8    Anti-Imperialist Racial Solidarity before the Cold War

Success and Failure

ALAN MCPHERSON

“On the international scene there has now appeared a new actor: solidarity,” said Dominican Tulio Cestero in late 1919, as the end of the Great War provoked both elation and disillusionment at the peace it had wrought. “No nation, no people, can realize by itself its destiny.” To Cestero, “nationality” encompassed transnational identity, especially among Spanish-speaking Latin Americans. “We are citizens of twenty nations,” he said, “but in one language, with the same soul, we feel nationality.”1

Did they, though, “feel nationality”? More importantly, did they do anything about it? Political leaders in the interwar years in Latin America often declared their racial unity and devotion to one another despite separation by national borders, and historians should take seriously their desire to forge a common identity. When based on mere claims of shared cultural traits rather than interests, however, Latin Americans’ actions were often not able to match their rhetoric.

This chapter finds both success and failure in about equal measure in Latin American racial thought and activism when trying to end U.S. military occupations in Haiti (1919–34) and in Cestero’s own country, the Dominican Republic (1916–24). People of African heritage in both republics of Hispaniola were greatly affected by the landing of U.S. Marines, including tens of thousands who migrated from the West Indies. Their many grievances against the racism of U.S. occupiers translated into transnational political action through the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), European publics, and alliances with African Americans. Pan-Africanism was partly spurred by the occupations, and, though its role in actually ending occupations remained minimal, antiracism pointed to larger patterns of identity and transnational solidarity against empire that were the primary causes of withdrawal. This story of identity formation through imperialism, however, cannot be complete without examining the substantial limits and failures of pan-Africanism in Hispaniola, based partially on Dominicans’ and Haitians’ own racial ideas. Ethnic “oneness” was in no way as accepted by Latin American leaders as Cestero might have hoped. Even Cestero did not fully buy his own rhetoric.

This clear-eyed look at anti-imperialist solidarity at the apex of U.S. military power in the region may be most helpful as a comparison and contrast to the rest of this volume, where the focus lies almost entirely on the Cold War. We might assume too easily that racial solidarity with the rest of the developing world came naturally to Latin Americans or that anti-imperialism was always effective. Moreover, major political moments such as World War II and the Cuban Revolution caused major shifts in Latin America’s shared identity, bringing about fundamental breaks with the more racist interwar years.

This chapter’s purpose is not to analyze the racism of empire, as scholars have covered the topic exhaustively. It is appropriate to remind ourselves, however, that pervading almost all interactions between occupiers and occupied was the marker of race.2 The racism of U.S. occupiers toward Haitians is well known, but the occupiers were also nearly uniformly contemptuous of all nonwhite, non-Protestant, or non-English-speaking Latin Americans. Marines often called Dominicans “spigs” or “niggers,” even more so in the east, where there was more mixed and African blood.3 There were clear political implications in this racism. “The negro race,” said John Russell, the head of the Haitian occupation, “will always require inspection by white men.” “The only power the Haitian recognizes is force.”4

Relations between men and women further heightened racial tensions. The Marines at first discouraged white U.S. wives from accompanying their husbands to Haiti in order to minimize opportunities for friction.5 When wives were allowed in 1916, tensions arose, mostly at dances.6 “When a Haitian gentleman asked an American woman to dance,” reported the New York Times, “he usually was met with a polite excuse, only to see her a few minutes later dancing off with an American.”7 Marines also treated black women as either jezebels or mammies, lascivious or asexual. In Port-au-Prince, a city of 100,000, there were 147 registered saloons or dance halls, and prostitutes operated out of all of them.8 Yet, as one Marine recalled decades later, the “thought of intermarriage” with Haitian women was “horrifying.”9

In response to such pervasive racism, Haiti certainly presents a successful case of pushback—though one undercut by Haitians’ other racial perceptions. Generally, investigator Carl Kelsey found that Haitians showed “no subserviency [sic] in their attitude toward the whites.”10 Haitians rarely fought back physically because military courts protected U.S. whites. Instead, they used their own courts in which judges and juries regularly sided with Haitians against whites.11 In one typical case, a Haitian lawyer defended his client against an airtight case of theft by saying, “It is not the poor negro who is guilty … it is the white man.… But why, by an absurdity of the law, is it necessary that the American escape from Haitian [justice]?” After seventeen minutes of deliberation, the jury pronounced the defendant not guilty and the court broke out in applause.12

U.S. racism also helped change the way Haitians thought about race and their connections to other peoples of color. By the late 1920s, some Haitian intellectuals developed their own version of black empowerment. This flourished a few years later in France under the names négritude or noirisme, partly in response to what Dantès Bellegarde called the “white dictatorship.”13 The agenda of these intellectuals was primarily to recognize the positive contributions of Africa to Haitian culture, but some individuals also aimed to dehumanize whites. Émile Roumer, founder of one of the central vehicles of noirisme, La Revue Indigène, explained that “the racial principle of l’Indigène consisted in recognizing only two races: homo sapiens and the human excrement that is the WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant].”14

Jean Price-Mars set the intellectual tone for the new generation in a more genteel fashion. The son of a deputy, a cousin of a former president, and himself a physician and former minister to Paris, Price-Mars was fully of the elite, except that he was “a pure black man” and seriously explored Haiti’s racial identity.15 In 1904 Price-Mars had visited the Centennial Exposition in St. Louis and been shocked by its primitivist treatment of Filipinos. He was also disgusted by segregation. Yet, he attended Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and showed interest in bringing its agricultural techniques to Haiti. Price-Mars returned to Haiti denigrating the superiority complex of mulattoes and other elites and preaching an embrace of the black peasantry and its practices such as farming and Vodou. His masterwork was Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928).16

