The Union Patriotique addresses the Haitian people

On 12 August 1921 the central committee of the Union Patriotique issued an address to the Haitian people, signed by its thirteen members, and L'Essor quotidien printed the text on 16 August. American marines had held the country since 1915. On 11 December of the same year Jean Price Mars spoke to the Union Patriotique on the Haitian problem considered as a function of the American occupation, and the speech appeared in L'Opinion nationale on 4 March 1922. The organisation was the main civilian vehicle of opposition to the occupation. It worked by petition, public meeting and the press at a moment when armed resistance in the countryside had been broken, and its committee was made of doctors, lawyers, teachers and writers. The same men were assembling the argument that the Haitian peasant, whom the occupation treated as raw material and the Port au Prince elite treated as an embarrassment, was the foundation of the country.

Testifying before the Senate select committee that investigated the occupation in 1921 and 1922, General Smedley Butler said that the men who ran it understood themselves as trustees of a large estate belonging to minors, that Haitians were wards and that the Americans were building a rich and productive property to be handed over when their own government saw fit. Renda builds her argument on this. Historians have treated paternalism either as a genuine benevolence, or as a mitigating factor, or as rhetoric to be seen through, and she rejects all three. Paternalism was a whole constellation of images and values that shaped American relations with former European colonies, an assertion of authority and control expressed through the metaphor of fatherhood, structured as much by discipline as by care. On her reading it was not opposed to violence but one of the cultural vehicles for it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda rejects both the view that paternalism softened the occupation and the view that it was mere cover story, arguing it was an operative mechanism of violence.

Between the wars a class of educated Africans in the French territories began arguing about politics in print, and the administration worried that they would find a rural following. Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, an activist and for a time a communist, wrote about the emerging African proletariat and about nationalism. He belonged to a set of men across French western and equatorial Africa who ran newspapers, built the first trade unions and corresponded with Marcus Garvey and with George Padmore, the Trinidadian who took charge of the African section of the Comintern in 1927. Plenty of African politicians in these years worked with the colonial order. Blaise Diagne, elected to the French assembly from Senegal in 1914 on rural votes, made himself an ally of France and defended its policies in public, conscription included. Andre Matswa built a society in the French Congo in the late 1920s demanding French citizenship and the rights attached to it, and by the early 1930s the administration had broken both him and it. Dockers struck at Conakry in 1919 and railwaymen in 1925 and 1938.

In December 1921 a United States Senate commission was in Haiti investigating reports of atrocities committed during the occupation. Senator Medill McCormick questioned Jean Marie Jan, the French Catholic bishop of Cap Haitien. Jan called the occupation an act of kindness, then explained the war against the Americans by saying the people had been driven to desperation by arbitrariness, injustice and mistreatment and had proclaimed their right to defend themselves. Asked whether Vodou had diminished since the landing, he answered that it had increased, and that the greatest cause was that the boko had been the soul of the insurrection. He also asked whether Washington intended to impose Protestantism by force. He had grounds. Edwin Denby, the American under secretary of the navy, was writing to E. O. Watson of the Council of Churches that Haiti lay within the sphere of the United States and that the Navy Department would be happy to facilitate the work of the missionary societies.