Earlier Intervention Holds Lessons for U.S. in Haiti : Occupation: Public improvements didn’t last. Ill will created by racism then could snarl relations now.

With their flags rippling and Springfield rifles held high, 330 Marines and sailors splashed through the tepid surf near Port-au-Prince on a mission to save Haiti from the Haitians.

It was 1915, and the country’s ruler had been dismembered by a mob in a burst of anarchy that President Woodrow Wilson considered a threat to America’s sea lanes and investors. Wilson declared the turmoil “a public nuisance on our doorstep,” and called for a swift restoration of order.

Nineteen years later, the American diplomats and dogfaces were still there. And they had met with disagreeable surprises: sullen resistance from the political class; angry divisions among Haitians, and sporadic rebellion that ultimately made the occupation an embarrassment in the eyes of many at home and abroad.

When it was all over, the Americans’ proud improvements--from government offices to bridges, hospitals, sewers and roads--were quickly lost to neglect and advancing tropical undergrowth.

That occupation differs in its motive and execution from the one begun last week to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But as newly deployed U.S. troops contemplate their still hazily defined mission, the episode offers a cautionary lesson of the difficulties of one country imposing its will on a land so troubled, so poor and--quite simply--so different.

The history points up the risks Americans face as they try to pacify a country that has been riven for two centuries by factional fighting and where American intentions are viewed with suspicion--even, it is increasingly clear, by Aristide himself. And in its outcome, the first occupation raises questions of the lasting value of the current mission, in which the United States has already committed nearly $1 billion.

As they have recently found in places like Rwanda, Somalia and Iraq, American forces must find their way through the deep-dyed loyalties, long hatreds and inexplicable twists of local history to carry out their mission.

To outsiders, Haiti’s history is as impenetrable as any. The nation was born violently in the struggle of African slaves to throw off their colonial French masters; the two centuries since have seen a rarely interrupted clash of the tiny mixed-race upper class and their military retainers with the impoverished remainder of the population.

And the occupiers’ efforts to deal with the situation may be further snarled by poisonous memories of the bitter encounter of the 1920s when the Americans--whose country was then gripped in a period of fevered racism--considered Haitians little more than animals and never hesitated to say so.

One of President Clinton’s allies, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), cited history’s lesson last week as he delivered his own negative judgment on the prospect of an invasion. “When we were there last time, Woodrow Wilson got us in and Franklin Roosevelt got us out,” Moynihan said. “Nineteen years.”

America’s first intervention came at a time when Caribbean incursions by the United States were regular and rarely accompanied by public debate or even much notice. In Haiti’s case, it seemed to Wilson there was more than sufficient justification for military action, on grounds of military security and economic interests.

The Germans, one year into war in Europe, seemed about to strike a deal to build a naval base in Haiti that could directly threaten the American lifeline through the Panama Canal. And the latest sudden change in government--the 102nd in 75 years--raised Wilson’s fears that Haiti’s debts would go unpaid and that some European power might step in to collect them.

Vilbron Guillaume Sam, the latest Haitian military chieftain, had killed 165 political opponents before he was seized from the French Legation and torn limb from limb by the mob. The American charge d’affaires witnessed a man parading by with Sam’s severed thumb in his mouth as a fevered procession bore Sam’s remains through the capital.

The Marine landing subsequently ordered by Wilson was accompanied by only two American casualties--both, it was later concluded, from self-inflicted wounds. There were few Haitian casualties and initial resistance by guerrilla bands in the mountains was snuffed out within six months.

As today, many average Haitians welcomed the incursion.

But for many, those feelings didn’t last.

The Haitian National Assembly soon proved stubbornly resistant to U.S. demands, refusing to ratify a new, American-written constitution that would have validated the occupation and permitted American ownership of property. So the Americans took another route: They pressured their newly installed Haitian president to sign an order dissolving the legislature, then had Marine Lt. Col. Smedley D. Butler read the proclamation in a public square.

Rather than risk the election of a new legislature that might also prove too independent, they organized a plebiscite to ratify the creation of a new governing body. Only about 5% of the Haitians showed up to cast ballots beneath the stony gaze of Marine guards; perhaps not surprisingly, they voted overwhelmingly for the American-sponsored proposal.

Fearing results they might not like, the Americans didn’t allow national elections until 1930. And they invalidated the results of local elections that were not to their liking.

Martial law, imposed with the invasion, was maintained for a decade. The Americans censored the press and jailed editors who broke the rules; they forced Haitians to accept a bilateral treaty that empowered Americans to collect taxes, pay debts and oversee local governments.

Marine officers were appointed to supervise government in local districts.

All this helped to quickly crystallize the discontent of the French-speaking, mixed-race ruling class, which represented about 5% of Haitians. That resentment was only reinforced by the personal treatment they got from Americans who considered them a lower order than the ruling classes of the Spanish-speaking territories they occupied in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The Americans wouldn’t mix socially with them, and even in public statements referred to them in the most contemptuous terms. Adm. William Caperton, the naval commander in Haiti when the 1915 crisis began, described President Sam as “a very gorgeous black gentleman, arrayed like a head bellhop at the Waldorf.”