Some of the new generation’s concerns, coinciding with the rise of a transnational noirisme, were largely literary and consisted mostly of an effort to pull away from classical French influences.17 For this reason, U.S. occupiers paid little mind to Price-Mars and his ilk; nor did they care about Haitian art.18 However, another purpose of Ainsi parla l’oncle and La Revue Indigène was to build up solidarity against occupation by reminding Haiti of its unique and meaningful blend of African and Western virtues.19 Among the many new rebels of noirisme were well known anti-occupation activists Léon Laleau, Alfred Nemours, Ernest Chauvet, Georges Léger, and Clément Magloire.20

Haitians’ growing identification with the African Diaspora led to meaningful transnational networks of solidarity against occupation. Among U.S. citizens, African Americans played a disproportionate role in transforming nation-based anti-occupation movements into transnational crusades. Haiti was a major concern for a diverse group of African American leaders, from Communists such as Cecil Briggs of the African Black Brotherhood to capitalists including the Tuskegee Institute’s Robert Moton and feminists such as Addie Hunton. In 1919, Hunton founded the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) in order to investigate the lot of Haitian women and children. Those traveling, writing about, or otherwise defending Haiti were a veritable who’s who of postwar black America. In 1919, Madam C. J. Walker allied with A. Philip Randolph to found the short-lived but important International League of the Darker Peoples to oppose the occupation. Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T., presided over the ICWDR. Visitors to the black republic included some of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance and 1920s civil rights—Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Scott, and Arthur Spingarn. They linked the cause of Haitian independence to larger struggles for racial justice.21

James Blackwood wrote to the U.S. chief of the Haitian Gendarmerie to denounce its abuses in Haiti: “I am an American citizen, though of the colored race, which means that I am little, or not at all regarded at home; yet I cannot help to be loyal to the mother country [Haiti].”22 Blackwood’s letter demonstrated that, for African Americans, patriotism meant pressuring their nation to meet its own standards. The only African American working for the occupation in Haiti, Napoleon Marshall, became a critic of it and helped connect Haitians and U.S. citizens.23 Back in the United States, 143 members of a Harlem church asked for the recall of the U.S. head of the occupation after reading an article in the Courrier Haïtien.24 The African Episcopal Church in New York, under Haitian native Reverend John Hurst, also spoke out for the five hundred or so New Yorkers from Haiti.25 Through much of the 1920s, Joseph Mirault, a Sleeping Car porter, wrote tirelessly to U.S. officials and prominent African Americans to promote the cause of a free Haiti.26

More than any other group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) contributed to making Haiti a pan-African cause for solidarity.27 From 1915 on, the NAACP’s co-founder, W. E. B. Du Bois, whose grandfather hailed from Haiti, editorialized against the occupation.28 Du Bois urged President Woodrow Wilson to send African Americans instead of whites if an occupation had to occur and called on “we ten million Negroes” to write the president. In the following years, the NAACP denounced human rights violations in Haiti.29 When three Haitian delegates presented a memoir to the U.S. government in 1921, Moorfield Storey, the NAACP’s white former president and last president of the Anti-Imperialist League, was there and wrote to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.30 Haitian anti-imperialists also used the NAACP’s New York office as their headquarters.31 In 1923, Perceval Thoby and Georges Sylvain used their friendship with Spingarn, also of the NAACP, to seek justice when President Louis Borno persecuted editors.32 By the mid-1920s, therefore, African Americans were deeply intertwined with anti-imperialism in the Caribbean—far more than whites.

The individual who most contributed to this solidarity was James Weldon Johnson, hired in 1916 as the NAACP’s first black field secretary. With a great-grandmother from Haiti, facility in Spanish and French, formative days in France, and diplomatic experience in Venezuela and Nicaragua, Johnson felt a kinship to Latin America.33 Like many African Americans, he originally thought that strategic interests justified the Haitian occupation. But the constitution of 1918 imposed on Haiti changed his mind. Johnson also wanted to enlarge the scope of the NAACP by making it more international, and Haiti served that very purpose.34

Johnson headed to Haiti in March 1920 and stayed for two months.35 He talked to Marines—some of whom, while drunk, admitted to the worst abuses. He also met with the most prominent Haitian activists, which, in turn, prompted the rebirth of the Patriotic Union (UP). One Haitian later boasted that Johnson’s resulting articles were “the almost literal translation” of the notes he gave the African American.36 Johnson would stay in contact with Haitians, especially UP founder Georges Sylvain, and even helped create a U.S. branch of the UP in 1923.37 Johnson’s resulting exposés in The Crisis and The Nation and his speeches got the attention of the U.S. public.38 He made arguments that shocked progressive consciences—namely, that economic interests had plotted the invasion of Haiti and that atrocities and racism ran rampant. Often explicit was a comparison to U.S. Southern traditions of underdevelopment, disfranchisement, and lynching.39

Johnson also did arguably more than anyone to insert Haiti into U.S. presidential politics. His trip to Haiti was partly motivated by politics since, as a member of the Republican National Advisory Committee, he asked for Theodore Roosevelt’s advice before boarding his ship.40 It is also likely that the Republican Party financed the trip in order to dig up a scandal against Democrats.41 Additionally, the NAACP polled African Americans in 1920 on their concerns, and Haiti ranked number four. So, to cement the alliance between the GOP and blacks, Johnson set up a meeting with candidate Warren Harding on 9 August 1920 in Marion, Ohio. The meeting prompted the candidate to make a front-page speech on 28 August denouncing “the rape of Haiti and Santo Domingo” and forcing Democrats to respond.42

This pan-African effort also included a non-black entity, The Nation magazine. This anti-imperialist force since the War of 1898 played perhaps as weighty a role as Johnson and the NAACP, often in collaboration with them.43 It was one of few U.S. publications, black or white, that spoke out against the Dominican intervention during World War I.44 It also uniquely served to join together the resistance to both occupations by helping to found, along with Johnson and the UP, the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society and house its headquarters in The Nation’s New York offices.45 Following the Johnson articles, some Haitians founded La Nation in 1920, a newspaper that reproduced articles from the New York magazine.46

By as early as 1920, results of this solidarity began to show. Largely because of the work of Johnson and The Nation, the majority of U.S. publications swung from pro-occupation to anti-occupation.47 Occupation officials stopped trusting visiting U.S. journalists and began spying on them.48 The Marine Corps also began fearing a newfound spunk in the Haitian press, which they explained “partly as a reflection of race disturbances and agitation in the United States.”49 Such a comment was a testament to the effectiveness of the transnational pan-African solidarity stirred up by U.S. occupations in Hispaniola.

