by their guards, who claimed they had been trying to escape. But none of that deterred him from his path. Péralte’s October raid marked the beginning of a new Caco war, one that would soon outstrip the previous conflict in both the size of the revolt and the brutality used to suppress it.94

  The fact that this new uprising began in a town in the northern part of Haiti was not mere happenstance. Colonel Clark H. Wells, the marine commander in charge of the region, was a particularly ruthless officer, whose methods for controlling the local population alarmed even his superiors. By the time that Péralte started gathering supporters for his uprising, for instance, the occupation authorities—responding to the urging of Haitian politicians and some marines—had already declared an end to the practice of the corvée. But it was only a limited abolition: corvée workers could still be used if there was a “real urgency” or a lack of funds for a given project. Taking advantage of the loophole, Wells continued to promote the use of forced labor in many areas under his command.95

  Several months after the corvée officially ended, Albertus Catlin, who took over as high commissioner of the U.S. occupation in December 1918, encountered a large group of laborers outside the northern town of Maïssade. When he asked all those who were there involuntarily to cross to one side of the road, only three men stayed put. Major Richard Hooker, who was dispatched by Catlin on an investigative tour of the region, found similar cases. Outside Hinche he saw a group of 150 peasant laborers who were being paid only a tiny wage and carefully guarded, in what Hooker dubbed a “camouflage corvée.” In Maïssade, meanwhile, he discovered that the local magistrate, in collaboration with the marine commanders, was using the corvée system to put fifty forcibly conscripted men to work on his own property.96

  Hooker also found that other abuses abounded. He had to intervene in Hinche to stop a marine from hitting a market woman who had supposedly overcharged him for tobacco. In the town’s prison, he saw three gendarmes beating a prisoner. And when he talked to Wells, the colonel told him quite unself-consciously that under his command “bandits” were simply “bumped off,” with no trial or report of their execution. Hooker was so surprised that at first he thought the officer was joking, but Wells was completely in earnest.97

  The execution of captured Cacos without a trial was in fact the standard practice in the area. “The orders down there were: the prisons are filled; we don’t want any more prisoners,” recalled Lewis Puller, the same young marine who had been so impressed with the drilling of the Haitian gendarmes. After a year in Haiti, Puller admitted in a letter to a friend that the tactics they were using could easily be seen as criminal. “You may rest assured that I was relieved when I found out that I had been ordered to Port-au-Prince to be decorated for killing Cacos,” he wrote, “and not to be court-martialed for the same.” Though he derided the occasional “misguided fool” in the United States who might “set up a howl over a few black bandits being knocked off,” Puller also urged his friend to stay put at home. “You don’t want to come down here … It’s a dog’s life.” The NAACP magazine the Crisis published a terrifying photograph of one such summary execution. In it, a captured Caco, his hands severed, is about to be shot by a U.S. marine holding a pistol to his head. On the ground nearby is a previous victim.98

  As they had in 1915, marines sometimes burned entire villages they considered friendly to the Cacos. A Catholic priest from the town of Thomazeau testified in the Senate that after a group of retreating Cacos stopped in his town, a Gendarmerie unit decided to punish the local population. They looted the houses, took the residents’ horses, then burned down several hundred homes, along with the chapel that stood among them. For the next months, the homeless townspeople camped in the nearby woods, ready to flee at the first sight of the gendarmes. When the U.S. officer who commanded the detachment returned to the area two weeks later, the priest confronted him. The marine insisted that the town had given shelter to Cacos, though he admitted that he should have interrogated the inhabitants before burning their houses. He apologized only for having destroyed the chapel, saying he hadn’t realized that the modest structure was a house of worship.99

  A few observers in Haiti at the time also wrote descriptions of the occupation’s abuses. In March 1919, the French vice-consul in Haiti produced a hair-raising summary of recent reports of violence. A marine officer in St. Marc had beaten a seventy-five-year-old woman, a relative of the former town mayor, unconscious in the street and then had his dog attack her. The same officer had imprisoned a local official and tortured him by burning much of his body with a hot iron, seeking a confession about a theft, and had executed four teenagers for minor thefts they had committed. Another officer had gunned down a woman because she refused to give him information about the location of Cacos. In the prison at Le Cap, 10 percent of the prisoners, on average, were dying. “With such approaches to ‘civilization,’” the vice-consul wrote, “it is not surprising that the people are exasperated and the peasants would rather die fighting than submit to the caprices of such individuals.” With a measure of hope, the vice-consul concluded by saying that the cabinet in Washington must not be aware of the situation, otherwise they would surely be acting to correct it.100

