14 October 1920 to 1921 · Haitianspan
Indiscriminate killings reaches page one and changes nothing
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Two days after the Lejeune and Butler report went in, the New York Times printed on its front page the private correspondence between General Barnett, commandant of the marine corps, and Colonel Russell in Haiti, with the phrase indiscriminate killings played large. The American election of 1920 was at its height. James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, advising the Republican candidate Warren Harding, told him to use the atrocity charges at once, and Harding was already telling crowds that American marines had killed thousands of Haitians. Johnson recalled that Harding treated the matter as a gift off the Christmas tree. Wilson answered with one more inquiry under Admiral Henry Mayo, which The Nation called a whitewash before it had reached Haiti and which concluded that the offences were remarkably few. Executions without trial did happen. The corvee ran on after orders to stop it and worked as debt peonage for the profit of Haitian officials. Major Wells and a few American subordinates covered for it. The Senate investigation of 1922 established ten illegal executions and nobody was convicted.
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