The problems and limitations encountered by this network, however, were as substantial as its achievements. Race proved as much of an anticoagulant as it was a glue for solidarity networks in the Caribbean and between the Caribbean and the United States.

The Dominican Republic largely stood in the way of a solidarity network in Hispaniola itself. Haiti’s neighbor harbored few advocates of pan-Africanism. Most Dominicans who resisted the occupation in newspapers and politics were whites or mulattoes, and they identified with Europe rather than with the African Diaspora. Dominican elites did enlist a racial discourse in the cause of anti-imperialism, but, devastatingly for solidarity, it was in the service of persuading the U.S. invaders of their similarities instead of their differences. Dominicans’ blood was mixed—their own 1920 census showed that half were mulatto, one quarter white, and the remaining quarter black.50

Elite Dominicans, disproportionately white, consequently used the trope of “civilization” to distinguish themselves from their neighbors and expressed shock at the possibility of being considered at the same level as Haitians. As U.S. troops first disembarked in Santo Domingo in 1916, four Dominicans explained to the U.S. minister that Dominicans were “not a semi-barbaric race needing to be civilized by canons.”51 One of the most persistent advocates for withdrawal, Tulio Cestero, wrote President Wilson that his country had fought a nineteenth-century war against Haiti for its independence “on behalf of the prevalence of the white race and with the same unswerving will they conserve religion, language, and the racial attributes bequeathed by the Spanish founders.”52 In 1921, another Dominican wondered why occupiers “treated us as though we were Negroes from the Congo.”53 He might as well have said “Haiti.”

Haiti, meanwhile, had its own conflicted racial identity that acted against solidarity in that its color line was drawn even more sharply than in the Dominican Republic. There, racial difference coincided with class and culture. Occupiers were often perplexed by the differentiations Haitians made between mixed-race and African-phenotype Haitians, or, as Haitians said at the time, between “yellows” and “blacks.” The so-called line was, in fact, more of a ladder with many confounding rungs as Haitians constructed a vast array of miscegenation formulas—4 for Indians, 10 for whites, and 14 for blacks.54 Many African Americans who visited were shocked at the pervasiveness of inter-Haitian racism. “It was in Haiti that I first realized how class lines may cut across color lines within a race, and how dark people of the same nationality may scorn those below them,” wrote Langston Hughes in his memoir. “I hated this attitude.”55 Educator Robert Moton and other African Americans came back from the black republic even saying “that the dividing line between mulattoes and negroes is more sharply drawn than between the whites and negroes in the south of the United States.”56 Because of mulatto-black relations, wrote former Haitian president Sténio Vincent, “too many Haitians became hypnotized by race and thus relegated the Nation to a secondary consideration.”57 Many others agreed that the color line undermined political stability, observing that mulatto-led governments tended to be thrown out by blacks and vice-versa.58 U.S. occupiers did little to discourage this state of affairs. Some reinforced it by assuming that light-skinned Haitians were more competent and honest in government and appointed them disproportionately to positions of influence. President Sudre Dartiguenave, appointed by the Marines in 1915, was the first mulatto president since 1879, and three others followed.59

These ideological perceptions eventually scuttled some efforts to resist occupations via pan-African solidarity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) ran successful chapters throughout the circum-Caribbean. In the Dominican Republic, however, U.S. and Dominican racism sealed its fate. The context lay in a labor dispute that predated occupation. Dominican political elites and U.S. occupiers both disliked Haitians and other black workers, yet sugar corporations needed the labor, and the occupation welcomed corporations as agents of globalized development. A legal tug of war thus ensued. In 1912, before the occupation, Santo Domingo required authorization to introduce non-Spanish-speaking workers into the country and declared Spanish the official language. In 1919, the occupation countered by giving the mostly dark-skinned braceros temporary residency, effectively nullifying the requirement for authorization and prompting migration around the southern Dominican town of San Pedro, where most sugar plantations were located. Since English-speaking blacks outnumbered Haitians there, it was a logical place for the establishment of one of the first UNIA chapters in the Caribbean in December 1919.60 The San Pedro UNIA was a mutual aid society “for all Negroes irrespective of nationality.” It took care of its ailing, buried its dead, and taught its illiterates.61

The occupation still shut it down, not because the UNIA opposed the occupation but rather because of accusations of Bolshevism and anti-white racism.62 A white Episcopal minister, Archibald Beer, told occupation authorities, “The negroes are as jealous as can be of one another and continual trouble and contention arises.” Accusing them of unspecified labor agitation, he also charged them, without a trace of irony, of “Klu [sic] Klux Klan methods.”63 In September 1921, the San Pedro police burst into UNIA headquarters, arrested its leaders, and deported them for “not observing an irreproachably moral and legal conduct according to law.”64

In Haiti, the UNIA also made a brief appearance, but its solidarity activism there gained even less traction. There is mention of a UNIA-connected business established in the summer of 1920 but no record of its success.65 For “Haitian Independence Day” on 26 October 1924, the elite’s Georges Sylvain allied with the UNIA to parade banners marked “Down with the Occupation, Long live Haiti,” “Long live the Negro Improvement Society,” and “Long live Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.” Occupation authorities reported that 90 percent of attendees were “of the lowest class” and that in Cap-Haïtien, a town of twenty thousand, only two hundred took part.66 The crowds were exclusively black and urban, meaning that peasants, mulattoes, and the elite stayed away. In a sign of the continuing class- and culture-based divisions that plagued Haiti, a Cap paper, Les Annales Capoises, denigrated Garvey as a “workman who does not possess … that beautiful Latin culture, that civilization of which we are so proud and which distinguishes us from all the other Negroes in the world.”67

