The Bright Isle

To Munson Havens

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI 25 January, 1937
MY DEAR FRIEND: —
I am now in Haiti, ready to bet with anyone that it is the most charming and interesting spot on this hemisphere. It has something for pretty nearly everybody. Its marvelous beauty goes to the tourist’s heart and stays there; the student of civilization delights himself in hobnobbing with the people; and the island appears to be a virgin field for research-workers in almost every branch of science I can think of, from agronomy up and down.
Even an archaeologist might find something to do here, for people occasionally turn up artifacts of the earliest known inhabitants, the tribe which Columbus found, and which his noble countrymen killed off so promptly that there has not been an authentic trace of their blood in the Haitian population for a couple of centuries. No one seems to know just what those folks were; some sort of Indians, probably, for they were copper-colored. They were often raided by Caribs, however, so probably there was some admixture of blood resulting, since that is the usual thing. Their numbers are estimated at 200,000, though I do not know on what evidence. In his official report Columbus gives these poor souls a great character for gentleness, kindness and hospitality. It would have been money in their pocket, as Artemus Ward said, ‘if they had given Chris a warm meal and sent him home again ore the ragin Billers.’ In fact, I think you and I might agree that it would have been a good thing all round if the whole Western Hemisphere had been let lie fallow for fifty or a hundred thousand years, or until such time as people came along with sense and decency enough to do the right thing by it; assuming, of course, that such people ever would come along, which I should say is open to great doubt.
I have seen a small fragment of an artifact in clay, showing the head and face of some animal, very well moulded. I am so ignorant of such matters that I have no idea whether the thing was originally part of a jug-handle or part of an idol; it could do for either, as far as I know to the contrary. Over on the south side of the island there are certain mounds which appear to be artificial, like those in the Ohio Valley. It might be worth while to cut a crosssection of one of them to find out what is inside, if anything; it would not cost much. Perhaps the whole region is worth a look-see by some competent archæologist, for I cannot get any testimony to its ever having had one.
Biologists and anthropologists could certainly do some business here. As reckoned by political geography, the blood-strains uniting in the present population are Spanish, African and French; Spanish and African since 1500, French since 1600. The Africans were slaves imported by the Spanish and French, and many French also had a slave-status, having been brought over under indenture, like our own original settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth. It is not generally understood, I believe, that slavery in America was originally an institution; there was no color or nationality peculiar to it; it knew no such thing as a color-line. So here in Haiti a man might be white, black, brown, French, Indian, African, anything, but if he bore the slavestatus, that was that, and he was simply out of luck.
But blood-strains do not follow political geography; and here is another thing not generally known: Whereas the original importations of low-grade labor into our own country, for example, were mostly ‘clean-strain’ (our miscellaneous importations were relatively late, following the development of heavy industry), Haiti’s were anything but that. The French slaves were of every strain from the Channel to the Mediterranean; Bretons, Basques, Normans, Poitevins, Picards, Angevins, everything, bearing with them their peculiar provincial dialects, customs, habits of mind and temperament. Likewise the Africans were not all raked out of one tribe, district or coast; they came out of pretty nearly every tribe in Africa, differing in language, social customs and religious practices, and often hostile one to another. The result is a mixture such as I doubt exists anywhere else in the world, and I would suppose its biology might have some points of special interest.
Nor is this all. Haiti was cut off from the rest of the world after it emerged from under the French domination and set up for itself in 1804. It closed its ports for twenty years, building a sort of Chinese wall around itself, during which time nobody came here; and for various good reasons very few came afterwards. Practically none of those who did come got any further than the port towns or had any contact, even indirectly, with more than eight or ten per cent of the people. Thus as far as the great general mass of the population is concerned, the country remained in virtual isolation until the American invasion of 1915, and even now there is an accidental combination of factors tending powerfully to maintain that isolation; indeed, which make it almost impossible of breaking down. Hence the specific cultural peculiarities of a civilization bred out of a most unusual mixture of blood-strains and traditions have been developed in more than a century of isolation, unmodified by social contacts or biological adulterations. One may put it that they have been developed under laboratory conditions, and therefore they might be well worth investigation by some pundit, who is in that line of trade.

