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US Missionaries and the US Occupation of Haiti

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US Missionaries and the US Occupation of Haiti DAVIS, CHRISTOPHER W., Ph.D. Cross Purposes: U.S. Missionaries and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti. (2019) Directed by Dr. Mark Elliott. 252 pp. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the previously understudied role of U.S. missionaries in the intervention and occupation of the Republic of Haiti by the United States from 1915 to 1934. The prior historiography for the U.S. occupation of Haiti has focused on the Wilson administration in its decision to intervene in the beleaguered Caribbean republic, as well as how the subsequent occupation created animosity toward U.S. control after it diminished native sovereignty and reportedly committed abuses against the Haitian population. Important to our understanding of those events is the 1921 U.S. Senate hearings investigating the rationale given for U.S. intervention in Haiti and reports of misconduct by U.S. soldiers against the Haitians. However, how U.S. Protestant missionaries in Haiti influenced and impacted these hearings, and the occupation overall, has not been studied up to this point. This study demonstrates that U.S. Protestant missionaries working in Haiti first appealed to the U.S. government to assist an increasingly unstable Haiti, and later became outspoken opponents to the U.S. occupation once they concluded it was increasing the suffering of the Haitian people. These missionaries are shown to have influenced both political decision-making regarding U.S. policy towards Haiti and U.S. public opinion regarding the occupation. This study focuses on two U.S. missionaries who were shown in U.S. government documents, NAACP articles, and U.S. newspaper reports to be the most active in trying to first reform, then encourage the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Haiti: L. Ton Evans from the American Baptist denomination and S.E. Churchstone Lord of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Whereas Evans’s activities focused on bringing political attention to the abuses of the Haitians by the occupying forces, first to the Wilson administration and then to Wilson’s Republican opponents, Lord focused his efforts on informing the NAACP and the African American community of these abuses. Both missionaries are shown to have influenced the U.S. press in shifting public opinion of the occupation from supportive to critical. Their actions resulted in the U.S. government under the Harding administration curtailing abuses against the Haitian people and diminishing political and public support for the occupation until its end in 1934. This adds greater complexity to the existing historiography of both U.S./Wilsonian policy towards the Caribbean and Latin American in the early twentieth century, which has traditionally viewed U.S. missionaries there at that time as agents of U.S. imperialism. A brief comparison with the parallel U.S. occupations of the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua during that same period also reveals that this role of U.S. Protestant missionaries challenging their home government’s occupational policy in the region was unique to Haiti. CROSS PURPOSES: U.S. MISSIONARIES AND THE U.S. OCCUPATION OF HAITI by Christopher W. Davis A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2019 Approved by Committee Chair © 2019 Christopher W. Davis APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Christopher W. Davis has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Mark E. Elliott Committee Members W. Greg O’Brien Linda M. Rupert Peter B. Villella ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………1 II. AMERICA’S DIVIDED OPINION OF HAITI: ABOLITIONISTS, ANTI-ABOLITIONISTS, AND MISSIONARIES PRIOR TO THE U.S. CIVILWAR….………………………………………………....24 III. THE ROAD TO JULY 1915: HOW AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICAL, AND MISSIONARY INTERESTS IN HAITI CONVERGED TOWARD INTERVENTION……….…………….….......64 IV. WARS OF THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH: U.S. MISSIONARIES AND THE U.S. INVASION OF HAITI..……............100 V. BUYERS’ REMORSE: U.S. MISSIONARY RESISTANCE TO THE OCCUPATION……………….…………….…………….…....139 VI. SPREADING THE (NOT SO) GOOD NEWS: U.S. MISSIONARY RESISTANCE AND THE U.S. PRESS REACTION…………………………………………...…….………….....197 VII. CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………….….225 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………….