Taking Haiti begins with an intriguing question: “How does a man imagine himself when he is about to pull a trigger?” (p. 3). Mary Renda attempts to answer that question by examining how the culture of American marines was shaped in and by their experience in Haiti and how the occupation of Haiti impacted American culture at home. Renda argues that “the military occupation of Haiti that began in 1915 was no sideshow . . . . It was one of several important arenas in which the United States was remade through overseas imperial ventures in the first third of the twentieth century” (p. 12).The structure of the book reflects Renda’s dual objectives. Part 1 focuses on the cultural dimensions of the intervention. After briefly covering the occupation itself, Renda examines the paternalistic discourse that shaped it and explores the links between paternalism and violence. In part 2 Renda turns her attention to the uses of Haiti on the mainland: after the marines “took” Haiti, American culture began “taking Haiti” in other ways. Looking at the cultural production of intellectuals, artists, missionaries, and writers during the occupation, Renda sees how the occupation facilitated the renegotiation of domestic racial and gender issues.Renda argues that a paternalistic impulse guided American policy makers and the marines. Previous studies of American intervention have examined its paternalistic nature, but they have, according to Renda, failed to recognize that paternalism was not just “laid on after the fact in order to pretty up American wrongdoing” (p. 15). While Renda does not deny the existence of other discourses, she argues that paternalism was “the central discursive construction that supported the U.S. presence in Haiti . . . . [I]t was more than mere rhetoric. It was the cultural and ideological framework within which U.S. imperialism would be conceived and carried out” (p. 303). The discovery of a paternalistic impulse behind the rhetoric of a moralist and interventionist like Woodrow Wilson is no great revelation. Whereas previous scholars saw paternalism as a means of tempering the violence, however, Renda argues that “paternalism should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one among several cultural vehicles for it” (p. 15).Renda leaves little doubt that many marines saw themselves as wards of Haiti. Major Smedley Butler, whose anti-imperialistic incantations have been quoted by many scholars, is here cited for his contributions to this paternalistic discourse. As the trainer of the Haitian security forces, Butler initially expressed some pride in training “my little black Army.” When the Haitian government refused to obey him, however, Butler was enraged by this reduction to the “subservient chief of a nigger police force.” According to Renda, both comments reflected Butler’s paternalistic outlook.While Renda clearly exposes the breadth and depth of paternalism, she is not entirely persuasive in her case for paternalism as the dominant discourse. In the 1930s, Butler confessed that he had raped a half dozen Caribbean republics on behalf of Wall Street. To prove her case about the primacy of paternalism, Renda must either disprove the legitimacy of Butler’s denunciation of Wall Street or else ignore it. She chose to do the latter, unfortunately.Equally unpersuasive is Renda’s argument that “the occupation, in turn, enabled the deployment of a cultural line of defense against domestic black and feminist challenges to the status quo” (p. 305). To accept this thesis, one must concur that Haiti’s impact on American culture was more significant than that of the Philippines, Nicaragua, Panama, and other imperial adventures. We should waste little effort trying to assess the relative importance of these occupations, for they all certainly contributed to the formation of a new American empire, politically, economically, and culturally.So what did that marine think of himself as he pulled that trigger? Renda does not provide a neat answer to that question, but Taking Haiti has already received three prestigious awards, including the 2002 Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. Despite a tendency to exaggerate her conclusions, Renda’s cultural history of the American occupation of Haiti is a welcome, important, and controversial contribution to the literature, the product of impressive work in search of new answers to old questions.
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Jul 30, 2008
Helen Emmott 
Open Access