Haiti

  In 1919, the Haitian consul in Cuba spoke of the conditions experienced by immigrant workers as “very close to slavery”: they lived in large, dirty sheds, couldn’t leave the plantation without permission, and were under constant guard. An article published in Cuba that same year similarly mentioned the “dark days of slavery” as it described a gruesome scene: the bodies of three Haitian workers hanging from a tree in Oriente province, with no explanation and no investigation of how or why they had been killed. The writer suspected that they had tried to run away and were the victims of plantation guards. In 1922, a Haitian journalist wrote that the migrants were leaving “like our ancestors from the coasts of Ivory and Dahomey,” dressed in rags, carrying nothing. Some of them sang as they went, recalling a Vodou song dating back to the days of Saint-Domingue: “I’m leaving this land / This land is not for me.”14

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  One night in May 1919, in the midst of the Caco war, an elderly oungan imprisoned in Croix-des-Bouquets was summoned by the marine commander, Lieutenant Louis A. Brokaw. Along with another prisoner, he was taken to a nearby field by Brokaw, two marine privates, and several Haitian gendarmes. The two men were told to dig their own graves, then shot and killed. The marine authorities who investigated the killing concluded that Brokaw was insane and discharged him from the force. But when the two privates who accompanied him were put on trial, the marine officer defending them insisted they weren’t guilty of any crime because such incidents were commonplace—he had “seen many similar cases.” Reviewing the case in Washington a few months later, Marine General George Barnett was shocked by the argument that killing prisoners was customary and therefore excusable. Alarmed, he looked into the matter, and he filed a confidential report alerting his superiors that “practically indiscriminate killing of the natives has gone on for some time.” The document was leaked to the press, and soon it was all over the front pages. One newspaper decried “slavery in Haiti,” while the New York Times wrote of civilians being “slain for sport” by marines, who fired “machine guns from airplanes against defenseless Haitian villages, killing men, women and children in the open market places.”15

  The media attention that followed General Barnett’s report was the first time that descriptions of the violence of the occupation circulated widely in the United States, though since 1915 a few determined writers and activists had been trying to get Americans to pay attention to what was being done in their name in Haiti. The Afro-American newspaper had described the occupation as “a stench in the nostrils of all decent people,” and in 1917 the Nation had called it “imperialism of the rankest kind.” The most prominent critic of the occupation was James Weldon Johnson, a leader of the NAACP, who saw the debate as part of the broader struggle against racism. Asked once about cannibalism in Haiti, Johnson had retorted: “You can take your choice between eating your human flesh without cooking it in that benighted island and cooking your human flesh without eating it in possibly no less benighted Mississippi.” Instead of worrying about Vodou practices in Haiti, he suggested, people in the United States should stamp out their own traditions of ritual killing.16

  In 1920, critics of the occupation found an unlikely supporter in Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding. The occupation in Haiti, Harding realized, provided a perfect opportunity to attack the incumbent Democratic president Woodrow Wilson—a celebrated internationalist and defender of small nations—as a racist hypocrite. Eager to get more details about the brutality of U.S. conduct, Harding met with Johnson, who recalled that the Republican “looked upon the Haitian matter as a gift right off the Christmas tree. He could not conceal his delight.” Soon, Harding began regularly referring to the “rape of Haiti” by the Wilson administration. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, played right into Harding’s hands in a campaign speech when he tried to promote his expertise in foreign affairs by falsely declaring: “You know I have had something to do with the running of a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself and, if I do say it, I think it is a pretty good Constitution.” Harding seized on the comments, explaining that if elected he wouldn’t blithely “empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by the U.S. Marines.”17

  Harding won the presidency, and in 1921–22 the U.S. Senate carried out an extensive investigation into the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The senators heard from U.S. soldiers and marine officers as well as from Haitian witnesses. But while the testimony documented many abuses on the part of the U.S. forces, something strange happened as the investigation went on: it frequently became, instead, a forum for condemnation of Haitian culture. When General Barnett, author of the leaked 1919 report, took the stand, he was peppered with questions about cannibalism and child sacrifice. Was it true that a U.S. marine had been decapitated and that “his skull had been used in some of their incantations there; did you hear of that?” “I did not hear of it, but I can well understand it might be true,” Barnett replied. And was it true that some Haitian prisoners were accused of the “butchery of one or more little children, whose blood was necessary in their rituals, in their pagan religious ceremonials”? “Yes,” Barnett told the audience. Such questioning was part of a broader pattern. The numerous atrocities carried out by the marines that the investigation exposed were interpreted as aberrations, the fault of a few bad apples. On the other hand, the brutalities of the Cacos—which centered on rumors that the bodies of several marines killed in combat had been ritually mutilated—were regarded as proof of the savagery of Haitians in general. A similar navy investigation of the occupation also included both allegations of Caco brutality and accounts of ritualized violence by U.S. forces: an American ex-soldier described how he and others had crucified Haitian victims, while a priest testified that an officer had the skeleton of an executed prisoner hanging in his house. The headline in the New York Times, however, focused exclusively on the anti-Caco stories: “Natives in Haiti Ate Marine Officer,” it declared.18

