7

SECOND INDEPENDENCE

In June 1929, a resplendent new agricultural school was inaugurated in Damien, a suburb north of Port-au-Prince. It was outfitted with laboratories, a geological museum, a collection of Haitian plants, and a dairy farm where imported Jersey and Holstein cows cohabited with a few “indigenous” ones. Haitian and American teachers provided instruction in zoology, botany, agronomy, physics, chemistry, and political economy, and the students got exercise playing soccer, volleyball, and basketball. The school was the crown jewel of a decade-long effort by the United States to transform education and agriculture in Haiti, meant to demonstrate unequivocally that the occupation was a force for progress and civilization. Instead, however, it ended up doing the opposite. Within a few months, the Damien school became the launching pad for a mass student uprising, which eventually helped to do what Péralte’s Cacos could not: send the U.S. forces home.1

The unrest began on October 31, 1929, when the first class of students at the Damien school learned that the administration was cutting back on promised merit scholarships. They went on strike, marching into Port-au-Prince, where they were soon joined by other high school and university students. The young protesters became heroes for a population fed up with the U.S. presence. Greeted by cheering crowds, they lived an adolescent dream: getting free bus rides, free restaurant meals, even free movie tickets. As a symbol of their protest, they were wore green ribbons, standing for the renewal they hoped to inspire.2

When Haitian government employees joined the strike, the U.S. authorities declared martial law and carried out a wave of arrests. Fearing that they were losing control, several officials moved their families out of Port-au-Prince and onto boats in the harbor. Most frightening to them was the fact that the uprising was not limited to the cities: for the first time since the crushing of the Caco revolt, there were mass protests in the countryside as well. In early December, when fifteen hundred rural residents marched on Les Cayes, the tension proved too great: as the protesters entered the town, a marine detachment fired machine guns into the crowd, killing a dozen people and wounding many more.3

It was the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation. The massacre was an international embarrassment, making it clear that the Haitian people were increasingly united across class and regional lines in their opposition to the American presence. Less than five years later, the U.S. Marines formally withdrew. At a simple ceremony in Le Cap, the stars and stripes were taken down and the Haitian flag put back up. Shortly thereafter, the bones of Charlemagne Péralte were disinterred from his cement grave, his skull identified by his mother thanks to a gold tooth. Hastily buried as a bandit in 1919, he was now given a grand state funeral, officially acknowledged as a national hero.4

The departure of the marines represented the culmination of two decades of struggle against the occupation. It was supposed to be a new dawn for Haiti; political leaders proclaimed that 1934 was their country’s “Second Independence.” But that name highlighted the danger as well as the promise of the situation. A hundred and thirty years after Dessalines’s 1804 proclamation, Haiti was again starting from scratch in its efforts to secure a place for itself in the world. An entire generation—children when the marines arrived and adults by the time they left—had been deeply marked by the occupation. Quite a few of them had thrown themselves into the resistance movement, and they could take pride in having finally driven out the invaders. But they and their elders were also forced to think hard about how and why their country had—in clear violation of the key principles set forth by its founders—allowed itself to be taken over by foreigners. Many activists argued that kicking out the United States was only the first step to securing real independence: Haitians also had to transform themselves and their culture. They had to overcome the profound divisions that sapped their strength in the face of outside threats. They had to bridge the gap between the governing elite and the majority who remained on the margins of political life. They had to stop slavishly imitating others and embrace who they were and where they came from.

Like the generation of 1804, though, the activists of the 1930s discovered that the legacy of foreign control was extremely difficult to escape. The U.S. occupation had profoundly changed the country, smashing the political and economic order that had emerged during the nineteenth century and deepening the poverty of the countryside. It had centralized and strengthened the government’s authority, giving the country’s leaders more power than they had ever had to control the masses and suppress dissent. Many Haitians dreamed in 1934 that their country would finally be able to move forward toward a radically different future. Instead, they found that the years of subjugation were haunting them still.

*   *   *

The antipathy that Haitian peasants felt toward the United States was rooted not only in the cruelty of the marines and the ignominy of losing national sovereignty, but also in severe economic suffering. In the early 1910s, when they were urging the State Department to invade Haiti, U.S. bankers and businessmen had argued that an occupation was crucial for making Haiti attractive to foreign investors. Half a decade later, as the country came more and more firmly under U.S. military control, those investors were duly coming in—and life in the Haitian countryside, never easy to begin with, was becoming more and more precarious.

Among the first businesses to profit from the occupation was the Haitian-American Sugar Company, known as HASCO. Founded by Haitian and American entrepreneurs, HASCO aimed to revive large-scale sugar production in the Cul-de-Sac plain outside Port-au-Prince—an area that once had been full of sugar plantations but after independence had been taken over by small farmers who grew cane mostly for rum production in local distilleries. Before the occupation, HASCO had trouble acquiring enough land in the region, but after the American invasion, everything became easier for the company: with the support of the new regime, it simply evicted local peasants to make room. In December 1918, HASCO inaugurated its first Cul-de-Sac sugar mill. The event was touted as a sign of Haiti’s progress: President Dartiguenave, the marine brigade commander, and the archbishop of Port-au-Prince all attended, watching intently as the mill’s engineers showed off its modern machinery. “In less than half an hour,” a Haitian newspaper effused, the cane was transformed into sugar. Although it had taken a long time to get the mill up and running, the newspaper concluded, “all’s well that ends well.”5

But things were not going so well for the farmers who lived near the sugar mill. Even those who had not lost their land directly to HASCO soon found it difficult to make ends meet: the sugar mill replaced the local distilleries and paid the farmers less for their cane. The displaced peasants had the option of working at the mill for wages, but those who accepted jobs there found the conditions and the pay deplorable. Within a few months of the mill’s opening, HASCO workers organized the first of many strikes, which brought production to a standstill. Their wages were less than they’d been promised, they complained, and they needed some form of insurance: there were frequent accidents at the mill, sometimes with fatal results. For the company, of course, low wages and low costs were precisely what was attractive about Haiti. They paid their workers no more than thirty cents a day (the equivalent of about $4 in modern currency), a wage one-fifth of that on U.S.-owned plantations in neighboring Cuba.6

Other businesses soon followed HASCO’s lead. In 1922 the North Haytian Sugar Company acquired a hundred acres of land, and the Haytian Pineapple Company six hundred acres. A few years later, the Haitian American Development Corporation took over 14,000 acres, while the Haytian Agricultural Corporation was granted a 2,200-acre concession. These companies produced a range of products for export to the United States, such as sugar, fruit, and the sisal used to make twine and rope. Their presence was made possible by new laws put in place under the occupation: the 1918 constitution had for the first time allowed foreigners to acquire land in Haiti, while a series of government decrees enacted in the following years provided various legal mechanisms that could be used to take land from rural farmers. Many peasants who cultivated land under the métayage system, in which they gave half of what they produced to the landowners but retained significant autonomy regarding how and what they farmed, suddenly found that the fields they’d worked—sometimes for generations—had been sold or leased to American corporations. And even though foreign companies were able to gain control of only a small portion of land in Haiti—no more than 2 percent of the territory was in foreign hands by the 1920s—their impact was outsized. They often monopolized local resources, especially water, and brought about shifts in the local economy that left many peasants increasingly impoverished. To make matters worse, farmers soon discovered that U.S. occupation authorities were substantially more assiduous about collecting taxes than local Haitian authorities had been. During the nineteenth century, rural residents had developed intricate mechanisms for avoiding the state’s demands, but now they could no longer do so. Even as their communities were being invaded by U.S. companies, rural Haitians found themselves handing over a sizable portion of their shrinking incomes to subsidize their country’s occupation.7

