The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945 082232234X, 9780822322344

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE. Dominican History, the United States in the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Good Neighbor Policy
TWO • The Dominican Revolution of 1930 and the Policy of Nonintervention
THREE. The Bankrupt Neighbor Policy: Depression Diplomacy and the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council
FOUR. What Will the Neighbors Think? Dictatorship and Diplomacy in the Public Eye
FIVE. Genocide Next Door: The Haitian Massacre of 1937 and the Sosua Jewish Refugee Settlement
SIX. Gold Braid and Striped Pants: The Culture of Foreign Relations in the Dominican Republic
SEVEN • Fortress America, Fortaleza Trujillo: The Hull-Trujillo Treaty and the Second World War
EIGHT. The Good Neighbor Policy and Dictatorship
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE DICTATOR NEXT DOOR

A book in the series AMERICAN ENCOUNTERS / GLOBAL INTERACTIONS

A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg

THE DICTATOR NEXT DOOR • The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, I930- I 945

ERIC PAUL ROORDA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON,

1998

© I998 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

@I

Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

AMERICAN ENCOUNTERS / GLOBAL INTERACTIONS

• A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg

This senes alms to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multi archival historical research. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and reshaped.

TO PEARL ELAINE AND WILLIAM SIMON ROORDA AND TO A. E. DOYLE

CONTENTS

+

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction ONE.

Dominican History, the United States in the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Good Neighbor Policy

6

TWO • The Dominican Revolution of 1930 and the Policy

of Nonintervention

31

The Bankrupt Neighbor Policy: Depression Diplomacy and the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council 63

THREE.

What Will the Neighbors Think? Dictatorship and

FOUR.

Diplomacy in the Public Eye

88

Genocide Next Door: The Haitian Massacre of 1937 and the Sosua Jewish Refugee Settlement 127

FIVE.

SIX.

SEVEN •

Gold Braid and Striped Pants: The Culture of Foreign Relations in the Dominican Republic 149 Fortress America, Fortaleza Trujillo: The Hull-Trujillo Treaty and the Second World War

EIGHT.

192

The Good Neighbor Policy and Dictatorship Notes

245

Bibliography 307 Index 327

230

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

•

The process that produced this book began on a snowy afternoon in Baltimore in 1983, much like this one in Louisville in 1997, listening to Milton S. Eisenhower's views on the u.s. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. After four hours of conversation and a big manhattan in a Disney cartoon tumbler, he suggested I apply to Johns Hopkins for graduate school. My interest in the Dominican Republic and my association with the Johns Hopkins University began with Dr. Eisenhower, and so does this attempt to thank as many of the people who have helped me write this book as I can remember. The first who comes to mind is my friend Paul Haspel, who initiated the chain of introductions that led to my interview with Milton Eisenhower, and who drove me through the snow to see him. Since then, there have been hundreds of people who have given me introductions and rides, among a thousand other kinds of assistance, from my mentors to the people who picked me up hitchhiking on the way to the Hoover Library in Iowa. Edward Crapol's classes at William and Mary motivated me to study diplomatic history, and he directed the thesis that involved my interview with Milton Eisenhower, among other Eisenhower administration officials. At Johns Hopkins, Louis Galambos, editor of the Dwight Eisenhower Papers (and strayed disciple of Samuel Flagg Bemis), guided me through my dissertation; Franklin W. Knight directed my Latin American studies and assisted me in receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to do research in the Dominican Republic; and Francis E. Rourke schooled me in the perspectives of political science and bureaucracy studies. Professors Galambos, Knight, and Rourke constituted my dissertation committee, which was hard service at

