Occupation expropriation sends Haitian peasants to cut cane abroad

Hurbon dates the first modern wave of Haitian rural exodus to the years spanning the American occupation, which he gives as 1915 to 1934. Thousands of peasants expropriated by the occupier and subjected to the corvée left to cut cane on American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The mechanism matters to his larger argument: the migration was produced by a political act, land seizure backed by forced labour, and not by a simple shortage of work. He uses this to attack the purely economic reading of Haitian emigration that dominated the literature, including Mats Lundahl's conclusion that mass migration is above all a result of poverty. If the first wave was political, Hurbon argues, then the far larger wave of his own day, driven by Duvalierist terror reaching deep into the countryside, must also be read politically. Where this account departs from the standard one: Hurbon rejects the economic explanation of Haitian migration advanced by Mats Lundahl and by common sense, insisting that political terror is the primary cause even for illiterate peasants and workers whom observers refuse to credit with political motives.

Seabrook's travel narrative The Magic Island, built around the marine sergeant Faustin Wirkus and Seabrook's own fanciful account of Haitian religion, was chosen by the Literary Guild as its featured book for January 1929 and became a national bestseller. Renda uses its reception to show how empire was absorbed at home. Seabrook printed Wirkus's address, and schoolboys in Pennsylvania wrote to the man they understood to be a king, identifying with him as a Pennsylvanian, a working class boy and a Boy Scout, and asking about wild animals and chief exports. The Guild editor Carl Van Doren praised the book as a work in the literature of American empire and told readers they were citizens of an empire reaching far beyond their own continent. Renda notes that in 1929 empire was no longer debated in the United States, it was a point of pride.

At three in the morning on 7 August 1912 an explosion shook Port-au-Prince and a column of fire went up from the National Palace. The Italian powder Antoine Simon had left in the basement finally caught, and with it a million rounds of ammunition and other explosives stored there by a run of presidents who preferred their munitions underfoot to out of reach. The floor of President Cincinnatus Leconte's bedroom dropped into the fire. His daughter and son-in-law got out of a window before the building came down. The dead included his grandson and three hundred men of the presidential guard. Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, who had no affection for Haitian politicians, wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that Leconte's had probably been the best administration Haiti had seen in many years, and that the bank once reckoned ninety percent of customs duties were actually reaching the treasury. Leconte had told him officeholders were threatening his life over exactly that.

Under its charter the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti owed the government its revenues only at the close of the fiscal year, while the government needed cash every month. Cincinnatus Leconte asked for a supplementary convention to keep the old arrangement running. The bank refused, hinting that a monthly allowance might follow some form of control over the customs. Its New York group, run by Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, assured the State Department that no such thought had crossed anyone's mind. A convention was patched together anyway, and honest collection under Leconte and Tancrède Auguste left the government square with the bank and more than eight hundred thousand dollars in hand when the 1913 fiscal year closed. The bank opened a second front instead. It held ten million francs in gold meant to retire the debased paper gourdes, was lending that gold at twelve and a half percent, and would not give it up. When the assembly closed the loopholes, the bank called in loans and stopped making new ones.