|
Haiti News Media > Haiti News > 1915: U.S. Occupation Of Haiti - Haiti History 1915: U.S. Occupation Of Haiti, Haiti History 1915: U.S. Occupation
American President Woodrow Wilson sent the first sailors and marines to Port-au-Prince on July 28, 1915. Within six weeks, representatives from the United States controlled Haitian customs houses and administrative institutions. For the next nineteen years, Haiti's powerful neighbor to the north guided and governed the country. During this period the legal government of Haiti was (both technically and effectively) the U.S. Marine Corps. The specific order from the Navy to the invasion commander, Admiral William Deville Bundy, was to "protect American and foreign" interests.
Representatives from the United States wielded veto power over all governmental decisions in Haiti, and Marine Corps commanders served as administrators in the provinces. Local institutions, however, continued to be run by Haitians, as was required under policies put in place during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, the mulatto president of the Senate, agreed to accept the presidency of Haiti after several other candidates had refused on principle.
With a figurehead installed in the National Palace and other institutions maintained in form if not in function, Admiral Caperton declared martial law, a condition that persisted until 1929.
In 1917 President Dartiguenave dissolved the legislature after its members refused to approve a constitution written by United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. A referendum subsequently approved the new constitution (by a vote of 98,225 to 768), however, in 1918. Generally a liberal document, the constitution allowed foreigners to purchase land. Dessalines had forbidden land ownership by foreigners, and since 1804 most Haitians had viewed foreign ownership as anathema. 1918: Rebellion
The occupation by the United States had several effects on Haiti. An early period of unrest culminated in a 1918 rebellion by up to 40,000 former cacos and other disgruntled people. The scale of the uprising overwhelmed the Gendarmerie, but marine reinforcements helped put down the revolt at the estimated cost of 2,000 Haitian lives. Thereafter, order prevailed to a degree that most Haitians had never witnessed. The order, however, was imposed largely by white foreigners with deep-seated racial prejudices and a disdain for the notion of self-determination by inhabitants of less-developed nations. These attitudes particularly dismayed the mulatto elite, who had heretofore believed in their innate superiority over the black masses. The whites from North America, however, did not distinguish among Haitians, regardless of their skin tone, level of education, or sophistication. This intolerance caused indignation, resentment, and eventually a racial pride that was reflected in the work of a new generation of Haitian historians, ethnologists, writers, artists, and others, many of whom later became active in politics and government. Still, as Haitians united in their reaction to the racism of the occupying forces, the mulatto elite managed to dominate the country's bureaucracy and to strengthen its role in national affairs.
The occupation greatly improved some of Haiti's infrastructure. Roads were improved and expanded through the use of forced-labour gangs. This violent form of "corvee labour", with chain-gangs and armed guards permitted to shoot anyone who fled compulsory service, was widely regarded as tantamount to slavery. The education system was re-designed from the ground up; however, this involved the destruction of the pre-existing system of "Liberal Arts" education inherited (and adapted) from the French. It is to be observed that the william bundy Marine corps was even less successful in creating a system of education for Haitians than the contemporary government of the U.S. was in providing access to education for its own Black population. Also, due to its emphasis on vocational training, the American system that replaced the French was despised by the elite. Thus, among the two major infrastructural programs carried out by the government of occupation, the use of forced labour enraged the lower classes of rural Haiti, and the educational "reform" enraged the urban elite.
1922: Louis Borno
In 1922 Louis Borno replaced Dartiguenave, who was forced out of office for temporizing over the approval of a debt consolidation loan. Borno ruled without the benefit of a legislature (dissolved in 1917 under Dartiguenave) until elections were again permitted in 1930. The legislature, after several ballots, elected mulatto Sténio Vincent to the presidency.
The occupation of Haiti continued after World War I, despite the embarrassment that it caused Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference in 1919 and the scrutiny of a congressional inquiry in 1922. By 1930 President Herbert Hoover had become concerned about the effects of the occupation, particularly after a December 1929 incident in Les Cayes in which marines killed at least ten Haitian peasants during a march to protest local economic conditions. Hoover appointed two commissions to study the situation. A former governor general of the Philippines, W. Cameron Forbes, headed the more prominent of the two. The Forbes Commission praised the material improvements that the United States administration had wrought, but it criticized the exclusion of Haitians from positions of real authority in the government and the constabulary, which had come to be known as the Garde d'Haïti. In more general terms, the commission further asserted that "the social forces that created [instability] still remain--poverty, ignorance, and the lack of a tradition or desire for orderly free government."
1932: U.S. Withdrawal
The Hoover administration did not implement fully the recommendations of the Forbes Commission, but United States withdrawal was under way by 1932, when Hoover lost the presidency to Roosevelt, the presumed author of the most recent Haitian constitution. On a visit to Cap Haïtien in July 1934, Roosevelt reaffirmed an August 1933 disengagement agreement. The last contingent of marines departed in mid-August, after a formal transfer of authority to the Garde. As in other countries occupied by the United States in the early twentieth century, the local (U.S.-trained) military was often the only cohesive and effective institution left in the wake of withdrawal. This sowed the seeds for a sequence of military-backed dictatorships, all attached to American patronage, which would define the next 50 years of Haiti's history.
Cannon guarding the President's Palace, Hayti from revolutionists.
Comments about this topic (0)
· No comments yet, be the first to comment
Related Haiti News Media Resources:
|