  The emphasis on the supposed backwardness of Haitian culture had immediate political repercussions: the Senate concluded that the country was not capable of governing itself and that the United States therefore had a responsibility to remain there. As one sociologist put it a few years later, while the occupation might “violate theoretical ideas of national rights,” it had not actually “destroyed the right of self-government” in Haiti, because there had never been “real democracy” in the country to begin with. Whatever abuses the United States had brought, “the continuation of former conditions would unquestionably have produced greater ones.” John Russell, who served as high commissioner for the occupation from 1922 to 1930, likewise argued that if his forces withdrew, the country would “revert to a condition of chaos when, after a time, the United States would be forced to again occupy Haiti or permit some foreign nation to do so.” Russell made a point of socializing with the bourgeoisie in Port-au-Prince, but his opinion of most Haitians was unequivocal: the average “uneducated” citizen was “more or less of an animal” and had “the mentality of a child of not more than seven years of age”—though a seven-year-old, he granted, “reared under advantageous conditions.” The general population was “bordering on a state of savagery, if not existing in such a state.” Russell considered any suggestions that he should even share power with elected Haitian leaders to be an “absurdity”: “Two men can ride a horse but one must ride behind,” he explained. Instead, he said, the United States had to govern Haiti the way the British had ruled when they colonized Egypt from 1882 to 1914, through a “tripartite system.” In Egypt “one alien race, the English, have had to control and guide a second alien race, the Turks, by whom they are disliked, in the government of a third race, the Egyptians.” In Haiti, as Russell saw it, the United States had to guide and control the Haitian elite, particularly its “mu
latto” leaders, in controlling the third group: the mass of the Haitian population. And even the governing elite was never to be fully trusted. In 1919 Russell wrote of Haitian president Sudre Dartiguenave: “At heart he is anti-American, a man of no integrity, a schemer, a Vaudou believer, and he will only work for the good of Haiti when it is to his own personal interests or he is forced to do so by the occupation.”19

  Given such attitudes among the American leadership of the occupation, there was little chance that they would respond to Haitian demands for greater democracy and political participation. But the spate of criticisms that the occupation was attracting in the United States did place the authorities under pressure to make good on the justifications they had given for invading the country—that is, to prove that they were truly engaged in a project of improvement and uplift. Accordingly, during the 1920s, they embarked on a series of ambitious schemes aimed at transforming and modernizing Haiti. At first these efforts garnered support from many prominent Haitians, who hoped that with U.S. assistance they would be able to carry out initiatives they themselves had long envisioned as necessary for their country’s advancement. Startlingly quickly, however, the patronizing, top-down approach taken by U.S. officials, and their disregard of the Haitians’ own aspirations, would turn that enthusiasm into animosity and rancor.

  The Americans’ primary partner in their work was Louis Borno, whom they installed as president of Haiti in 1922. Borno—who, back in 1914, had so strenuously protested the USS Machias incident—was not technically eligible to be president: his father was French, and the 1918 constitution required any presidential candidate to have a Haitian father. But he’d been handpicked for the job by the United States, which was, as historian Claude Moïse puts it, the only “real elector” in the country anyway. And Borno agreed with the United States that Haiti wasn’t ready for democracy. “Democracy is government by the people through conscious popular suffrage,” he later explained, and therefore impossible in a country peopled by “totally illiterate” peasants—easy prey for “audacious speculators” who bought their votes.20

  The only way forward, Borno argued, was to collaborate with the United States in order to carry out an economic and social transformation, which would lay the foundation for the development of a true democracy. “The hour is decisive,” he declared in his first presidential message: this was Haiti’s chance “to uproot misery and ignorance.” The existing situation was a national embarrassment: “a small bourgeoisie, educated, elegant, and refined,” coexisting with “an immense popular mass in rags, unable to read or write, plunged into superstition.” “This must end,” Borno proclaimed; “this social crime must disappear.” He promised to create more jobs, construct roads and railroad lines, provide irrigation to help rural farmers, and expand education.21

  Working with the United States, Borno carried out highly visible public works projects and oversaw the completion of a new National Palace to replace the one destroyed in the 1912 explosion that killed Cincinnatus Leconte. The occupation authorities also won favor by building hospitals in the towns and small clinics in the countryside, which provided significant assistance to many in Haiti. Indeed, the medical personnel who served in Haiti during the occupation left a particularly positive impression on many in the country. “The American doctors,” wrote one former Haitian official, “seemed to have given themselves the mission of dressing the wounds inflicted by their peers in the other sectors of the occupation, and of teaching us that their country was not only made up of unscrupulous businessmen and soulless soldiers.” The occupation authorities did occasion some protest when they shut down the Haitian-run medical school in Port-au-Prince, which had existed since 1823, and replaced it with one staffed by U.S. doctors; still, the U.S.-run school attracted many students, including a young high school graduate named François Duvalier.22