The UNIA’s failure in the so-called Black Republic reflected not only its color line but also Haitians’ structural difficulties and poor strategic choices in finding common ground with others in the hemisphere. Despite their occupation lasting thirteen years longer than the Dominican one, Haitians enjoyed far fewer transnational connections. The UP, which Johnson inspired, devoted most of its energies to funding ineffectual trips for its delegates. From March to May 1921, Pauléus Sannon, Sténio Vincent, and Perceval Thoby were in the United States and presented the UP’s report to the U.S. press, the Republican Party, the Department of State, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.68 In August, Vincent returned to Washington to give a statement at Senate hearings.69 The UP report was well argued and specific. Unlike Dominican reports, though, it advocated quick withdrawal and no U.S. supervision of a transition, indicating that Haitians accepted none of the reforms advocated by Washington.70 The radical stance of the Haitian resistance earned it much less traction with U.S. audiences.71

A few years later, Dantès Bellegarde, twice Haitian delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva, had an equally frustrating experience. Since Haiti was nominally sovereign during the occupation, it carried on diplomacy but in a muted fashion. Bellegarde broke with the pattern by making passionate speeches in Europe, especially in 1924 and 1930, which drew more attention from Europe than any other Haitian action. President Borno recalled Bellegarde so as to silence him, but Bellegarde persisted.72 In 1924, the League of Nations accredited him despite protests from his own government.73 A speech in Lyon on 1 July to a pacifist organization garnered applause for “several minutes, punctuated by cries of ‘Bravo!’ ” and, when he returned to Port-au-Prince, Bellegarde received more of the same.74

Haitian efforts, however, failed to obtain much from the international community. Woodrow Wilson himself admitted that he had occupied the republic partly because, in the rest of Latin America, Haitians, “being negroes[,] … are not regarded as of the fraternity!”75 In the 1920s, Haitian anti-occupation activist Pierre Hudicourt went to the United States, Peru, Cuba, and to the Fifth Pan-American Conference in Chile, but was escorted out of the conference.76 A lone State Department bureaucrat met with him, and, Hudicourt, wishing not to disappoint the UP, lied that the president and secretary of state had received him on his return home.77 In Geneva, British delegates, with U.S. assistance, diluted a request for the immediate withdrawal of troops to instead simply reaffirm Haiti’s nominal independence.78 The Quai d’Orsay also refused to advocate for Haiti on the technicality that Haiti was independent and could fend for itself.79 Perhaps for these reasons, Le Nouvelliste called Bellegarde’s 1924 speech a “moral victory.”80 It was little else.

One of the reasons for Haitians’ difficulty in raising support from abroad was the expense. The UP’s major fundraising drive in 1920–21 raised less than ten thousand dollars.81 Dominicans raised over ten times that in just one week.82 In 1925, the UP began another subscription drive, but after several weeks the town of Jacmel had raised only $50, Aux Cayes $100, and a few other towns nothing at all.83 Unlike Dominicans, Haitian diplomats abroad largely toed the line of occupied Port-au-Prince.84 There was not yet much of a Haitian community in New York and even less of one in Florida. Even Paris was quiet, despite the prominent Haitians there. (Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 would more directly awaken French négritude intellectuals to anti-imperialism.85) Only The Nation’s editor, Garrison Villard, made an effort to welcome the Haitians to the United States in 1921.86 The Courrier Haïtien took notice of how the Dominicans were better organized with an “intelligent, tireless” network of solidarity active in Europe and the Americas.87 The Courrier’s editor, Joseph Jolibois Fils, himself spent September 1927 to March 1930 touring Latin America, but encountered widespread indifference, some of which was based on language and race.88 Costa Ricans said that “his color and his complete appearance are against him.… He speaks Spanish so brokenly as scarcely to be able to make himself understood.… Even those who know French in this country have difficulty in understanding him.”89 As a U.S. officer noted in 1922, in contrast to the Dominican Republic, “no criticism has been directed in Latin-America against the action of the United States Government in intervening in Haitian affairs.”90

Latin American discrimination, to be sure, was also based on race. One particular incident is telling. Years after the occupation of his own country was over, Afro-Dominican rebel Gregorio Urbano Gilbert left his homeland to join the struggle of Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua. When Gilbert tried to board a vessel for Central America, none would take him because he was “colored.” He finally found passage to Belize but jumped off the ship when it briefly stopped in Honduras. There he met Nicaraguan guides who, he said, treated him as an inferior, overcharged him, and tried to lose him in the woods. When he finally got to Sandino’s camp, on 13 October 1928, he was called a “Haitian.” In this case, racism backfired. While it may have discouraged Gilbert, it also kept him motivated to fight segregationist U.S. soldiers. Sandino’s troops eventually accepted him as “the Dominican.” Sandino even promoted him to captain within three weeks and made him his Dominican liaison.91

Even when not facing foreigners’ racism, Haitians failed to find common cause with potential allies abroad. The color line they had drawn at home between “yellows” and “blacks” extended to all African Americans precisely because of their propensity to ignore color gradations when advocating social reforms. Haitian elites wanted little to do with cross-class efforts or sensibilities. When William Scott, an African American painter, visited in the 1920s, he was shocked that no Haitian painter had taken the rich natural beauty of the island as a subject. Haitian artists were instead stuck in a formalism inherited from premodern Europe and unable to appreciate abstraction or realism. In 1932, when a U.S. lieutenant named Perfield put on an exhibit of his own clearly reminiscent of the Ashcan School, Port-au-Prince newspapers derided it for portraying “the most villainous kind of Haitians, sometimes poor and sickly.” President Borno, buckling under elite pressure, deported Perfield.92

The Haitian elite also negatively associated vocational training with African Americans, an antipathy most in evidence during the visit of the Moton Commission, which President Herbert Hoover sent to Haiti in mid-June 1930 to recommend changes to Haitian education. African Americans dominated the commission, starting with its head, Robert Moton.93 In response to the announcement of the commission’s coming, Raoul Lizaire, the Haitian chargé in Washington, feared that African Americans would recommend “a program of agricultural and vocational rather than cultural education.”94 The Moton Commission, which no Haitian took seriously, was to reform an area that no Haitian wanted reformed.

