"They didn't speak our language; we didn't speak theirs."
Frances MacLean
Just after midnight on July 26, 1915, two Haitians, one living in asylum at the French Legation, the other at the Portuguese, quietly closed the doors to their sanctuaries and slipped into the Port-au-Prince night.
Like many of their countrymen, they were veteran intriguers. They trusted the dark to hide them, and they counted on the denseness of the tropical air to muffle the sound of their movements and that of 52 mercenaries whom they would meet in a nearby ravine.
Once assembled, the guerrillas shouldered their rifles and followed their leaders to the city center. There they knelt in the darkness, took aim at the looming shape of the president's mansion and fired off round after round.
Inside, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, Haiti's seventh president in seven years, waited with his family and attendants until dawn. Slightly wounded but with a gun in one hand, Sam and entourage bolted for the French Consulate next door.
In Port-au-Prince, everyone knew that sustained gunfire meant a change of government; guards had orders to kill all political prisoners. That day 168 members of the country's elite families were slaughtered, and the streets were filled with mobs screaming for Sam's blood.
The next day, relatives of the massacred prisoners surrounded the barricaded consulate, calling for President Sam's death. Finally at dawn, July 28, in a wave of rage, an 80-man murder party scrambled over the garden wall. They swarmed through the building, searching behind doors, under beds, in cupboards. A medicinal odor from Sam's dressed wound led them to his hiding place, an alcove concealed by the ambassador's stately bed.
Someone stabbed the president. Another grabbed his heels and dragged him downstairs. Another heaved him over a veranda railing to the courtyard below, where the crowd shoved and pummeled one another to get at him. Sam gripped the spokes of a diplomat's carriage until a whack broke his wrist. As he staggered to the front gate, his skull was split open with a blow from a cocomacaque, the heavy stick made of coconut palm often carried by Haitians. The U.S. charge d'affaires reported: a man ... rushed howling by me, with a severed hand from which the blood was dripping, the thumb of which he had stuck in his mouth."
Meanwhile, aboard the U.S. Navy ship Washington, which lay in tranquil waters a mile offshore, radiograms flew back and forth to Washington. At about 6 P.M. on July 28, 1915, Adm. William Caperton had his orders. He loaded 330 marines and sailors into boats and went ashore to restore order. The marines stayed 19 years.
According to Robert and Nancy Heinl, authors of the Haitian history Written in Blood, two marines died that day, apparently shot by their own weapons, and one Haitian, as he single-handedly defended Fort National. Most Haitians complied as the marines seized arms and took over public operations. The 1915 invasion surprised neither Haiti, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, nor the rest of the world. For a decade U.S. ships as well as those of other foreign nations had patrolled Haitian waters, to protect their nationals and monitor a succession of mostly bloody revolutions on the island. "In the beginning we were glad to see the marines," Franck Henriques, a Haitian teacher, would recall.
In the 72-year period before the invasion, Haiti had had 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections, revolts and coups. Of 22 presidents, just one served a complete term. Only four died of natural causes. Thirteen were ousted by coup. One was blown to smithereens by an explosion in the palace. One was deposed, then executed. One was torn to bits in the streets. Despite the gore, running for president in Haiti had a certain etiquette. Candidates (with someone else's money) assembled armies of cacos, part-time guerrilla fighters recruited from peasant villages in the mountains. (In the elusive Creole patois spoken by Haitians, caco is variously translated as "mean red ant" and "bird of prey.") The brigades then marched to Port-au-Prince to kill the current president. First attempts were not always successful, so second or third tries were common.
Today the takeover of another country is frowned upon. And it is true that at the time the United States favored something called Dollar Diplomacy, the use of investment and trade to further American influence abroad, as well as to encourage order and prosperity in politically unstable countries. But forcible meddling where American interests were involved was still looked upon as more or less legitimate.
