1920 to 1921 · Haitianspan
The elite takes up the pen and calls itself the Union Patriotique
›Read the full entryClose
The Haitian peasantry feared the return of white mastery less than the Haitian elite did. In 1917 the French envoy de la Batie reported to Paris that the oligarchy which had bled the country for a century now dreaded the rebuilding of a white society above it, a fear he thought natural in the descendants of free coloured proprietors and reasonable given what was being done to Black Americans at the time. The elite had encouraged the cacos in order to embarrass President Dartiguenave, then noticed how many caco generals were Black. Once the revolt was crushed Dartiguenave turned on the Americans himself, and the trouble moved from the central plateau to the capital. In early 1920 Herbert Seligman spent a short time in Haiti and published in The Nation the charge that marines had shot three thousand Haitian men, women and children. His informant was the Union Patriotique, founded in 1915 by Georges Sylvain, by then claiming thirty thousand members and led by Stenio Vincent, Price-Mars, Perceval Thoby and Pierre Hudicourt. A Haitian wit called them the cacos of the pen.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.