The End of Occupation: How Haiti Defeated the United States

From 1915 to 1934, the Republic of Haiti was ruled by the United States. For nineteen years, the US Navy and Marine Corps occupied and controlled the world’s first free nation and first Black republic, ending more than a century of Haitian independence and sovereignty. This short essay will outline the reasoning behind and the nature of the US military occupation of Haiti. It will then discuss the efforts of the Haitian people, supported by Haiti’s international anti-imperialist allies, to defeat United States military rule and bring about the end of occupation.

The reasons for the military invasion and occupation of Haiti by the United States are well known, as are the conditions of US rule. The US State Department claimed that Haiti’s internal political instability threatened the safety of US interests within the country and the security of the Caribbean as a whole, a situation exacerbated by war in Europe and, with it, an alleged threat of German and French designs on the region. Haiti’s location in the Caribbean Sea was a critical factor in this regard. Since the nineteenth century, the US had coveted Haiti’s territory, particularly the Môle-Saint-Nicolas. Described as the Caribbean’s Gibraltar, Môle-Saint-Nicolas was a bay on Haiti’s northwest coastline facing the Windward Passage, the primary sea lane for US shipping traffic between the Atlantic and the Pacific through the Panama Canal. Haiti commanded a central axis for United States commerce, and for US strategic control of the Caribbean.

At the same time, at the beginning of the twentieth century US corporate and financial interests, especially the National City Bank of New York (the precursor to today’s Citigroup), were increasingly interested in the commercial and financial possibilities of Haiti. As part of a broader project of expansion into the Caribbean and South America, City Bank slowly assumed control not only of Haiti’s ports, railroads, and sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations, but also its national debt and its Paris-chartered government bank, the Banque Nationale d’Haiti. City Bank, in an attempt to create the conditions for military intervention, tried to destabilize the Haitian state by withholding government salaries and, in 1914, in a brazen assertion of its power over Haitian affairs, moved the country’s $400,000 gold reserve from Port-au-Prince to a Wall Street vault, transporting it aboard the USS Machias.

City Bank officials repeatedly pressed Washington for military intervention in Haiti, hoping to expand the policy of “dollar diplomacy” Washington had already deployed in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. However, the immediate justification for US military intervention was articulated in a memo drafted by City Bank Vice President Roger L. Farnham for US Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan. Paternalistic and racist, the “Farnham Plan,” as the memo became known, argued that Haitians were incapable of self-government and needed the tutelage of a stronger, more advanced power. According to the Farnham Plan, US military control of Haiti would lead to political, economic, and social reform and development; peace and prosperity under Haiti self-rule would eventually follow. Testifying before the U.S. Congress six years into the occupation, Farnham re-iterated his vision of Haiti under military occupation:

I believe that Haiti can be made exceedingly productive in certain lines—sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco. I think that the Haitian can be taught to become a good and efficient laborer. If let alone by the military chiefs, he is as peaceful as a child, and as harmless. In fact, to-day they are nothing but grown-up children, ignorant of all agricultural methods, and they know nothing of machinery. They must be taught.

For the United States, if the Haitians were to be taught, the curriculum was based on violence. US military rule was enacted through force. The US unilaterally dissolved Haiti’s legislative assembly. Civilian administration was replaced by military authority. An unelected president was installed as a figurehead of the state, a mere puppet slavishly beholden to the US. Martial law was imposed, Haiti’s vigorous free press was censored, and journalists critical of the actions of the US were jailed. The US imposed a treaty on Haiti placing the republic under the supervision and protection of Washington. The treaty demanded Haiti cede control of not only its political and legal functions, but its finance, taxation, and customs revenue. Power was centralized in Port-au-Prince and a native police force, the Garde d’Haiti, was organized and trained, becoming an effective force in the repression of the Haitian masses. The US also rewrote the Haitian constitution, allowing foreigners to acquire land, the once-inviolable territory of the Haitian people. The amendment reversed the twelfth clause of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s 1805 Constitution of Hayti which read, “No whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein.” It was an attack on the foundations of the Haitian republic, and the Black peasantry that were its heart and soul.