The occupation’s proponents in the United States and Haiti celebrated the arrival of foreign corporations, insisting that they would help develop the country’s economy and thus alleviate poverty. And the new plantations did bring jobs to many regions. But such employment was very poorly paid, ultimately no compensation for the loss of family land and the independence that land ownership had provided. Meanwhile, the promised expansion in the national economy never materialized. The production of coffee, long Haiti’s most dependable and profitable export, remained flat throughout the twenty-year occupation. And while HASCO remained in Haiti, most of the other new ventures failed. In many parts of the country, rural communities took on the arriving corporations in a war of attrition and succeeded in driving them away—by refusing dangerous, low-paying work, insistently demanding better conditions, and resisting expropriation of land. It is, in fact, a remarkable testament to the strength of Haiti’s counter-plantation system that while American companies successfully built plantations elsewhere in the Caribbean during this period, particularly in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, they were largely unable to do so in Haiti—even though the U.S. directly governed the country for two decades.8

The efforts to alleviate rural poverty might have met with more success, perhaps, if the alternatives to large-scale plantation agriculture long embraced by the Haitian population been taken seriously as a foundation for agricultural development rather than simply an obstacle to it. In August 1918, the prominent Haitian intellectual Dantès Bellegarde, then serving as minister of public instruction and agriculture, proposed a sweeping set of reforms aimed at addressing the urgent problems facing rural areas. Among his ideas was creating local councils to share knowledge about more proactive ways of working the fields, and offering microcredit loans to help farmers improve their technology and agricultural techniques. He later testified bitterly, however, that the U.S. authorities were not interested in such “serious projects for agricultural organization and the education of the popular masses” and had ignored his proposals. Most U.S. officials—and many Haitian leaders, too—believed that the system of small farms had to be swept away and replaced with large plantations in order for the country to prosper.9

Although Haiti’s farmers largely managed to stop the spread of HASCO-style foreign businesses, the U.S. occupation still contributed to the immiseration of the Haitian countryside. Life had never been easy in rural Haiti, but for generations many communities had done well for themselves by growing their own food and cultivating coffee for export. The political and military transformation brought about by the occupation broke the precarious balance that these communities had relied on. The system of regional ports was dismantled and Port-au-Prince became the dominant hub for trade, concentrating economic power in the hands of a smaller group of merchants. The crushing of the Cacos by the marines in 1918 and 1919 ended the possibility of open resistance to the invaders, while the central government—long kept at bay thanks to the power of local leaders—was greatly strengthened by the U.S. forces. The new state was no more invested in helping rural communities than the old state had been, but now it had a much greater capacity to control the country’s population.

The damage done to the rural Haitian communities was magnified by a sustained attack on their ancestral religious practice, as the occupation forces launched a devastating campaign of persecution against Vodou. It was not the first time such attacks had taken place, of course. In the 1860s, the widely publicized trial at Bizoton had demonstrated Fabre Geffrard’s desire to rid Haiti of the religion, and in 1896 the Catholic Church—with the support of the government and many intellectuals—had tried to eliminate Vodou so that Haitians could “prove to the world that we are a civilized people.” But such campaigns, though traumatic for their victims, had had little broader impact. An 1899 government report concluded that Vodou ceremonies were on the rise, and a French merchant who lived in Haiti between 1904 and 1906 described flourishing temples patronized by local politicians.10

Indeed, in the long run, perhaps the most harmful effect of the nineteenth-century anti-Vodou efforts was to develop what Haitian anthropologist Laënnec Hurbon describes as an “ideological wardrobe” awaiting the occupation authorities. When they arrived in the country, U.S. officials noted that Haiti’s penal code included two articles outlawing the use of poison and the casting of spells. Like the Boyer-era laws allowing for the use of corvée labor, by 1915 these were legal relics, rarely enforced. What’s more, they specifically criminalized only certain practices—the use of spiritual power for negative ends—that most practitioners of Vodou also condemned. But such distinctions were largely ignored by the U.S. authorities, who tended to see the entire complex of popular religious activity in Haiti as a kind of black magic. The old laws about poisons and spell casting were among the only ones—out of the 413 articles that made up Haiti’s penal code—to be translated and distributed to U.S. troops governing the rural districts, and the new rulers used them as the legal foundation for a wide-ranging attack on Haitian Vodou in general. Suddenly, for the majority of the population in the country, participation in the many ceremonies that made up their religion’s ritual calendar was now a crime.11

U.S. authorities began to focus especially intently on Vodou during the Caco wars, seeing it as a key component of the insurrection. Marine reports claimed that leaders like Péralte used religion to frighten otherwise docile and contented Haitian peasants into fighting. “Probably all of the caco chiefs are Vaudoux priests and thus hold together bands which, freed from religious scruples, would abandon their purpose of brigandry,” wrote one U.S. visitor. The “elimination” of Vodou was therefore “imperative.” In the 1920s, with the Caco war coming to an end and the use of corvée labor falling out of favor, the criminalization of the religion took on a new purpose: it was a convenient way for occupation forces to secure workers. Marine Faustin Wirkus explained that when he needed to build a new police headquarters, he followed the suggestion of a Haitian judge and raided a Vodou ceremony. All those present were arrested and sentenced to up to six months of hard labor on the construction site. Such raids were widespread: Marine General Littleton Waller told the U.S. Senate in 1921 that Vodou “is against the Haitian law … but they never enforced the law. We did, and we broke up all their meetings, seized their drums, etc., and wherever a voodoo drum was heard we immediately got on the trail and captured it, and broke it up, as far as we could.” A Baptist missionary from the United States similarly testified about the “joy of burning tomtoms and the whole paraphernalia” of the religion, and carrying away “donkey loads of demon-worshipped implements.” When a prominent oungan was put on trial in Haiti in 1920, the U.S. prosecutor told the marine commission charged with reviewing his case: “Gentlemen, today you have it in your power to aid in ridding humanity of one of its most dangerous and degrading elements. You have it in your power to aid in delivering the Republic of Haiti from a curse which has been on it from the time of its foundation.”12

For Vodou adherents, service to the lwa and to family ancestors involves ongoing ritual responsibilities, and to shirk them is considered both shameful and dangerous. The U.S. occupation thus placed many Haitians before a cruel choice: they could either turn their backs on the lwa or risk harassment, prison, and hard labor. Religion had long represented a refuge in Haitian culture, a source of strength for the oppressed; but under the occupation even this realm of life became difficult to defend.