In the early 20th century, many Caribbean and Central American countries were heavily in debt to European countries and still shakily trying to make it as independent nations. Political upheavals were common. Sometimes during riots or revolutions, or after a foreign debt went unpaid, U.S. marines were sent in to establish order. Customhouses, generally the main source of revenue, were often seized. Then the United States used the export-import duties collected there--augmented with revenues from bonds sold in the United States--to pay off the foreign loans. This brought a measure of honesty and order out of fiscal chaos but tended to assure the countries' future indebtedness to U.S. bankers and businessmen.
In doing so, the United States was following the "Roosevelt Corollary," Teddy Roosevelt's update of the Monroe Doctrine, which required European countries to keep their distance. TR declared in 1904 that the United States alone had the right to police the turbulent little countries of the Western Hemisphere, to protect property, maintain order and make sure they paid their debts. By 1915 we had intervened in Colombia to create Panama for a future canal (1903) and in Cuba (1906). Marines had landed in Honduras (1907), Nicaragua (1910, 1912) and Mexico (1914). They would take over in the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924.
Despite its political upheavals, Haiti was very much a special case. Haitian presidents, who had access to its customs receipts, had borrowed unwisely. In 1915, with a debt of $21.5 million-so large that 80 percent of its budget went to debt service-Haiti was one of the Poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Also one of the proudest. In 1804 a heroic and successful war with France had made Haiti the world's first black republic-and history's only example of a successful slave rebellion. The high cost of expelling a foreign master remained a vivid historic memory. Come coup or countercoup, come graft or corruption, Haiti, unlike most Caribbean or Central American countries, never defaulted on its foreign debt payments.
In the years leading up to World War I, the little country also stoutly resisted all financial pressures, bribes, blandishments and dirty tricks calculated to get it to go into receivership and let Uncle Sam put Haitian fiscal affairs in order. A chief instigator was American banker Roger Farnham, an officer of the National City Bank of New York, president of the National Bank of Haiti and vice president of one of Haiti's railroads. He had decided that his financial future in Haiti, as well as the country's stability, would depend on a U.S. takeover and he steadily exaggerated the extent of German holdings and influence there. Farnham became a leading adviser to Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, who was no expert on Haitian affairs. ("Dear me! Think of it. Niggers speaking French," Bryan marveled during an early briefing.)
Ship traffic through the Panama Canal began in August 1914, within days after World War I broke out. The pressure on Haiti, as well as strategic concerns, mounted. In February 1915, the German government announced unlimited submarine warfare against neutral ships carrying cargo to its enemies Britain and France. In May 1915, the Lusitania was sunk. About 1,200 drowned, including 128 Americans. Encouraged by Farnham, the already exaggerated fears about possible German acquisition of a base in Haiti escalated dramatically. Plans to intervene had been ready for some time. The Haitian bloodbath of July 26 provided the right moment and a justifiable excuse to intervene.
What the marines first noted was that in the land Christopher Columbus had called a paradise, everything was in shambles. "In the street were piles of evil-smelling offal . . . the whole prospect was filthy," one wrote. Telephone and telegraph lines had been inoperable since 1911. Railroad tracks were sporadic and shaky. Lighthouses were lit with kerosene lanterns. Designated rocks and chunks of iron served as weights in the customhouses. Bridges were down. Holes gaped in the prison walls. Mattresses and pillows covered doors and windows to absorb stray bullets.
More immediate and distressing, the cacos soon cut off the mountain paths used by peasants bringing food to coastal towns and city markets. Many of the country's 1.5 million people were hungry. President Wilson was worried about whether the United States had "the legal authority to do what apparently we ought to do." In the end, the Administration had the marines do what they were trained to do. They took over. Food and medical centers were set up, and remained for much of the occupation. Then the Navy commander took over the country's purse strings, meaning, essentially, Haiti's ten customhouses. Navy paymasters became collectors of customs.
First bivouacking in tents around Port-au-Prince, the relative handful of marines (there never were more than 2,500 at a time in Haiti, and usually far less) soon branched out around the country and built more comfortable thatched-roof mud-and-wattle huts, often with the added luxury of poured concrete floors. They brought cars, trucks and even airplanes to Haiti.