  The most ambitious of the U.S. occupation-era projects was the creation of a new bureaucracy, the Service Technique de l’Agriculture et de l’Enseignement Professionnel, to provide technical and agricultural education to Haitians. John Russell, the high commissioner of the occupation, believed that “the one system of education to be pursued in Haiti should be to teach each individual a trade, to make each citizen an asset to his country.” As he saw it, the classical education that was traditionally offered in Haiti was useless, even detrimental. “For over one hundred years Haiti has been struggling along, having its schools or semblance of them, giving classical instruction only, and what has been the result?” The answer, Russell thought, was clear: “suffering” and “backwardness,” not to mention “political and financial chaos.” Technical education, Russell argued, was Haiti’s only hope. “It is essential that there be developed in Haiti, as rapidly as possible, a middle class—a class of artisans and skilled laborers, who will become the backbone of the country, and go far to assure the stability of the government.”23

  Over a few years, the Service Technique built sixty-nine farm schools (welcoming 7,500 students in all) and five experimental agricultural stations. It was directed by Dr. George Freeman, who laid out his vision of the schools in a 1925 speech to Haitian students. There was, he explained, no place there for those who were “afraid or ashamed to work with their hands”: “Give us men who know labor. Give us men who are not ashamed of honest toil.” Having “travelled over your country and studied your natural resources,” Freeman intoned, he had “found valleys, rich in fertility, capable of loading thousands of steamers with cargoes of sugar, cotton, bananas, pineapples, and other fruits.” But what sprang into his mind, he said, was the “expression of our Holy Master, ‘The harvest is ripe but the reapers are few.’” It was a curious analysis, for the country of which Freeman spoke—and which he claimed to have visited and observed carefully—was densely covered with small farms, worked intensely by residents using long-practiced and well-honed agricultural techniques designed for self-sufficiency. If he saw an absence of work there, it was probably in part because he had gone in expecting to see that, thanks to well-established racist ideas about the laziness of Haitians. More importantly, however, for Freeman—as for many others—real agricultural production meant only one thing: large-scale agriculture for export. The counter-plantation system as it was practiced in Haiti registered only as an absence, or an obstacle to progress. In a cynical sleight of hand, he presented the task of producing a new plantation system as mainly a struggle to teach Haitians how to work with their hands.24

  Freeman’s advocacy of technical education was applauded by many prominent Haitian intellectuals. Dantès Bellegarde saw the initiative as a chance to carry out his earlier unrealized proposals for reforming the Haitian countryside, while others took inspiration from Booker T. Washington’s ideas of uplift through vocational training. Haitian students enthusiastically enrolled in the new agricultural and technical training schools when they opened, and over time the Service Technique—along with other educational reforms carried out during the occupation—did succeed in expanding the professional classes in the country. But the occupation’s educational policies also rapidly generated resentment and resistance. Many of the Haitians who supported the development of agricultural training nevertheless felt it essential to maintain the country’s cherished traditions of classical education; they wanted the Service Technique to be an addition, not a replacement. But the U.S. occupation authorities, who controlled the entire state budget of Haiti, wanted instead to carry out a profound reorientation of the country’s schools. Over the objections of Haitian leaders, they decided to channel the majority of the education budget to the new agricultural establishments at the expense of all other kinds of classes.25

  The unbalanced approach taken by the United States convinced many Haitians that a sinister motivation was at work. Like African American critics of vocational education in the United States, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, they worried that the exclusive focus on this training was deliberately designed to maintain Haitians in a subservient role. In view of the
strong support given by the occupation to the development of corporate plantation agriculture, they had reason to wonder whether the educational reforms were aimed at transforming all of Haiti into little more than a giant pool of low-wage agricultural and artisanal laborers. When the African American historian Rayford Logan visited Haiti in the late 1920s, he was shocked to discover that U.S. authorities seemed convinced that “vocational training is the only kind to which Haitians are suited.” Even more galling, the reason the agricultural schools needed so much money was that they were largely staffed by teachers from the United States—“foreign experts” who were paid substantially more than their Haitian counterparts. Given that the teachers’ salaries came from Haitian taxpayers, the disparity was particularly infuriating, and the system was not only demeaning but inefficient. The U.S. teachers rarely spoke either French or Kreyòl, so they gave their lectures in English to largely uncomprehending students, or else explained the material to Haitian assistants who then had to teach the classes for them.26