Pursuing a “historical ontology,” then, demands something that philosophical study of ontology tout court might pursue but more often does not: identification of mutating assignments of essence and its predicates in specific time and place. On the face of it, the notion of essence implies stability and fixity, the enduring properties of people and things. But if there is anything we can learn from the colonial ontologies of racial kinds, it is that such “essences” were protean, not fixed, subject to reformulation again and again.

It is precisely this “reformulation” that i find intriguing in this story of the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. occupation. What could cause the RF to change a long-standing policy? I’ve hunted through State Department materials, military records, public health records – i’ve been to seven physical archives in five U.S. states and two countries, and i’ve scoured countless other online archives – all in search of the exchange of letters that lead to the RF health survey trip to Haiti in 1924. When i arrived at the Rockefeller Archive in Sleepy Hollow, NY, two weeks ago, i was elated and hopeful. However, every time i came close to finding the letters, there would sit a pink or brown cross-reference slip – refiled in someone else’s correspondence file, or with State Department records. I cross checked, pulling box after box, going through, page by page, hundreds upon hundreds of pages of (the most dull.dull.dull) correspondence – all for naught. That first successful exchange is missing.

But this is part of why the story of Haiti and the U.S. interventions is so intriguing. This is what has kept me traipsing across continents for the past 18 months, as i furiously dig around in archives. This story, the one of the Amazing Work of the US Occupying Forces for Public Health in Haiti, the trail of it doesn’t exist. I’ve emailed other authors who have written extensively about it, asking for guidance to the archives they used – and they haven’t. They haven’t used archival material, i mean, not that they haven’t helped. They have relied heavily on secondary sources, including the Naval Bulletin. I have enlisted the help of countless archival librarians (and a hearty thanks to the men [all men] who have found my hunt intriguing and have spent the extra hours with me, pouring over old index catalogs, trying to find the moment that things may have been misfiled sometime in an analog past). I have sat, bleary-eyed, in front of reels-readers. And i’m still curious. Still searching.

In Heiser’s oral history, housed at the Rockefeller Archive, the interviewer asks him about the U.S. Navy’s attempts to build a public health system in Haiti. He refuses to talk about it. Victor G. Heiser is, to anyone who studies U.S. health imperialism, a well-known figure. He is not a man of few words. He is verbose and eloquent, judgmental and quick to elaborate. His diaries of his journeys are filled with the most minute detail, wonderfully woven stories in and of themselves. He was, by any reading of him, quite pleased with himself and the work he did. He was called upon by Hoover to participate in the Forbes Commission in 1930 – a study of the conditions of the U.S. occupation in Haiti that followed the Senate Hearings of the same. In his own words (spoken in 1970), the fervor of protest against the occupation was actually stronger than what he had witnessed of the protest against the Vietnam War. While many may suspect this a far stretch of a comparison, what it does speak to is his own investment in the project, more generally. And yet, when pressed for details, he quickly dismisses the interviewer, saying that the military had done a great job.

Other materials in the Rockefeller archive, however, say differently. In fact, the correspondence flying between Wickliffe Rose and his officers in Haiti during the 1924 investigations into health, note a rather shoddy job of the Navy in all matters relating to health. The initial health survey conducted by the Navy is paltry. The programs put in place are pale attempts at appearing care-ful. What few clinics and dispensaries have been set up are poorly stocked and more poorly managed. There’s a general sense of exasperation in the communications (what few i could find) about the general state of health services. But, the investigators are quick to point out, this really is the fault of the system in place. The U.S. refused to invest money in the system, drawing, instead, upon the monies collected in taxes, hence, the $7,500 budget. Among the letters (prior to the finally successful one in December 1922) are several requests simply for money to help build the health system. There is exasperation on the part of the first letter-writers, too. Their hands were tied and they were desperate to truly help.

And so i’ve come home and begun a new campaign of contacting other archives that house some bits and pieces of other people’s materials.Victor G. Heiser’s  papers are held by the Philosophical Society in Pittsburgh. General Gorgas’ (yes, he also worked with the RF on health matters!) papers are at the University of Alabama. The Forbes Commission papers are housed in the Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa. And i keep hoping and digging and foraging for those missing bits and pieces – all in the search for that single moment when something changed big.