7
The landing force shoved off at 4:50 P.M. on July 28, 1915. The 340 sailors and marines from the U.S. armored cruiser Washington landed two miles west of Port-au-Prince and marched into town. From a distance, Marine Sergeant Faustin Wirkus thought the Haitian capital looked “beautiful” and “romantic,” with its sloping hills dotted with “white-walled, tile-roofed houses” surrounded by “green foliage.” But on closer inspection, “Fairyland had turned into a pigsty.” The marines discovered “evil-smelling offal” and rotting garbage piled up in the streets. “More than that, we were not welcome. . . . ” Firkus later wrote. “We marched over the cobblestoned streets of the waterfront through walls of human silence and dead-eyed stares.”
But the resistance was mostly passive, and the marines had little trouble occupying Port-au-Prince, notwithstanding occasional sniping. The only two U.S. casualties were the result of “friendly fire” from inexperienced sailors. The U.S. occupation of Haiti, which would last for 19 years, had begun.
“A Wild Orgy of Revenge”
American troops had been drawn into Haiti for much the same reason they had occupied Veracruz: because of political turmoil. It was a pattern that was to be repeated throughout the Caribbean and Central America in the early years of the twentieth century: The more unstable a country, the more likely the U.S. was to intervene. And no country was more unstable than Haiti. Of 22 rulers between 1843 and 1915, only one served out his term of office. During those years there were at least 102 civil wars, coups d’etat, revolts, and other political disorders. The period between 1908 and 1915 was particularly chaotic. Seven presidents were overthrown during those seven years.
Most of these coups followed a familiar pattern. They were orchestrated by the mulatto elite that ran the black republic. (Mulattos, or those of mixed African and European ancestry, were a tiny, educated minority, practicing Catholicism and speaking French. They regarded themselves as a race apart from, and superior to, the Creole-speaking, voodoo-practicing, darker-skinned Haitian masses.) A cabal of mulatre (mulatto) plotters in Port-au-Prince, the capital, would become unhappy with the incumbent. They would select an alternative candidate—usually a noir (black)—and line up financing for him from the German merchant community, which expected to make a tidy profit on its investment out of public funds once the usurper came to power. The would-be president would journey to the wild, mountainous north of Haiti, where he would recruit to his cause tatterdemalion soldiers of fortune and part-time bandits known as cacos (after a local bird of prey) with promises of loot. The cacos would march south toward Port-au-Prince, plundering coastal towns as they went. Since the Haitian army was corrupt and ineffectual, there was little to slow their progress. Upon the cacos’ arrival at the outskirts of the capital, the incumbent president would go quickly and quietly into foreign exile, taking a portion of the treasury with him. His successor would be elected by the National Assembly at gunpoint. The cacos would be paid off from the public treasury and happily return home, until a fresh revolutionary leader invited them to march again. It was, boasted one Haitian in 1915, “an efficient revolutionary system. . . . The most intricate and elaborate system in the world.”
The last of these genteel coups occurred in February 1915, when Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, a noir from the north, seized the presidential palace with caco help. Almost immediately upon taking office, Sam found the cacos once again in revolt, this time rallying to the banner of Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, a red-haired mulatre who had the support of the Dominican Republic’s ministry of war. Unlike the previous occupants of his office, Sam was not prepared to go quietly into exile. He ordered Port-au-Prince’s police chief, General Charles-Oscar Etienne, to round up 200 members of the mulatto elite, including a former president, and hold them as hostages to be killed in the event of a revolution, presumably backed by their relatives.
The revolution broke out on July 27, 1915. That morning the National Palace was attacked and President Sam sought refuge with his family in the French legation next door. Police chief Etienne and his henchmen proceeded to massacre at least 160 of their prisoners, leaving the prison walls covered with entrails, the gutters running with blood. This was a violation of the “time-honored rules and precedents” of Haitian coups, which held that the mulattos who orchestrated events were to remain inviolate. Mobs of enraged mulattos rose up across Port-au-Prince. Oscar Etienne was dragged out of the Dominican legation where he had taken refuge and torn to bits. His body “was shot at, hacked at, and defiled by every passer-by, and by evening had become an unrecognizable pulp of flesh.” The following morning Etienne’s remains were doused with cooking oil and set afire.
President Sam suffered a similar fate. On July 28, a mob led by the fathers of his victims dragged him out of the French legation and quickly killed him with machete chops. “Hands, feet and head cut off, eviscerated, the body was dragged through the street by mobs, elite mingling with blacks in a wild orgy of revenge. Sam’s hands, feet and head were stuck on pickets of the iron fence on our Champ de Mars.”
News of this violence, with its violation of French diplomatic immunity, swiftly reached Rear Admiral William B. Caperton aboard the U.S. cruiser Washington, anchored just a mile off Port-au-Prince. “A trim, smallish man with the weathered face of a sailor, his hair and mustache silver-gray beneath his gold braided hat,” Caperton was a 60-year-old Tennessean and had spent 44 of those years in the navy, rising upward in a steady but unspectacular progression of jobs until in January 1915 he took over the Atlantic Fleet’s Special Service Squadron, which handled gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean. He had been in Haitian waters aboard the Washington since the beginning of July, shadowing Dr. Rosalvo Bobo’s progress along the coast to ensure that no foreigners were caught up in revolutionary violence.
After President Sam’s untimely demise, the American, British, and French ministers journeyed out to Caperton’s flagship and begged him to land troops to restore order. On the evening of July 28, 1915, Caperton received a cablegram from the chief of naval operations in Washington: “State Department desires American forces be landed Port-au-Prince and American and Foreign Interests be protected.” Caperton had anticipated his orders by a few hours, so that by the time the cablegram arrived U.S. Marines were already in control of Haiti’s capital.
The American public, preoccupied with the war ravaging Europe and various news events closer to home, barely noticed. The July 29, 1915, edition of the New York World, the mass circulation daily founded by Joseph Pulitzer, relegated the landing to a small item on page nine. Among the more important stories splashed across the front page: “Elsie Ferguson, Actress, Will be a Banker’s Bride.”
U.S. and Haiti
The occupation of Port-au-Prince was only the culmination of a longstanding U.S. involvement in the affairs of Haiti stretching back to 1800, when a slave revolt had expelled Napoleon’s legions and, with a little help from the U.S. Navy, established the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere. In the nineteenth century, several U.S. administrations made unsuccessful attempts to secure use of the excellent port at Môle Saint-Nicolas on the northwest coast. Civil unrest in Haiti led to 19 landings by U.S. Marines to protect foreign residents between 1857 and 1913.
U.S. interest in Haiti grew with the construction of the Panama Canal, since Haiti and Cuba dominate, from opposing sides, the Windward Passage leading to the canal. The State and Naval departments lived in constant fear that some European power would establish a naval base in Haiti that would threaten U.S. preeminence in the Caribbean. These fears were especially acute because Haiti had a flourishing German merchant community, which controlled 80 percent of its foreign trade, and American intelligence reports indicated that these businessmen were active in manipulating Haitian politics. Washington was afraid that Haiti’s constant chaos would give the Europeans an excuse to intervene.