Faced with such assaults, many in the rural communities concluded that there was no choice but to leave their ancestral lands behind. For the first time in its history, Haiti—long a magnet for immigrants from the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and the Middle East—became a country of large-scale emigration. The statistics are startling. In 1912, only about two hundred Haitians had migrated to Cuba; but in 1916—the year after the occupation began—five thousand of them did so, and the numbers increased steadily after that. By 1920, there were already 70,000 Haitians in Cuba, and in that year another 30,000 emigrated there. And throughout the 1920s, about ten thousand Haitians a year left for the Dominican Republic. Yet while they went in search of freedom, the migrants who left the countryside often ended up in precisely the kind of place they and their ancestors had been seeking to escape: the plantation. In Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other neighboring Caribbean countries, the only places hiring rural refugees were large agricultural enterprises looking for field labor. And there was no escape from U.S. control, either: most of these companies were owned by American corporations.13

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. authorities also alarmed many Haitian intellectuals by proposing that English should become the main language of instruction in all of the country’s schools. This was a step too far even for their most steadfast collaborators, including Louis Borno. In one of his few gestures of resistance to the U.S. authorities, Borno insisted that Haitian students be taught in French, and he took the forward-thinking step of allowing Kreyòl to be used in schools as well. The U.S. attempt to impose English on Haiti struck many as a bald attempt at cultural imperialism, stoking the rising resentment about their policies. Such a change, after all, would have represented a kind of cultural amputation: the entire tradition of Haitian political thought and literature, not to mention the country’s laws, were in French. Once it had been a colonial language, but now it was a national one, an integral part of Haiti’s history and culture. Many saw it as a crucial link with the broader world, allowing Haitians to “to join hands with the world’s intellectual elite,” as one thinker put it. Indeed, anger at the U.S. occupation pushed many Haitians to affirm their cultural links with France more strongly than ever before. Haitians renarrated their revolution by emphasizing the alliance with French republicans that made it possible. “The first time that a man of the black race was ever a citizen, he was a French citizen,” the ex-general Alfred Nemours proclaimed in 1919; “the first time that a man of our race was ever an army officer, he was a French officer. And our birth certificate, where is it found? Was it not in France, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man?” The former colonizer was now a useful counterweight to the new empire. Even as the United States gained increasing cultural importance in Haiti, many resisted the trend, a fact symbolized perhaps most clearly in the realm of sports: among the Caribbean countries that were occupied by the United States, Haiti is the only one that never took up baseball, sticking instead with the more European and Latin American game of soccer.27

By the time the Service Technique opened its long-awaited flagship school at Damien in 1929, resentments over U.S. educational and cultural policies had been mounting for years, creating a highly combustible situation. When students angry about losing scholarships went to see Dr. Freeman, who was serving as the principal of the school, the encounter summed up everything that frustrated Haitians about the system. The discussion took place through a translator: after seven years of running a major educational initiative in Haiti, the well-paid and powerful Freeman had not learned either French or Kreyòl. Smoking a pipe, he briefly listened to the students but then broke in and told them that he was free to change scholarship policies as he saw fit. When the students pressed him, Freeman got angry and, waving his arms, told them that they could leave the school if they wanted: they would be easy to replace. When he learned that the students were planning to march to Port-au-Prince, Freeman attempted conciliation: there was no need to walk to town, he told them, when they could use the institution’s bus. He had not yet realized that something serious was going on. Indeed, he was mystified by the resistance he encountered. These were, after all, supposed to be the most trusted and loyal of the new class of educated Haitians the United States was aiming to produce.28

Freeman’s surprise is itself surprising: he seemed blind to the fact that for all the buildings, roads, and schools the Americans had constructed, the U.S. presence was still seen by Haitians as an occupation. A commission sent by the U.S. government the following year to evaluate the educational project in Haiti, however, saw clearly where the problem lay. “Had there been less of a disposition to deal with the island as a conquered territory and more to help a sister state in distress,” the commission wrote—less “enforced control” and more “helpful cooperation”—perhaps the unrest could have been avoided. Having spoken with many Haitian teachers and students, the group argued that it had been a mistake to overwhelmingly emphasize vocational training, and insisted that U.S. teachers should not be paid out of the Haitian treasury. Their report, however, was ignored, and none of its recommendations were adopted.29

Many Haitians were ultimately disappointed, and often infuriated, by an education policy they saw as racist and high-handed. By the mid-1920s, political leaders such as Dantès Bellegarde who had once been willing to work with the United States had turned vociferously against the occupation. And by the early 1930s, it was difficult to find anyone at all who would speak up on behalf of agricultural education. Despite initial goodwill and massive investment—of Haitian money—over the course of several years, the project had failed, largely because it was so disconnected from the population’s own vision of the kind of education they needed and wanted. In April 1931, one legislator demanded to know why there were still so many overpaid U.S. teachers working at Damien’s and other schools. Perhaps a few of these foreign experts were truly needed, he admitted, but it was time to send most of them home and replace them with the many competent Haitians who could just as easily do the job. “What do these experts do?” he asked bitterly. “Experts in grass, experts in cooking, experts in everything and nothing, experts in strangulation—they’re sucking the blood of the people.”30

*   *   *

For Haiti’s elites, much of the shock of the U.S. occupation was the long and intimate experience it gave them of American racism. Haitian society had its own intricate forms of social hierarchy, based on skin color, education, and wealth. But for many in the U.S. forces, all Haitians—light-skinned and dark-skinned, uneducated and accomplished alike—were simply “Negroes” or “niggers.” Over the course of the occupation, the attitude of the Americans was a constant source of bitterness that profoundly shaped the Haitian social experience. While there was some congenial contact between U.S. troops and Haitians, there were also perpetual tensions, even at the highest levels. Some of these were the result of simple culture shock: U.S. officials, for example, found it odd and amusing that before the start of meetings, Haitian cabinet members might engage in erudite discussions about recent surrealist poetry and similarly unexpected subjects. Others involved more serious snubs, such as an incident when the entire Haitian government was kept waiting for an official mass to begin because of the absence of two marine officers, who in the end never showed up. In their daily lives, meanwhile, Haitians often found the behavior of U.S. troops racist, rude, and uncouth. One evening, a drunk marine threw rocks down on guests listening to a garden piano recital being given by a Haitian who had recently returned from studying at the Paris Music Conservatory. Confronted with such provocations, some young residents answered with violence, ending up in street fights with the occupying forces. Others responded with pugnacious humor, turning the initials of the Marine Corps, USMC, into derisive tags such as “Use Sans Moindre Contrôle” (“has no self-control”) or “Un Salaud Mal Costumé” (“a badly dressed jerk”).31

Much of the tension involved what Haitians saw as a patent hypocrisy on the part of the occupiers regarding race and sex. At a reception for Franklin Roosevelt in 1917, for instance, U.S. officers had danced with Haitian women but commanded their wives to remain in another room to avoid having to dance with Haitian men. American authorities worried constantly about relationships between Haitian men and white women, even as the occupying soldiers created a boom in prostitution and often lived openly with Haitian mistresses. Marine Captain John Houston Craige later recounted the story of one soldier who went on a killing spree in Port-au-Prince, shooting several Haitians after a local woman broke up with him. “Chiquita and her like seldom get into official reports,” Craige wrote, “but they have a way of influencing affairs for all of that.”32

At the same time, for many Haitian elites, the shock of occupation was also a shock of recognition. American attitudes toward Haiti’s population and culture, they realized, often uncomfortably paralleled their own. Before the occupation, many had celebrated the United States as a model of economic and political progress; now, the brutal reality of the American regime forced them into a period of soul-searching. Ultimately, the two-decade-long occupation pushed a generation of thinkers to revise their understanding of their own society, spurring new literary and cultural movements that reshaped the intellectual landscape of twentieth-century Haiti.33

“A nationality defends itself not only through political action,” opposition leader Georges Sylvain wrote in 1918, “but through all the expressions of its thought, which rebels against destruction, against violent absorption.” In the face of U.S. occupation, he argued, Haitians needed to study their history to “illuminate the quality and true meaning of our intellectual production.” A true political transformation in Haiti, Sylvain insisted, would come only through a cultural transformation. His ideas got a wide hearing: by 1921, his group, L’Union Patriotique, boasted six thousand members.34

Musicians were among the first to respond to the call. The singer Candio, who in 1915 had teased the occupation’s opponents, soon changed sides and wrote a popular song whose chorus declared: “With faith, hope, work, and unity / Down with the occupation … Haiti will remain a nation.” The Haitian composer Occide Jeanty, meanwhile, wrote a celebrated orchestral piece called simply “1804.” It drew on classical and modern influences, as well as on the music of Haitian Vodou, to celebrate Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s revolutionary heritage. Jeanty conducted it weekly in outdoor concerts on the Champ de Mars to rapt audiences, until the U.S. authorities realized that it had become an antioccupation anthem and banned him from performing it.35