A Marine Corps officer was placed in charge of each district with instructions to keep order, collect taxes, arbitrate disputes and even distribute medicines. The enlisted men tended to be monolingual, often with less than a high school education. Most had been brought up to think Africans inferior. Suddenly they found themselves confronted with a black society that had an upper class better educated and more sophisticated than they, and an intensely proud, though uneducated, peasant class. Nonetheless, Haitian Daniel Beaulieu, a 77-year-old radiologist, has fond memories of some of the foreign invaders. "The Marine station was across the street from our house in Jacmel. I was just a baby. In the evenings they came over and sat on my porch. They rocked me and sang to me. Sometimes they took me for a walk."
Picking a candidate for president
Nevertheless, strong antioccupation feelings inevitably set in-except among rich and favored mulattoes who hoped the Americans would turn the country over to them. Haitian presidents were officially "elected" by the members of the legislature, whose votes could often be bought, and were swiftly swayed by the presence of victorious revolutionaries. Charmed by the educated, more pliable upper class, U.S. officials now arranged for the election of Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, a mulatto, as Haitian president to succeed Sam. He was the only candidate who had agreed to the American plans for restoring political and financial order in the troubled country. But making him president proved to be a major mistake.
To a large extent Haitian politics had been a long struggle, still going on today, between blacks and mulattoes, a class that resulted from colonial liaisons between French men and Haitian women. Black mistresses were, at times, acknowledged, and their children were usually well educated, sometimes in France. And sometimes they inherited property. Culturally, they considered themselves French, not African. Inevitably, members of the mulatto class were looked down on by their French relations and hated by their envious African kin. In Haiti they gradually acquired much influence through wealth, and devised a social and economic hierarchy based on skin color, lighter being better. In the minds of the black majority, the choice of a mulatto as president permanently aligned the Americans with the blacks' oppressors. President Dartiguenave was a lawyer who had been a leader in the senate, but before long much of the population disliked him so intensely that he had to go everywhere, and even sleep, guarded by marines.
At the time and later, though the marines made life in Haiti tenable with food and eventually health care, anti-American feeling grew. Martial law was imposed on September 3, 1915. Haitians sandwiched life's chores between curfews. The United States censored criticism in the press and tried political offenders in military courts. In sorties from their mountain dens, a resistance movement of cacos began ambushing marines day and night. Hoping to end the skirmishing, Admiral Caperton agreed to dispatch more marines. Violence only escalated. His men "hunted the cacos like pigs," wrote Maj. Smedley Butler, the diminutive, war-loving son of a Quaker Congressman from Pennsylvania, who had commanded a Marine battalion in Veracruz in 1914 (SMITHSONIAN, June 1984).
Quite apart from the dangers, it was trying duty for marines in the countryside. In a memoir written later, former Pvt. Homer Overley of Monon, Indiana, would list the rigors of patrolling the mountain bush: " 'Spic' itch, rotting feet, malaria and black water fever, and 87% civilian venereal disease factor, elephantiasis and small pox epidemics, lamp-burning Clarine as poor man's booze, dirty water, too little food. . . ." According to Overley there had been three local instances of mutilation of marines by cacos. Other atrocities were rumored, including some by marines.
To maintain at least the forms of diplomacy between two nations, President Wilson called for a formal treaty. Drafted without any Haitian consultation, the treaty was signed in October 1915, making Haiti a virtual U.S. protectorate. It called for American control of the country for ten years, established a U.S. financial adviser to the Haitian government and a national police force officered by Americans. Most important, it gave America control of Haiti's debt.
With the treaty in train, Admiral Caperton sailed home. He had respected and even entertained Haitians. The elite referred to him as le beau vieillard svelte, "the handsome, graceful old man." His replacement, Littleton W.T Waller from Virginia, was quite a different sort. "There are some very fine looking, well educated polished men here," Waller wrote a friend, "but they are real nigs beneath the surface. What the people of Norfolk and Portsmouth would say if they saw me bowing and scraping to these coons-I do not know." Pre-World War I America crackled with racial prejudice. Inevitably, marines brought their biases to Haiti. In return, Haitians criticized the marines, less often for racism than for lack of culture: the Americans had no manners, they claimed, and did not speak French.
