1915, June 14 – July 2: (Action Is Evidently Necessary: Fuller’s Platt Amendment Recommendation and Wilson’s Somber Minute): Nine days after departing Haiti,…

1915, June 14 – July 2: (Action Is Evidently Necessary: Fuller’s Platt Amendment Recommendation and Wilson’s Somber Minute): Nine days after departing Haiti, back in Washington, Fuller told Lansing that any concession made to the United States would be viewed by the public as selling out to foreigners, an accusation for which revenge would promptly be taken — yet the present government and a large majority of all classes were desirous of entering into a convention with the United States along the lines originally submitted, and a majority of honest Haitians would be willing to agree to a plan for indirect customs control and for turning over Môle St. Nicolas to the United States. Both the president and the secretary for foreign affairs had stated they were willing to sign the guarantee regarding the Môle and to devise some legal method by which the United States could secure control — only fear of personal violence now stood in the way. So forcibly was Fuller impressed with the futility of negotiation that he concluded by posing the ultimate solution: land Marines and exact a treaty like the 1901 Platt Amendment, which governed U.S. relations with Cuba. When on July 2, 1915, Wilson read Fuller’s report, he somberly minuted that action was evidently necessary and no doubt it would be a mistake to postpone it long. The trajectory from Bryan’s question “Where is Haiti?” through the Fort fiasco and the Fuller mission to Wilson’s somber minute of July 2 traced the arc of imperial decision-making that Césaire would later anatomize: a process in which ignorance produced misunderstanding, misunderstanding produced failed negotiation, failed negotiation produced the conviction that force was inevitable, and the conviction of inevitability absolved the decision-makers of responsibility for the very conditions — the Banque’s strangulation, the Machias gold seizure, the refusal to recognize governments that would not surrender sovereignty — that had made negotiation impossible in the first place.