Take up the White Man’s burden—

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.

The havoc wreaked by the Haitian earthquake reminded me of Rudyard Kip­ling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” originally published in McClure’s Magazine in 1899.  Kipling believed that Western man had a duty to uplift and modernize the uncivilized world but seemed resigned to the ultimate failure of such efforts.  Some saw his poem only as a justification for colonialism, coming as it did at the peak of the rush for overseas possessions.  The poem is much richer and deeper than that, and full of irony.

None of this was examined when I was in college during the 1960’s.  Although I had professors who mockingly referred to its title, the poem itself was not read.  Students only understood they should repudiate the notion of the White Man’s Burden as ethnocentric and condescending, yet one of the highest callings on campus was volunteering for the Peace Corps.

This same kind of contradiction remains with us today, and there is no better example than the two-century disaster that is Haiti, the country that occupies the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.  The French first arrived on Hispaniola as pirates early in the 17th century, settling along the island’s western coast.  The buccaneers not only raided but developed tobacco plantations.  More French arrived, and sugar cane joined tobacco as a cash crop.  By 1790 there were 30,000 French, 30,000 free mulattoes, several thousand free blacks, and half a million black slaves in what the French called Saint-Domingue.  It was the wealthiest French colony in the New World, profits then coming principally from sugar, coffee, and indigo.

In 1791 a slave revolt erupted in the northern portion of Saint-Domingue and spread in fits and spurts.  The French not only confronted the rebels with military force but, in an effort to gain allies, granted more civil rights to the mulattoes and free blacks.  Although the Jacobin government abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794, the rebellion continued, now concerned with factional strife and independence.  The involvement of the Spanish and British complicated the situation.  Nonetheless, by the summer of 1795, Toussaint L’Ouverture, a well-educated free black, had risen to leadership of the rebel forces and was in control of two thirds of Saint-Domingue.  Much of his war was now fought against various factions of mulattoes, who were badly outnumbered and ultimately nearly exterminated.  Emerging victorious in 1801, L’Ouverture declared himself emperor-for-life.

By now Napoleon ruled France and, not sharing Jacobin sentiments about abolition and colonial independence, sent 20,000 troops to depose L’Ouverture.  The French force won the battles but lost most of its men to yellow fever.  L’Ouverture was captured, sent to a prison in France, and soon died of tuberculosis.  Back in Saint-Domingue, Jean Jacques Dessalines defeated the disease-decimated French force and established the new nation of Haiti in 1804.  Some 24,000 French settlers who didn’t escape to New Orleans in time were butchered.  Dessalines became the new emperor-for-life but was assassinated in 1806.

Haiti disintegrated into warring factions, and the infrastructure built by the French deteriorated rapidly.  Periodically during his reign, which began in 1818, Jean Pierre Boyer, a mulatto who had been one of the revolutionary leaders during the 1790’s, enforced a limited degree of unity and stability.  The American Colonization Society was encouraged and sent 6,000 manumitted blacks there in 1824.  Nearly all of them quickly returned to the United States, aghast at conditions in Haiti.  Boyer was deposed in a coup in 1843, and more than 30 coups followed.  The Marines landed in 1888 and again in 1914 to restore order.  In 1915 the United States began an occupation of Haiti, enforced by the Marines and lasting until 1934.  Several Marine legends served there, including Smedley Butler, Dan Daly, and Chesty Puller.  The United States poured millions into Haiti, building schools, hospitals, harbors, roads, and bridges.

As soon as we left the Haitians reverted to their old ways, characterized by indolence, voodoo, rape, mutilations, murder, and brutal despots such as “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier and their death squads.  Earthquake or no, Haitians survive through foreign aid and the work of hundreds of private U.S. and European charities.  The White Man’s Burden.