Smedley Butler, who later referred to his marines and himself as "a glorified bill collecting agency" for American business, held divided sympathies with regard to race, or rather, class. He had a strong paternal feeling toward "those who did not wear shoes," meaning the vast majority of black Haitians, and a terrible contempt for the well-to-do. He was concerned about the welfare and training of the peasant recruits for his Gendarmerie, a national police force that he set up to end the cycle of Haiti's revolutionary bloodshed. Butler's rudeness toward the mulatto elite, who considered service in the Gendarmerie beneath them, was legendary. On a trip with Dartiguenave, Butler claimed that he made the president sleep on the floor while he occupied the only bed in a room they shared.
History also credits Butler with reactivating a harsh Haitian labor practice, the corvee, similar to the one used by independent Haiti's reformist black king, Henry Christophe, in order to help build new roads. Under Butler's command, members of the Gendarmerie sometimes marched the conscripted corvee road gangs to and from sites, roped together like prisoners. When cries of slavery stirred in the press in 1918, Washington officially stopped the corvees, though the system persisted for a few more months in the backcountry, where caco guerrilla activity was hottest.
It wasn't long before these resistance fighters became folk heroes in Haiti. Charlemagne Peralte, a charismatic, educated black, emerged as their leader. As Peralte's legend grew, the marines grew more and more determined to get him. Eventually, after months of spying, a marine-led Gendarmerie patrol snaked over mountain trails at night into Peralte's camp. A marine shot him twice. Needing proof of his death to demoralize the cacos, the marines propped Peralte's body against a board, unwittingly posing him with arms hanging limp and head slumped to one side as if crucified. A photograph of it circulated throughout the country, assuring Peralte's place in Haitian martyrdom.
The surrender of Germany, in November 1918, eliminated the strategic reason for the marines being in Haiti. Most of them, who would rather have fought in Europe anyway, had begun to lose their sense of purpose: "We . . . tried to keep Esprit du Corps high," Private Overley wrote, "but we sometimes wondered ... if our flag wasn't being dragged through the slime of Imperialism." Sgt. Faustin Wirkus of Dupont, Pennsylvania, came to believe that kind treatment and understanding might avert the "spirit of rebellion among the country people-which might save a lot of fighting and killing and get Haiti on its feet."
By 1920, Republican Warren Harding campaigned for the Presidency partly by denouncing the Democratic Administration's occupation of Haiti. Democrats, particularly Franklin D. Roosevelt, were attacked for imposing a constitution on Haiti "at the point of bayonets." As Wilson's Undersecretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had visited Haiti and liked to claim he had drafted Haiti's constitution. In 1921 and 1922, testimony in Senate hearings on the issue painted a grim picture of brutality, mismanagement and racism. In the first five years, it was estimated, 2,250 Haitians, including some of the Gendarmerie, had been killed, as against 14 to 16 marines. But the United States did not want Haiti to return to political and economic chaos-nor did it want to see its stabilizing mission appear a failure in the eyes of the world. The Senate voted to stay on.
We would be staying under different terms, however. The plan was to turn Haiti into "a first-class black man's country," as Major Butler later put it. Haiti was to be pulled up by its bootstraps, becoming a country where Americans could invest. The new program was sometimes called "Occupation Uplift." The treaty of 1915 was extended; a U.S. high commissioner was installed. Haiti's debt was renegotiated-through the National City Bank of New York. In 1922 Dartiguenave stepped down. Louis Borno, who had served as both foreign minister and finance minister, became president.
The United States then began seriously trying to improve conditions and to make Haiti progressive, efficient, technological. Haiti, it was hoped, would become stable and prosperous, buying U.S. goods and supplying us with fruit and vegetables raised by plantation agriculture. "Just because the Haytian native population does not use knives and forks and cups," wrote Frankin Roosevelt, who was interested in investing in Haiti, did not mean that they would never do so.
