1904: (The Roosevelt Corollary and Haiti’s Warning Unheeded): The outcome of the Spanish-American War, coupled with the U.S.

1904: (The Roosevelt Corollary and Haiti’s Warning Unheeded): The outcome of the Spanish-American War, coupled with the U.S. takeover of the Puerto Plata customs house in July 1904 and an American customs receivership in Santo Domingo early in 1905, ought to have warned Haiti that its interests would be best served by what Ludwell Montague called reform from within as a guard against reform from without. Theodore Roosevelt’s message to Congress that year made the point abundantly clear: if a nation showed it could act with reasonable efficiency and decency, it need fear no interference, but chronic wrongdoing or impotence that lessened the ties of civilized society might ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the Monroe Doctrine might force the United States to exercise an international police power. Some Haitians heard Roosevelt’s words and recognized how pointedly they applied; most did not, for the meaning of the Centenaire was encompassed in the enormous gathering at Gonaïves — its four portals named Louverture, Dessalines, Pétion, and Nord Alexis — where 250,000 people gathered to fête their country, their ancestors, and old Tonton Nord. Yet for Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, the mulâtre nationalist physician of the Cap, Marcelin’s celebration was not enough: instead the country should drape an immense funeral pall over all its territory and plunge itself into meditation on the follies of the past. Roosevelt’s evocation of America’s mission civilisatrice — with its casual conflation of political dysfunction and racial incapacity, its assumption that the standard of “civilized society” was self-evidently that of the Euro-American metropole — performed precisely the epistemic operation that Césaire would later anatomize: the transformation of the Monroe Doctrine from a shield against European recolonization into a license for American imperial intervention, justified by the same civilizational hierarchy that had underwritten the slave trade itself.