1915, August 2: (Take the Bull by the Horns: Lansing’s Perplexity and Wilson’s Three-Point Order): For an event so long considered, intervention in Haiti rat…

1915, August 2: (Take the Bull by the Horns: Lansing’s Perplexity and Wilson’s Three-Point Order): For an event so long considered, intervention in Haiti rather oddly seemed to have taken the U.S. government by surprise. With the Marines five days on the beach, Robert Lansing plaintively told Wilson that the situation in Haiti was distressing and very perplexing, that he was not at all sure what they ought to do or what they legally could do. Whatever his faults, Woodrow Wilson could never be numbered in the ranks of the uncertain — within twenty-four hours Lansing had his answer: there was nothing to do but to take the bull by the horns and restore order. Wilson laid out three points: first, send to Port-au-Prince a force sufficient to absolutely control the city and the country immediately about it from which it drew its food; second, let the present Haitian Congress know that America would protect it but would not recognize any action on its part that did not put men in charge of affairs whom Washington could trust to handle and put an end to revolution; and third, give all who now had authority or desired to have it to understand that the United States would take steps to prevent the payment of debts contracted to finance revolutions — so much for the German merchants. Wilson concluded that they considered it their duty to insist on constitutional government there and would, if necessary, take charge of elections and see that a real government was erected which they could support. What Wilson envisaged amounted to intervention on the most high-minded however inapplicable principles — only the one phrase, “put men in charge whom we can trust to handle,” suggested there might be more to it. The chapter epigraph from Charles Moravia captured the Haitian elite’s immediate response to the occupation with a clarity that Fanon would later theorize: we are not at war with the United States, we are at war with Humanity, which we have not ceased to offend for a century — the Americans are the foe of a sovereign Despotism and occupy the country to thwart his restoration. Within three years Moravia would be Haitian minister in Washington; within eleven years, founder and editor of Le Temps and a beacon of Haitian nationalism, he would be doing preventive detention inside the pénitencier for having goaded the occupying Americans too far and too often.