In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the American occupation of Haiti in 1915, and of the Dominican Republic the following year, in works by Hans Schmidt and Bruce Calder. Spector complements Schmidt’s fine study of the Haitian occupation of 1915-1934 with this assessment of the special commission that President Hoover dispatched to Haiti after the embarrassing riots of 1929.
Actually, there were two commissions sent to Haiti—one white, one black. W. Cameron Forbes headed the white delegation. Forbes was a capable bureaucrat of the early twentieth-century imperial order. He had acquitted himself well in the Philippines, becoming governor just in time to suffer dismissal in the after- math of Wilson’s victory in 1912 and Secretary of State Bryan’s controversial purges that followed. Forbes never forgave Wilson who initiated the occupation, and he went to Haiti with decidedly ambivalent feelings. Forbes was a political victim of the occupation’s creators, and had little inclination to validate it. At the same time, however, he was a presidential appointee and could not afford to disavow the accomplishments of the occupation to a generation desperate to find some good in American works in the tropics yet determined to get out. The second commission was headed by the president of Tuskegee Institute, Robert Russa Mouton. It focused on the occupation’s educational mission, the Service Technique, which emphasized vocational and industrial education and, predictably, drew the wrath of Haiti’s mulatto elite.
Spector is weakest in his coverage of the occupation itself, and the general reader will find only the bare essentials of America’s longest tutelage of a Caribbean society. Where Spector strays from the very narrow focus of his study, he displays an unfamiliarity with the most recent scholarship on the occupation, and he occasionally lapses into superfluous commentary on “moralism” and “realism” in American foreign policy. This book provides a competent technical account of the last years of the Haitian occupation but fails to enlighten us on that dreary episode of American empire. It is a classic example of a historian trying to make a book out of two or three good articles. Students will still want to consult Munro’s article on Haitianization (which appeared in HAHR, Vol. 49:11-26).
