"IMPERIALISM REVISED: MILITARY, SOCIETY, AND U.S. OCCUPATION IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1880-1924" By Ellen Davies Tillman DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Nils P. Jacobsen, Chair Professor Kristin Lee Hoganson Professor Emeritus John A Lynn Associate Professor Michel Gobat, University of Iowa ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the historical implications of World-War-One-Era armed occupations through a study of the U.S.-created constabulary in the Dominican Republic during the military occupation of 1916-1924, and a contextualization of those years in the wider context of Dominican history. Through this historically under-studied case, I demonstrate the negotiations and compromise that, over the course of a long occupation, both revised the approaches of U.S. occupying forces and changed occupied society--fundamentally reshaping Dominican social class and regional power relationships through the military, unifying a heavily regional society, and polarizing society between military and civilian. The occupation took place during a time of rapid modernization in the Dominican Republic and drastically changing U.S. foreign policy methods, opening the way for its events and character to play a central role in the development of both. This study combines an analysis of U.S. and Dominican government and popular sources, including international communications, military records and newspapers from both countries, and private letters, to demonstrate the complex dialogue through which the new Dominican military and political system came into being. This dissertation takes back to its origin the question of what happens in U.S. military occupations meant to export democracy, examining the interplay and give and take between the occupied and occupiers, and the ways in which the end results were an evolution of something new, built of compromise. The society and military that emerged on the other side of the occupation was the result of a creative and ever- evolving dialogue between opposing forces, an evolution that led to a product distant from the plans of occupiers, but also distant from the plans of resisters, one that fundamentally reshaped Dominican power relationships and societal structure by the occupation's end. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am greatly indebted to the following for their help through the years of research that brought this work together, and would like to extend my appreciation here: To my main advising committee at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Dr. Nils P. Jacobsen, Dr. Kristin Hoganson, and Dr. John Lynn, without whom I would have been quite lost, and to Dr. Michel Gobat of the University of Iowa. I would also like to thank Marcelo Bucheli and Jose Cheibub for your advice and guidance, which helped me to locate my study in the international economy and politics of the time. I offer special thanks to my other long-term advisors for all their help over the years, Dr. Joseph Love of University of Illinois and Dr. Kevin C. Murphy of the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia; my work is very much a product of the counsel and wisdom of those outside of my committee who guided me along the way and opened my eyes to new ways of envisioning history. My thanks, too, to Dr. Bruce Calder of the University of Illinois-Chicago for his advice during my research. For monetary support for my dissertation I am indebted primarily to the History Department at the University of Illinois for internal funding, and to the University of Illinois Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies—who funded my pre-dissertation research through a grant in summer of 2006—as well as the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) at University of Illinois. For other monetary help along the way, aid that helped me travel and present my research, my thanks to the United States Commission on Military History (USCMH), the International Commission on Military History (ICMH), and Michael Gray. For lodging during my studies, I extend my thanks to Lucina de la Cruz and her family for their gracious hospitality and friendship, and to Teresa Gray (TAG) and her daughters for keeping me while I was researching at Quantico in 2009. For their general support, advice, and availability ii through the years of my research, I would also like to thank Luis B. Peralta and his family, Lic. Eligio Serrano García (Gabriel), Dr. Charles Neimeyer and the staff at the Quantico USMC Historical Division and the Marine Corps archives and special collections, Dr. Christine Kern, the staff at the Biblioteca Pública de Santiago, the staff of the Archivo General de la Nación in Santo Domingo, and the archivists at NARA in College Park Maryland, all of whom were more than willing to go out of the way to help out. Finally, my extensive appreciation always to Kitty and Joseph Davies, for making it possible, and to Jasmine and Ticonderoga for putting up with it for so long. A note about sources: Recent organization and extensive digitalization of the Dominican Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) under Director Roberto Cassá has greatly facilitated research there and led to better preservation and clearer classification of documents. My research began before these changes, however, and took place over the years of transition in the archives. For that reason, I have marked the original citations from the AGN as "AGN1," and the citations from the new system as "AGN." iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Seeking Modernity: Between Regional Military Tradition and the Search for a New Republic ....................................................................................... 34 Chapter Two: Sovereignty in the Caribbean at the Height of U.S. expansionism: Intervention and Military Deterioration ................................................................... 79 Chapter Three: Threads of Power, Fraying Ends: The Occupation Constabulary, 1916-1918 ............................................................................................................... 132 Chapter Four: The Osmosis of Tradition: Regional Negotiation ....................................... 189 Chapter Five: Foundational Elements of Resistance: The Constabulary Across Regions, 1918-1920................................................................................................. 229 Chapter Six: Opposing Networks for Change: Consolidating Reform and Resistance, 1920-1922 ............................................................................................................... 293 Chapter Seven: Products of Compromise: Legitimating State and Military, 1922-1924 ............................................................................................................... 351 Conclusion: The Constabulary under Dominican Government: Legitimacy, Revision, and the Tools of Dictatorship ................................................................................. 406 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 432 iv INTRODUCTION This dissertation examines inter-Caribbean relations and Latin American state-building in the early twentieth century through a case study of the international and domestic negotiations that shaped Dominican society and politics before and during U.S. occupation (1916-1924). I examine Dominican political culture, military institutions, and U.S.-Dominican relations from 1880-1924, and the U.S. creation of a new Dominican military under Marine forces of occupation from 1916. My research demonstrates that early U.S. attempts to build Dollar Diplomacy and to export democracy inadvertently sparked changes in society that led to an especially powerful and long-lived military dictatorship in the post-occupation Dominican Republic. In creating this new military, U.S. occupation planners carried out an "experiment" expected to control and reshape Dominican society and provide a model for U.S. military interventions elsewhere. The majority of Dominicans fought to reject the experiment. The end result was a dialogue between the theoretical expectations of an occupying force and the creative negotiation of an occupied people who largely rejected U.S. impositions. This set of international relations was central to the diplomatic and military histories of both countries. On the U.S. side, it was one of the core interventions characterizing and defining U.S. diplomacy of the period, a key experiment in the policy of exporting democracy through military intervention. On the Dominican side, the major focus of this study, it completely shifted the balance of power among classes and--through infrastructural developments and military imposition and resistance- -united previously regional power bases. Dominican society was drastically changed because of negotiations between U.S. impositions and Dominican reactions against them. The country's diverse regions were unified physically through improved roads and communications, and 1 ideologically through the growing unification of anti-occupation sentiment and action. Analyzing these changes, my dissertation shows how negotiation to end the occupation allowed the hated, U.S.-supported military