The commission went ahead with its work for twenty-four days in Haiti and gave its report to Hoover on 1 October 1930. It concluded that private, religious education was elitist and unsuited to the needs of the country. Yet it sympathized “with the Haitian view point concerning the charge that the [U.S.-dominated educational] service is over-staffed and extravagant.” The report’s sixty-one recommendations advocated a third way—namely, public education for all, with a centralized system, higher salaries, more farm and educational programs, a national university and library, foreign study, Haitian rather than U.S. administrators, and more.95 The Department of State said the report was badly informed and made no announcement to the public when it was published in April 1931. No recommendation saw the light of day.96 No Haitian protested.

These internal and external challenges to establishing pan-Africanism in Hispaniola during times of occupation resulted clearly in the prolongation of the occupations, especially in Haiti. The main reason why the Dominicans moved toward independence in 1922 while the Haitians did not until the early 1930s was the judgment by U.S. policymakers and observers that Haitians were unprepared for self-government, primarily because of their race. In typical remarks, the Latin-American Division urged the Department of State “to distinguish at once between the Dominicans and the Haitians. The former, while in many ways not advanced far enough on the average to permit the highest type of self-government, yet have a preponderance of white blood and culture. The Haitians on the other hand are negro for the most part, and, barring a very few highly educated politicians, are almost in a state of savagery and complete ignorance. The two situations thus demand different treatment.”97

A U.S. Senate committee agreed that “early withdrawal of or drastic reduction in the American marine occupation force in Haiti would be followed certainly by brigandage and revolution.”98 A half-decade later, at a Pan-American conference in Havana attended by Charles Evans Hughes, the U.S. secretary of state faced a barrage of criticism from Latin American delegates for the U.S. practice of occupation. This disapproval, however, was directed primarily toward the ongoing occupation in Nicaragua, not the then thirteen-year-old one in Haiti. The secretary seemed to sense that Latin Americans’ racism compelled them to agree on the degenerate nature of Haitian politics and, therefore, with the occupation. “We would leave Haiti,” he promised them, “at any time that we had reasonable expectations of stability, and could be assured that withdrawal would not be the occasion for a recurrence of bloodshed.”99 By 1935, a year after the Haitian withdrawal, even the NAACP criticized openly Haitians for their lack of civic freedoms. Haitian elites shot back that “here no one any longer bothers about” jailed journalists and accused African Americans of being manipulated by Haitian Communists.100 In 1942, Howard University historian Rayford Logan visited Haiti for the second time since 1934 and noted a growing disenchantment with democracy. “I was especially struck,” wrote Logan, “by the frequency with which I heard the statement: ‘What Haiti needs is a dictator like [Dominican Rafael] Trujillo.’ ”101

Yet despite these very real impediments to pan-Africanism in Hispaniola, we should not forget nor minimize the meaningful efforts to forge and spread a pan-African identity among those who resisted occupation, and the substantial—if indirect—results of those efforts. Scholars such as Robin Kelley, Penny Von Eschen, Andrew Zimmerman, and Michael Goebel have been exploring the many connections that African Americans, Africans, and Europeans nurtured in the first half of the twentieth century, and how those connections impacted U.S. and other imperialist interests in the Americas.102 They have demonstrated that pan-Africanism, first, was a unique literary movement, and, second, that its waves built upon one another—weak during World War I but growing mightier in the interwar years. This resulted in a multivocal, multidirectional set of networks that deeply impacted the politics and culture of the Atlantic world. The French intellectuals who developed négritude into a full intellectual movement in the 1930s, for instance, owed a debt to the Haitians of the previous decade.

The Haitian occupation, especially, might have continued for another generation had African Americans and pan-Africanist Haitians not combined their energies to pressure Washington to end its foolish adventure. When major events such as World War II and the Cuban Revolution further questioned the traditional racism of Latin American elites in the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America, racial solidarity advocates could have pointed to the interwar years of occupation for examples to emulate as well as to avoid.

Notes

  1. 1. My translation. “Palabras pronunciadas por Tulio M. Cestero el 5 de julio en Nueva York,” Letras, 11 August 1918, 7, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

  2. 2. Historians have noted how anti-imperialism has long had a racial and ethnic component. See, for instance, Thomas Miller Klubock, “Nationalism, Race, and the Politics of Imperialism: Workers and North American Capital in the Chilean Copper Industry,” in Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 232.

  3. 3. Bruce J. Calder, “Caudillos and Gavilleros versus the United States Marines: Guerrilla Insurgency during the Dominican Intervention, 1916–1924,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58, no. 4 (1978): 664.

  4. 4. Russell, memo to Forbes, Port-au-Prince, 13 March 1930, Folder Russell, John H., 13–14 March 1930, Box 1073, President’s Commission for Study & Review of Conditions in Haiti, Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa.

  5. 5. Randolph Coyle, United States Marine Corps (hereafter USMC), “Service in Haiti,” Marine Corps Gazette, December 1916, 343; Dana G. Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean 1900–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 358–59.

  6. 6. Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 [1971], repr. with a foreword by Stephen Solarz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 136.

