Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.-Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation

Abstract

Jeffrey Sommers with contributions from Patrick Delices, Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.-Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, xvi + 141 ppThe United States occupation of Haiti ended in July 1934, nineteen years after it began. Over its course it transformed from a grudgingly welcome intervention into an anarchic political climate to a bitterly despised neocolonialism. Since the 1970s, scholars of Haiti have presented the occupation in all its messiness, magnifying its more deplorable aspects of which there were many: violence, slash and burn raids in the countryside, forced peasant labour, naked racism, suppression of Haitian autonomy, and interference in all arms of government were part of daily life under the command of US marines. Notwithstanding the value of the structural outcomes, a hotly debated topic, the means of marine rule were too brutal for the USA to claim victory. This narrative of brilliant failure has all but eclipsed the arcane interpretation of US control in Haiti as a laudable exercise in democratic institution building.Duplicitous US foreign policy imperatives in our own time have validated the findings of historians of Haiti's relationship with its northern empire early in the twentieth century. In Race, Reality, and Realpolitik Jeffrey Sommers (and contributor Patrick Delices) concisely remind us of this fact. The book is premised on the argument that US intervention before and after 1915 should be seen as part of "deadly" imperial abuse and punishment of long independent Haiti (xii).The politics of occupation were systematically crafted in Progressiveera USA by a cabal of political and economic powerbrokers. The author avers forcefully that the occupation was "staged almost exclusively for the financial gain of a very wealthy and powerful few" in the United States of America (xi). This elite had voice in chambers of power, the realpolitik in the title.The strength of this point is only understood when the occupation is placed in the hemispheric context of US empire. Logically, then, the book's chapters proceed chronologically, each detailing the emergence of US imperial intentions and its relations with Haiti. The main arguments are discussed in chapters 3-5 which address how US business elites pursued offshore investments in Haiti. Sommers insists that this constituency, every bit a part of the state apparatus, is given too little regard in analyses of empire. The "'imperial' dominance [of the state] in scholarship has prevented us from seeing how forces both smaller and larger than the nation have driven state policy." (75)Sommer substantiates the importance of Haiti to US business interests with research from the Bulletin of the Pan American Union, an outlet for "elite activism" of US expansion (57). The author decodes rhetorical claims of "uplift" and "progress" to expose real intentions for Haiti at the turn of the century. As Haitian politics spun out of control, the Bulletin only contemplated the fiscal potential of its "tropical abundance" (61). …