The US also brought their racism to Haiti. Haiti’s majority peasant class, the descendants of half a million formerly enslaved Africans, were treated, initially, with a combination of condescension and pity; to the US they were, as Farnham stated, “nothing but grown-up children.” On the other hand, the Haitian elite, a small, wealthy, largely light-skinned class who sent their children to lycees in France for their education and lived off the labor of the peasantry, were treated with scorn and contempt by the US. White US officers and officials found the Haitian elite’s cultured airs and claims to European civilization pretentious, if not farcical, and they subjected the elite to the daily humiliations of Jim Crow racism. While the Haitian elite identified culturally with France, for the US they were simply, to borrow from William Jennings Bryan, “Niggers speaking French.” Amongst the Haitian elite, US occupation forced a profound crisis of psychology and identity. That crisis would be at the center of their protests.

In the early years of the occupation, the Haitian elite fought against the US using the weapons they had at hand: pens and printing presses. Editorials, petitions, statements of protest, and later, works of literature, attacked the US and demanded the return of Haitian sovereignty. By contrast, the most militant response to the US occupation came from the countryside, from the peasants whose land, labor, and livelihood were being expropriated and exploited. From 1918 to 1919, bands of rural peasant guerrillas – dubbed cacos, but derided as “bandits” by the US – engaged in insurgency operations in an attempt to overthrow the United States occupation regime. The height of the caco insurgency occurred in 1919, with an ill-fated plan to re-take Port-a-Prince and drive the US occupiers into the sea.

In response to the caco rebellion, the US initiated a campaign of counterinsurgency. What was termed a “pacification” campaign was brutal, excessive, and remorseless. Marines swept through the countryside, burning villages, imprisoning, torturing, and massacring peasants, and assassinating the caco leadership, including Charlemagne Péralte and Benoit Battraville. (The US media was complicit in covering up the marine atrocities by publishing lurid and racist stories of Haitian “cannibalism” committed against US soldiers). Upwards of 3,000 Haitians were killed during the US counter-insurgency campaigns, while countless others were forced to work on chain-gangs on the US road-building projects. Thousands of Haitian peasants were forced to leave the country in what George Padmore called a “slave trade” to work on US sugar plantations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, many of them owned by directors of the City Bank.

The US counterinsurgency campaigns were temporarily successful. The armed response to the US occupation and the militant attempts at regaining Haiti’s sovereignty were quelled. Yet the protests against the occupation did not end, they merely only took on another form. Outside of Haiti, an uncoordinated campaign of publicity sought to expose the conditions of the occupation to shift the opinion of the North American public. US journals including the progressive Nation and the radical Daily Worker, alongside African American newspapers and journals including the Pittsburg Courier, the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, and the Crisis, wrote critically about the US occupation, the attack on Haiti’s sovereignty, and the atrocities committed by the Marines. In 1920, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent James Weldon Johnson on a fact-finding mission to Haiti. Johnson published a four-part report in the Nation that exposed the North American public to the conditions of occupation, and the role of the City Bank behind it. The third installment of the series was titled “Government of, by, and for the National City Bank of New York.” In 1926, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, sent a delegation to Haiti led by economist and Quaker pacifist Emily Balch Green. The report they produced upon their return, titled Occupied Haiti, provided a critical appraisal of the occupation and called for the return of Haitian sovereignty. A year later, at the fourth Pan-African Congress held in August in New York City, delegates invoked Occupied Haiti in their resolutions demanding the withdrawal of the US.

Meanwhile, Haitian intellectuals, editors, and lawyers, aided by James Weldon Johnson, formed the Union Patriotique d’Haiti to publicize their cause. They spoke at rallies for their country and published editorials and statements in the progressive press. At the 1927 Pan-African Congress Haitian statesperson M. Dantès Bellegarde condemned the US intervention and occupation and demanded “that actual self-government be restored.” Often, the protests of the Haitian elite took literary form. They grappled with the psychological and cultural effects of the occupation by producing a literature that rejected the cultural legacy of France that they had once embraced, damned the US and its harsh, whitesupremacist modernity, and embraced the African identity of the Haitian peasantry. Fernand Hibbert novel Les Simulacres (1923) was perhaps the first Haitian novel to deal with the psychological consequences of the occupation. It was soon followed by the rejection of Anglo-Saxon modernism within the pages of the important literary journal La Revue Indigene.