“These are a proud people, and they resented it very much,” said Richard A. Best, a defense analyst at the Congressional Research Service.

The Americans--including Wilson, the famous evangelist for democracy--never believed the Haitians capable of self-government and made no effort to build U.S.-style democratic institutions in the country.

But the Americans did make a considerable effort to maintain order.

From 1918 to 1920, the Marine Brigade and the local constabulary they had organized, the Gendarmerie d’Haiti, fought throughout the countryside to subdue cacos , guerrilla bands that took refuge in the mountains. (Cacos is variously translated as a predatory bird or angry red ant.)

The Americans were largely successful in the campaign, which cost the lives of 15 Marines and an estimated 2,000 cacos.

But it required that the Marines--who never numbered more than about 2,500--maintain regular patrols, pay bounties for weapons and sometimes eliminate rebel leaders.

One spur to popular discontent was a system of forced labor, the corvee, under which Haitians were pressed into service for several days shoveling earth and cracking boulders to build 800 miles of unpaved roads. The system, transplanted from France, was based on a notion that even citizens too poor to pay taxes owed some contribution to the state.

The corvee camps initially had some popularity with some rural Haitians because workers were fed, sheltered and even entertained, wrote Robert and Nancy Heinl in their 1978 Haitian history, “Written in Blood.” But that attitude faded, particularly as some better-educated city dwellers were caught in the corvee’s net.

Soon it had become a source of widespread resentment and the basis of a popular conception that “the whites are come hither to restore slavery; the corvee is only the beginning,” according to the Heinls’ book.

When the outside world saw pictures of rope-bound road gangs, there was an outcry against this seeming restoration of slavery in the onetime French slave colony. But by the time corvee was abolished by the Marine command in 1918, it was too late to erase its popular significance.

Still, like most U.S. interventions of the time, the Marines’ actions in Haiti drew little public notice in the United States. One exception was in 1922, when charges of American atrocities in the campaign to put down the cacos led Congress to hold hearings.

In a committee report, Congress concluded that most abuses had occurred in the battle to put down the insurrection. But it acknowledged that there were at least 10 illegal executions by Americans.

A second round of hearings came after 1929 riots, led by student demonstrators, in the provincial city of Les Cayes. The beginning of the Great Depression had driven down prices for Haitian coffee and other farm products, causing hardship and raising complaints about the stewardship of a government that included no real Haitian voice.

Twelve Haitians died in the disorder, hastening a shift in U.S. public opinion that, amid deepening domestic problems, was already turning against such foreign commitments. On a presidential commission’s advice, the Herbert Hoover Administration took halfway steps to greater home rule; some Haitians were added to the government.

Even so, the Hoover Administration found it difficult to fully withdraw because of concern that the country would not remain stable and solvent.

Not until 1934 did Americans finally leave Haiti--and even then, they left behind a financial monitor to ensure that the debt payments would continue.

By some measures, the occupation had benefited Haitians. Haiti was financially stable, foreign debts were paid, political violence was largely contained and Haitians were more secure than before.

By all accounts, the Haitians’ treasury was not plundered by its American stewards. The Americans had help set up a Haitian-funded health service of 153 rural clinics and 11 hospitals, supervised by Navy doctors.

Yet with the Americans’ departure, the fruits of this labor fell into immediate disuse.

Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador in Latin America, believes most comparisons of the two occupations are misleading, because the current mission has the support of most Haitians.

Even so, he acknowledges that such an undertaking is likely to meet serious obstacles. “Any time you have a military and an elite that regard democracy as a threat, there will be grave difficulties.”

And, as in earlier decades, there is a risk that the Americans will alienate the Haitian leadership, even as they try to bring democracy. While the Clinton Administration has pledged to strictly limit the American role, “when you come in like this, it is almost guaranteed that you won’t be loved,” said Gaddis Smith, professor of diplomatic history at Yale University.

With Washington’s agreement with the Haitian junta, the U.S. military seems to face a declining risk of having to fight organized guerrilla warfare from the mountains. But, as occurred with the Marines in the Les Cayes riot of 1929, they could find themselves in the midst of bloody civil clashes.

This already happened last Tuesday, when Aristide supporters battled the Haitian military in Port-au-Prince as U.S. troops watched. It happened again over the weekend in Cap Haitien, where U.S. Marines got into a gun battle in which 10 Haitians were killed; emboldened by the Saturday firefight, thousands of Haitians on Sunday ransacked police facilities in the city.

U.S. military officials have acknowledged that being forced to disentangle combatants is one of the roles they fear most.

As in the earlier occupation, the United States may find it takes far longer than Washington had hoped for Haiti to reach a point when outside forces can leave without the risk of a reversion to the old ways.

“When you get involved like this, there’s simply no guarantee that you’ll be able to leave when you want to,” said Hugh DeSantis, a defense specialist at the National War College. “The bottom line is, there’s no guarantee that because you have democratic ideals, the people you support are going to put them into practice.”