More than 1,000 miles of roads and 210 bridges were built. The 200-year-old French irrigation system was resurrected and expanded. Haiti's telephone system was expanded and updated to link the island's cities. Old wharves were repaired and new ones constructed. Fifteen acetylene lighthouses were built. The barely existent sanitation system was overhauled. Parks were laid out and gardens planted in city centers and at municipal buildings. A number of theaters and schools were restored or built from the ground up. The public health program was expanded. Hospitals and clinics were set up across the country to help control malaria and yaws. American doctors came to train Haitian doctors, and some Haitian doctors eventually went to the States to study. (One of them was Francois Duvalier, who later became known as "Papa Doc," the country's infamous dictator, 1957-71.) The size of the Gendarmeric was increased in part by "Haitianization" replacing some of its American officers with Haitians; and in 1928 it was renamed the Garde d'Haiti. The tax system was expanded, as well, to include basic levies on exports and imports. The currency was stabilized by fixing it to the U.S. dollar.
The hope was to advance Haiti in one giant step from a predominantly hoe-wielding culture to a modern agricultural state. On paper, one of the most useful programs was the Service Technique, created to give formal instruction in field-crop production and soil management, as well as in simple technology. Sometimes lecturers came from the United States, a few from schools like Howard University and the Tuskegee Institute, but visiting Americans needed translators, and instruction was slow.
Manual work made them feel "like slaves"
With great enthusiasm and the best of intentions, the Service Technique recruited young men and took them into the fields for training in such things as cattle raising or tobacco growing and veterinary medicine. Some were placed in open-air "shops" where they were taught to operate simple assembly-line machines to stitch boots, for example. Some were elites drawn from the lycees (high schools) because they could read, who were paid scholarships to join the program. Americans, who are accustomed to doing their own work, could not have imagined that such training would offend the Haitians. But Haitians, emulating the French cultural upper class, preferred classical French education. Many of the elite (and in U.S. eyes, effete) young men felt degraded working with their hands. They said it made them feel like slaves.
Some farmers gained from the new technology, but too often, at least from the educated Haitians' viewpoint, the program seemed designed to benefit a few large plantations, some owned by American companies. Progress was made in the production of sisal (for cordage) and sugar. But there were, in fact, too few large plantations, partly because much of Haiti was mountainous and remote, partly because Haitian land titles favored small plots and acquiring them to create plantations under Haitian law was costly, complicated and time consuming.
American banks had taken over Haiti's national debt, which had to be serviced. Everything done in Haiti had to be done with what was left over from Haitian funds. During the prosperous '20s, when the world coffee price was high and Haiti's long period of U.S.-enforced stability allowed small businesses to flourish, Haiti's government revenues ranged between $8 million and $10 million a year, almost twice the revenues of just before the occupation. The money went farther, too, since graft and corruption and costly revolutions had been eliminated. But there was never enough money to finance necessary reforms.
Occupation officials had hoped eventually to raise money through a combination of U.S. and international loans and bonds sold on the U.S. market, but were disappointed. Haitian soil turned out not to be as rich as expected. In the end all that Haiti had going for it was cheap labor. U.S. and European investors decided that their money would be more profitably spent elsewhere-including in Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, which was under U.S. control from 1916 to 1924.
The Dominican Republic had better land for plantation agriculture. In contrast to Haiti, its U.S. administrators had used the country's funds to build hundreds of schools, and they resurveyed land so that legal titles could be easily conveyed. The Haitian government's budget for 1927 shows the occupation's fiscal priorities: $2.68 million for public debt; $1.44 million for public works; $1.28 million for the Gendarmerie; $680,000 for public health; $500,000 for agricultural service; $400,000 for public instruction.
In addition to quarrels over the way Americans were supervising the Haitian budget, there were social frictions. "We thought of Americans as wild cowboys," says Albert Mangones, a 75-year-old architect and sculptor. "They didn't speak our language; we didn't speak theirs. And we were well aware of the lynchings of American Negroes." Hostile feeling became steadily more intense. By the late 1920s a coherent, elite-based opposition had developed.