Over the course of the 1920s, the energy of opposition fueled the development of an increasingly dynamic public sphere. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers created professional organizations, while workers of all stripes—tailors, shoemakers, typographers—founded unions. Several feminist groups came together to lobby for suffrage rights for women and other legal and political reforms. There was no official political outlet for these activities: the U.S. refused to hold legislative elections, and the government insistently harassed the opposition. In 1921, President Dartiguenave had decreed that it was illegal to criticize the Haitian government or the U.S. officials working with them. But the new law could not close the floodgates. There were so many people in the Port-au-Prince jail who had been arrested for writing and publishing articles critical of the government, one U.S. visitor quipped, that you could start an excellent school of journalism there.36

President Borno kept a close eye on opponents: his personal archives include a series of letters written by antioccupation activists to their supporters outside the country, intercepted by the police and never delivered. Borno’s government also moved to eliminate the traditional lifetime appointments of Haitian judges, many of whom openly opposed the occupation. All these repressive measures, however, only emboldened the opposition. They attacked the occupation regime, and at the same time, they looked past it. Though no elections were scheduled, they campaigned anyway, speaking to the Haitian population and developing political platforms that aimed to tackle the pressing questions of the day: deforestation, environmental protection, immigration, taxation, policing. By creating a political movement independent of the government imposed by the United States, they sought to demonstrate that a democratic order was indeed possible in Haiti.37

The Haitian opposition also carried out a vigorous international campaign aimed at embarrassing the United States and connecting with anti-imperial activists elsewhere. Dantès Bellegarde, who was relieved of his government position when he began speaking out against occupation policies, made himself into a sort of roving ambassador for the opposition, convincing a number of international organizations to pass resolutions demanding that the United States withdraw from Haiti. His activism culminated in an eloquent speech to the League of Nations in which he denounced the occupation’s hypocrisy and pointed out the damage that it was doing to America’s reputation worldwide. A French newspaper applauded Bellegarde’s “spirited attack on American imperialism,” though it also remarked that most members of the assembly did not want to listen to the message: instead of giving the Haitian speaker “the homage which his courage and talent deserved,” they were absorbed in the task of “tracing little figures on sheets of paper.” But while diplomats doodled, activists worldwide took note. Bellegarde participated in several Pan-African Congresses alongside luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois and the Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne, arguing that the United States was promoting the idea of “Haitian inferiority” in part as a way of justifying the disenfranchisement of African Americans. He and other Haitian activists also developed ties with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which sent a delegation to Haiti and later published a book arguing that an occupation based on the use of force was doomed to fail.38

While Bellegarde connected with supporters in Europe and the United States, the energetic activist Joseph Jolibois traveled as a representative for L’Union Patriotique from the Dominican Republic to Argentina, stopping in nearly every Latin American country along the way. In Nicaragua, where U.S. marines had been fighting against resistance forces led by Augusto Sandino—and where they had also begun bombing civilians, as they had done in Haiti—he found a particularly sympathetic audience for his denunciations of American imperialism. Like Pétion a century before, Jolibois sought to connect Haiti’s battle for independence with that of other Latin American nations. The difference, of course, was that in Pétion’s time, Haiti had struggled against a European empire and had seen the United States as a potential ally and an inspiration. Now, Haitian activists increasingly regarded the United States as the most dangerous empire of all.39

World-traveling intellectuals like Bellegarde and Jolibois were key members of the opposition, but within Haiti itself, the thinker who truly defined the cultural awakening of the 1920s was the teacher and scholar Jean Price-Mars, whose writings became a touchstone for generations of Haitians. Price-Mars claimed a venerable ancestry: he was descended from Jean-Baptiste “Mars” Belley, the African-born man who had represented Saint-Domingue at the French National Convention in 1794 and played a crucial role in the revolution. As a child, Price-Mars had grown up at the crossroads of two religions: his father was a Baptist, converted by African American missionaries, while his grandmother, who largely raised him, was a fervent Catholic. This background made him notably ecumenical: throughout periods of intense religious conflict, Price-Mars often urged Haitians to seek out “compromise and reconciliation” between their different religious traditions.40

From 1896 to 1902, when he was in his early twenties, Price-Mars studied on a government scholarship at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Wandering into a bookstore one day, he picked up a book by the prominent French social theorist Gustave Le Bon, who had created a typology of human races ranging from “primitive” to “superior,” with Africans at the bottom and Europeans at the top. As Price-Mars later recalled, he “revolted against the injustice and insolence of such a judgment,” and—like Firmin and Janvier before him—became determined to use “scientific truth” to battle such prejudices. He saw Haitian history itself as a powerful refutation of Le Bon’s theories, proof that an oppressed group of Africans could successfully transform their own society. On returning to Haiti, Price-Mars gave a lecture that exemplified the intellectual approach he would develop over the coming decades. Haitians, he argued, suffered from internalizing the racist ideas directed at them by outsiders. In order to productively confront their social and political problems, they first needed to understand and accept that they were the equals of any other people. “Let us persuade ourselves that we are men like other men,” he declared.41

Price-Mars’s belief in the value of Haitian history and culture eventually led him to spend his weekends wandering the countryside, speaking to rural residents about language, music, kinship, and religion. On one of these excursions in 1918, he experienced firsthand the dangers of the U.S. occupation: he was detained by soldiers, and he might have ended up in a corvée labor team somewhere were it not for his status as a well-respected teacher. But he continued his work in the countryside, determined to provide a detailed ethnographic account of Haiti’s rural way of life, which he believed should serve as the major reference point for a nation in search of itself.42

Price-Mars’s ethnographic work, and particularly his readiness to treat Vodou as a subject worthy of serious study, was groundbreaking. Foreign visitors had produced many accounts purporting to describe the “superstitions” of Haiti’s population, but Haitian intellectuals had tended to avoid the topic. “We bear very little resemblance to the primitive peoples of Africa, either in physical beauty, spirit, or intelligence,” one writer had declared in 1905, explaining that Haitians had more in common with the “Latin part of the white race.” Former president François Denys Légitime, speaking in 1911 at a congress in London, had likewise suggested that if Haiti still harbored “a few traces of African fanaticism,” it was “only a lingering relic of ancestral traits which a people does not easily suppress.” Even Price-Mars’s close friend Dantès Bellegarde insisted that Haiti was an “intellectual province of France” and that Vodou was a brake on progress and an all-too-easy justification for racist attitudes. Haiti “would cut a poor figure,” Bellegarde declared, if she “divested herself of her French culture and presented herself naked as a little savage” among neighbors clothed in “the magnificent finery of their Western Civilization.”43

Price-Mars, however, urged Haitians to completely rethink the way they related to their culture. In his classic 1928 book So Spoke the Uncle, he drew on his ethnographic work and on a broad range of anthropologist theorists, including Anténor Firmin, to decry the “disconcerting paradox” of Haitian life. Haitians had a past, he said, that was “if not the most beautiful, then certainly the most engaging and moving in the history of the world”—the “transplantation of a human race to a foreign land.” And yet they reacted with “an embarrassment barely concealed, indeed shame,” when confronted with the fact of their African roots. They were ensnared in the slaveholders’ ideology, which presented blacks as “cast-offs of humanity, without history, without morality, without religion.” Price-Mars lamented that having overthrown slavery and colonialism, the “black community of Haiti clothed itself in the rags of western civilization.” Ever since 1804, the country’s leaders had sought to improve Haiti by copying France. “An absurd task, if there ever was one!” Price-Mars exclaimed.44

