TAKING HAITI: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940.

By Mary A. Renda. Univ. of North Carolina Press. 414 pp. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper

No one who has been to Haiti is likely to forget the experience, and almost everyone who has been there retains an interest in the country and its culture. It is one of those countries that, though small and unimportant from an economic or political point of view, has a history that reaches beyond its boundaries, a history of unequaled tragic grandeur. Haiti’s heroic but unsuccessful search for security and freedom seems profoundly to epitomize the individual human condition.

President Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to stabilize Haiti in 1915, and they remained until 1934. At first sight, an account of the occupation through the lens of current academic obsessions with race, gender, and class might seem a depressing prospect, an opportunity for the mechanical repetition of ideological clichés, but Renda transcends the genre by the excellence of her writing, the quality and interest of her evidence, and her temperate voice.

Renda sets out to deal with the American attitude toward Haiti rather than with the Haitian attitude toward America. She first asks what the Americans thought they were doing in Haiti, from presidents down to the marines who carried out the occupation. Were they restoring order to a chronically chaotic country, bringing Christian civilization to benighted pagans, securing a strategic base at Môle St. Nicholas (one of the few deep-water harbors in the Caribbean), seeking new markets and economic domination, or some combination of all these? Although no definitive answer can be given, Renda conveys the texture of the occupation by examining a number of unusual and revealing sources, such as the postcards the marines sent home and the private correspondence of their commander.

The author writes scathingly about the Wilsonian highmindedness that sent marines into Haiti in the first place. She sides with George F. Kennan, who, in American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (1951), saw more of a threat to world peace in a foreign policy that allegedly pursued abstract ideals than in one that openly pursued concrete national interest. Wilson, thinks Renda, was an archetypal liberal humbug who was unable to see any contradiction between the occupation in practice of Haiti and the right in theory of small nations to self-determination. Similar contradictions characterized the occupying troops, whose actions were sometimes philanthropic and sometimes brutal.

The second half of the book concerns representations of Haiti in American pulp fiction, plays, serious novels, films, plastic arts, and even wallpaper. For some years before World War II, Haiti was an object of fashionable interest (Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones started the ball rolling). It was seen by turns—and sometimes at the same time—as dangerous, sexually alluring, primitive, exotic, noble, and culturally authentic. People used Haiti according to their purposes: American racists saw its history as proof positive that blacks were unfit to rule themselves, while American blacks, smarting under segregation and other disabilities, saw in figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and le Roi Christophe proof that black heroes could equal white ones. It is the author’s thesis that exposure to Haitian themes had a profound effect on American race relations.

Renda’s discussion of these matters is subtle, honest, and evenhanded, where it could easily have been strident. One lesson from this most interesting book is that while powerful nations can change small ones, they cannot mold them into any shape they choose. Neither men nor nations are putty. This is a lesson that has still not been fully assimilated in the corridors of power.

—Theodore Dalrymple