As elsewhere in the Caribbean, the Taft administration tried to use dollar diplomacy to stabilize the situation. With scant success. In 1910–11 Secretary of State Philander Knox muscled aside a Franco-German consortium that wanted to grab control of the Banque Nationale de la Republique d’Haiti, and helped Wall Street banks led by National City Bank (forerunner of Citibank) acquire a 50 percent stake in the national bank. Another Wall Street consortium with many of the same participants began building a Haitian national railway. In 1914, fearing that the destitute Haitian government would raid the Banque vaults, the State Department sent a gunboat and some marines to transport gold stocks from Port-au-Prince to New York for safekeeping. (The money was returned five years later with interest.)
The American business community agitated for more military involvement to safeguard their investment. But in the larger scheme of things, the U.S. economic stake in Haiti was insignificant; in 1913 U.S. direct investment in Haiti amounted to $4 million, or one-third of 1 percent of the total U.S. investment in Latin America. In any case, Woodrow Wilson, according to his navy secretary, refused to put American troops “at the beck and call of the American dollar.”
Wilson and his first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, continued the policy of their predecessors: trying to create stability by imposing U.S. control over government finances, the model that had been tried in the Dominican Republic next door. But the intensely nationalistic Haitians refused to budge. When Haiti’s foreign minister broached the subject of U.S. financial control to the National Assembly, he was almost killed by the enraged legislators. Haiti’s financial situation kept deteriorating and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s warships kept nosing around its waters, raising the possibility of German intervention in the event of a debt default. Meanwhile, Haiti’s worsening political chaos troubled a U.S. president bent on extending constitutional government south of the border.
“Action is evidently necessary and no doubt it would be a mistake to postpone it long,” Woodrow Wilson wrote on July 2, 1915. Less than a month later, the bloodbath in Port-au-Prince presented the president with the perfect opportunity to intervene.
The marines were landed for essentially two reasons, as Wilson’s second secretary of state, Robert Lansing, later explained. The first was “to terminate the appalling conditions of anarchy, savagery, and oppression which had been prevalent in Haiti for decades.” The second was “to forestall any attempt by a foreign power to obtain a foothold on the territory of an American nation.” Contrary to the prevailing myth, economic considerations did not play an important role. U.S. business interests, such as they were, had not been directly threatened by the revolution that toppled Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.
“This, I Think, Is Necessary”
To secure the capital, Admiral William Caperton summoned reinforcements. By early August 1915 there were 2,029 marines in Haiti, formed into a brigade commanded by Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller, the 59-year-old colonial soldier who had acquired a certain notoriety on the Philippine island of Samar. Tony Waller’s men disarmed the remnants of the Haitian army, paying them off at $2 per head. Some cacos tried to make trouble, but their ineffectual attacks on the marines were easily repulsed and they were chased out of town. The marines took over the administration of Port-au-Prince, offering free food to the hungry, free medical care to the sick—and a free kick in the backside to troublemakers.
Acting Secretary of State Lansing, who had just taken over for William Jennings Bryan, was not sure what the next step should be. President Wilson told him: “I suppose there is nothing to do but take the bull by the horns and restore order.”
This meant, first of all, picking a new president. The job would be done by the National Assembly, but Washington wanted to make sure the legislators made no mistake. Admiral Caperton and his French-speaking deputy, Captain Edward L. Beach, made a quick survey of the Haitian political scene and decided that Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, the latest revolutionary leader, would not govern in either Haiti’s or America’s best interests. Captain Beach summoned Dr. Bobo aboard the cruiser Washington and peremptorily informed him, “You are not a candidate because the United States forbids it.” Instead the U.S. settled on Senate president Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, a mulatto who promised to cooperate with the American occupation. On August 12, 1915, under the watchful eyes of marines with fixed bayonets and with Beach walking the floor to round up votes, the National Assembly overwhelmingly picked Dartiguenave as president. It was no more brazen a usurpation than that of any previous Haitian president, but neither was it quite the democratic election that the U.S. pretended at the time.
The Americans wasted no time in solidifying their hold on Haiti, a country about the size of Maryland with perhaps 2 million inhabitants. In late August and early September 1915, marines finished occupying Haiti’s coastal towns, and navy paymasters began running the government’s customs houses. The proud Haitians evinced growing hostility to the blancs and their client president. Admiral Caperton responded in early September by declaring martial law and banning “false or incendiary propaganda against the Government of the United States or Government of Haiti.”
To give all this a legal gloss, the State Department drafted a Haitian-U.S. Treaty that it presented for Dartiguenave to sign “without modification.” The treaty gave the U.S. the right to supervise government finances, control customs collection, create an American-officered constabulary, and, last but not least, intervene militarily to enforce the other treaty provisions. The treaty would last for 10 years, with the option of renewing it for another 10 if either party so desired.
At first Dartiguenave balked at signing this accord—until Major Smedley Butler, Old Gimlet Eye, entered the picture. Among the marines, it was said that Smedley was dispatched to the National Palace to obtain Dartiguenave’s signature. The president tried to hide in his bathroom. The marine waited outside the door for an hour. Still no sign of the president. Growing impatient, Butler walked outside, grabbed a ladder, propped it against the palace wall, and climbed up to the window of the bathroom to discover Dartiguenave sitting on a porcelain commode, fully dressed in pinstriped trousers, morning coat, and top hat, smoking a cigar and reading a copy of Petit Parisien. Wasting no time, Butler supposedly leaped through the window to present the treaty and a fountain pen to the startled president. “Sign here,” he commanded, and the president did.
There is no sense inquiring whether this “gorgeous legend” is literally true; even if only apocryphal, it gives an accurate flavor of how the U.S.-Haiti Treaty of 1915 came into being. “I confess that this method of negotiation, with our Marines policing the Haytian capital is high-handed,” wrote Secretary of State Lansing to President Wilson. “It does not meet my sense of a nation’s sovereign rights and is more or less an exercise of force and an invasion of Haytian independence. From a practical standpoint, however, I cannot but feel that it is the only thing to do if we intend to cure the anarchy and disorder which prevails in that Republic.”
Wilson, whose pure faith in national self-determination was diluted by a generous dollop of Realpolitik, wrote back, “This, I think, is necessary and has my approval.”
The First Caco War
It did not have the approval of the cacos, the wild northern gangs whose lucrative racket—preying on peasants and politicians alike—was threatened by the North American newcomers. In September 1915, the cacos rose up to challenge U.S. rule. They besieged U.S.-occupied coastal towns and ambushed marine patrols. Clearly, this was a job for Smedley Butler.
