Taking Haiti Seriously

Mary A. Renda. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi + 414 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $44.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In October 1929, Helen Miller, a junior high school teacher in Pennsylvania, assigned her students to write to Faustin Wirkus, a U.S. Marine sergeant serving in the Haitian Gendarmerie. "I would like to know how you like it down there as king," a student named Donald Pifer asked Wirkus. "I think that you would get very lonesome down there without any white people to talk to but I guess you are used to that by this time" (p. 5).

Mary A. Renda's Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 explores both the experiences of U.S. soldiers, like Faustin Wirkus, and the U.S. cultural understandings of Haiti that prompted Donald Pifer to consider a solitary white marine to be a king. Renda argues that historians have incorrectly considered the 1915-1934 Haitian occupation to be a trivial distraction, like the letter of a Pennsylvania schoolboy. Rather than being a sideshow, the Haitian engagement "was one of several important arenas in which the United States was remade through overseas imperial ventures in the first third of the twentieth century." (p. 12) Renda contends that the Haitian occupation, more than other contemporary overseas military actions, "facilitated the domestic renegotiation of racial and gender issues" because people in the United States generally perceived Haiti "as a distinctly black nation" that was geographically near but culturally distant from its northern neighbor (p. 36).

To explain why and how the United States was remade, Renda focuses on culture, particularly the paternalism at the heart of U.S. culture. In the eyes of many "U.S. Americans" (Renda's term), Haiti in 1915 was a miserable orphan. Haiti's French father had abandoned her long ago, and her African single mother had nothing of value to offer. Haiti's generous Uncle Sam, then, had little choice but to become, in the words of General Smedley Butler, "the trustees of a huge estate that belongs to minors" (p. 13). The image of a benevolent father, however, masked domination and violence inherent in paternalism. Renda argues, "Paternalism did not mitigate against violence but rather reinforced and extended it" (p. 35). Paternalist discourse encompassed a range of issues, including age, class, race, gender, and sexuality. Renda explores each of these within the paternalist framework to probe how U.S. culture supported, questioned, and was transformed by the occupation of Haiti

Renda's careful attention to resistance enriches her analysis of paternalism. Although she documents Haitian resistance to the occupation, Haiti is more of a stage than a player in Renda's drama. Her book centers on the resistance within U.S. culture, beginning with the story of U.S. soldiers in Haiti. Each marine brought to Haiti both military gear and cultural baggage—including individualistic understandings of what it meant to be white (all were white or passed as white), a marine, a man, and an American. These soldiers operated within a highly structured chain of command, but in Haiti they frequently had to interpret orders issued from afar. To ensure that the soldiers would do their duty, Renda contends, "They had to be conscripted into the [paternalistic] project of carrying out U.S. rule" (p. 12). Individual marines responded in a variety of ways to this cultural conscription, and Renda explores in detail how soldiers "negotiated the challenges of paternalism, shaping the discourse even as it shaped them" (p. 17).

Renda, for example, probes the shifting and uncertain understandings of manhood among marines in Haiti. At the time of the occupation, many white men in the United States worried about the status of their manhood. A growing women's movement challenged traditional male dominance in the political realm, threatening to "sissify" the nation. Economic transformations also altered traditional...