1914, November 4–12: (The Wilson Plan and Bryan’s Laundry List: Washington’s Unrealistic Demands): The question of U.S.

1914, November 4–12: (The Wilson Plan and Bryan’s Laundry List: Washington’s Unrealistic Demands): The question of U.S. recognition and the more pressing one of funds were in fact closely linked. Woodrow Wilson’s reformist instincts toward Central America and the Caribbean had long been offended by Haiti’s bottomless problems and squalid politics, and more practically — through the medium of such rogues as Desiderio Arias — by the unhealthy interaction between Haitian affairs and those of the Dominican Republic, which the United States was trying to uplift and regularize. Thus, with Wilson’s personal approval, on November 4, 1914, Acting Secretary of State Robert Lansing mailed Bailly-Blanchard a lightly edited version of the so-called Wilson Plan, under which the United States had just imposed a semblance of constitutionality on Dominican politics — and which, prior to the downfall of the Zamors, Washington had hoped might just solve Haiti’s difficulties. Vain hope: as Dana Munro, one of the State Department’s ablest Latin American specialists, trenchantly commented, the plan had worked in Santo Domingo where there were organized political parties with a substantial following, but in Haiti the contending leaders were little more than chiefs of mercenary bands, and the ignorance and political indifference of the masses made a popular election practically impossible. Then on November 12, dangling financial rescue and recognition, Bryan telegraphed a laundry list of demands covering practically all outstanding matters of interest to the United States — customs control, railroad, Banque, assurances about the Môle, settlement of private American claims — promising that once Haiti agreed, the State Department would induce the Banque to slacken its grip. These unrealistic goals, as Heinl observed, called for performance beyond Haitian capacity if not comprehension, and for concessions no Haitian politician could make. The structural trap that the Wilson Plan represented — visible through the lens Césaire applied to the civilizing mission — was that Washington was simultaneously demanding democratic processes and fiscal regularity from a state whose fiscal capacity had been systematically destroyed by the very financial institutions whose grip the State Department promised to loosen, creating a closed loop in which the conditions for recognition could never be met because meeting them required the resources that only recognition could unlock.