The country’s upper classes, Price-Mars argued, had spent two centuries turning away from what really made them who they were: their African heritage, their slave revolution, their rural culture, their religion. All the “authentically indigenous” features of Haitian society were treated with suspicion by the elites, for whom the term “African” had become a “humiliating affront.” “The most distinguished man” in Haiti, Price-Mars teased, “much prefers that one find him to bear some resemblance to an Eskimo” rather than “remind him of his Guinean or Sudanese ancestry.” Everything, Price-Mars complained, was upside down: instead of glorifying their ancestors, members of the light-skinned elite took pride in the fact that they were descended from “bastard” relationships between French masters and their slaves, from “the anonymous shame of chance encounters.” Poignantly summing up, he wrote that “as we gradually forced ourselves to believe that we were ‘colored’ Frenchmen, we forgot we were simply Haitians.”45

Price-Mars’s eloquent argument and his riveting lectures at the prestigious Lycée Pétion shaped an entire generation of young intellectuals, who agreed that Haiti’s lack of cultural independence had paved the way for its loss of political independence. It was dangerous, as Price-Mars put it, for a society to sink into the “ruts of dull and slavish imitation” of other cultures, for that made it seem as if it had made no contribution to human progress—which was a pretext for “nations impatient for territorial expansion, ambitious for hegemony, to erase the society from the map of the world.” In failing to acknowledge its own religion and language, traditions and beliefs, Haiti had opened the door to foreign occupation. The lesson was clear: if it wanted to secure independence, Haiti needed to look to its own culture as the necessary foundation of true sovereignty.46

*   *   *

In February 1930, an official delegation arrived from the United States to investigate conditions in Haiti. Created by President Roosevelt in response to the 1929 student strike and the massacre of protesters at Les Cayes, the commission had a diverse membership: it was led by the banker William Cameron Forbes, a strong advocate of U.S. imperialism, but also included liberal critics of the occupation. Haitian activists knew that this was a crucial opportunity to demonstrate unequivocally that the country wanted to be free from U.S. rule. They filled the streets of Port-au-Prince with protesters holding Haitian flags, mobilized witnesses to testify about the abusive behavior of the marines, and gathered in churches to pray for an end to the occupation. The opposition parties presented the Forbes Commission with a detailed plan for disentangling the two countries, beginning with free elections and the reestablishment of constitutional rights, followed by the withdrawal of U.S. military forces. When they returned to Washington, the Forbes Commission praised many aspects of the occupation, but they also criticized the racism of some U.S. officials and the controversial overemphasis on vocational education. They agreed with the opposition that the only way forward was for the United States to hold a truly open presidential contest and to finally allow legislative elections, which had been deferred for the preceding twelve years. But to the disappointment of many in Haiti, the commission concluded by recommending a slow withdrawal over the course of several years. The country, they believed, was not yet ready for complete control of its own financial and military institutions.47

A few months later, Haitians went to the polls for the first free elections since the beginning of the occupation. Though the balloting was organized by the American regime, U.S. officials were under strict orders to make no statements about the candidates, and the marines were kept in their barracks on election day. Energized by the years of opposition activism and by rules allowing for universal manhood suffrage, a record number of Haitians—some three hundred thousand—cast their votes, packing the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies with anti-U.S. activists. Joseph Jolibois, back from his years of traveling across Latin America on behalf of the cause, became the speaker of the Chamber. As the country’s president, Haitians elected Sténio Vincent—the former interior minister who had resigned from Dartiguenave’s government to protest its submission to U.S. bankers, and who was now a leading member of L’Union Patriotique.48

Throughout the 1920s, the Haitian opposition had worked to create an alternative public sphere in the absence of parliamentary democracy. Now they had the parliament back, along with a president who had played a crucial part in the movement against the U.S. presence on the island. Nevertheless, many activists found that progress toward full independence was frustratingly slow. The United States spent four years on a gradual “Haitianization” of the country’s institutions, meanwhile maintaining strong control over all financial matters and ruling the countryside through their troops as they had done for the previous decade. The Americans also used these four years to negotiate agreements with the Haitian government that would allow them to maintain a significant level of control even after the formal withdrawal of the marines.

Many antioccupation activists were dismayed to find President Vincent offering enthusiastic support to these agreements. Though he was still committed to ending direct foreign control, Vincent had also become convinced that it was in Haiti’s best interest for the United States to maintain a very strong role in the country. He even proposed that a small number of marines should remain in Haiti to provide training and security—a suggestion that infuriated many senators and deputies, who successfully pushed through plans for a full military withdrawal. He also wanted to continue direct U.S. involvement in budgetary and fiscal matters. This, too, angered many representatives, but Vincent outflanked the opposition by waiting until a legislative holiday, then signing a deal with the United States that gave Washington a “fiscal representative” within the Haitian government. The job title sounded innocent enough, but the representative was granted remarkably wide powers: controlling customs collection, inspecting the tax collection system, and approving any changes to tariffs and taxes. The U.S. fiscal representative could also set limits on Haitian government spending, and the officer would remain in place as long as Haiti was still paying off the 1922 loan it had contracted with the United States. Even after the marines departed in 1934, then, the Haitian government still contained a powerful U.S. official. The fiscal representative remained there until 1941, and the Banque Nationale d’Haïti would remain under U.S. supervision until 1947.49

In 1932, Vincent and the Haitian Congress rewrote Haiti’s constitution to replace the one that had been foisted on the country in 1918. The new constitution, though, maintained the crucial change from that year: granting foreigners the right to own property in Haiti. Eager for investment from the north, Vincent also—despite strenuous opposition from some Haitian congressmen—negotiated an agreement with the powerful U.S.-based Standard Fruit Company that gave them a monopoly on the export of bananas from Haiti. The deal was meant to create an alternative to Haiti’s traditional coffee crop, developing a new and profitable export.50

In time, the arrangement did succeed in improving the economy in the west of Haiti, with independent small farmers growing the bananas and selling them to Standard Fruit for shipment to the United States. Still, many young activists from the “generation of occupation” were furious at their government’s eagerness to concede so much to the Americans. Inspired by Marxist ideas, some of them pressed for a different model of development, one that would avoid foreign investment and control and focus on attacking the massive economic inequalities within Haitian society. Vincent and the United States saw such arguments as dangerous and seditious, however. In 1933, while the marines were still in the country, they worked with Vincent on a campaign targeting leftist leaders, the goal of which was officially described as the “suppression of Bolshevist activities.” That same year, in the wake of protests, Vincent declared a “state of siege” in the western part of Haiti, and his interior minister, Élie Lescot, ordered several opposition newspapers shut down. Joseph Jolibois, who had emerged as the most prominent critic of Vincent’s cozy relationship with the United States, was arrested and imprisoned. He would remain behind bars for the rest of his life, dying in prison in 1936.51

Even before the “Second Independence” was formalized in 1934 with the departure of the U.S. marines, Vincent and his supporters had thus mortgaged away much of what was possible. They argued their position on pragmatic grounds, insisting that there was really no choice but to work with the United States—now Haiti’s most important trading partner and clearly the most powerful player in the Caribbean region. In the process, however, they also locked themselves into a relationship with a country whose vision of Haiti would remain profoundly limited and deeply skewed.