  7. 7. Harold N. Denny, “Haiti—A Problem Unsolved. IV. Heredity that Hampers Agreement,” New York Times, 2 July 1931; Dossier 14, Haiti, Amérique 1918–1940, Correspondance Politique et Commerciale 1914–1940, Archives Diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, France.

  8. 8. Emily G. Balch, ed. Occupied Haiti [1927] (New York: Garland, 1972), 119.

  9. 9. Brig. Gen. Ivan W. Miller, USMC, oral history, by Thomas E. Donnelly, 10 December 1970, 24, Marine Corps Audiovisual Research Archives, Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia.

  10. 10. Carl Kelsey, “The American Intervention in Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 100 (March 1922): 123–24.

  11. 11. Alan McPherson, “The Irony of Legal Pluralism in U.S. Occupations,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 1149–72.

  12. 12. [Shepard?], Intelligence Report, Cap-Haïtien, 22 July 1926, Folder Intelligence Reports Nord 2 of 2, Box 1, Intelligence Reports from the Department of the North, 1926–27, Record Group 127 (hereafter RG 127), U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NARA I).

  13. 13. My translation. Dantès Bellegarde, L’occupation américaine d’Haïti: ses conséquences morales et économiques (Port-au-Prince: Chéraquit, 1929), 20.

  14. 14. My translation. Roumer cited in Michel J. Fabre, “La Revue Indigène et le mouvement nouveau noir,” Revue de littérature comparée 1 (January–March 1977): 32.

  15. 15. Magowan, Memo to Henderson, 5 May 1931, File A2898, Reference 15093, Foreign Office 371, Public Record Office, Kew, UK.

  16. 16. Magdaline W. Shannon, Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation, 1915–1935 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 27, 7–20; Roger Gaillard, Les blancs débarquent, vol. 4, La République autoritaire, 1916–1917 (n.p., 1981), 220; Jean Price-Mars, Une étape de l’évolution haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: La Presse, n. d.).

  17. 17. David Nicholls, “Ideology and Political Protest in Haiti, 1930–1946,” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 4 (October 1974): 3–26; Michel-Philippe Lerebours, “The Indigenist Revolt: Haitian Art, 1927–1944,” Callaloo 15, no. 3 (1992): 711–25; Matthew J. Smith, “Shades of Red in a Black Republic: Radicalism, Black Consciousness, and Social Conflict in Postoccupation Haiti, 1934–1957,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2002, 24–25.

  18. 18. Shannon, Jean Price-Mars, 71.

  19. 19. Nicholls, “Ideology.”

  20. 20. Georges Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans, vol. 5, La capitale d’Haïti sous l’occupation, 1915–1922 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1984), 220.

  21. 21. Anne R. Winkler-Morey, “Good Neighbors: Popular Internationalists and United States’ Relations with Mexico and the Caribbean Region (1918–1929),” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2001, 87–103; Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy 1900–1950 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 127; Lerebours, “Indigenist Revolt,” 713–14.

  22. 22. Blackwood, letter to Wise, Port au Prince, 22 September 1919, Folder Complaints from Citizens (1918–19), 1 of 3, Box 1, General Correspondence of Headquarters, Gendarmerie d’Haiti 1916–1919, RG 127, NARA I.

  23. 23. Munro, memo to White, Washington, 19 April 1929, 838.00/2523, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG59, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA II); Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 127.

  24. 24. Lawson, Petition to Coolidge, New York, 14 December 1925, 838.00/2178, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  25. 25. “Bishop Hurst Calls for Haitian Inquiry,” New York Times, 10 November 1920, 3.

  26. 26. Munro, memo to White, 19 May 1924, 838.00/2024, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  27. 27. The NAACP did not completely ignore the Dominican Republic. It prepared a full day of activities on its behalf for its August 1922 convention in New York City; Robison, memo to Department of Foreign Relations, Santo Domingo, 25 May 1922, Legajo 120, 1920–1922, Fondo Gobierno Militar, AGN.

  28. 28. W. E. B. DuBois, “Hayti,” The Crisis 10, no. 6 (1915): 291.

  29. 29. DuBois, “Hayti,” 291; Le Nouvelliste, 20 October 1915, cited in Roger Gaillard, Les blancs débarquent, vol. 3, Premier écrasement du cacoïsme: 1915 (n.p., 1981), 153; Leon D. Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans: A Heritage of Tragedy and Hope (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 104, 122. One such letter was Williams, telegram to Wilson, Cincinnati, 8 February 1916, 711.38/66, U.S.-Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  30. 30. Storey, letter to Hughes, Boston, 6 June 1921, 838.00/1780, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Robert D. Johnson, Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 37.

  31. 31. Brenda G. Plummer, “The Afro-American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,” Phylon 43, no. 2 (June 1982): 139.

  32. 32. Arthur Spingarn, “Under American Rule in Haiti,” The World, 7 February 1925. A similar case was that of Jolibois Fils: Thoby, letter to Spingarn, Port-au-Prince, 1 May 1923, Folder Thoby, Perceval (On Haiti) 1923–27; Sylvain, letters to Spingarn, Port-au-Prince, 30 May and 12 June 1923, Folder Sylvain, Georges (On Haiti) 1923–24, and undated; Thoby, letter to Spingarn, Port-au-Prince, 4 July 1923, Folder Thoby, Perceval (On Haiti) 1923–27, all in Box 4, Papers of Arthur B. Spingarn, 1850–1968, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  33. 33. James W. Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson [1933] (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000).

  34. 34. Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 202–3.

  35. 35. Biographers disagree on the point; see Levy, Johnson, 204; Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans, 109. But Johnson himself said he was in Haiti from 21 March to 21 or 22 May 1920, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, 67th Congress, 1st and 2nd sessions, 1921 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1922), 1:779.

  36. 36. My translation. B. Danache, Le président Dartiguenave et les Américains, 2nd ed. (Port-au-Prince: Les Editions Fardin, 1984), 9.