x

Acknowledgments

low pay. Johns Hopkins also supported my research with graduate fellowships and a grant to go to the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto, California. Research at the Hoover and Roosevelt presidential libraries has been a joy because of the helpful archivists in West Branch, Iowa, and Hyde Park, New York, inspiring places both. Dwight Miller at the Hoover Library was especially considerate to point me in the right direction. A Vigortone Scholarship from the Hoover Foundation and Beeke-Levy Fellowship from the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Library Foundation made possible the weeks I spent among the papers of the presidents who figure in this study. I encountered memorable settings, rich information, and affable experts in the many places (twelve towns and three countries) where research for this book took place. A list of all the people who boosted me along the way would run as long as the closing credits of a cinema epic, because they include staff members at the National Archives, old and new, especially the Motion Picture Branch; the Library of Congress, especially the Manuscripts Room and the Hispanics Branch; the Navy and Marine Corps Historical Centers; the Columbus Library of the Organization of American States; the National Air and Space Museum Archive; the Milton Eisenhower Library; the Sterling Memorial Library; the Hoover Institute on War and Peace; the Naval War College; the Pioneer Records Service; the Public Record Office; the Universidad Aut6noma de Santo Domingo; the Biblioteca Nacional and the Archivo General de la Naci6n. Many scholars have been generous with their knowledge and time, suggesting approaches, sharing sources, collaborating on conference panels, reading drafts, and providing friendship and encouragement. Lauren "Robin" Derby has been especially motivational, beginning when we visited Rafael Trujillo's ruined estate with Julie Franks, another I have to thank. The National Endowment for the Humanities funded the 1993 visit when I met them, support I gratefully acknowledge. The sessions the three of us put together for the Latin American Studies Association and American Historical Association meetings in 1994 triggered many fortunate events for me. These panel presentations assisted me in deepening the study, and I thank Catherine LeGrand, Bruce Calder, and Louis Perez Jr. for their participation. Panel presentations at two meetings of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations also helped me a great deal, with the help of Douglas Little, Judith Ewell, and Michael Weis. Anonymous reviewers at Diplomatic History and Howard Wiarda helped me to improve the chapter on the Haitian massacre (Chapter 5), which appeared as an article in that

Acknowledgments

Xl

journal. Thanks especially to Gil Joseph and Catherine LeGrand for inviting me to the conference they organized at Yale University with Ricardo Salvatore in 1995, "Rethinking the Post-Colonial Encounter," and for steering me to Duke University Press, which published parts of this study in a volume generated by the conference: Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of United States Latin American Relations (1998). Some of the most captivating information and images in the present volume were kindly provided to me by Scott R. Schoenfeld, whose cooperation was instrumental in the completion of this project. The Williams College-Mystic Seaport Museum Maritime Studies Program financed my conference travel for three years, supplemented my NEH grant for research in Santo Domingo, and provided student research assistants among whom John Bohannon and Katherine Paculba were especially helpful. John Lewis Gaddis found merit in this approach and offered me the chance to work at the Contemporary History Institute of Ohio University, where I learned a great deal and met Michael Hall, who brought his knowledge of the Dominican Republic to bear on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Bellarmine College, where I teach, supported the last stage of this research with a grant and provides an atmosphere of collegiality that I appreciate. Many friends helped me during my research travels, especially Barbara Harrick, who puts me up (and puts up with me) every year when I visit Washington to rifle the files, and Mark Welsh, who hosted us during my research at the Public Record Office in Kew, England. One individual stands out as emblematic of my fourteen-year pursuit of U.S.-Dominican relations. Every time I went to the Dominican Republic, Julio Santana showed up without prior arrangement to add serendipity to the quest. He was there from the first hour I spent in the country in 1985, when he offered to acquaint me with the use of the informal carro publico system. He was a homeless tiguere, a clever young man of the streets of the Las Americas barrio, and although I was distrustful of him, I needed to know how to get downtown. Beginning with that first ride with seven other people in a compact car across the Ozama River to Parque Central, Julio led me to the places I wanted to go, and many other places I knew nothing about, and broke down the fear I had of the sprawling city and its people. He guided me with complete confidence from the office of the director of the National Library to the exclusive interiors of the Casa de Campo resort, gaining access anywhere he wanted to go by being powerfully suave, suave,