Unlike Haitians, citizens of the United States had the privilege of largely overlooking—and in time forgetting—the huge impact their country had had on their neighbor to the south. After the Senate investigations of 1920–21, there was never a broad and public exploration of the occupation. Indeed, there has never been any widespread reckoning of what the United States did in Haiti during those twenty years, and today few people are even aware that the occupation ever occurred. Instead, the most successful writings produced in the United States about the occupation were largely self-congratulatory about its impact, and they portrayed American soldiers and officials as being forced into brutal actions by the backward habits of the Haitian population. These works refined and disseminated a set of tropes about Haiti—stereotypes of naïve and fatalistic peasants, manipulative religious leaders, and a secret world of dark sorcery—that have remained startlingly powerful to this day. The combination of silence about the political and economic impact of the occupation on the one hand, and a great deal of noise about the supposed nature of Haiti and its culture on the other, was in itself a devastating consequence of the U.S. invasion of the country.

The most influential work in the genre was William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island. Seabrook had traveled to Haiti eager to see Vodou ceremonies, but at least at first he had no luck: no one was willing to risk imprisonment to satisfy the curiosity of a foreign visitor. In his book, he claims to have eventually gained access to the secrets of the religion by apprenticing with a manbo, though it seems that he actually got much of his information from marine reports about their raids on temples. His vivid, exoticized depiction of Vodou helped make the book a commercial success and an influential work among many intellectuals, including participants in the Harlem Renaissance. Seabrook’s bestseller was followed in 1931 by The White King of La Gonave by the marine Faustin Wirkus, who had served a lengthy tour of duty in Haiti starting in 1916. Wirkus claimed that the local population of the small island of La Gonâve, where he was stationed, had made him their king. Seabrook effused that Wirkus had lived every man’s dream: “Every boy ever born, if he is any good, wants, among other things, to be king of a tropical island.” The story was, of course, more complicated than that: when Wirkus was the governing marine officer at La Gonâve, local Haitian groups had worked with him—they had no choice—and probably included him in some of their social rituals. This hardly meant that they saw him either as their king or their god. The American readers’ expectations, however, were already relatively settled, and the story of Haiti’s own long-standing forms of local political and social organization was not part of them. Nor was there much room in these books for soul-searching about the worthiness of occupation itself. When Marine Captain John Houston Craige drafted his memoir, he was at first quite critical of what he had experienced. Before publication, though, he decided that such a work “would knock me out of the Marine Corps because it was brutally frank about political matters,” and he rewrote it completely into “a local color book.” In his tellingly titled Black Bagdad and its sequel Cannibal Cousins, Craige’s time in Haiti comes across as a humorous romp through a strange and exotic society.52

The wave of American occupation-era memoirs was also responsible for sending an unending stream of zombies traipsing through U.S. popular culture. The 1934 film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi, even advertised itself as a kind of documentary, “based upon personal observations in Haiti by American writers and research workers.” The movie helped spawn an entire genre, which fixed Haiti in many minds as a place of dark ritual and wandering undead, animated by an unending soundtrack of threatening drumming.53

By making zombies into generic horror-film monsters, such representations obscured the fact that in Haitian folklore, the zonbi is a powerful symbol with a specific, haunting point of reference. It is a person devoid of all agency, under the complete control of a master: that is, a slave. Sometimes the term is used as an insult—to this day, independent farmers in Haiti might call wage workers zonbi, insisting that to sell your labor is to sell your freedom. Tales about zonbi often reflect fears of an individual or collective loss of control. When the HASCO sugar mill opened in 1918, for instance, a rumor circulated that some of the workers there were zonbi. One of the middlemen hired by the company to bring in a gang of field laborers, the story went, had arrived with a group of particularly ragged, dazed, and silent workers whom he had zombified so that he could steal their wages. William Seabrook heard the story and featured it in his book, commenting that it was strange that HASCO—“a modern big business” that looked like “a chunk of Hoboken”—would be connected with “sorcery or superstition.” It wasn’t really strange at all, though: telling stories about zonbi workers at HASCO was probably a way for the local community to articulate the feelings evoked by the reappearance of the plantation in their midst. Indeed, it is the American zombie clichés that have functioned as a kind of intellectual sorcery. They took a religion developed in order to survive and resist slavery—one that had served as central pillar in the counter-plantation system at the core of the Haitian struggle to secure autonomy and dignity—and transformed it into nothing more than a sign of barbarism, further proof that the country would never progress unless it was guided and controlled by foreign whites.54

*   *   *

A decade before the occupation, Anténor Firmin had predicted that the United States would be the crucial force shaping Haiti’s destiny in the twentieth century. The only question, as he saw it, was whether his country would find a way to work productively with their neighbor to the north, or whether it would be swallowed up by the United States altogether. At the dawn of the Second Independence, Vincent and many other Haitian leaders, reviewing the harsh lessons of the previous decades, found themselves agreeing with Firmin’s analysis. Accordingly, they sought to maintain a relationship with the United States, though they pushed for one based on cooperation rather than domination. In so doing they seized on the increasingly popular doctrine of Pan-Americanism, which envisioned connections between different countries in the Western Hemisphere based on mutual interest and respect for sovereignty. In Washington, U.S. politicians and statesmen were also seeking to develop a new approach to the Caribbean and Latin America, one with fewer guns and battleships and more free trade and cultural exchange.55

For many of Haiti’s leftist activists, however, the happy talk about Pan-Americanism was just a smoke screen for continued U.S. dominance. What they wanted instead was a profound reorientation of Haitian politics. A key figure in this movement was Jacques Roumain, who was born into a wealthy Port-au-Prince family, grew up studying in Switzerland, and had come back to Haiti in 1925 to fight the “hated Yankee.” During the 1920s Port-au-Prince cultural renaissance, he had published vigorous articles attacking the occupation and promoting the literary style that came to be known as indigénisme, which sought to fulfill Jean Price-Mars’s call for writing rooted in Haiti’s rural culture. Now, with the marines having finally withdrawn in 1934, he founded the Parti Communiste Haïtien, attacking “the excess of the Haitian bourgeoisie and the bourgeois politicians, valets of imperialism and cruel exploiters of the workers and peasants.”56

The fundamental issue in Haiti, Roumain argued, was one of class: most of the country’s population was excluded from political participation and prevented from improving their lot. For generations, Haitian politicians had managed to deflect real challenges to this social structure by focusing instead on issues of color, cultivating conflicts between “blacks” and “mulattoes” and encouraging their followers to believe that getting blacks into power was the answer. But, Roumain insisted, the real problem was that elites of all colors were maintaining the masses in subjection and poverty. The argument was summed up in the motto of the PCH: “Color is nothing, class is everything.”57

Roumain’s movement faced tremendous challenges. Even the remarkably widespread antioccupation protests had largely replicated the country’s social divisions, with urban intellectuals and students rarely collaborating directly with rural farmers. But young activists, energized by the artistic and ethnographic celebrations of rural culture, believed that they could overcome the existing divisions, reaching out to the countryside in order to produce real social change in Haiti. They found, however, that they had little room and little time to maneuver. Vincent’s government, using the police network set up by the U.S. occupation, quickly and effectively worked to crush the nascent communist party. Roumain was soon arrested and accused of trying to get weapons for an armed uprising from a Haitian communist living in New York. As proof, the police produced letters in which Roumain requested “materials” from his correspondent—though in fact he was requesting pamphlets about the Scottsboro case.58

