Bullying Hayti

Background: On December 17, 1914, U.S. marines landed in Haiti and moved the nation’s gold reserves to the National City Bank’s New York vaults. Eight months later, the marines again landed in Port au Prince, Haiti’s capital, this time claiming the need to protect foreign lives and property. They placed Port au Prince under martial law, ruthlessly subdued armed resistance in rural areas, and began training a new Haitian militia. As this article in the Afro-American Ledger noted, despite clear aggressions by both Germany and Mexico in the early years of World War I, the U.S. declined to take the same level of military action.

Just what excuse the United States government has in sending troops to Hayti and bullying that little black republic is not at all patent to the casual observer. Just what right it has to take over the custom [revenues] and order the natives to give up their arms and submit to whatever the United States may assume to do and say does not at all appear, unless it is to show its authority and how it can use it to bully a little island government with its gunboats and marines. For the past three or four years, Mexico, right next door, so close in fact that one has only to step across an imaginary line, has been at war, United States citizens have been killed, and yet the United States pursues a “watchful-waitingness.” . . .

Time and again has this country threatened what it was going to do but up to the present it has done nothing. And now this “watchful waitingness” is being applied to Germany, while Americans are being sent to their watery graves. Words, words, words, and still they come and go, but when it comes to a little poor, poverty-stricken, black republic, sailors, soldiers and marines must be sent, the natives disarmed and the government threatened with dire punishment unless it allows this great big bully to do what it pleases. It is a stench in the nostrils of all decent people.

Source: Afro-American Ledger, Baltimore, Maryland, August 27, 1915.