His first stop was Gonaives, a small coastal town under siege by 800 cacos led by General Pierre Rameau. Butler and his 108 men had just arrived in Gonaives on September 20, 1915, and were resting after supper when word arrived that Rameau’s cacos were attacking the railroad tracks. The marines, wearing only underclothes, did not bother to put on uniforms; they simply grabbed their rifles and gunbelts, and, half-naked, chased the cacos out of town. Butler later described how he caught up with Rameau, “a weazened up old Negro” on a horse, surrounded by about 450 followers. Butler claimed he walked up to the caco general, and when he refused to dismount, abruptly pulled him off the saddle. “This was more humiliating to him than defeat in battle,” Smedley wrote. “His prestige with his men was destroyed, and he was no longer the great general.”
This story—probably somewhat exaggerated—indicates that Butler had lost none of the brashness that he had displayed in Nicaragua. He chafed under his commanding officer, Colonel Eli K. Cole, who did not show similar flair. Cole was holed up with 700 men in Cap Haitien, the largest town in northern Haiti, and was afraid to move into the interior. The colonel claimed that it was impossible to clean out the cacos from the mountains of northern Haiti until he had 3,000 men. At the time, there were not that many marines in the whole country. Both Tony Waller, Cole’s commander, and Smedley Butler, his subordinate, thought he was being overly cautious. “Cole was a fine officer, but inclined to be over-educated,” Butler fumed. “If you have too much education, you are acutely conscious of the risks you run and are afraid to act.” Butler, by contrast, had little formal schooling but lots of experience in what is now called counterinsurgency warfare. His background convinced him that a small number of well-trained Western troops could disperse a large number of guerrillas, as long as they displayed considerable élan and never gave up the initiative.
To prove his theories, Butler set out on October 22, 1915, with just four officers and 37 enlisted men, old-timers all, on a reconnaissance patrol through the heavily forested mountains of northern Haiti. This area, infested with cacos, had not been visited by white men since the French had left in 1804. “Oh the wildness of it all,” Butler marveled in a letter to his father, “the half-clothed, vicious natives, the wonderful scenery and fine clean air, there is no country like it that I have ever seen.”
Two days after starting out, Butler’s patrol was wending its way in pitch darkness and driving rain across a river when they came under rifle fire from hundreds of cacos. With bullets whizzing through the air, Butler was right in his element. “Isn’t this great?” he exulted. Luckily for the marines, the cacos were extremely poor shots, but they still put the outnumbered Americans on the run. In their haste to escape, the marines lost their lone machine gun in the river. Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, the 47-year-old spitfire who had already won a Medal of Honor defending the Legation Quarter in Peking during the Boxer Uprising, volunteered to retrieve it. He swam the river by himself, found the machine gun strapped to a dead horse, hefted it onto his back and coolly hiked back to the rest of the patrol—all under fire. For this exploit he would win his second Medal of Honor.
The marines spent a miserable night besieged by hordes of cacos who blew conch shells and screamed death threats. Smedley was undaunted. “Just go for those devils as soon as it’s light,” he told his men. “Move straight ahead and shoot everyone you see.” That’s just what they did, the cacos scattering before their onslaught. “The Marines went wild after their devilish night and hunted down the Cacos like pigs,” Butler later wrote. Amazingly, only one marine was wounded in this battle. The patrol, hungry and exhausted, finally staggered back to base a couple of days later.
A number of other caco forts fell in short order, leaving only one major redoubt in enemy hands: Fort Rivière, an old French stronghold planted atop Montagne Noir, 4,000 feet above sea level. Colonel Eli Cole, cautious as ever, thought it would take an infantry regiment and an artillery battery to conquer the fort. Smedley Butler had other ideas. He told Cole, “Colonel, if you let me pick one hundred men from the eight hundred you have here, I feel I can capture the place at once without wasting more words.” Cole was skeptical but offered to let his brash subordinate take a shot.
Butler reached Fort Rivière on the evening of November 17, 1915. Leaving most of his force to provide covering fire, he took 26 men with him, advancing in rushes until they reached the base of the fort’s 15-to–25 foot walls. Here they were temporarily safe from being fired on from above. But the only entrance they could find was a drain 4 feet high and 3 feet wide extending about 15 feet into the interior of the fort. It was obvious that anyone crawling through the hole would be an easy target for a defender on the other side. Butler, for once, was “writhing inside with indecision.” Sergeant Ross L. Iams stepped forward and declared, “Oh hell, I’m going through.” He was followed by Butler’s orderly, Private Samuel Gross, and then by Butler himself.
As the three marines were crawling through the drain, a big caco on the other side took aim with a rifle, fired . . . and somehow missed. Before he could reload, Sergeant Iams jumped into the courtyard and shot him dead. The three marines quickly found themselves surrounded. “Sixty or seventy half-naked madmen, howling and leaping, poured down upon us,” Butler wrote. A few seconds later the rest of the marine company “began to pop out of the hole like corks out of a bottle.” In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, the marines made short work of the cacos, who, in their desperation, threw away their rifles and fought with swords, clubs, rocks, and machetes, “which were,” Butler noted, “no match for bullets and bayonets.”
The battle was over in ten minutes. At least fifty cacos were killed, and while some escaped, the marines took no prisoners. The only U.S. casualty was a marine who lost two teeth when he was hit in the face with a rock. Major Butler, Sergeant Iams, and Private Gross all received Medals of Honor (Butler’s second) for this engagement, which essentially ended the caco threat in the north. Butler had vindicated his own boasts: Relentless pursuit could indeed bring a far more numerous, but ill-trained and badly armed, enemy to heel.
Within a few months, roughly 2,000 U.S. marines had established firm control over a country of 2 million people. The marines suffered three killed, 18 wounded; caco casualties are unknown but probably numbered some 200 dead. The marines’ success may be attributed to daring patrolling combined with generous treatment of cacos who surrendered; they were given amnesty, money to turn in their guns, and consideration for government employment. It was a virtuoso display of counterinsurgency warfare.
In Washington, a fellow cabinet member kidded Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels by hailing him as “Josephus the First, King of Haiti.” The jape was not far off.
Governing Haiti
To consolidate its power, the U.S. set up a native constabulary officered by Americans that would combine the functions of an army and a police force. Similar units had been created in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Smedley Butler, fresh from campaigning against the cacos, was appointed the first commandant of the Gendarmerie d’Haiti in December 1915. Newly promoted to the rank of marine lieutenant colonel, Butler became at the same time a major general in the gendarmerie. Along with 114 other marines, he trained a force of 2,553 Haitians. It was an attractive assignment for marines like Butler because they received a higher rank in the gendarmerie and a second salary to supplement their corps paycheck. Most of the junior gendarmerie officers were corporals and sergeants in the corps, though as time went by more Haitians were promoted to the officer ranks.
The recruits tended to be uneducated noirs; mulattos generally thought military service beneath them. They proved on the whole to be fiercely loyal to their American officers, though their combat effectiveness was not great in the early years. The marines concentrated their own forces in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien, where they lived the easy lives of imperialists, with the usual round of dances, clubs, and social hours. Some officers, including Butler, brought their wives over to join them. The Haitian gendarmes and their American officers were scattered in garrisons across the impoverished countryside.