  The Haitian government publicly denied the importance of the new Caco uprising, attributing it to the ambition of a few embittered leaders who hadn’t understood that the “time of revolutions is over” and to “ignorant peasants” who followed such leaders into battle. But some politicians realized that the situation was veering out of control. Louis Borno, the minister of foreign relations, suggested in a letter to a Catholic bishop that what was needed was a “general amnesty” for the Cacos, most of whom had been “propelled into revolt by the abuses caused by the occupation.” It was a generous thought, but also perhaps a naïve one, for Péralte’s movement—unlike the earlier Caco resistance—was not only protesting the terms of U.S. rule and the overbearing behavior of the marines. Rather, its clear political and military goal was to rid Haiti of the occupation entirely. “The worst of it,” wrote Charles Moravia, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington, to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “is that as it develops this movement of brigands is acquiring the character of a struggle for liberty.”101

  Moravia, who at the beginning of the occupation had celebrated the United States as “the enemy of Sovereign Despotism,” laid out a devastating summary of the occupation’s problems: the imposition of martial law, the privileging of U.S. officials over qualified Haitians in bureaucratic appointments, the daily brutality suffered by rural populations at the hands of gendarmes. Many in Haiti, he insisted, wished to collaborate with the U.S. forces in order to bring peace and progress to the country. But that desire didn’t compensate for the “deprivation of certain liberties guaranteed by the constitution” and the “bad treatment to which they are constantly exposed.” Like the French vice-consul, Moravia retained confidence in the best intentions of the United States, which he described as the “honored champion of Civilization, defender of the rights of Humanity.” He was confident that, having established the fundamental right to the “pursuit of happiness” in its constitution, the United States was bound to help others exercise that same right. But to do that in Haiti, Moravia wrote, they would need to gain an understanding of the “true needs of the people, its mentality,” and find ways to pursue improvement without “unnecessary violence.”102

  Moravia’s examination highlighted the increasingly difficult situation faced by the Haitian leaders. In many cases, they had welcomed the U.S. occupation, seeing it as a necessary step to resolving the country’s profound problems. But they now found themselves unable to defend their population from the brutality of the U.S. regime. The Caco rebels had stepped into the breach, presenting themselves as the true defenders of Haiti and its people, the rightful heirs to the ancestors who had won freedom
from slavery.

  Catlin, the high commissioner of the occupation, was well aware that the resistance movement was steadily growing. The Cacos were not only active in the northeast, where Péralte operated, but also in the Artibonite region, where rebel troops under the command of Benoît Batraville attacked and killed a marine officer in March 1919. Catlin requested—and received—reinforcements from Guantánamo Bay, and he budgeted money for building more roads in the regions where Péralte’s Cacos were strongest. But while they publicly exuded confidence that there would be no trouble defeating the Cacos militarily, some U.S. officials were clearly worried. General Alexander S. Williams, the head of the Gendarmerie, moved his residence from the outskirts of Port-au-Prince into the more heavily guarded center of town. Meanwhile, fights between U.S. soldiers and young Haitian men were regularly breaking out in the capital’s streets. And in August 1919, the city’s residents were infuriated when a deaf-mute teenage boy, leaving his house to tell his relatives about the death of his father, was shot and killed by marines for breaking the curfew.103

  One night Port-au-Prince was papered with bold posters: “For the last four years, the Occupation has constantly insulted us. Each morning brings some new offense.” President Wilson, the posters declared, was a “traitor, brigand, trouble-maker, and thief.” Invoking Dessalines and the Haitian Declaration of Independence, the posters announced that a new day, “like that of January 1804,” would soon arrive. Haitians needed to “follow the example of Belgium,” which had resisted German occupation during World War I by flooding a part of the country and preserving a tiny sovereign territory. In a similar way, Haitians were to take to the mountains to defend their nation from barbarous invaders. The revolt that was already under way in the north would soon spread to the south. “There is no danger. We have weapons. Let us chase away these savage men,” the poster exhorted. “Long live independence!… Long live just war! Down with the Americans!”104