But the man who really gets his money’s worth out of Haiti is the student of civilized society, such as you are, and such as I too pretend to be, in a small way. You would be here but a short time before you would be asking yourself, if what you see is the upshot of a century of isolation, precisely what could a larger intercourse with other nations do to improve it. You know the conventional answer to that question, and so do I, but if you could make it stick in this instance, you are just the man I want to see. Isolation is supposed to be a bad thing for a country, and perhaps it may be, speaking generally, though I must say most of the arguments I have heard on that point seemed to be specious. But has it been bad for Haiti, and is it bad now? The longer you stay here and the closer you reckon the fat with the lean, the tougher that query becomes; at least, that is my experience. I confess that when I tot up the balance of advantage and disadvantage, I am not at all sure that Haiti would get a net profit — mind you, I say a net profit — out of any freer intercourse with the outside world than it now has.
I am speaking, of course, from the point of view of civilization; and if one takes the apparatus of civilization as the index of civilization, as all good Americans do, the answer is simple enough. For you and me, civilization does not mean the mere possession and operation of machinery. It means the humanization of man in society, which the possession of machinery may or may not tend to promote, and may indeed actively discourage. Our countrymen, on the contrary, can never get it through their heads that a society which sports a great array of schools, banks, industries, railways, finance-companies, newspapers, plumbing, household appliances and so on, may yet be thoroughly uncivilized. Naturally they cannot, for if they could it would set them to examining their own society, which in turn would set them to examining themselves, which in turn, as Dickens’s old lady said, ‘is one of those things that simply will not bear thinking about.’ Nevertheless the fact stands; a society may have all the apparatus of civilization there is, and remain quite uncivilized; and on the other hand, a society may reach an enviably high degree of civilization with but a small amount of apparatus, and that too, perhaps, of hardly more than a primitive order.
So when you look at our immense and complicated array of apparatus and see what we have done with it in the way of actual civilization, and then look at Haiti’s and see what has been done with that, you are bound to suspect that there may be too much of a good thing. A society may become so absorbed in running the machinery of civilization as to forget what it is that the machinery is supposed to do, or indeed to forget that it is supposed to do anything. In such a case, obviously, as in the United States, the people have more machinery of civilization than their natural capacity for civilization enables them to use profitably; and the result of their mismanagement of it is so bad as to work against, and ultimately to defeat, the very purpose which the machinery is meant to promote. Dissolving Haiti’s isolation would merely mean increasing indefinitely the amount of its available machinery; and the question is whether the example of other countries, notably our own, does not strongly suggest that this is something which can all too easily be overdone.
I am not going to write you a general dissertation on the subject in this boiling hot weather, so by way of illustration I shall take only one conspicuous piece of social machinery — schools. Ours, which are many, do so little to civilize our society (indeed they work mightily against the spread of civilization, rather than for it) mainly because they are set to the Sisyphean task of educating people far in excess of their abilities. Haiti has few schools; I am told that only about one per cent of the population can read. Perhaps a few more than that know the alphabet, but for actual reading it comes down to something like one per cent. Very well; now, my dear friend, candidly considering the natural capacities of our own people, considering the kind of thing they read, the purposes that guide their reading and the uses they make of what they read, would n’t you say that one per cent would be about right? I think so. Regarding literacy as strictly a device for helping to civilize a society, does it not seem to you that our society would to-day be much further on the way to civilization if that device had been left in the hands of those only who have a sufficient natural ability to make an appropriate use of it — say, at the outside, about one per cent? I think so.
It comes down to this: Is it the object of education to produce and foster an elite, or to groom the mediocrity of the masses? We in America think the latter; we call it by the absurd name of ‘democratizing education.’ The judicious have always known better; they have known that the dissemination of culture is and must be an effect of the high culture of such as are capable of culture; in other words, of an elite. Trying to get at it the other way around, as we do, results only in what Mr. Michael Sadleir calls ‘ the decapitation of the eminent in the interests of the average,’ and in the consequent ostracizing of culture; which is precisely what the addiction to our theory has brought about, just as Ernest Renan long ago foresaw it would. As far back as before you and I were born, he said that a people committed to our theory ‘would long expiate their mistake by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence’; and it does not take much of an eye to see that this expiation is now going on at full speed and with no sign of respite.