Although the United States had quickly taken control of Haitian customs and financial affairs, the other so-called treaty services, public works and public health, were slower to get going. Most of those functions wound up being performed by the gendarmes, who administered prisons, roads, bridges, the water supply, telegraph lines, sanitation, and other vital services. Gendarme officers, in the manner of colonial administrators everywhere, ran their districts with virtually unlimited authority, serving as local judges, paymasters, mayors, and tax collectors. While they generally performed far more efficiently and honestly than their Haitian predecessors had, there were some abuses that would cause problems later on.
Smedley Butler, who as gendarmerie commander became one of the most powerful men in Haiti, reflected the attitudes of most marines. He expressed affection for “my little chocolate soldiers” and determined to do his “level best to make a real and happy nation out of this blood crazy Garden of Eden.” Other U.S. officers were more disdainful. Colonel Tony Waller, scion of a long line of Virginia slave owners (including some killed in Nat Turner’s slave revolt), bragged, “I know the nigger and how to handle him.”
Tensions escalated in Port-au-Prince between the undiplomatic marines and the mulatto elite who had been used to living off government largesse. The elites looked down on the occupying blancs as uncouth, unschooled clods; most of them did not even speak francais! The marines seethed at the mulattos’ pretensions and demands for privileged positions. Butler announced that “no preference [will be] shown any negro owing to a supposed superiority due to the infusement of white blood in his veins.” Smedley declared that he liked the 99 percent of Haitians who didn’t wear shoes; they were “the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people.” It was the other 1 percent, in their “vici kid shoes with long pointed toes and celluloid collars,” who drove him to distraction. He felt that they were not trustworthy and, while professing friendship to the Americans, were plotting against them in secret. And so many of them were. Who could blame them?
No mulatto caused more consternation for the Americans than their own hand-picked president, Phillipe Sudre Dartiguenave. With the Americans having defeated the cacos, bane of generations of Haitian presidents, he felt free to assert more independence. After U.S.-supervised legislative elections were held on January 15, 1917—the fairest in Haitian history—Washington wanted the new National Assembly to approve a fresh constitution. The State Department demanded that legislators remove the bar on property ownership by foreigners and ratify all acts of the occupation authorities. Both Dartiguenave and the assembly balked. Instead nationalist deputies began writing and adopting their own constitution. The marines decided that they had no choice but to dissolve the assembly. Dartiguenave was quite happy to have this occur—he was not popular with the deputies—but he wanted the blancs to do the dirty deed so that no one would blame him.
The marines, however, insisted that the legal niceties be observed. On the morning of June 19, 1917, Smedley Butler, in his capacity as chief of the gendarmerie, marched over to the presidential palace to get the president and a majority of his cabinet to sign a decree proroguing the assembly, as required by law. At first Dartiguenave was reluctant, but Butler browbeat the president and four cabinet members into signing. “The signatures were so small that one needed a magnifying glass to read them,” Butler commented.
The only question now was who would present the decree to the assembly. Dartiguenave feared for his life if he did so. Butler went over to the assembly with a handful of gendarmes. Like Cromwell before the Long Parliament, he was met by jeers and hisses. The alarmed gendarmes began cocking their rifles. Butler ordered them to unload, and proceeded to formally enter the decree dissolving the assembly. Dartiguenave would now rule as a virtual dictator, relying on a hand-picked Council of State to carry out his decisions.
The U.S.-written constitution was submitted to a national plebiscite on June 12, 1918. The vote was 98,225 in favor, 768 against. The lopsided margin was no surprise, since 97 percent of Haitian voters were illiterate. They were willing to vote any way the men with guns, in this case the gendarmes, told them to. Wrote one marine: “I blush at the transparent maneuvers to which we resorted to make it appear that the Haitians were accomplishing their own regeneration in accordance with democratic principles as understood in the United States.” Blushing or not, U.S. control was now both de facto and de jure.
Dominican Republic
Just as the marines were settling into Haiti, trouble was brewing next door in the Dominican Republic. Though larger in land area than Haiti, occupying two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic had fewer inhabitants. Its population, at a million or so in 1916, was perhaps half that of Haiti. This disparity had made it relatively easy for Haiti to impose brutal colonial rule upon its neighbor from 1801 to 1805 and again from 1822 to 1843. The Hispanic Dominicans liked rule by the francophone Haitians so little that they volunteered to return to Spanish sovereignty from 1861 to 1865. When the Spanish pulled out a second time, the Dominicans tried to interest the U.S. in annexation. The Grant administration was amenable, but the treaty was defeated by the Senate in 1871.
Left to its own devices, the Dominican Republic reverted to weak central government and strong caudillos who held sway over the countryside. Theodore Roosevelt’s customs receivership, imposed in 1905, did little to stabilize the situation. Another period of turmoil broke out in 1911 when Dominican President Ramon Caceres was assassinated. In an attempt to end the chaos, Woodrow Wilson demanded that fresh elections be held in October 1914. The winner of the balloting, supervised by the U.S. Navy and Marines, was a wealthy caudillo named Juan Isidro Jimenez. Having overseen his election, the Wilson administration pressured Jimenez to agree to a treaty allowing the U.S. to set up a constabulary and assume financial control, thereby expanding the customs receivership already implemented by Roosevelt into a more wide-ranging protectorate. Jimenez was amenable to some of these demands, but the Dominican Congress was not.
In the spring of 1916, the Dominican Congress began impeachment proceedings against Jimenez at the same time that the powerful war minister, General Desiderio Arias, declared a revolt against him. The president was chased out of his own capital. In Washington, Jimenez was perceived as “our man,” while Arias was thought to be pro-German and a conduit of arms to the cacos resisting U.S. rule in Haiti. Rear Admiral William Caperton, commander of the navy’s Special Service Squadron, was given wide discretion by the Navy and State departments to intervene as he saw fit to prop up Jimenez.
Caperton sent 150 marines by sea from Haiti to Santo Domingo. The marines’ commander, Major Frederic Wise, found President Jimenez encamped outside the walls of Santo Domingo with about 800 followers. Jimenez told the Americans that he wanted his presidency back but did not want it with American help, which would discredit him among his own people. He asked Wise and the American minister to visit General Arias and ask him to surrender without a fight. This they did. “Dopey” Wise, a blunt-spoken marine with a volcanic temper, later recounted the conversation:
I told him that this damned business of having revolutions in San Domingo had to cease; that he must get out and let the President come back into the capital without a row; that the United States meant business and if he didn’t do it we were going to put him out.
“I do not intend to leave,” he said.
“Oh, yes, you will,” I told him.
