Haiti declares war on Germany

On 12 July 1918 the Council of State of the Republic of Haiti, which at the time exercised legislative power, resolved at the government’s request that from that day a state of war existed between Haiti and the German Empire. President Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave approved the resolution, and the official gazette Le Moniteur published it on 13 July. More than a year after breaking off diplomatic relations with Berlin, the only French-speaking republic in the Americas became a belligerent. The declaration concerned Germany alone and made no mention of Austria-Hungary.

The same day the president addressed the nation in a proclamation whose text was later circulated by the Pan American Union. “In the mighty conflict that is drenching the whole world in blood, two principles are clashing,” he wrote. One was brute force, “implacable, heartless, deaf to the lofty ideals that are the honour and the reason for being of the community of nations”. The other was “Right, sacred Right”, the great moral achievement of humanity. “Small nations have only one strength in international life, Right, which is the guarantee of their existence,” Dartiguenave argued. Germany, “that mighty military power warring against nations”, had in his view risen against Right in open revolt, and so Haiti’s place was among the peoples fighting it, at the side of “our powerful and natural ally, the United States”.

A Council of State instead of a parliament

The resolution was not passed by an elected parliament, because Haiti had none at the time. Since 28 July 1915, when American marines landed at Port-au-Prince after President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was lynched, the country had been occupied by the United States. Dartiguenave, elected in August 1915 under American supervision, signed a treaty that gave them control of the customs, the finances and the gendarmerie. When in the spring of 1916 he came into conflict with the chambers, he dissolved the Senate and by a decree of 5 April 1916 created a Council of State whose members he appointed himself. The National Assembly elected in 1917 proved just as awkward. In May it refused to declare war on Germany, as the president had asked, and then would not adopt a new constitution drafted under American supervision. On 19 June 1917 Dartiguenave dissolved it, and the decree was carried out by the gendarmerie commanded by the marine officer Smedley Butler.

The constitution was therefore approved in a referendum on 12 June 1918, only a month before the declaration of war. According to the official results more than 98,000 people voted for it and only a few hundred against, but only a small fraction of the population went to the polls, and the American military authorities announced that anyone who publicly opposed the draft would be arrested. The new constitution for the first time since independence allowed foreigners to acquire real estate in Haiti. A separate article ratified and declared valid all acts of the United States government during the occupation. Another provision laid down that until a new parliament was elected, legislative power would be exercised by a Council of State of 21 members, formed on the basis of the 1916 decree. Elections were held only more than a decade later. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt boasted during the 1920 election campaign that he had written Haiti’s constitution himself, which historians regard as an exaggeration, although the draft was indeed produced in Washington.

The Council of State, appointed by the president, had no reason to refuse. On 15 July the Haitian minister in Washington, Solon Ménos, informed the State Department that the Council, “exercising legislative power under the constitution in force”, had declared a state of war with Germany from 12 July. The decision was, he said, a response to “the aggressive and insulting attitude of the Imperial German Government towards the Haitian people” and meant full support for the noble views that President Woodrow Wilson had set out in his “memorable speech of 4 July”, delivered at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s former estate. On 17 July the Acting Secretary of State, Frank Polk, replied that the government and people of the United States “are proud to see the flag of another American republic joined to the banners already raised in the common cause of the freedom of the world”.

France at heart, America at its back

The American historian Percy Alvin Martin, who in the 1920s described Latin America’s part in the war, observed that the official reason for the decision was Germany’s increasingly barbarous conduct of the war, and the real one probably Dartiguenave’s wish to align Haiti’s foreign policy with that of the United States. He admitted, however, that the Haitians also had reasons of their own. The country’s official language was French; the small but educated ruling class regarded France as the source of its culture, the clergy was largely recruited from Frenchmen, and wealthy families sent their sons to study in Paris. Several Haitians fought as volunteers in the French army. Haitian citizens died on the French ships Karnak and Montréal, sunk by German submarines, which provided the pretext for breaking off relations in 1917.

There was no sympathy for Germany on the island. The empire had several times settled its claims against Haiti with an ultimatum backed by a show of force. In 1897, over the merchant Emil Lüders, arrested in Port-au-Prince, two German training ships forced the Haitian government, under threat of bombardment, to pay compensation and apologise. According to Martin, in the decade before the war many Haitians sincerely believed that Berlin was only waiting for a pretext to intervene. At the same time the small German community, numbering about two hundred people around 1910, had an influence on the country’s economy out of all proportion to its size. Germans conducted a large share of foreign trade, owned the wharf and the tramway in the capital and public utilities in Cap-Haïtien, and their merchants lent money at high interest to rival factions, financing one revolution after another. Some married daughters of the most influential families and in this way got round the ban on foreigners owning land. Fear of German influence near the Panama Canal was one of Washington’s reasons for intervening in 1915.

Sequestration of German trading houses

The declaration of war at last made it possible to strike at this community. On 22 July the Council of State passed a law giving the executive extraordinary powers: the right to expel citizens of enemy states or to control their movements, the right to place their property under sequestration, and the right to requisition anything the state needed for its defence. On 24 July the president issued a decree placing the eight largest German trading houses under sequestration. Their administration was entrusted to the general receiver of customs, an American appointed under the 1915 treaty, and to the director of the National Bank of the Republic of Haiti. A second decree of the same day restricted the freedom of movement of all Germans living in the country and provided for the internment of those who failed to comply with the regulations or committed hostile acts against Haiti or its allies.

Haiti had no army it could send to Europe. Its only armed force was the gendarmerie commanded by American officers. The foreign minister, Louis Borno, later claimed that his ministry had been negotiating the dispatch of a Haitian contingent to the front when the armistice ended hostilities. Martin doubted, however, that these talks had got far, as he found no other mention of them in the extensive correspondence of the period.

War in the shadow of occupation

For most Haitians the war in Europe was distant, and the occupation very close. The Americans revived the obligation of unpaid labour on road building (the corvée) recorded in the old rural code, and gendarmes rounded up peasants for forced labour, which provoked growing anger in the countryside. In the autumn of 1918 the former officer Charlemagne Péralte took the lead of the Caco peasant uprising against the occupiers. The fighting lasted until 1920 and by some estimates cost the lives of about two thousand insurgents; Péralte himself was killed by marines in the autumn of 1919.

Taking part in the war did, however, secure Haiti a place among the victors. Its minister in Paris, Tertullien Guilbaud, signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, and in 1920 Haiti became a member of the League of Nations, from which it withdrew only in 1942. The American occupation lasted until 1934. In Latin America, Cuba, Panama, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had already declared war on Germany. Haiti was the seventh, and less than a week later Honduras joined them too.