In its virtual isolation, Haiti has bred an elite which I must say is the wonder and admiration of a visitor. It is very small — probably in about the right proportion to the population — but of a remarkably high and fine order. I have conversed with several specimens of it, and have read their books. True, some have gone abroad to put a mansard roof on their training for some specialty, usually scientific, but many have got on with what their native schools were able to give them. One of these latter told me he had got all his education in the free schools of Haiti, and had never gone outside the island until he was forty-four; and he is one of the most accomplished and highly cultivated men in my acquaintance anywhere. You see, I think, what I am driving at. If Haiti’s isolation were dissolved, every foreign influence would bring pressure, direct or indirect, to ‘democratize education’; yet if Haiti’s schools can produce even one specimen as creditable as this man, it strikes me that the Haitians may well go very gingerly about a flirtation with that theory, especially when they observe its effect on the civilization of the countries which have adopted it. A hundred years ago, New England’s schools were probably but little, if any, better than Haiti’s, yet they somehow contrived to produce a very respectable elite; and if the ‘democratized’ schools of New England are now producing any Channings, Holmeses, Lowells, Everetts, Emersons and Danas, I have so far somehow not heard of it.
As with education, so with the other avenues of intercourse with other nations; commerce, finance, news-service, transportation, tourist-traffic and so on. I get the impression, whatever it amounts to, that perhaps the Haitians are doing pretty well as they are, and that they have about all the machinery of civilization that they can carry comfortably. The other day an American who has been here a dozen years told me that when he came an officer of our invading forces said to him, ‘I think possibly your experience here may be something like mine. In my first year, when I saw what needed to be done and how easy it was to do it, I felt I had to pitch right in and get it done. In my second year I was n’t in such a hurry; I was willing to wait a little and let things have a chance to happen; and now in my third year I catch myself thinking, Well, it’s their country, and if they want it this way, why not let them have it?’
Why not, indeed? The Haitian looks happy, acts happy, and there is unanimous testimony that he is happy. How many people do you know in your town who fill that bill? I have not once seen the hard, weary, vacuous face that you and I see everywhere in our respective bailiwicks. Does not a diffused general happiness and contentment say something for the quality of the civilization in which it prevails, even if the people have no railways and can’t read newspapers? The Haitian can’t freeze; the climate won’t let him. He can’t starve unless he wants to; the earth and its waters are too prolific. Any sort of shelter that will shed rain is enough, and as for clothes, I’ll take oath that one garment is one too many, unless you get up pretty high in the mountains. ‘Social security’ is something the Haitian does not understand at all. He does not like hard work any more than you or I do, and the average of his natural intelligence and capacities runs on about the same level as elsewhere. He has exquisite good manners and is amiable, kind, and especially obliging to strangers. Foreigners who have lived here for years tell me that you may go where you will in the forests and fastnesses of Haiti, and the two things you will never meet are a deadly varmint and an ill-disposed Haitian. Defining civilization as the humanization of man in society, as you and I do, all this seems to sum up to a degree of civilization respectable enough, to say the least, to breed doubt whether an indiscriminate inflow of foreign influence might not cost more, in terms of actual civilization, than it came to.

What most interests me here, however, are the factors which I spoke of a moment ago as tending to keep up Haiti’s isolation. The most important one is the constitutional provision that no foreigner can own land in Haiti. When Toussaint, Dessalines and Henri Christophe — who notwithstanding all the rainbows squirted at them by Wordsworth, Wendell Phillips and Co., must have been fearful fellows — when they threw off the French yoke in 1804, they had seen enough of large foreignowned landed estates, very correctly associating them with slavery. They seem to have got a glimpse of the great basic truth that it is impossible to exploit a people unless you first expropriate them from the land. In this they showed more sound economic wisdom than has been shown by all our progressives, laborites, square-dealers and new-dealers. Dessalines cut up the land into small-holding peasant proprietorships, and put a provision against foreign ownership into the constitution, where it remained until the American invasion of 1915.
Thereby hangs a nice story. As you know, capital gravitates straight to any field which offers two inducements: abundant natural resources and an abundant potential supply of cheap low-grade labor. Haiti has no end of both. Hence whole generations of scoundrelly American imperialist enterprisers have licked their lips at the thought of making it another Porto Rico by expropriating the natives and thus enabling themselves to exploit them as thoroughly as the French did years ago by the same method. But that clause in the constitution has always been a killer; there was no way to exploit the natives until it was got rid of, and apparently the only way to get rid of it was by force. You no doubt recall how in the ’seventies a group of would-be exploiters wheedled Grant into a scheme for forcibly annexing the eastern half of the island, and how near they came to succeeding.