  37. 37. Leon D. Pamphile, “The NAACP and the American Occupation of Haiti,” Phylon 47, no. 1 (1986): 118; Plummer, “The Afro-American Response,” 132.

  38. 38. James W. Johnson, “The Truth about Haiti: An N.A.A.C.P. Investigation.” The Crisis, September 1920, 217–24; James W. Johnson, “Self-Determining Haiti II: What the United States Has Accomplished,” The Nation, 4 September 1920, 265–67.

  39. 39. Johnson, “Haiti and Our Latin-American Policy,” speech delivered at the “World Tomorrow Dinner,” New York City, 31 March 1924, in In Search of Democracy: The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins, 1920–1977, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 113.

  40. 40. Plummer, “The Afro-American Response,” 132.

  41. 41. Levy, James Weldon Johnson, 203.

  42. 42. Harding cited in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 255; Pamphile, “NAACP,” 94, 113–14; Richard B. Sherman, “The Harding Administration and the Negro: An Opportunity Lost,” Journal of Negro History 49, no. 3 (1964): 156; Kenneth J. Grieb, The Latin American Policy of Warren G. Harding (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 2.

  43. 43. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 124.

  44. 44. Joseph R. Juarez, “United States Withdrawal from Santo Domingo.” Hispanic American Historical Review 42, no. 2 (1962): 153.

  45. 45. Robert Debs Heinl Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1492–1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 469; Grieb, Harding, 69.

  46. 46. Entry for 27 November 1920, Russell, USMC, daily diary report, 29 November 1920, 838.00/1725, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  47. 47. John W. Blassingame, “The Press and American Intervention in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, 1904–1920,” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 2 (1969): 42.

  48. 48. Williams, letter to Snowden, Santiago, 17 December 1920, Folder 4, Admiral Snowden Personal File, Box 30, Military Government of Santo Domingo, Record Group 38, NARA I.

  49. 49. Unsigned memo, Washington, DC, 24 June 1921, Folder Haiti opns Reports, Intelligence Summaries (1920–21), Box 3, General Correspondence, 1907–1936, RG 127, NARA I.

  50. 50. Bruce J. Calder, The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic during the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), xxvii.

  51. 51. My translation. Vicente Galván, Conrado Sánchez, Manuel A. Patin Maceo, and Lirio H. Galván, “Al Señor Ministro Americano,” in Vetilio Alfau Durán en Anales: escritos y documentos, ed. Arístides Incháustegui and Blanca Delgado Malagón (Santo Domingo: Banco de Reservas, 1997), 544–46.

  52. 52. Cestero, letter to Wilson, Washington, 1 April 1920, Legajo Papeles 1919–1920, Tomo 1, Archivo de Tulio Cestero, Fondo Antiguo, Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

  53. 53. Statement of Perez, U.S. Senate, Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, 2:967. See also Fabio Fiallo et al., “A los extranjeros residents en el territorio nacional,” Santo Domingo, 19 June 1921, in Vetilio Alfau Durán en Anales: Escritos y documentos, ed. Arístides Incháustegui and Blanca Delgado Malagón (Santo Domingo: Banco de Reservas, 1997), 609.

  54. 54. Sténio Vincent, En posant les jalons … Tome 1 (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de L’État, 1939), 21–23.

  55. 55. Langston Hughes, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 13, Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander, ed. Joseph McClaren (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 59, 61.

  56. 56. Phillips, letter to McCormick, Washington, 13 July 1923, 838.00/1950, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  57. 57. My translation. Vincent, En posant, 152, 153.

  58. 58. “La question de couleurs,” wrote Danache, “c’est la seule qui nous émeuve véritablement et qui soit capable de nous porter aux injustices les plus criantes, aux pires extrémités” (Le président, 20); Brig. Gen. Lester A. Dessez, USMC oral history, by Thomas E. Donnelly, 16 June 1970, 94, Marine Corps Audiovisual Research Archives, Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia.

  59. 59. James G. Leyburn, The Haitian People [1941] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1966, 1941), ix.

  60. 60. Humberto García Muñiz and Jorge Giovannetti, “Garveyismo y racismo en el Caribe: El caso de la población cocola en la República Dominicana,” Clío (Dominican Republic) 168 (July–December 2004): 127–34.

  61. 61. Van Putten, letter to Secretary of Interior and Police, San Pedro de Macorís, 23 December 1919, Legajo 43, 1919, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN.

  62. 62. Hennessy, letter to Secretary of Interior and Police, San Pedro de Macorís, 6 February 1921, Legajo 405, 1921, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN.

  63. 63. Beer, letter to Moses, San Pedro de Macorís, 13 September 1921, Legajo 420, 1921, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN.

  64. 64. My translation. Warfield, memo to the Departement of Foreign Relations, 28 April 1922, Legajo 90, 1922, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN; Fuller, letter to Van Putten, Santo Domingo, 27 December 1919, Legajo 43, 1919, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN; De Jesús Lluveres, memo to Peguero, San Pedro, 24 January 1922, Legajo 90, 1922, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN; Military Governor, memo to the Department of the Interior and Police, 22 March 1922, Legajo 90, 1922, Fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía, AGN.

  65. 65. Russell, daily diary report, 12 July 1920, 838.00/1651, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  66. 66. My translation. Russell, letter to Hughes, 31 October 1924, 838.00/2049, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Scott, letter to Kellogg, 27 October 1925, 838.00/2165, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Brenda G. Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 123; Russell, letter to Hughes, 11 November 1924, 838.00/2051, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  67. 67. Les Annales Capoises, 30 October 1924, cited in Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans, 132.

  68. 68. Agel, letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Port-au-Prince, 15 March 1921, Dossier 4, Haiti, Amérique 1918–1940, Correspondance Politique et Commerciale 1914–1940, Archives Diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, France; Sannon, Vincent, and Thoby, letter to Hughes, Secretary of State, New York, 13 April 1921, 838.00/1765, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Pamphile, “NAACP”: 96–97.

