08 Aug Experiments, or how the US learned to Develop

I’ve come to this project with a sense that the Occupation in haiti was really an experiment, a kind of testing ground for what would be the future of Big D Development, as we know it. Today, while reading through JAG files, i found this lovely statement that was an Exhibit (1) in the court record:

The Military Representative of the United States in Haiti in 1917 made the following statement in a Memorandum entitled “Relations Between Treaty Officials of the Haitian Government”:

“The United States is carrying on in Haiti a great experiement, the success of which is a matter of national importance to the United States and, as far as the Naval Service is concerned, of service pride. It is, of course, a further matter of doing the greatest possible work for Haiti. Nothing avoidable should be allowed to stand in teh way of complete success. The thing that will make for success in a higher degree than anything else is complete harmony and team work between all Americans who are in any way connected with the experiment. On the other hand, no worse thing could happen than to have the Haitians get the idea that there is any lack of complete harmony among Americans who are officially there.”

I guess it doesn’t matter how the Haitians actually feel about any of the Occupation, in general… thanks, Haiti, for being a US petri dish…

On that note, thank goodness for the declassification of JAG files. I found, tucked in as evidence for the trial, daily log reports for July 1915 – September 1920, along with correspondence, etc. These were not actually in with the other logs and reports. I don’t know if they were never declassified or if they were simply lost, but, after two 30 minute sessions of going through the Research Guides, one-by-one, i have yet to find the original documents. Lesson learned? Don’t give up on missing documents, something might be tucked in somewhere else.

Also, today’s post was brought to you by De La Soul (yes, this is what i’m listening to as i scan documents and run OCR Text Recognition on my scans):