The great chance came in 1915, when all America’s attention was focused on the European war. A Heaven-sent rumpus broke out in Port-au-Prince, in the course of which a number of political partisans, including the president, were most laudably killed off; I say laudably, for Haitian politics, what there is of them, are as noisome, and their politicians as verminous, as ours are or as such are everywhere. Our marines went in and took possession; and in 1918 a new constitution, with this cardinal provision left out, was written by a pliant politician in our Navy Department, and forced on the Haitians at the point of the bayonet.
Like Poincare’s silly invasion of the Ruhr, however, the thing did not pan out; the Haitians would not stand for it. We occupied Haiti for years, hanging on hopefully, and getting out as late as 1932, I think it was, only because the scheme was not practicable. Its abettors finally saw that it would have to be garrisoned in perpetuity by about six marines per native, and would cost more than could be got out of it. The Haitians did not wait for our backs to be turned before pitching out the constitution of 1918, and adopting a new one which restored the old provision.
People will tell you that we had to invade Haiti in support of the Monroe Doctrine: i.e., if we had not gone in, other creditor nations would. Yet I can very easily imagine some Grover Cleveland serving notice that our State Department was no collection-agency, and that we would neither go in ourselves nor let anyone else go in; Haiti might murder all the politicians it liked — not half enough of them being murdered as it was. Others will tell you that we went in because the Germans were about to establish a base on the Mole-St.-Nicolas, commanding the Windward Passage. Pretty thin, my friend — pretty thin. Not that I would put any conceivable idiocy past the Wilson Administration in the face of its superb record, but if that were the case, why should we have gone on occupying Haiti for a dozen years after all supposititious peril from the Germans had blown by? Can you believe we would ever have got out if there had been any prospect of making the enterprise pay? Hardly. The whole episode is simply a first-class exhibit of economic imperialism backed up by force of arms; in other words, an exhibit of American politicians in cahoots with American enterprisers — all in all, as our old friend Artemus said, ‘a sweet and luvly set of men. I’d like to own as good a house as some of ’em would break into.’
So much for that. The second factor tending to maintain Haiti’s isolation is the absence of a middle class. Industrialists and merchants are the sappers and miners of a country’s isolation; indeed, as Mr. Jefferson said, rather contemptuously, ‘Merchants have no country. The spot where they stand is not as dear to them as that from which they draw their gains.’ Haiti has no industries of any consequence, and few merchants. Eighty-three per cent of the people are in agriculture, which they carry on in small independent holdings, usually detached; the inland settlements are mere hamlets, pretty widely separated, and most of them are unearthly hard to get at. Thus there is no general contact of the people with an organized merchant class, except in the port towns; which from the point of view of civilization is all to the good. You remember Julius Cæsar’s grim observation that one reason why the Belgians had managed to preserve so fine a character was that ‘drummers almost never get through to them with a line of goods which tend to effeminate the spirit.’ That holds for at least eighty per cent of Haiti’s population, and it is one strong root of their persistence of type.
Again, Haiti is very short on bridges and roads; that is, what we would call roads. What few it has are poor. Yet while this is highly discouraging to foreigners, the natives seem to have all the transportation they need, for they get about on mules, and mules care nothing whatever about roads; any sort of footing suits them perfectly. One day, wishing to reach a little settlement near Grand-Goave, I had to shin up about two hundred feet on a pebbly crumbling pathway that was almost perpendicular. It was a tidy climb; I was well out of wind when I reached the top; and going down again was even harder than going up. Yet when I got down I saw coming after me a cavalcade of a dozen men and women mounted on mules which walked down that precipice as easily and surely as you would walk down a flight of steps. Neither the people nor the mules seemed to think they were doing anything spectacular, but I found it a most remarkable and reassuring sight. For all I can see, the island is about as penetrable as it need be and ought to be, consistently with keeping the enviable quality of its civilization unimpaired. Aviation has come in; there is a landing-field at Port-au-Prince; and tourist-cruises have lately taken to stopping ships there for a few hours; but as long as the bulk of the population remains as nearly inaccessible as it is, the effect of these misfortunes will doubtless be pretty well localized.
Lastly, and perhaps least important, though well worth mentioning, the discouragement of foreign capitalist enterprise has done a great deal to keep the development of Haiti’s natural resources from touching off the get-richquick spirit. If you could corner the banana business, or sugar, or coffee, I suppose it might run to some real money, but the mischief of it is that you can’t get your hands on the land. The best you can do is a middleman’s export business, buying by handfuls from small producers, sorting the product, and shipping it out; and while this is a good business and very useful, one does not get purse-proud on it overnight. Easy money means exploitation; and in so admirably safeguarding themselves against exploitation the Haitians have pretty well blocked up the approaches to easy money, and thereby have kept the rage for easy money from running wild.