When Wise got back to camp, he told President Jimenez that they would have to take the capital by force. The president was appalled: “I can never consent to attacking my own people.” He resigned on the spot, his duties being taken over by a council of ministers. Wise, feeling that American prestige was on the line, was still determined to oust Arias. He waited a few days until 400 marine reinforcements arrived from Haiti under Major Newt Hall (last seen defending the legations in Peking during the Boxer Uprising). Admiral Caperton also showed up to take command personally. Arias was told that he had two days—until 6 A.M. on May 15, 1916—to surrender Santo Domingo. That morning the marines marched into the city expecting to fight it out block by block as they had in Veracruz, only to discover that Arias and his men had slipped out the night before. The marines occupied the capital without a shot being fired.
Arias was still in the countryside with a considerable portion of the Dominican army, ready to resist U.S. occupation. But he proved no match for the marines. It took 1,300 marines little more than a month to occupy the major coastal towns and to seize Arias’s stronghold, Santiago de los Caballeros, the country’s second-largest city. It was no contest, really. On one occasion, a small party of marines was attacked by 150 of the enemy. “I suppose the eight or nine of us looked easy to them,” Dopey Wise wrote. What the Dominicans had not counted on was the Americans’ machine gun; they apparently had never seen such a weapon before. Wise let them advance quite close before demonstrating what it could do. “I could see sheer amazement on their faces. The gun was functioning properly. All up and down the line I could see them dropping. Then they turned and ran.”
The biggest loss of American lives occurred not in this brief campaign, which concluded with Arias’s surrender, but shortly thereafter. A hurricane blew into Santo Domingo harbor in August 1916, causing the cruiser Memphis to founder on the rocks and killing 40 U.S. sailors.
In 1917, the Wilson administration purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark and landed troops in Cuba to quell unrest (see Chapter 6). These moves completed the U.S. strategy, stretching back to the days of Commodore David Porter’s campaigns against pirates in the 1820s, of turning the Caribbean into an American lake. The Stars and Stripes now flew over the Panama Canal Zone, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Virgin Islands, while the rest of the Central American and Caribbean states were firmly under Uncle Sam’s thumb, with the exception of a few islands safe in the hands of America’s allies, Britain and France. Germany, and any other power bent on making trouble for the U.S., had been firmly excluded from the region.
Pacification and Administration
Now the U.S. occupation authorities turned to the task of running the Dominican Republic, a country about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. As in Haiti, the Americans preferred to rule through a local president who would accede to U.S. control of government finances and a new constabulary. But unlike in Haiti, no suitable high-level politician was willing to work with the occupiers. President Wilson was told that he could either withdraw U.S. forces or impose martial law. He chose the latter option “with the deepest reluctance,” as “the least of the evils in sight in this very perplexing situation.”
On November 29, 1916, Rear Admiral Harry S. Knapp, who had replaced Admiral Caperton as commander of the Special Service Squadron, proclaimed U.S. military government of the Dominican Republic with himself as governor. Marines assumed control of the Interior, War, Police and other ministries, though many lower-level Dominican civil servants remained on the job. Under U.S. direction, the educational system was revamped (the number of students enrolled increased five-fold), roads built, jails cleaned up, sanitation imposed, hospitals updated, taxes overhauled. Thanks to American medical improvements, the population rose sharply. As in Haiti, the U.S. created an American-officered constabulary, the 1,200-man Guardia Nacional Dominicana, that was intended to serve as an efficient and apolitical police force and army.
The most immediate problem for the U.S. occupiers was pacifying the wild eastern provinces, El Seibo and San Pedro de Macoris, which had never been brought under the effective control of any central government. As in Haiti and elsewhere, the marines tended to see anyone who challenged their rule as mere gavilleros (highwaymen). There were some 600 full-time Dominican fighters in the field, supplemented by many more part-time guerrillas who would blend into the civilian population when necessary. There was no guerrilla leader of transcending importance—no one like Aguinaldo in the Philippines or later Sandino in Nicaragua—but there were a number of potent local chieftains. One of the most effective anti-American caudillos was Vicente “Vicentico” Evangelista. In March 1917 he kidnapped two American civilians and hacked them to death, leaving the remains for wild boars to feast on. He led marine pursuers on a merry chase before surrendering on July 5 of that year. Two days later Vicentico was shot and killed by marines “while trying to escape.” The widespread suspicion that he was murdered only deepened anti-American feeling.
When the U.S. entered World War I, all of the marine officers were eager to go to France. Many of the best ones did; those left behind in this backwater tended to be second-raters. And instead of commanding seasoned veterans from the “Old Corps,” these officers had to lead inexperienced draftees, many of them practically mutinous when they were not discharged after the armistice of 1918. The incidents of abuse against Dominicans jumped noticeably during 1917–18. A marine captain named Charles F. Merkel became notorious as the Tiger of Seibo; he personally tortured one prisoner by cutting him with a knife, pouring salt and orange juice on his wounds, and then cutting off his ears. Word of these abuses reached Santo Domingo, leading to Merkel’s arrest in October 1918. While in prison awaiting trial he blew his brains out. Rumor had it that his suicide was preceded by a visit to his jail cell by two marine officers who left him a gun with one bullet in it.
Patrolling the sprawling Dominican countryside was not easy given how few marines were in the country—never more than 3,000 men, a peak reached in 1919, and of that total only about one-third were out in the field in the rebellious eastern provinces. By 1919 the marines had received radios that made it easier to coordinate their efforts and six Curtiss “Jenny” biplanes that allowed them to expand the reach of their patrolling and even to bomb some guerrilla outposts. Still, as in most guerrilla wars, there was no quick or easy victory to be had; just the wearying slog of garrison duty and incessant patrolling.
Anti-American activity never seriously threatened the U.S. hold on the country, but it was a constant, low-level nuisance. The unrest in the eastern provinces lasted until 1922 when, with independence already in sight, the marines launched a final counterinsurgency campaign under the direction of Brigadier General Harry Lee. The guerrillas finally agreed to surrender in return for amnesty. The countryside was pacified at last. During the course of the campaign between 1916 and 1922, the marines claim to have killed or wounded 1,137 “bandits,” while 20 marines were killed and 67 wounded.
The Second Caco War
Matters were more serious in Haiti, where in 1919 another full-blown caco revolt erupted. Its roots lay in assorted grievances created by four years of American occupation, principal among them being the corvée. An ancient practice going back to prerevolutionary France, the corvée was a system whereby poor peasants could be forced to work on road gangs in lieu of paying taxes. A Haitian law of 1863 allowed the corvée in Haiti, but it had fallen into disuse—along with the roads—until revived by the marines in 1916. When he was gendarmerie commander, Smedley Butler made large-scale use of the corvée to create a modern transportation system for Haiti. In 1915, when the marines arrived, there had been only two paved streets in the entire country, both in Port-au-Prince. By 1918 the corvée had constructed 470 miles of roads, including the first highway linking Haiti’s principal cities, Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien.