xu

Acknowledgments

like a smooth merengue. This attitude seems to me now to be characteristically Dominican, a lesson in the rise of Rafael Trujillo, and also in the Aristotelian metaphysic that underlies part of the following study: sometimes, form does determine substance. Julio tutored my bad Spanish, speaking in English he learned from U.S. airborne troops in I965-66, and refused to accept more than a token lOo-peso note for many days of help. When I returned in I988, this time to the north coast, I met Julio on the highway after my first visit to the town of Sosua, which plays a dramatic role in this history and became my base for Fulbright work in 1989. I was waiting for a guagua to cling to for the ride back to Puerto Plata; he drove up in a rental car and commented offhandedly, "I knew I would see you again." No longer living on the streets of the capital, he had gotten a job as a translator-of German! I met him last in I99I, when our respective tour groups of German and u.s. visitors met in front of the palace of Diego Columbus in the heart of the ancient colonial zone in Santo Domingo. On that occasion, as in I988, I had sailed to the country aboard the schooner Spirit if Massachusetts with the Long Island University-Southampton SEAmester program. Among many other reasons, I thank the program founder Douglas Hardy, the most durable, indomitable, and energetic man I have ever met, for bringing about these encounters, and for giving me the chance to explore so much of the land and waters of Hispaniola. Saving the best for last, my most profound appreciation is reserved for those to whom this book is dedicated. My parents have supported my passion to be a historian since I was a little kid, and encouraged me at every turn of the circuitous path of getting an education, competing for a job, and publishing a book. My spouse, A. E. Doyle, has been an editor, researcher, computer consultant, and travel buddy whose spirit and humor have made this odyssey enjoyable. Our daughter Alida has already charmed librarians here and abroad on my behalf, and her sister Frances shows equal promise as a research assistant.

INTRODUCTION

•

The two subjects of this book help to define each other: the Good Neighbor policy, the initiative to improve Latin American relations through nonintervention and friendship that developed during the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations; and the Generalisimo Rafael Trujillo regime, the dictatorship that consolidated in the Dominican Republic at the same time and lasted thirty-one years. Trujillo's seizure of power in 1930 and his repressive military rule thereafter tested u.s. resolve to quit meddling in the internal affairs of its neighbors and to preserve amiable relationships with all Latin American leaders, regardless of their path to power or political stripe. The formation of the Trujillo regime showed that a foreign policy based on the principles of national sovereignty and self-determination, the Geist of the Good Neighbor policy, meant having to accept as gracefully as possible the nearby existence of regimes antithetical to the principles of peace and democracy. The Good Neighbor policy demonstrated to a generation of Caribbean dictators that they were free to run their countries however they pleased, so long as they maintained common enemies with the United States: first the fascists, then the communists. The combination of nonintervention on the part of the United States and a powerful dictatorship in the Dominican Republic imposed new limits on the hegemony Washington had long exercised over that country. The connection between the Good Neighbor policy and the Trujillo regime offers a revealing perspective on the debate over how democratic states should treat authoritarian governments. It also calls into question the ability of any single individual, group, or branch of government in the United States to control or even to consistently influence the forces of nationalism and per-

2

The Dictator Next Door

sonalism that intertwine in the figure of a dictator, whatever he is called: Fuhrer, Duce, Chairman, First Secretary, or Generalisimo. Dictatorship has been the greatest problem of the twentieth century, rising up after the Great War to fuse the worst aspects of the old autocracies to new ways of thinking and of mobilizing the masses. Gaining momentum with the global depression in the late 1920S and 1930S, the formation of dictatorships in Europe, Asia, and Latin America was a central challenge to the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. The behavior of these states was menacing, with their single-party political systems; enormous public rallies; ethnic, racial, and anti-intellectual violence; military buildups; and territorial aggression. It was also impossible to ignore, as the proliferation of communications technology-electronic, cinematic, and printbrought these disturbing scenes home to the public in the United States and gave such media greater prominence in society, politics, and foreign relations than they had ever had before. It also increased the importance of public relations, because henceforth diplomacy would be carried out with the cameras rolling, the microphones on, and the bulbs popping. Publicity sometimes made it difficult to discern who really spoke and acted for the United States, as different individuals with claims to represent the country (generals, senators, and secretaries of state) said different things about the various new tyrannies, near and far. Trujillo's control of the Dominican military assured that stability would prevail under his rule, but sometimes stability did not live up to its billing. Although imposing order with devastating force, the regime's foreign and domestic policies did not coincide with U.S. interests in several important regards. The Dominican Republic became a difficult place to do business, a querulous participant in negotiations, and a major cause of Caribbean disquiet, including genocide, war scares, and assassinations. The regime cooperated with U.S. defense efforts but also made overtures to the Axis governments, which it strongly resembled in style and ideology. Trujillo's dictatorship, directly attributable to the U.S. Marine occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916-24, rebuked the democratic principles the United States espoused in its foreign policy. The Dominican intervention was supposed to establish a representative system supported by an apolitical police force, but instead it created a military dictatorship with a single-party state organized on the principles not of democracy but of hero worship. Although Trujillo's military mentors prided themselves on the achievements of the occupation and their seeming continuation under the

