22 Aug Desperation

It has been four weeks since i first stepped foot into the Archives downtown Washington, DC. It has not been as fruitful as i would have liked. I have spent countless hours (six days a week – eight to twelve hours a day) pouring over military documents from the Occupation 1915-1934. I’ve read daily logs, weekly reports, monthly intelligence and operations reports, monographs, bulletins, correspondence between the Brigade Command and USMC Headquarters, JAG files, inquiry findings, and random bits of paper that have been stuck in between. I’ve pulled more than 100 boxes of files, have fiddled with photos, and scanned through treaties and agreements. I even got desperate enough one day to thumb through a badly organized index (of thousands of index cards, all hand written, one-by-one – see photo) of Federal Agencies in the hopes of finding even the tiniest clue. I have emailed several professors, authors and even an NGO, seeking guidance (turns out nobody who has written about this time has actually used original archival sources). I have taken thousands of scans and nearly 300 pages of notes. I have traveled between downtown DC and Silver Springs, MD and College Park, MD. I have taken cabs, subways, buses and done and awful lot of walking. And today, with my most recent visit to Silver Springs Otis Archives, i finally hit gold. Not there, mind you… they’re all in Bethesda at the US National Library of Medicine. All thanks to the tireless efforts of Eric Boyle, quite possibly the nicest archival researcher i’ve talked to yet.

There they are – the reports and files i’ve been looking for – just a Metro ride away in Bethesda. I don’t know how i missed them. I do know how i missed them – they are not cataloged in the NARA catalog – the Library has its own catalog system that has not been melded with the NARA database. I’m running out of time. I only have a few days left here and am frantically trying to figure out how to get in to the Library to do the research…

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how i can turn this into a learning moment. But i can’t. I’ve asked all the right people (with varying degrees of success), i’ve scoured internet resources, i’ve picked through indexes… Mostly, it now comes down to a lack of funding and time. It’s unfortunate. I’m deeply married to this project. I think the only lesson i can glean from this is that one should always plan to spend months (not just five weeks) in the archives to find the gems. Unfortunately, the limitations of being an un-funded graduate student have really made themselves known to me this go ’round.

And this is not a complaint – i’ve had a blast digging through old files. I can honestly say that i’ve learned more about the occupation through reading these reports and files than i ever have from reading books on the subject. I have a very different view of the occupation than i expected to. I have learned two incredible lessons, separate from my actual research, about the continued construction of Myths – myths that get repeated and retold and embellished. And the second is that it is only too easy to assume that there is a single (hegemonic – did i?) frame of thinking about any given moment in time, particularly where the military is concerned. But i have read such varying reports on the “nature” of Haitians at that time from Generals and Colonels. It’s been, actually, a bit uplifting to find that the entire occupying force was not of a single mind.

I have a new found respect for the importance of original research. I wouldn’t have it any other way.