…240 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION On July 28, 1915, the U.S.S. Washington, under the command of Admiral William Caperton, sailed into the bay outside of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Under orders from U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, 330 American Marines disembarked from the Washington and swiftly took control of the Haitian Government, meeting almost no resistance in the process. Shortly after taking control of the Republic of Haiti, the United States began a military occupation of that nation which continued for 19 years. What prompted the United States to engage in and maintain military action in Haiti from 1915 to 1934 is a complex story with multiple individuals, groups, and organizations contributing to these events. This study explores the role of individuals within a particular group of Americans whose influence on, and interaction with, U.S. foreign policy in the early twentieth century has seldom been explored in general and barely at all in regard to Haiti. The invasion and subsequent occupation are thus far only understood via political and economic lenses, and therefore the main actors through which this story has traditionally been told are either U.S. politicians or businessmen. Therefore, the intervention itself has been explored largely within the limited scope of strategic or economic gain for the United States, with religious, moral, and humanitarian motivations 1 only having been explored regarding the person of Woodrow Wilson. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the significant and thus far understudied role of religious, non- state actors on the U.S. occupation of Haiti. The title “cross purposes” signifies the two stages in which U.S. Protestant missionary involvement in the intervention and occupation of Haiti interacted with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s leadership in those events. The “cross purposes” of the intervention stage speaks of how both the Protestant missionaries and President Wilson viewed themselves as agents of Christian principles to bring order and prosperity to Haiti. Wilsonian biographer, Arthur S. Link, describes Wilson and his first Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, as being motivated in Haiti and elsewhere in the U.S. sphere of influence to advance the cause of international peace through the principles of democracy and Protestant Christianity.1 At this stage, Wilson saw himself as a kind of missionary, which initially gave U.S. missionaries to Haiti confidence that their goals for the Haitian people were well aligned with that of the U.S government. As the intervention stage gave way to the occupation, however, U.S. missionaries and the Wilson administration found themselves at a different kind of “cross purposes”. By 1918, U.S. missionaries to Haiti became painfully aware that their goals for Haiti, and that of the U.S. government and military, were not in alignment after all. The evidence for U.S. Protestant missionaries having had a significant role in shaping and ending the U.S. occupation of Haiti is found in this divergence. This study 1 Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1954), 82. 2 shows that, initially, U.S. Protestant missionaries in Haiti were optimistic, either whole- heartedly or cautiously so, of Wilson’s intentions to militarily intervene in Haiti. This is consistent with Richard Gamble’s analysis of Progressive Protestant Christianity in the pre-WWI United States, in which many U.S. Protestants felt the election of Wilson in 1913 had given them a political ally in promoting a social gospel of bringing peace and order to the world.2 While there seemed to be reason for U.S. missionaries in Haiti to be hopeful for Wilson’s internationalist philosophy, there were significant differences between Wilson the missionary and the actual missionaries on the ground. Link described Wilson and Bryan’s foreign policy between 1913 and 1914 as “missionary diplomacy” yet clarifies this as not referring to the protection of U.S. missionaries and churches abroad but rather to advance democracy and international peace.3 Wilson and Bryan are thus portrayed as missionaries of democracy, and therefore interventions in places like Haiti could be, and were in their minds, justified as they believed it was the mission of the United States to bring democracy to those they viewed as incapable of bringing it to themselves.4 Though Wilson is not the focus of this study, how U.S missionaries in Haiti reacted and eventually challenged his belief that the United States was justified to intervene, militarily if necessary, to achieve ordered and stable democracy in the neighboring republic is. Gamble and Link both describe Woodrow Wilson as a leader 2 Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), 98. 3 Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 82. 4 Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 278. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 94. 3 whose religious ideology motivated his decisions on foreign policy, however, John Cooper’s comparative biography of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson describes Wilson as more nuanced in this regard. Cooper describes Wilson as a devout Protestant but, while holding strong views about personal and social morality, also demonstrated little patience for the “vice crusades” that were prevalent at the time.5 Without trying to measure Wilson’s religiosity, if indeed it is even possible to measure such, his justification for the invasion of Haiti found support among U.S.
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