The most important literary intervention of the time was found in Jean Price-Mars’ influential extended study of Haitian folklore and popular beliefs, Ainsi Parle L’oncle (1928) (in English, Thus Spoke the Uncle). Price-Mars recovered the deep historical ties between Haiti and Africa, asserting the African foundations of Haitian culture and society, while excoriating the Haitian elite for disavowing Africa, Blackness, and the Haitian peasant in favor of a deluded, delusional, and dangerous embrace of Europe and European “civilization.” Price-Mars’s writing had a profound impact on successive generations of Haitian writers and intellectuals, especially in the noiriste approach of the intellectuals of Les Griots. At the same time, an anti-bourgeois literature of peasants and proletarians emerged in the writing of figures Jacques Roumain, founder of the Haitian communist party. For Roumain, “La couleur n’est rien, la classe est tout” – Colour is nothing, class is all. As Roumain would later write in the manifesto, Analyse schématique, the Party’s slogan was:

CONTRE LA SOLIDARITÉ BOURGEOISE-CAPITALISTE
NOIRE, MULÂTRE ET BLANCHE :
FRONT PROLÉTARIEN SANS DISTINCTION DE COULEUR !

[AGAINST BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST SOLIDARITY
BLACK, MULATTO, AND WHITE:
PROLETARIAN FRONT WITHOUT COLOR DISTINCTION!]

The year 1929 saw the renewal of militant rebellion against the US occupation. As George Padmore noted in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1930), the “underlying conditions” of this renewal were found in the effects of the global crisis of capitalism on daily life in Haiti, and around the world. On October 29, 1929, students at l’École Centrale d’Agriculture in Damien staged a protest over the withdrawal of state funding for educational bursaries. Their protests quickly spread to other schools throughout the country. In Port-au-Prince, students from the national medical college, the law school, the school of applied science, and the Normal School for girls staged walk outs and parades against the US. Soon, government employees and custom house clerks across the country joined them in what became a general strike against. Martial law was reimposed on December 4. On December 6, a protest at Aux Cayes led to a confrontation with the US marines. The Marines shot into the crowd of protestors, killing ten people and wounding more than twenty.

In the United States, in response to the renewed violence radical groups organized protests and demonstrations against the occupation and the policies of US imperialism. Rallies for Haiti were held at Tivoli Hall in Williamsburg and St. Luke’s Hall in Manhattan. In Brooklyn and Harlem protests were organized by a inter-racial coalition of radical organizations that include the American Negro Labor Congress, the Trade Union Unity League, All-American Anti-Imperialist league, the Harlem Tenants league, and the Haitian Patriotic Union. Demonstrators gathered at the White House and 500 people converged in protest at Union Square in New York City. Toussaint Louverture and other revolutionary leaders were celebrated at rallies and in the radical press. Editorials and essays attacking the US occupation appeared in the Daily Worker, the Labour Monthly, the Negro Champion, the Negro Worker, and the Crisis, all calling for, as Ernest Gruening wrote in the Nation, “Haiti for the Haitians.”

While the occupation authorities sought to bolster the US military presence in the country, President Hoover decided instead, to send a commission to Haiti to inquire into the conditions of the US occupation – and to placate the increasingly agitated Haitian people. When the commissioners arrived in Haiti they were met with well-organized and vocal demonstrations. The streets of Port-au-Prince were thronged with Haitians holding banners and flags calling for elections, denouncing US- installed president Louis Borno, and demanding an end to the occupation. They encountered similar scenes in Cap-Haïtien. Crowds of Haitian women lined the streets, singing anti-American songs and waving paper flags “darkened with black paper bars to indicate a state of mourning for lost liberties.”

The protests were successful. The political agitation within Haiti, and from a range of groups in the United States, made Washington realize that their rule of Haiti was no longer tenable. On August 1, 1934, the US Marines withdrew from Haiti. Haiti had defeated the US. The withdrawal of the National City Bank from Haiti took longer. City Bank had profited from their ownership of the Banque Nationale de la Republique d’Haiti (BNRH), as it was now called, and were reluctant to let it go. But they were stung by the criticism they had received in the Nation and other journals and the relentless attacks on the bank made for bad publicity In July 1935, City Bank sold the BNRH to the Haitian government for $550,000. The transfer of ownership was not completed until
1941.

With the end of occupation, Haiti had returned to the Haitians and the republic’s second independence began. Like the first independence, it was only possible because of the protests of the Haitian people.