British diplomats ask what the Monroe Doctrine leaves of Haitian sovereignty

On 30 April 1911 the British minister Murray reported to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on the Monroe Doctrine and what it meant for Haitian independence, noting that American intervention in the region was growing more frequent. Britain had reason to follow the question. It had used gunboats in Haitian waters itself, held Jamaica two hundred miles away, and had money in the country. The doctrine, announced by the United States in 1823, began as a warning to European powers to stay out of the Americas. Haitian statesmen had once used it as a shield, invoking it in 1891 when an American admiral demanded a naval station at the Mole Saint-Nicolas. By 1911 the same doctrine carried the Roosevelt Corollary, which committed the United States to correcting disorder in the hemisphere itself. A rule written to keep Europe out had become a licence to move in, and British diplomats spent that year reporting on how far it would reach.

The Ku Klux Klan was refounded at Stone Mountain in Georgia in 1915, with the full Reconstruction era costume and cars instead of horses. It aimed its hatred at Jewish and Catholic immigrants as much as at black Americans, and by the early 1920s it claimed about five million members and controlled the politics of Indiana and Oregon for a time. That sentiment became law in 1924, when Congress cut immigration to a trickle and closed the era of nearly unrestricted entry to the United States. The ethnic neighbourhoods that had grown for a generation stopped growing from abroad and began to settle. Kennedy adds the consequence nobody could see at the time, which is that the door was shut in advance against people who would try to escape Nazi Germany in the following decade. The Haitian communities of New York and Boston grew up under the same quota system.

Refusal took many shapes. In the French territories young men crossed borders and waited in hiding until the recruiting sergeants had moved on, the same evasion they used against tax collectors and labour levies. Revolts that looked like protests against conscription carried grievances that had been building since the 1890s. Armed resistance broke out against the British in Nigeria and against the French in Dahomey. In Mozambique the Barwe rose in 1917 against Portuguese rule. The Ottoman empire joined Germany late in 1914 and called for a jihad across the colonial world, which never came. The Sanusiyya, supplied with German and Ottoman money and weapons, beat the Italians in Libya early in 1915 and attacked the British in Egypt. Britain answered by declaring a protectorate over Egypt, crushing nationalist activity there, and taking the sultanate of Darfur in 1916. In Nyasaland in 1915 the preacher John Chilembwe led a short and fierce insurrection, driven in part by the scale of conscription and the number of local men killed fighting the Germans.

Soon after taking office in 1913, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan asked John Allen of the Banque Nationale to come and explain Haiti to him. Bryan said he was very interested in the place and asked who the people were, then stopped and asked where it was. Two hours later, as Allen was leaving, Bryan shook his head over the discovery that there were Black people who spoke French. American policy towards Haiti for the next two years was built on that foundation. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations had held that small republics could be steadied by customs control imposed from Washington. Woodrow Wilson added instruction in democracy, remarking of Mexico that he meant to teach the Latin Americans how to elect good men. Bryan's information about Haiti came almost entirely from Roger Farnham, a vivid talker who ran the National City Bank's interests there. The occupation was assembled out of ignorance, condescension and a banker's balance sheet, which hold together far better than malice.