When Roumain was sentenced to three years in prison, there was an international outcry, and the African American writer Langston Hughes—who had met and befriended Roumain during a visit to Haiti in 1931—created an organization to lobby for his release. After a year in jail, during which he contracted malaria, Roumain was allowed to go free but forced to leave the country. Other PCH organizers in Haiti also found that writing articles critical of the government could land them in prison just as easily after the “Second Independence” as back when the marines had been in charge. In 1936, President Vincent decreed that “any profession of communist faith, oral or written, public or private, will be punishable by an imprisonment of six months to one year and by a fine.” In the face of such restrictions, Vincent’s opponents found other ways to criticize him. Parodying a song that listed his accomplishments, for instance, they sang instead of his failures: “Who made my skin show through my worn out pants? It’s President Vincent!” But the political repression was largely effective at silencing the country’s leftist movements.59

When it came to the question of Haitian democracy, Vincent in fact sounded very much like the U.S. administrators he had once fought against. Arguing for strong limits on political participation, he cited the conclusions of the 1930 Forbes Commission to claim that all “thoughtful and well-intentioned” Haitians knew that most of the population simply wasn’t educated enough to choose their leaders responsibly. “Enlightened public opinion,” Vincent wrote, represented only a “thin golden fringe” decorating the “primitive clothes of our society.” In time, education could expand the basis for popular participation, but until then, too much democracy would lead to instability. “In a country like ours, where the tropical sun exasperates the temperament,” he argued, politicians often lost sight of “hard reality” and got lost instead in “vain subtleties” of liberal ideas. In Vincent’s opinion, what Haiti needed—what its circumstances and culture required—was a strong president who would override the irrationality and emotionalism all too easily expressed in parliamentary institutions, keeping the nation on track through firm and strict governance.60

Vincent made these arguments with a very specific purpose: like any number of presidents who had preceded him in Haiti, he was determined to stay in power as long as possible. In 1935, using a tried-and-true method, he rewrote the constitution to remove the rule that limited presidents to serving one term. Although this change faced stiff congressional opposition, Vincent outmaneuvered it by using the mechanism pioneered by the United States in 1918: a popular referendum, in which Haitians were asked simultaneously to approve the new constitution and to extend Vincent’s mandate for another five-year term. The historian Claude Moïse summarizes the electoral farce: “The people said yes. Massively. With more than 99 percent. As usual.” The new constitution represented a significant expansion of presidential power. It officially made the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, diminishing the military’s independence, and also placed him directly in charge of all internal security. It gave him total control over the naming of all officials in the administration. And it included an alarming symbolic stipulation, declaring that the president “personified the Nation.” Indeed, concludes Moïse, the 1935 constitution put into place an “absolute presidential monarchy,” providing the president with an assortment of tools to invalidate parliamentary opposition. Vincent was determined to work around congressional resistance to his plans for U.S. investment, such as the Standard Fruit deal, and after his reelection, the new constitution made it much easier for him to push through projects that he saw as essential for Haitian development.61

Vincent claimed that his projects would help to alleviate rural and urban poverty, and he even delivered some speeches in Kreyòl to bolster his image as a populist. But he shared with the U.S. occupation authorities a deeply negative view of the typical Haitian peasant. “The man is ignorant, superstitious, has no needs, dissolute morals, no taste for work,” Vincent complained. He was a burden on the land, for he “wastes the earth, sterilizes it, exhausting it with his stupid planting,” and a burden on Haiti, which staggered under the load of “thousands of examples” of such men. As Vincent saw it, there was no future for the counter-plantation system that the rural population had developed and cultivated for many decades. It needed to disappear, yielding to what he considered to be more advanced forms of agriculture and ways of life.62

The most startling illustration of Vincent’s distance from his country’s population came in 1937, when his first response to a brutal massacre of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic appeared to be one of indifference. The border region between the two countries—Péralte’s home territory—had long nourished its own culture, one that was relatively independent from the central authorities and paid little heed to the boundary separating the nations. “Although there were two sides, the people were one, united,” a Haitian later recalled. Many Haitians had settled on the Dominican side of the border, acquiring and cultivating land. By the 1930s, some had been there for several generations, and they spoke both Spanish and Kreyòl.63

The precise placement of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic had long been contested, but in 1936, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo—whose mother was Haitian, though he tended to hide this fact—traveled to Haiti to sign a treaty formally settling the boundary dispute. Newspapers and politicians hailed the moment as a triumph of diplomacy, the beginning of a new era of collaboration between the two neighbors. In a gesture of friendship, Vincent renamed one of the main streets in Port-au-Prince “Avenue Trujillo.”64

Then, in October 1937, Trujillo took a tour of the border region and made an ominous announcement. “For some months I have travelled and traversed the border in every sense of the word,” he declared. “I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population.” On his journey, Trujillo said, he had heard complaints from Dominicans of “depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits,” and he had responded to them, “I will fix this.” “We have already begun to remedy the situation,” he announced chillingly. “Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue.”65

Over the next days, Dominican troops and civilians rounded up and killed tens of thousands of Haitians along the border. Often the assassins were extremely close to the victims: one officer apparently went into his kitchen and shot the family cook, an elderly Haitian woman. Thousands of Haitians were decapitated with machetes in the town square at Santiago. Others were cut down as they tried to escape across the border, which had been closed by Dominican troops. Decades later, a survivor, still carrying visible scars on her shoulders and neck, recalled how her entire extended family—twenty-eight people—had set out as a group early one morning to march toward Haiti and escape. At the border, however, Dominican soldiers were not letting any Haitians pass. When some tried to make a run for it, a guard began murdering the prisoners. “He killed everyone. I was the only one who was saved. They thought I was dead because they had given me a lot of machete blows. I was soaked in blood—all the blood in my heart. They killed my entire family … I was the only one to survive.”66

There was almost no media coverage of the massacre, and Trujillo denied any personal responsibility, presenting the events as a spontaneous reaction against Haitians by local Dominicans. The official response of the Haitian government, meanwhile, was startling in its timidity. President Vincent said nothing until cabinet members pressured him to criticize Trujillo and demand an explanation for the killings. Meanwhile, the United States, concerned about the implications for regional stability, stepped in and quietly helped broker a deal between Vincent and Trujillo. The Dominican dictator agreed to pay Haiti an indemnity of $750,000—a tepid apology for a genocide. (He eventually paid only two-thirds of that, the equivalent of less than $8 million in today’s currency.) Even after the indemnity agreement was signed, sporadic massacres of Haitians continued for years in the southern border region between the two countries, now directed at Haitian cane workers. The Haitian government, again, did nothing.67

Jacques Roumain, now living in France, described the events as a “massive lynching” of Haitians, their bodies “thrown to the sharks.” He accused Trujillo of ordering the attacks and Vincent of being complicit in the massacre. Though seemingly safe in exile, Roumain was once again pursued for speaking out: he was arrested and put on trial in a French court by representatives of Trujillo’s government, who accused him of “outrage against a foreign head of state.” (He was not convicted.) In Haiti itself, almost no one wrote about the massacre at the time; Trujillo and Vincent had effectively established a code of silence around the entire incident. Though the massacre was one of largest genocides to take place in the Americas during the twentieth century, there has never been any official trial or investigation of what happened. To this day, it remains a disturbing specter in both countries, largely unacknowledged and unmemorialized.68

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Vincent’s lack of respect for Haiti’s rural population and his penchant for repressive government combined to spell trouble for the religious culture of the countryside. After the U.S. forces withdrew in 1934, the laws used by the marines to justify the persecution of Vodou were revoked. The following year, however, President Vincent passed a new decree outlawing “superstitious practices,” defined as “the ceremonies, rites, dances, and meetings in the course of which are practiced, in offering to so-called divinities, sacrifices of cattle or fowl.” The 1935 law also targeted all practices that “exploited the public by making them think that it is possible, by occult means, either to change the luck or situation of a person, or prevent something bad from happening through procedures unknown to medical science.” Those who organized or attended such ceremonies could be imprisoned for up to six months. The legislation was a stark signal that the ethnographic movement of the 1920s, despite its profound impact on Haitian literature, music, and theater, had failed to transform the way the Haitian government itself related to the country’s population.69