Despite its obvious success, the corvée also caused equally obvious resentment. It was, after all, forced labor—and under the guns of the blancs no less. At first the peasants did not mind too much since they got free lodging, meals, and entertainment. But then rumors spread that the road work was a prelude to the reintroduction of slavery. As the corvée became more unpopular, gendarmes used more brutal methods to gather up road gangs, sometimes roping the Haitians together to prevent them from fleeing. Butler’s successor as gendarmerie commander, Major Alexander S. Williams, “soon realized that one of the great causes of American unpopularity among the Haitians was the corvée.” Williams abolished this practice on October 1, 1918, but by then the damage had been done. Many Haitian peasants were deeply resentful of the occupation. At the same time, the mulatto elites in Port-au-Prince were dissatisfied too, for the occupation had cut them off from the public treasury. In these explosive conditions, only a spark was necessary to ignite a conflagration.
The spark came from Charlemagne Massena Peralte. A mulatto who was a French-trained lawyer and an ally of would-be president Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, Peralte was described by one marine as “handsome, brave and intelligent”; another praised his “gift for flamboyant proclamations and the more inflaming brands of oratory.” He had been arrested by the gendarmerie in early 1918 and sentenced to five years’ hard labor for allegedly taking part in a plot to attack the home of an American officer. Later that year, while being forced to sweep the streets of Cap Haitien, Peralte escaped custody and took to the northern hills to rally another caco uprising “to drive the invaders into the sea and free Haiti.” The cry of “Haiti for the Haitians” spread across the land. With old hands like Littleton W. T. Waller and Smedley Butler having been transferred to France, the remaining marines were lethargic in putting down the disturbances. Before long, all of central and northern Haiti was aflame with rebellion. “You couldn’t go out of any of the towns in the affected districts without a Cacao taking a shot at you, though he wouldn’t hit you,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Frederic Wise, newly arrived from the Dominican Republican and promoted to command of the gendarmerie.
Peralte, with an estimated 5,000 full-time followers (and thousands more occasional volunteers), fought a running series of battles with the marines and gendarmes between April and October of 1919. On October 7, he even raided Port-au-Prince. This attack was driven off, but the marines and gendarmes could not stamp out the rebellion or capture its leader. Dopey Wise, the gendarmerie commander, instructed a subordinate: “Get Charlemagne.”
The job fell to Herman Hanneken, a 26-year-old marine sergeant acting as a captain in the gendarmerie. A strapping blond Missourian with “high cheek bones and lean jaws” and an “eye singularly direct, deep-set, pale and old, like a cat’s,” “Hard Head” Hanneken was known for being silent and standoffish, cold and calculating. He commanded the garrison at Grande Rivière, a small town in the north, located in an area infested with cacos. Hanneken hatched an elaborate plot to lure the elusive caco leader out of hiding. Out of his own pocket (no government money being available), he financed his own “caco” band, led by Jean-Baptiste Conze, a wealthy mulatto planter who set up headquarters in abandoned old Fort Capois along with a gendarme “deserter,” Private Jean Edmond Francois. Hanneken hoped that Charlemagne would take Conze into his confidence and thereby lead the Americans to his hideout.
To complete the ruse, Hanneken staged an attack on Fort Capois that Conze ceremoniously drove off. Hanneken was even “wounded.” Or so it seemed to anyone who saw the gendarmerie captain skulking around Grande Rivière with his arm in a sling oozing red ink. As the pièce de résistance, Conze presented Charlemagne with Hanneken’s pearl-handled Smith and Wesson pistol, which he claimed the wounded marine had dropped. The local people and Hanneken’s own marines muttered about what an embarrassment all this was: The mighty blancs beaten by those ragged nobodys from the hills!
But Charlemagne Peralte, nobody’s fool, was suspicious. One night, he stole into Conze’s camp and walked up to Conze. According to Dopey Wise’s account:
“Conzee [sic],” he said, “you are not a true Cacao. You are nothing but a spy in the pay of these accursed Americans.”
“If you believe that, the best thing you can do is kill me now,” he said.
Charlemagne stood over him, pistol in hand. For a moment Conzee’s life hung by a hair. Then Charlemagne spoke.
“I’ll give you a chance to prove if you’re a true Cacao,” he said. “All you have done so far is to lead a few small raids against a few small villages. Take me a real town away from the Americans and I’ll begin to think you’re a true Cacao.”
“I’ll do it,” Conzee told him.
The town picked for the caco raid was Grande Rivière. Just before the attack was scheduled to take place on October 31, 1919, Hanneken and his second-in-command, a marine corporal named William Button, slipped into the jungle with 20 gendarmes dressed in caco rags. Appropriately enough, this being Halloween, Hanneken and Button darkened their bodies with lamp black so they could pass as cacos in the dark. It helped that Hanneken, having spent four years in Haiti, could speak Creole, though Button could not. Hiding in the bushes, they heard hundreds of cacos marching by, headed for Grande Rivière, where a nasty trick awaited them: Marine reinforcements had sneaked into town the previous night with a machine gun.
All was going according to plan—except where was Charlemagne? Hanneken had hoped to ambush the rebel leader at a spot just outside Grande Rivière, but Private Jean Edmond Francois, the gendarme “deserter” planted in the rebel camp, arrived to inform him that Charlemagne had not gone along on the raid. He was going to remain on a nearby hill until he received word that the attack had been successful. Hanneken decided that he and his “cacos” would deliver the good word to Charlemagne in person. At 10 P.M., he set off with his small contingent into the mountains swarming with hundreds if not thousands of cacos. “It was as daring a deed, I think, as men ever undertook,” Dopey Wise wrote. “Certain death was the price of failure.”
The small party managed to get by four of Peralte’s outposts with little trouble, thanks to Private Francois, who was known to the guards and gave them the proper passwords. At the fifth outpost, the charade was almost uncovered. A sentry noticed Button’s Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and demanded to know where he got such a “fine-looking” weapon. Button just barely managed to bluff his way through. Finally they reached the edge of Charlemagne Peralte’s camp. Just 15 feet away they saw the guerrilla leader illuminated by the reflected light of a campfire. Peralte sensed trouble and was on the verge of melting into the night when Hanneken drew his .45 caliber automatic pistol and put a bullet through his heart. Meanwhile, Button opened fire on the milling cacos with his BAR. The gendarmes then hurried up and drove off the remaining rebels.
At daybreak on November 1, 1919, the raiding party returned to Grande Rivière, where they discovered that the main body of marines had easily repulsed the attack by Peralte’s men the night before. The return of Hanneken’s raiders caused no little excitement in the town since, as proof that they had really killed Charlemagne, four gendarmes were carrying his corpse trussed to a door. The marines circulated photographs of the dead man throughout the island nation, but the gesture backfired because the picture gave the mistaken appearance that Peralte had been crucified, helping to turn him into a martyr.
For the time being, however, Peralte’s assassination broke the back of the revolution. Hanneken and Button were awarded Medals of Honor for their exploits, so reminiscent of Frederick Funston’s raid on Emilio Aguinaldo’s camp in the Philippines. Hanneken also received a lieutenant’s commission in the corps; he would go on to command a battalion on Guadalcanal in World War II and retire as a brigadier general. Corporal Button was less lucky; he died in Haiti the following year, a victim of malaria.
