Taking Haiti Seriously

Abstract

In October 1929, Helen Miller, a junior high school teacher in Pennsylvania, assigned her students to write to Faustin Wirkus, a Marine sergeant serving in Haitian Gendarmerie. would like to know how you like it down there king, a student named Donald Pifer asked Wirkus. think that you would get very lonesome down there without any white people to talk to but I guess you are used to that by this time (p. 5). Mary A. Renda's Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and Culture of Imperialism, 1915-1940 explores both experiences of soldiers, like Faustin Wirkus, and cultural understandings of Haiti that prompted Donald Pifer to consider a solitary white marine to be a king. Renda argues that historians have incorrectly considered 1915-1934 Haitian occupation to be a trivial distraction, like letter of a Pennsylvania schoolboy. Rather than being a sideshow, Haitian engagement one of several important arenas in which United States was remade through overseas imperial ventures in first third of twentieth century. (p. 12) Renda contends that Haitian occupation, more than other contemporary overseas military actions, facilitated domestic renegotiation of racial and gender issues because people in United States generally perceived Haiti as a distinctly black nation that was geographically near but culturally distant from its northern neighbor (p. 36). To explain why and how United States was remade, Renda focuses on culture, particularly paternalism at heart of culture. In eyes of many U.S. Americans (Renda's term), Haiti in 1915 was a miserable orphan. Haiti's French father had abandoned her long ago, and her African single mother had nothing of value to offer. Haiti's generous Uncle Sam, then, had little choice but to become, in words of General Smedley Butler, the trustees of a huge estate that belongs to minors (p. 13). The image of a benevolent father, however, masked domination and violence inherent in