1913–1915: (Action Is Evidently Necessary: Bryan’s Ignorance, Farnham’s Whispers, and Wilson’s Governessy Attitude): Back in 1913, soon after he became Secre…

1913–1915: (Action Is Evidently Necessary: Bryan’s Ignorance, Farnham’s Whispers, and Wilson’s Governessy Attitude): Back in 1913, soon after he became Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan had asked the Banque’s John Allen to stop by and talk about Haiti — the Secretary said he was very much interested in Haiti, asked Allen to tell him about the country and who the people were, then paused abruptly and asked where Haiti was. At the end of two hours, as Allen departed, Bryan shook his bald head and exclaimed his astonishment that there existed Black people speaking French. That Bryan never acquired much more insight into the affairs of America’s unmanageable island neighbor might be inferred from the ensuing succession of U.S. approaches to the possibility of intervening. The notion that banana republics could be stabilized if not perfected through financial responsibility resulting from U.S.-imposed customs control was a Roosevelt-Taft hypothesis onto which Woodrow Wilson typically engrafted the corollary of civic uplift through the democratic process as he conceived it — he later said of Mexico that he would teach the Latin Americans to elect good men, and it was this governessy attitude that informed Wilson and his no less evangelical Secretary of State whenever someone asked what to do about Haiti. Behind the simplistic Wilson-Bryan view of Haiti lay not only ignorance such as Allen described but also, in the case of Bryan, plausible misinformation acquired mainly from Roger Farnham — the vivid raconteur who represented the National City Bank’s interests in Haiti and who had become Bryan’s principal source of intelligence on a country the Secretary of State could not locate on a map. The structural consequence of Bryan’s ignorance — visible through the lens Césaire applied to the civilizing mission — was that American policy toward the world’s first Black republic was being formulated by a man who could not distinguish Haiti from a curiosity, informed by a banker whose principal interest was the protection of his institution’s investments, and guided by a president whose conception of democracy was indistinguishable from imperial tutelage — the epistemic architecture of the coming occupation was thus assembled not from malice but from the far more durable materials of ignorance, condescension, and financial self-interest.