"Sentiments of a Private Nature": A Comment on Ann Laura Stoler's "Tense and Tender Ties"

Abstract

In closing months of 1918, Haitian government officials grew impatient with what seemed to them obvious injustice then being perpetrated against their nation by the powerful Republic of United States. For over three years, they had attempted to maintain some semblance of independent action in face of an uninvited military occupation replete with what one Haitian diplomat termed injunctions and another named more baldly the vexatious and unfair tyranny of American officials.' When Louis Borno, then Haiti's minister of finance, authorized an appeal to Washington for redress of those grievances, he sought to give U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing and President Woodrow Wilson a way to rise above such injustice, a way to square occupation with president's rhetoric about fairness for small nations. With American Government's help, he sought to assure them, the Haitian people are firmly resolved to carry out . .. all reforms that progress demands. But they would do so, he insisted, through that most cordial cooperation . . . which proceeds on joint examinations and not on imperative commands notified without regard to national dignity and prompted by sentiments of a private nature, in which higher interests of two countries are given no consideration. 2 The private sentiments that perhaps prompted U.S. officials' imperious behavior were amply in evidence in occupied Haiti, both before and after Borno's complaint. They were in evidence in summer of 1915, when a U.S. military officer rained down a shower of condescension on revolutionary leader and heir apparent to