In Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915 – 1940, Mary A. Renda argues, “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. The transformations of imperialism were also effected in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, the Philippines, and dozens of other places around the globe…Taken together, they formed a solid overseas foundation for new cultural departures in the United States. Each intervention also had its own particular character and thus contributed uniquely to the remaking of U.S. America” (pg. 12). Renda continues, “Paternalist discourse was one of the primary cultural mechanisms by which the occupation conscripted men into the project of carrying out U.S. rule. The traces of paternalism can be found in evidence left by marines of varied ranks and experiences” (pg. 13). Finally, Renda argues, “Paternalism did not mitigate against violence, but rather reinforced and extended it” (pg. 35). Renda defines culture as “the process of signification through which people – consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally – structure both social relationships and the material world” (pg. 24). Renda draws upon the work of George Chauncey, Glenda Gilmore, and Foucault.
Renda writes, “The U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 was not a single conflict between two monolithic and singularly unified bodies; it was a struggle for identity and power waged in so many local instances, framed by a number of systemic factors, official acts, formal relationships, and informal structures” (pg. 86). Discussing paternalism, Renda writes, “Paternalist discourse appealed to marines as masters and managers; it addressed them in terms of their masculinity and manhood, their relation to fatherhood, their racial identity, their class aspirations, and their national pride. The success of this process of cultural conscription can be seen in the ways that marines observed Haitians and Haitian society within the framework of the dominant paternalist rhetoric. Paternalism was, then, an important part of the indoctrination of marines in Haiti” (pg. 123). She continues, “Paternalism enabled both Smedley Butler and Woodrow Wilson to blur the differences between America and Haiti, indeed between America and the Americas, at one moment, and then to reinforce those differences at another” (pg. 124). Renda further writes, “Marines were shaped by the racism of their particular regional, class, and cultural contexts as well as by the racism of the Marine Corps itself. They necessarily brought racist constructs and dispositions with them to Haiti, but American men did not simply export domestic racism” (pg. 180).
Renda writes, “By 1918 and 1919 a rising militancy growing out of African Americans’ experience with the war in Europe, and sparked by the violence that met black soldiers upon their return to the States, occasioned a shift in African Americans’ perspective on Haiti” (pg. 186). She bases this argument on various literary, theatrical, and film works. Additionally, looking to economics, Renda writes, “As economic change challenged long-held conceptions of manliness and individuality by subordinating men to machines, and as world war challenged national pieties about civilization and progress, whites looked to racial others in new ways – as sources of liberation” (pg. 206). Renda continues, “Haiti’s appeal, for those who would applaud its revolutionary history, as for those who would render revolutionary heroes as monsters and zombie masters, rested, at least in part, on the resources it made available for negotiating the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Contests for meaning waged in Haiti’s name, moreover, would continue beyond the final withdrawal of the Marines in August 1934” (pg. 228).
Renda concludes, “If, as I have argued here, racial and gender hierarchies enabled U.S. actions in Haiti, the occupation, in turn, enabled the deployment of a cultural line of defense against domestic black and feminist challenges to the status quo. By explicitly linking race and gender hierarchies in fiction, film, travel narratives, and the like, imperialist discourses surrounding the occupation intervened in domestic cultural and political struggles” (pg. 305). ( )