Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy

CHAPTER 7. The First U.S. Occupation

77 The First U.S. Occupation “The little fellow does what he can; the big fellow does what he wants.” —a Haitian proverb “In the beginning we were glad to see the marines,” recalled Haitian teacher Franck Henniques years after the first U.S. occupation of Haiti ended in 1934. But that sentiment would soon change.1 And, Jim Crow racism and U.S. insensitivity to Haitian culture would inspire a virulent black nationalism that would open the portals to the strange and macabre dictatorship of François (Papa Doc) Duvalier. “What they [the U.S.] had unwittingly inspired,” wrote the Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph-Trouillot years later, “was a return to Africa.”2 But on the first day of the occupation, July 28, 1915, no one seemed to anticipatewhatlayahead.Occupyingtroopsfoundthecountryinadeplorable state. “In the streets were piles of foul-smelling offal,” one wrote. “Thewholeprojectwasfilthy.”3 Bridgeswerebroken;therailroadsworked sporadically. Telephone and telegraph lines had been inoperable since 1911. In the customs houses, chunks of rocks served as weights. And CHAPTER 7 7 8 THE FIRST U.S. OCCUPATION many of the country’s 1.5 million citizens were hungry. Contributing to the problem was the fact that cacos still controlled the mountain passes used by peasants to transport food to the coastal towns and cities. Initially, President Woodrow Wilson worried whether or not the United States “had the legal authority to do what apparently we ought to do.”4 But soon he ordered the marines to take charge. Martial law was imposed on September 3 and the Haitian army was disbanded. Hoping to maintain a semblance of diplomatic cooperation, President Wilson had his State Department draft a treaty, which made Haiti a virtual protectorate . According to the terms of the “Haitian-American Convention” promulgated on September 16, 1915, and ratified by the U.S. Senate in February 1916, the United States assumed the right to police Haiti and control its public finances for ten years. U.S. Rear Admiral William B. Caperton ordered about twenty-five hundred marines to fan out throughout the country and set up local headquarters outfitted with cars, trucks, and even airplanes. A Marine Corps officer was placed in charge of each district with instructions to keep order, collect taxes, arbitrate disputes, and distribute medicines. The fact that most of the U.S. Marines didn’t speak either Creole or French and tended to be chosen from southern states, because in the words of one officer “they know how to deal with darkies,” didn’t make for a smooth transition.5 From the start U.S. racism began to undermine the success of the occupation. “There are some fine-looking, well educated, polished men here, but they are real nigs beneath the surface,” wrote marine colonel Littleton W. T. Walker to a superior officer.6 One of those polished, educated men, Philipe Sudre Dartiquenave, was handpicked by the United States to become the country’s next president. In the countryside, resistance to the U.S. occupation was tenacious. To the north and in the center of the country, just north of Port-au-Prince, officers of the disbanded army, landowners, and peasants formed centers of armed resistance. Hoping to quickly put an end to the skirmishing, Admiral Caperton dispatched more U.S. Marines. Violence escalated. “We hunted down cacos like pigs,” wrote Major Smedley Butler. The strongest caco movement appeared in 1918 under the leadership of a charismatic landowner and officer in the disbanded army named 79 THE FIRST U.S. OCCUPATION Charlemagne Peralte. In late 1919 with the help of a Haitian informer, marine captain Hermann Hanneken led a nighttime raid into Peralte’s mountain camp. A marine shot the surprised caco leader twice. In order to establish proof of Peralte’s death, marines propped his body against a board and tied him so that his arms hung limp and his head hung to one side, as if he had been crucified. The photograph they took, which was intended to demoralize the cacos, ending up securing the martyrdom of Charlemagne Peralte. With the end of armed resistance, a new program known as “Operation Uplift” was launched to turn Haiti, in the words of Major Butler, into “a first-class black man’s country.”7 In the next decade more than one thousand miles of roads and 210 bridges were built. A modern telephone system was...