Vincent’s effort to eliminate this fundamental component of Haitian culture led to a particularly absurd situation a few years later, when Élie Lescot—now serving as the Haitian ambassador to Washington—was invited to bring a troupe of dancers and drummers to the city’s Constitution Hall. (In 1939, that institution had famously refused to let the African American opera star Marian Anderson sing there because of the color of her skin, and Eleanor Roosevelt had riposted by organizing a concert for her on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead; the 1941 performance by the Haitian group would, in fact, be the first breach of the color line at the hallowed hall.) U.S. organizers planning the visit had initially pushed for an “authentic” musical group from the countryside, headed by an oungan and ready to perform traditional Vodou songs. But Lescot warned the organizers that one could not be sure of “what would happen” with such a group. If the dancers “got under the power,” he said—that is, went into possession—“we might not be able to stop them.” Instead, he proposed bringing a nascent troupe made up of young dancers drawn from prominent Port-au-Prince families, who were studying traditional dances as part of a broader folkloric education.*71

Lescot’s approach put the dancers into a peculiar position. As they prepared for their journey to Washington, their teacher took them to a Vodou ceremony so that they could observe firsthand the performance styles that they were learning. The experience, one of the dancers later recalled, was both thrilling and frightening for someone who had long been taught to stay away from Vodou. “What adventure! What anxiety!” It was also illegal, and when the police decided to enforce the law that night, the ceremony was broken up and the young dancers were carted off to jail. Their teacher managed to get them released, but the irony of the situation was undeniable. In the process of preparing for what the Haitian state had asked them to do—perform traditional dances in the United States—the dancers had ended up breaking the state’s own laws.72

Shortly after the performance at Constitution Hall, Lescot succeeded Vincent as the president of Haiti. Despite his promotion of the folkloric dance troupe, though, he was no more inclined than his predecessor to support the actual practice of Vodou. Indeed, in 1941, when the Catholic Church began organizing a nationwide “anti-superstition” campaign aimed at pressuring Haitians to renounce Vodou, Lescot signed an order asking “civil and military authorities to give their most complete assistance” to the church in its struggle against “fetishism and superstition.” For several months, members of the Garde d’Haïti and local officials accompanied Catholic priests on their raids, collecting ritual implements to be burned in pyres. The campaign also left permanent scars on the Haitian landscape. In many communities, ancient trees were considered holy by those who practiced Vodou, understood to be a kind of home for some of the lwa; to eliminate such sites of worship, Catholic priests ordered these trees to be chopped down.73

The 1941 anti-Vodou campaign was part of a trilateral religious conflict that had been simmering in Haiti for several decades. The occupation years had brought to Haiti an increasing number of Protestant missionaries, who were attracting many converts. As the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux noted, some Protestant denominations, such as Pentecostals, were particularly appealing to Haitians because they found there “an atmosphere that reminded them of that of Vaudou sanctuaries.” The Protestants often saw Catholicism and Vodou as twin enemies; one Baptist missionary declared that “the Roman Catholic Church in Haiti is a bastard production of Voodooism, witchcraft, and other African heathenish cults with a gloss of Roman Catholicism.” Catholics, for their part, returned the favor, portraying the Protestants as a spiritual menace and accusing them of doing “Satan’s work” in Haiti.74

By the 1940s, many Haitian rural communities had become battlegrounds for tremendously complex spiritual warfare involving Catholic priests, Protestant missionaries, and oungans and manbos of the Vodou religion. Still, Vodou bore the brunt of the attacks. When Métraux arrived in Haiti for a vacation in 1941, he was shocked to see “an enormous pyramid of drums and ‘superstitious objects’” taken from Vodou temples, piled in the presbytery of a church and awaiting a “solemn auto-da-fé.” The scene reminded him of stories about Spanish priests engaging in the “suppression of idolatry” during the conquest of the Americas. The French priests in twentieth-century Haiti, Métraux later wrote, would have impressed their long-dead forebears with their zeal and intensity. When he pleaded that at least some of the items should be saved for scientific or aesthetic reasons, he was told that “the honour of Haiti was at stake and all must be destroyed.”75

Even Jacques Roumain—who, as a committed Marxist, held that religion in general was an obstacle to human progress—insisted that the anti-Vodou methods used by the Catholic Church were inhumane and ultimately counterproductive. In the long run, he argued, the attacks only ended up confirming the spiritual power of the sites and objects that the church tried to destroy. “We must, naturally, rid the Haitian masses of the mystical shackles,” Roumain wrote; but he believed that Vodou would disappear quite naturally once the ignorance and poverty that sustained it were gone. In his opinion, Haitian peasants went to the Vodou priest for healing because there were no health clinics. “What we need in Haiti,” he said, “is not an anti-superstition campaign, but an anti-misery campaign.”76

Roumain had returned to Haiti from his European exile after Lescot assumed the presidency. He had made little headway on the political front, and the “anti-superstition” campaign made it clear that, seven years after the departure of the United States, the social and religious divisions in Haiti were as deep as ever. Still, like other activists, Roumain had faith that cultural work could open the way for societal change. He began working on a novel called Masters of the Dew, which was meant to depict and confront Haiti’s problems. The title of the book came from an ironic and wistful moniker he had heard rural residents use for themselves: we are masters of the dew, they said, implying that they were masters of nothing else. Roumain’s novel, published in 1944, brought together much of the experience of Haiti’s rural population from the previous years, telling the story of a man named Manuel who, returning from years as a cane worker in Cuba, tries to save a village from drought. At once tragic and hopeful, the novel (which was translated into English by Langston Hughes a few years later) is considered perhaps the greatest work of twentieth-century Haitian literature.77

Masters of the Dew was—and remains—so powerful because it dreamed of a different future for Haiti: one in which the migrants scattered to Cuba and the Dominican Republic could come home, the water that was so badly needed could flow once again, and Haiti’s rural population would occupy the center of the story rather than being perpetually condemned to its margins. In both his political and his aesthetic work, Roumain tried to make a connection between the elite world into which he had been born and what he knew was the core and foundation of his country: the farmers and families of the countryside. But it was an uphill struggle. A decade after the departure of the United States, the political order was as closed to the majority of the population as ever. The rural population had seen its situation largely grow worse and had suffered two major assaults—the massacres along the Dominican border in 1937, and the religious persecution of 1941. The possibility of change that many had seen at the dawn of the “Second Independence” now seemed increasingly distant, even impossible.

Roumain himself died a month before his masterpiece was published. He was a young man—barely thirty-seven—but the years of imprisonment and exile had taken their toll. When he had been behind bars in the 1930s, he had taken solace in writing short poems for his young son. One of them described water coming down from the mountain and flowing to the prison, where it gives news of the outside world to a prisoner named “Little Jacques.” Another described a ship heading out onto the open sea—“that great indigo tub”—toward an island in the distance. But alongside these hopeful poems was one that transformed a comforting children’s song—“I’m going to the river”—into a haunting lament. In Roumain’s version, when the speaker gets to the river, he finds it dry. Nearby he sees a threatening presence, a white person, cutting wood. The elliptical poem—the only one Roumain ever wrote in Kreyòl—captured the sense of unshakable menace he felt shadowing Haiti: the threat of outsiders taking away the country’s resources, and its own sources of power and renewal drying up.78