The American Withdrawal from Haiti, 1929-1934
FOR OVER SIXTY YEARS the protectorate policy in the Caribbean which the United States undertook during the generation after the Spanish American War has been under heavy fire from critics both at home and abroad. While historians have studied the rise of this policy in some detail many details of its decline and abandonment are still only lightly sketched. Since so much of the controversy about Caribbean policy has centered on questions of motive, the attitudes and opinions of participants have a valid claim to attention. This essay will describe the last years of the American protectorate over Haiti, as seen from the vantage point of the United States legation in Port au Prince.' After 1920 the United States tried to reduce its interference in the internal affairs of the Caribbean republics. The officers who dealt with Latin American matters at Washington still hoped for the development of stable republican institutions in the Caribbean, but they realized that the effort to impose peace and progress by force had been unprofitable. At best the interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic had only partly achieved their objectives, and they had aroused hostile criticism which was politically embarrassing at home and harmful to our relations with the other American republics. Just before the end of the Wilson administration the State Department began to consider how the marines might be withdrawn.