1920, October 14 – 1921: (The Indiscriminate Killings Scandal: The New York Times Leak, Harding’s Christmas Tree, and the Investigations That Changed Nothing…

1920, October 14 – 1921: (The Indiscriminate Killings Scandal: The New York Times Leak, Harding’s Christmas Tree, and the Investigations That Changed Nothing): Two days after the Lejeune-Butler report was filed, readers of the New York Times were as shocked as General Barnett had been to read on page one the general’s private correspondence with Russell, including the phrase indiscriminate killings heavily played — someone had leaked the story. With the 1920 U.S. elections at climax, the issue was ready-made for Republican opponents of Woodrow Wilson and for the anti-occupation constituency gathering in the United States. James Weldon Johnson, Black adviser of Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding and secretary of the NAACP, keenly alive to the occupation issue, counseled Harding to take immediate advantage of Haitian atrocity charges — Harding, Johnson reminisced, looked upon the Haitian matter as a gift right off the Christmas tree, and had already told election crowds that thousands of native Haitians had been killed by American Marines. The Wilson administration’s response was one final full-dress investigation: the Mayo inquiry, named after its presiding officer Admiral Henry T. Mayo and dismissed in The Nation as whitewash before the court even reached Haiti, arrived at similar conclusions but significantly added that considering the conditions of service in Haiti it was remarkable that the offenses were so few in number. Behind the smoke lay fire: illegal executions did take place and so did acts of violence against Haitians, the corvée was continued in violation of orders and flagrantly misused as peonage for the benefit of Haitian officials, and Major Wells and a handful of American subordinates condoned and tried to cover up these misdeeds. Best evidence indicated abuses were confined to the Hinche-Maïssade area and to a six-month period from December 1918 to May 1919 — they were neither typical nor anything like nationwide, and the Senate investigation of 1922, energetically pressed at home and in Haiti, established only ten illegal executions. Catlin’s decision not to press charges when evidence was fresh effectively foreclosed further prosecution, and when Barnett reopened the matter six months later the trail was cold and guilty individuals were beyond legal reach. Colonel Little wrote a thoughtful letter to the new Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby in 1921: the corvée was an error, for by unjust enforcement in certain localities it brought doubt into the mind of the Haitian of the altruism of American intentions, and the countryman was mighty pleased to have the forces of the U.S. with him, for it saved him from a compulsory service little short of slavery and enabled him to work in the fields. The scandal of the indiscriminate killings — a phrase that entered the American political lexicon as an election-year weapon, was investigated by four successive military inquiries, produced no convictions, and was ultimately absorbed into the bureaucratic metabolism of the occupation without structural consequence — demonstrated the pattern that would recur in every subsequent American intervention: atrocities committed by occupying forces were investigated by the occupiers themselves, judged by the occupiers’ own standards of evidence, and resolved through administrative mechanisms designed to protect the institution rather than vindicate the victims, a pattern that Fanon identified as the characteristic self-absolution of the colonial power — the violence is acknowledged precisely in order to be contained, its acknowledgment functioning not as accountability but as inoculation against accountability.