So there you have what seems to me a most interesting combination of four factors which must largely determine the character of any society. Do you know of just that combination existing anywhere else? I do not, and I think a journey here to observe it is well worth while. I have the idea that it may prove to be Haiti’s surest guarantee of sound and rational progress, absurd as that idea undoubtedly would seem to our countrymen, and perhaps even to you. You know, we Americans have no notion whatever of any progress which does not go very fast; but the obstinate fact is, as Sir James Jeans says, that the only kind of progress which can go very fast is progress downhill.

Haiti’s lurid past, its long isolation, and the grotesque features of its history, have stimulated sensational writers to produce outrageous libels on its people and their civilization. I have lately been reading some of them with infinite disgust. It seems such an unsportsmanlike, unmanly thing to traduce a people who have made so much of themselves in the face of most undeserved misfortune; a people who in 1804 were a mere amorphous mob suddenly emancipated from atrocious conditions of servitude, and who since then have organized themselves into a peculiarly interesting and attractive society — and I believe a sound one — quite on their own, with no help or encouragement worth speaking of. It is fair enough, for instance, to be amused at the splendiferous court of Haiti’s remarkable emperor, Faustin I, just as it is fair to be amused at the extravagances of the Court of St. James. Faustin and his homemade dukes, counts and princesses certainly must have put on a gaudy show; ‘Rastus was on parade’ in those days, no doubt about it. But all that sort of thing is another matter, and quite foreign to the wretched stuff that I am deprecating.
Suppose the Haitians do keep up an exotic religious cult and an exotic ritual — I do not know that they do, but it is what they would naturally do and have every right to do. Suppose they are superstitious and have faith in Hexerei — well, how about the witch-craftsodden regions of Eastern Pennsylvania? Suppose their dances carry a strong sexual implication and lead to sexual excesses — well, surely a person who came down here from the United States to look at anything like that would be taking a busman’s holiday. My point is that in any serious view of a people such matters are quite trivial, and an exaggerated or exclusive concern with them is unfriendly and indecent; yet it is with these above all else that our popular literature about Haiti concerns itself.
The consequence is that visitors come here with their minds stuffed full of absurdities and their imaginations cocked and primed for any untoward adventure. Last Shrovetide, a year ago, a woman who had just been disgorged from a tourist-ship saw the usual fancy-dress parade moving through the streets of Port-au-Prince, and asked a native what it was. The native, who spoke no English, finally got the gist of what she wanted through his head, and said, carnivals. The woman legged it back to the ship in full cry, and reported that she had seen a huge procession of cannibals. Only last week another woman, who was told she could find some article she wanted in a certain small native shop, refused to go there for fear she would be smitten with leprosy; she had read somewhere that native shops and native goods were full of it, and catching it was practically a sure-fire chance.
I am told that one who stays here a fortnight never quite rids himself of the fascinations which the island and its society exercise, and is always hoping to come back. I can easily believe that. I met a man on shipboard who had been here four years as an officer in the invasion, and he said he had never seen either place or people that he loved as much.
He was another of the fine type I mentioned in my last letter, the kind that gives one a just pride in one’s nationality. When I asked him what the new president of Haiti was like, he said he seemed to be a pretty good sort. ‘The one before him lay down and let us do anything we liked,’ he said, ‘but this fellow made a lot of trouble for us. We respected him for it, though, for of course we had no business there, and we all knew it.’
What a queer country ours is! One runs into so many people like this man, people who are everything a human being should be, in integrity, intelligence, sensitiveness, instinct for the right thing, sometimes everything even in culture, and yet who are socially ineffectual; they have no more influence in determining the course of our collective public life than gnats on a locomotive. Probably, though, we are not exceptional; probably in other countries as well, in Italy, Germany, France, England, ‘the revolt of the masses’ is as effectively suffocating such people in the same quicksand of ignorance, vulgarity and brutality. If so — and I believe really it is so — it makes an extremely blue outlook for civilization at large.
This is a dismal tone on which to end a friendly letter. Yet it is the best I can do by way of a happy ending, for as things stand at the moment, I swear by the dog of Egypt — νὴ τὸν κύνα, the Socratic oath — I can see no happy ending possible for anything, even a letter.