1843–1915: (Haiti Is a Public Nuisance: The Ledger of Ruin and the Hour of the Marines): Robert Rotberg correctly wrote that the decision to intervene was no…

1843–1915: (Haiti Is a Public Nuisance: The Ledger of Ruin and the Hour of the Marines): Robert Rotberg correctly wrote that the decision to intervene was no sudden, capricious response to Haitian political and financial destitution — it was more surprising that the Americans waited until 1915 than that they intervened at all. Yet the American intervention was no simple explainable act of dollar diplomacy: American business interests in Haiti, the egregious Farnham their spokesman, to be sure exerted leverage on the State Department through Bryan, but economic penetration of Haiti, with or without U.S. support, had been negligible — in 1914, American investments in Mexico exceeded $800 million and amounted to $220 million in Cuba, and in all Latin America they totaled $1.7 billion, of which only $4 million was in Haiti. U.S. political and strategic concern so disproportionate to investment could be explained in one further statistic: the day U.S. Marines landed, Haiti, at the Atlantic gate to the American Mediterranean and the Panama Canal, had just experienced its eighth violent overthrow of government in less than seven years. Of twenty-two rulers of Haiti between 1843 and 1915, only one had served out his term of office — four had died in office, one had been blown up in his palace, one had been overthrown and executed, one had been torn to pieces by his subjects, and thirteen had been ousted by coup or revolution. During these same seventy-two years, Haiti had been wracked by at least 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections, revolts, coups, and attentats. The United States Navy had been compelled to send warships into Haitian waters in 1849, 1851, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1865, 1866, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1891, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, 1913, and during 1914–1915 had maintained ships there almost without interruption. The concatenation of events that finally put U.S. Marines ashore at Bizoton on the afternoon of July 28, 1915, was captured in a departmental minute by Alvey A. Adee, for many years the practically permanent Assistant Secretary of State: commenting on an 1888 dispatch from Consul Goutier at the Cap, Adee wrote simply that Haiti was a public nuisance at America’s doors. Nuisance could be tolerated, but when combined with utter disintegration — in a place and time where perceived American strategic interests could not allow collapse or vacuum — the hour for the Marines had come. The structural irony of Adee’s formulation — visible through the lens that Césaire, Fanon, and James each in their own way applied — was that the very powers who declared Haiti a nuisance had themselves manufactured the conditions of nuisance: the indemnity that bankrupted the treasury, the gunboat diplomacy that humiliated every government, the financial strangulation that made governance impossible, the arms merchants who bankrolled every revolution, and the racial contempt that rendered invisible the structural causes of the disorder being deplored — so that when the Marines finally came ashore, they came not as the solution to a problem but as the culmination of a process that had begun the day the enslaved of Saint-Domingue dared to become citizens, and for which the world had never forgiven them.