The only remaining guerrilla leader of any stature was Benoit Batraville, who had perhaps 2,500 followers spread throughout central Haiti. Starting in January 1920, Colonel John Russell, the new marine commander in Haiti, launched an aggressive campaign against him, with 1,300 marines and 2,700 gendarmes. The marines even utilized seven Curtiss HS-2L flying boats and six Curtiss “Jenny” biplanes; 25-pound bombs were loaded into mailbags, strapped between the wheels of a Jenny and released with a tug of rope, turning them into crude bombers.
The marines suffered only one major setback. On April 4, 1920, a small gendarme patrol led by Lieutenant Lawrence Muth was ambushed by a large caco force led by Batraville himself. Muth was badly wounded and left for dead by the rest of his patrol, but he was still alive, just barely. Batraville, who was an accomplished bocor (wizard), took him back to camp and enacted a grisly voodoo ritual. He decapitated Muth and cut out his heart and liver, toasting them over a fire and passing them around for his men to eat—the heart to steal Muth’s courage, the liver for his wisdom. Finally, Benoit and his men rubbed bits of Muth’s brain over their weapons and bullets to give them better accuracy.
News of this ritual spread around Haiti, enraging the marines and redoubling their determination to capture Batraville. A marine patrol acting on a peasant’s tip finally came upon Batraville’s bivouac on May 19, 1920. In the ensuing firefight, Benoit was wounded. As he was struggling to draw his revolver, the caco general was finished off by a marine sergeant with a pistol shot to the head. Lieutenant Muth’s binoculars were found around Batraville’s neck.
The Second Caco War was over. According to the marines’ official toll, they killed 2,250 cacos between 1915 and 1920, with the bulk of those deaths (1,861) coming in 1919. In addition, 11,600 cacos surrendered. The marines lost just 13 men, the gendarmerie 27 men. This huge disparity in casualties should not be taken completely at face value. As in Vietnam decades later, there was undoubtedly some inflation of the body count by glory-seeking soldiers (and cacos seldom left their dead behind to be counted and buried). But to the extent that the numbers can be trusted, they can be explained by the superior training of the marines and gendarmes. The disparity in weapons between the two sides was not vast. Though the marines had some machine guns and Browning Automatic Rifles and the cacos did not, both sides fought in the main with rifles and pistols. But the cacos were notoriously poor shots while the marines, and in later years the gendarmes too, fired with deadly accuracy.
As with any counterinsurgency, much of the marines’ success could be attributed to nonmilitary factors. American rule was sufficiently attractive that the vast majority of the population did not rise up in rebellion. Indeed many Haitians were happy to have protection against the predations of the fearsome cacos. This helps to explain why a couple of thousand marines succeeded where a century earlier 27,000 of Napoleon’s crack troops had failed. The French had been trying to reimpose slavery, and had fought a campaign of extermination, whereas, by Haitian standards at least, U.S. tactics were restrained and U.S. rule quite mild. (The other part of the explanation is that French ranks had been decimated by yellow fever. The link between mosquitoes and this disease was not confirmed until the turn of the twentieth century—knowledge that proved invaluable to the marines in Haiti, as it did to other white troops operating in tropical climes.)
“Practically Indiscriminate Killing”
The marines had no sooner put down the cacos than they came under fire on the home front. Rumors of alleged marine atrocities galvanized opposition to the occupation back in the U.S. Though the tales would become much exaggerated in the telling, they did start with a grain of truth: As in all colonial regimes, no matter how benign, some marines, especially those isolated in rural outposts, abused their authority over the natives.
In one remote town, Croix de Bouquet, the local marine commander had two Haitians shot to death just for the excitement of it. He was pronounced insane and confined to a mental institution. When one of his marine subordinates was put on trial, his defense lawyer claimed that killing natives in Haiti was comparatively routine. After reading the trial transcript, General George Barnett, the marine commandant, wrote to the commanding officer in Port-au-Prince, Colonel John H. Russell, that he “was shocked beyond expression to hear of . . . practically indiscriminate killing of natives.”
An internal investigation was conducted in Haiti, followed by an outside investigation by two marine generals, John A. Lejeune and Smedley Butler. Both reports concluded that “indiscriminate killings” were the exception, not the norm. That finding was confirmed in a third investigation led by Admiral Henry T. Mayo, who wrote, “considering the conditions of service in Haiti, it is remarkable that the offenses were so few in number”—a conclusion denounced as a “whitewash” by The Nation magazine.
The occupation of Hispaniola became election fodder in 1920 when General Barnett’s remark about “indiscriminate killing” leaked out and became front-page news. Warren G. Harding, the Republican presidential candidate, appealed for black votes by declaring that he would not “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.” It would have escaped none of his listeners that the assistant secretary in question was Franklin D. Roosevelt, now the Democratic nominee for vice president.
Harding’s denunciations of the “rape” of Hispaniola were echoed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and by the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Association, which won the support of such prominent Americans as Eugene O’Neill, Felix Frankfurter, H. L. Mencken, and Samuel Gompers. In their efforts to lobby American public opinion for an end to the occupation, these groups were aided by the Union Patriotique and the Union Nacional Dominicana, made up, respectively, of Haitian and Dominican intellectuals and politicians.
These protests spurred a congressional investigation in 1922. A special Senate committee chaired by Republican Senator Medill McCormick of Illinois spent 11 months studying conditions in Hispaniola, taking testimony from both critics and supporters of the occupation and visiting the island. The committee criticized some blunders made by the Wilson administration and a few abuses committed by the marines but did not find evidence of widespread atrocities. Senator McCormick essentially endorsed the policy Washington had been pursuing ever since the Wilson administration, which called for an indefinite occupation of Haiti but for withdrawal from the Dominican Republic in a few years’ time. To guarantee stability after the occupation’s end, the Wilson administration wanted a treaty that would guarantee U.S. control of Santo Domingo’s finances and constabulary, as well as the right to intervene militarily at will.
Harding, despite his caviling during the 1920 election, did little to change this policy once in office. His secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, entered into protracted negotiations with Dominican representatives over the terms of an American pullout. In 1922 an agreement was reached: The customs receivership installed by Roosevelt in 1907 would continue until all loans from Wall Street banks were paid off in 1942, but Yanqui officers would no longer boss around the Guardia Nacional. An election was duly held in March 1924, and in September of that year, the winner, Horacio Vasquez, was inaugurated as president. On September 18, 1924, the last marines left Dominican soil, their policing duties being taken over by the newly renamed Policia Nacional Dominicana under the command of Dominican officers. The situation effectively reverted to what it had been prior to 1916: a large measure of U.S. influence but not outright control over Dominican affairs.