  69. 69. U.S. Senate, Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1:3–4.

  70. 70. A summary is in “Haitian Delegates Want Us to Get Out,” New York Times, 9 May 1921, 17.

  71. 71. Welles, letter to Schoenrich, 16 April 1921, Folder Haiti 1920–1922, Box 178, Sumner Welles Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

  72. 72. Mercer Cook, “Dantes Bellegarde,” Phylon 1, no. 2 (1940): 132, 130. See also Interview with Bellegarde, “Latin America Against the Hegemony of the United States,” Le Temps (Port-au-Prince), 20–21 September 1927, in Russell, Letter to Secretary of State, 27 October 1927, 838.00/2412, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  73. 73. Cook, “Dantes Bellegarde,” 130.

  74. 74. “Defends Our Haiti Action,” New York Times, 3 July 1924, 17; Russell, letter to Hughes, Secretary of State, 1 October 1924, 838.00/2040, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  75. 75. Cited in Munro, Intervention, 54.

  76. 76. D’Arcy M. Brissman, “Interpreting American Hegemony: Civil Military Relations during the United States Marine Corps’ Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,” PhD diss., Duke University, 2001, 293.

  77. 77. Hudicourt, letter to Coolidge, Washington, 21 May 1925, 838.00/2119, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Hudicourt, letter to Kellogg, Secretary of State, Washington, 21 May 1925, 838.00/2114, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Russell, letter to Kellogg, Secretary of State, 20 June 1925, 838.00/2131, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; Merrell, letter to Kellogg, Secretary of State, 18 July 1925, 838.00/2143, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  78. 78. “La République de Haiti demande à être libérée des troupes américaines,” Le Nouvelliste, 24 July 1924, and “Une grande victoire morale—détails sur l’action de Bellegarde,” Le Nouvelliste, 29 July 1924, both in Folder Newspaper Clippings (1–28Jul24), Box 3, Records of the First Provisional Brigade in Haiti, 1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I.

  79. 79. “Rejects Plea for Haiti,” New York Times, 25 March 1925, 33.

  80. 80. “Une grande victoire morale.”

  81. 81. Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans, 213.

  82. 82. Welles, memo to Hughes, Secretary of State, Washington, 24 March 1921, 838.00/1833, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  83. 83. Russell, letter to Kellogg, Secretary of State, Port-au-Prince, 13 November 1925, 838.00/2169, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II; biography of Thoby, unsigned and undated, 838.00/2585, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  84. 84. There was one possible exception: Abel Théard, the chargé in London. See Delage, letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Port-au-Prince, 20 September 1919, Dossier 9, Haiti, Amérique 1918–1940, Correspondance Politique et Commerciale 1914–1940, Archives Diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, France.

  85. 85. Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 171.

  86. 86. Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans, 214.

  87. 87. My translation. “La leçon d’un échec,” Le Courrier Haïtien, July 1924, in Folder Newspaper Clippings (1–28Jul24), Box 3, Records of the First Provisional Brigade in Haiti, 1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I.

  88. 88. For more, see Alan McPherson, “Joseph Jolibois Fils and the Flaws of Haitian Resistance to U.S. Occupation,” Journal of Haitian Studies 16, no. 2 (2010): 120–47.

  89. 89. Cohen, G-2 report, 11 October 1928, 838.00/2489, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  90. 90. Welles, memo, [13 February?] 1922, 838.00/1845, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  91. 91. My translation. Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, Junto a Sandino (Santo Domingo: Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, [1979?]), passim 17–43, 269–73. Sandino, pronouncement, El Chipotón, 5 November 1928, and Sandino, credential, El Chipotón, 13 February 1930, both in E-001, C-002, 000070, Collección ACS (Augusto César Sandino), Centro de Historia Militar, Managua, Nicaragua.

  92. 92. Lerebours, “Indigenist Revolt,” 713–14.

  93. 93. Apart from Moton, the commissioners were Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson, President of Howard University; Professor Le M. Favrot, Field Agent of the General Education Board; B. F. Hubert, President of the Georgia State Industrial College, and Dr. W. T. B. Williams, Dean of the College at Tuskegee and Field Agent of the Jeanes and Slater Boards. Five others accompanied the party. Among the commissioners only Favrot was white. R. R. Moton letter to Hoover, 20 February 1930, Folder Countries—Haiti Haitian Commission, Moton Commission, Box 989, Presidential Papers, Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa.

  94. 94. Cited in Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans, 124.

  95. 95. “Digest of the Report of the United States Commission on Education in Haiti, by G. Lake Imes, Secretary of the Commission,” Department of State, press release, 29 November 1930, Folder Report of Investigation 10 March 1919–13 March 20, Haiti, Geographical Files, Reference Branch, Marine Corps History Division, Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia.

  96. 96. Munro, telegram to Secretary of State, Port-au-Prince, 13 December 1930, Folder Munro, Dana G. 1929–30, Box 8, Francis White Papers, Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa; Shannon, Jean Price-Mars, 94–95.

  97. 97. Mayer, letter to Hughes, 30 July 1921, 839.00/2451, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of the Dominican Republic, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

  98. 98. Cited in “Urges Maintaining Our Troops in Haiti,” New York Times, 27 June 1922.

  99. 99. Hughes cited in Donald B. Cooper, “The Withdrawal of the United States from Haiti, 1928–1934,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 5, no. 1 (1963): 86.

  100. 100. “Haitians Protest N.A.A.C.P. Resolution.” The Crisis, October 1935, 298.

  101. 101. Rayford Logan et al., “The Contributions of Negroes in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba to Hemispheric Solidarity as Conditioned by the Agrarian Problems in Each,” 1942, Folder 16, Box 166–37, Rayford D. Logan Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

  102. 102. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1997); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, & the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).