Outside events made matters worse too. Coffee was Haiti's main export crop. In 1928 the crop was poor, and the next year saw a drastic drop in the world market price of coffee. That was the year of the stock market crash, ushering in the Great Depression. In response, Haiti's American financial advisers raised Haitian taxes; they were eager to get as much of the U.S. bank loan paid off as fast as possible in case Haiti's economy should collapse totally.
Finally, a massacre stirs worldwide criticism
Inevitably Haitian resentment grew most voluble and incendiary among the handful of university-level students. They formed national unions, joined the infant Caribbean Negritude movement and met with U.S. representatives of the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They demonstrated en masse, sparking local antioccupation newspaper campaigns, which found an echo both in the United States and in anti-American Europe. In October 1929, when it was announced that Service Technique student stipends for fieldwork would be raised, while stipends in the city would be reduced, students stoned the director's house and boycotted the Service Technique's agricultural school in Port-au-Prince. Before long, students all over the country joined in. Finally the clergy, customs officials, storeowners and businessmen stopped working.
If one event symbolizes the failure and collapse of the occupation, it was what became known as the Les Cayes Massacre. On December 6, 1929, a crowd of 1,500 peasants, armed with rocks and clubs, marched through the town of Les Cayes to protest the 'ailing of demonstrators. When a Haitian protestor started a scuffle with a marine, other marines fired, most of them into the air, but some into the crowd, killing 12 and wounding 23. Or double those numbers, according to outraged Haitian reports.
The killings stirred worldwide criticism of America. President Herbert Hoover, recently elected and trying to launch his Good Neighbor Policy for Latin America and the Caribbean, dispatched a commission to Haiti. Its job: to decide "when and how we are to withdraw." Once back in Washington, Hoover's commission pointed out that the occupation's achievements, though impressive, fell far short of expectations partly because Americans failed "to understand the social problems of Haiti." Hoover wanted out, "bag and baggage." Negotiations dragged, however. We refused to withdraw troops unless the new government agreed to American control of the country's finances until 1952, the debt's scheduled payoff date.
On August 15, 1934, about 10,000 Haitians crowded the wharf as the last marines from the longest U.S. occupation in history boarded ship for home. There was no violence. Crowds cheered and slapped backs. "I was only a boy, but I was there," says hotelier and former diplomat Max Sam. "When the American flag came down I cried." A few days later the country sang and danced itself to exhaustion at the Festival of the Second Independence. Lamented Franck Henriques, "Soon horse dung was back in the street."
When historian Robert Heinl, then a Marine colonel, arrived in 1958 for a special mission to reorganize the armed forces for Papa Doc Duvalier, he found the " telephones gone ... roads approaching non-existence . . . ports obstructed by silt ... docks crumbling . . . sanitation and electrification in precarious decline."
In truth, according to historian Hans Schmidt (author of The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934), the long American effort had not changed Haiti much. It had strengthened the national bank, and created a sound national currency. It left some roads and small airfields, and an improved system of communications. To some extent it helped end Haiti's social and economic isolation by inaugurating the growing possibilities of tourism. The Garde d'Haiti provided an important avenue of social mobility for poor and illiterate blacks who were given a chance not only to train for constabulary duties, but to get a secondary education. The Garde had been conceived as a nonpartisan peacekeeping force that would help ensure the right kind of political stability. During the occupation it did so. Afterward, however, the existence of such a force ended by helping political strongmen stay in power--an improvement over yearly revolutions, but not exactly what the United States had intended.
During the past decade, in what seems like a haunting replay of preoccupation 1915, thousands of Haitians have died in violence. The government has changed seven times in the past six years alone. Blacks and mulattoes are still troubled by their centuries-long antipathy. And now, touched by the plight of Haitian boat people seeking asylum here, many Americans who in the past have roundly criticized other American overseas efforts as "capitalist imperialism," are calling for an international peacekeeping force in Haiti to calm things down and help establish democracy.
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Frances Maclean last wrote about Haiti's black king Henry Christophe (SMITHSONIAN, October 1987).
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