Haiti in the 1920s
When it came to Haiti, by contrast, the Harding administration was content to follow the advice of Senator McCormick, who wrote, “We are there, and in my judgment we ought to stay there for twenty years.” Why leave one end of Hispaniola but not the other? U.S. rule in Haiti was indirect and hence less burdensome and controversial than the military administration that had proved necessary in the Dominican Republic. As the New York Times opined in 1920, “The American administration of Haitian affairs is conducted under the treaty of 1916. . . . In the case of the Dominican Republic, however, there can be no such defense.” Washington, moreover, viewed Santo Domingo as better able to run its own affairs than Port-au-Prince.
While refusing to withdraw, Harding did reorganize the U.S. occupation of Haiti, creating at the suggestion of the McCormick Committee an office of high commissioner to coordinate the myriad occupation authorities. Smedley Butler was in the running for the job, but his appointment was torpedoed by the State Department, which feared that he was not diplomatic enough. The appointment went to Marine Colonel John H. Russell, a courtly Georgian who ruled Haiti for the rest of the 1920s in conjunction with Louis Borno, a mulatto who took over as president from Dartiguenave in 1922 in one of the few peaceful transfers of power in Haitian history.
Russell consciously modeled his regime upon that of the British in Egypt between 1882 and 1914. Lord Cromer, a former viceroy, had described the British occupation there: “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.” Substitute “Americans” for “English,” “mulattos” for “Turks,” and “blacks” for “Egyptians,” and that sentence forms a fair description of U.S. rule in Haiti.
The 1920s were one of the most peaceful and prosperous decades in Haiti’s troubled history. The American administrators, assisted by the increasingly Haitianized gendarmerie (renamed the Garde d’Haiti in 1928), ran the government efficiently and fairly. Graft was radically reduced, and the occupiers did not seek commercial gain for themselves or their countrymen. The occupation authorities were so determined to protect the Haitian people from “exploitation” by large foreign companies that they may even have retarded the republic’s economic development.
Haitian elites protested the government’s refusal to convene the National Assembly—President Borno ruled through an appointed Council of State—but this body had never been representative of the great mass of the Haitian people; it had served the interests only of the mulatto oligarchy. The major blot on U.S. rule was censorship of the press, which in the absence of effective libel laws tended toward incendiary, sometimes scurrilous, denunciations of the powers-that-be. In general, however, the U.S. regime was more tolerant of dissent and more liberal than any Haiti had seen before or since. The level of force required to support the government was minimal: There were fewer than 800 marines in the country, most concentrated in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien.
The first clouds appeared on the horizon in 1929. A dispute over the stipends paid to students at a government-run agricultural college led to a student strike that spread into a general protest against the occupation and against President Borno, who refused to hold elections. Outposts of the Garde d’Haiti were attacked by mobs. General Russell, the high commissioner, responded by imposing martial law. In the town of Les Cayes, some 1,500 protesters armed with stones, clubs, and machetes confronted 20 marines. The marines tried to disperse the crowd by firing over their heads. When a Haitian lunged forward and bit a marine, another American tried to use his bayonet to drive back the attacker. The enraged crowd surged forward and the outnumbered marines, fearing they would be torn to bits, opened fire. Twelve Haitians were killed, 23 wounded. It hardly compared with the Amritsar Massacre in India 10 years earlier, when a British garrison in a similar situation had killed 400 natives and wounded 1,200. Nevertheless opponents of the U.S. occupation were quick to condemn the Les Cayes “massacre.” The Communist Party even staged a protest rally in New York.
Within 10 days of the incident at Les Cayes, the civil unrest in Haiti was over and martial law was lifted. But to the new president, Herbert Hoover, who had much else on his mind, the 1929 protests showed that continuing the occupation was more trouble than it was worth. He began the process of withdrawal. In 1930, elections for the National Assembly were held for the first time in a decade. The winners were black nationalists opposed to the occupation, one of whom, Stenio Vincent, became the new president of Haiti. (This outcome offered indisputable evidence that the election had not been rigged by the marines.) What Hoover had started, former Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt finished. In 1933 Roosevelt, now president, signed a treaty ending the occupation, though a measure of U.S. financial control would remain until 1947.
On August 14, 1934, the U.S. colors were lowered for the last time at the headquarters of the marine brigade in Port-au-Prince. The next day the marines paraded down to the waterfront and sailed away. Having arrived in Haiti to the sound of gunfire, they left to the tune of the Marine Corps anthem, belted out by the Garde d’Haiti band.
In Retrospect
In later years it became fashionable to focus upon the failures of the U.S. occupation of Hispaniola, and failures there undoubtedly were, but the occupation did accomplish its immediate objectives: to keep the Europeans, especially the Germans, out, and to create stability. Of course there is no way to know whether the Germans would have intervened absent American involvement. From a military standpoint, the Hispaniola campaign showed that American soldiers could wage counterinsurgency warfare with great skill and without suffering significant casualties (26 Americans killed in action, 79 wounded). That a few thousand marines pacified an island of perhaps 3 million people was a tribute to the corps’ skill in waging small wars.
The proud American administrators who left Haiti could tick off a list of achievements: 1,000 miles of roads constructed, 210 major bridges, 9 major airfields, 1,250 miles of telephone lines, 82 miles of irrigation canals, 11 modern hospitals, 147 rural clinics, and on and on. (The Dominican occupation, being shorter, resulted in less construction.) All built by the occupiers, and at little cost to U.S. taxpayers; in these days before the Agency for International Development, the administrators of Hispaniola were expected to finance their governments out of customs revenues. Even critics were forced to concede the occupation’s material benefits. But the effects of occupation did not last long. After the marines left, the roads decayed, the telephones stopped functioning, and thugs once again took control of the machinery of government.
In the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, commander of the Guardia Nacional, seized power in 1930 and kept it until 1961, when he was assassinated in a CIA-backed coup. Four years later, in 1965, U.S. troops were back in the Dominican Republic to put down a leftist revolt. While the U.S.-created guardia proved indispensable to consolidating Trujillo’s rule, in Haiti, the garde, or army, was less important. Its commander failed in a 1938 coup attempt to seize power for himself. A parade of presidents of varying degrees of corruption and despotism ruled until 1957, when the black nationalist Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier began a long reign. Duvalier distrusted the army and relied on his own secret police, the Tontons Macoutes. Upon his death in 1971, he was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who held power until 1986. In 1994 the U.S. armed forces were back in Haiti, traveling down many of the roads built by Smedley Butler’s gendarmerie, in another attempt to introduce constitutional government to the island nation.
Critics of American intervention later charged that the U.S. had deliberately installed dictatorships in Hispaniola and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Very nearly the opposite is true. The marines had tried hard to plant constitutional government but found it would not take root in the inhospitable soil of Hispaniola. The only thing that could have kept a Trujillo or Duvalier from seizing power was renewed U.S. intervention—precisely the course that critics of American “imperialism” had deplored in the first place. Taking those criticisms to heart, Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated the “Good Neighbor” policy under which Washington would eschew intervention and befriend whoever was in power in Latin America. Unfortunately, those who came to power often were not of the highest moral caliber. The only thing more unsavory than U.S. intervention, it turned out, was U.S. nonintervention.