Introduction

3

Trujillo regime, the fact that his rule was sustained by violence and driven by vanity became common knowledge. For this reason, Trujillo's bombastic cooperation with the Good Neighbor policy was unwelcome to many policy makers in the Roosevelt administration who did not want to associate with everyone in the Latin American neighborhood On equal terms, preferring to shun the dictators. The threat of war with much more powerful dictators overseas in the late I930S removed such discrimination as an option. Overall, Trujillo directed his government's foreign and domestic affairs with self-conscious autonomy and brutal efficiency, giving the lie to the prevailing notion that he was a pliable client of the United States. Upon close examination of "bilateral" relations between the countries, the appearance of a unified "policy" on the part of the United States begins to blur, and multiple sources of influence instead come into focus. All of these together constitute the full relationship, and it is confusing and contradictory. The picture of the Good Neighbor policy that emerges from this case study shows Trujillo himself at the center of a crowded stage of international actors: diplomats, Navy and Marine officers, bankers, members of the foreign "colonies" in Santo DomingojCiudad Trujillo, journalists, lobbyists, and legislators. These individuals disagreed about the merits of Trujillo, and their actions and rhetoric toward the regime communicated conflicting messages to its leader. Trujillo was seen as an embarrassment to the United States by many in the State Department, the news media, and Congress, who opposed close ties with him. But Trujillo's supporters in the U.S. military and the members of a growing "Dominican lobby," especially Franklin Roosevelt's close friend Joseph E. Davies and several powerful congressmen, pressed Trujillo's interests in the United States and accepted his hospitality in the Dominican Republic. The official "policy" had to be sorted out of this muddle, and it was often not easy to find. Those who went looking for it were likely to emerge with different versions of what it meant to be neighborly. The "Good Neighbor policy" also had to adapt to different environments everywhere. In the case of the Dominican Republic, some of the important factors influencing policy implementation were Trujillo's sweeping megalomania; the conflation of personal, social, and political considerations in the culture of his regime; the committed opposition to his rule by important officials at the State Department, especially Sumner Welles; and the assistance of his circle of military comrades in buying arms and gaining favor in the United States. Every set of bilateral relations is the product

4

The Dictator Next Door

of a unique environment of circumstances and individuals, thus preventing broad policy from evolving in identical forms in all places. In the case of the Good Neighbor policy, as the first half of the Trujillo regime demonstrates, the genus mutated into very dissimilar species in the individual nations of Latin America. The domestic debate over the proper role of the United States in the world shifted against costly military involvement abroad in the 1920S, although the rise of authoritarianism around the world was similarly disfavored in the United States. Nonintervention and dictatorship were particularly difficult to reconcile in the Caribbean, where the US. presence had been very invasive, and where its responsibility for political developments was widely discerned. The Good Neighbor policy developed as an effort to encourage order, solvency, cooperation, and liberalism in Latin America through persuasion and benefits, rather than by force, but it would be put to a variety of unforeseen uses by Latin American leaders, especially those with autocratic power like Trujillo. To strenuously oppose dictatorships within the zone of US. hegemony, however, would not enhance the country's strategic or economic interests and would invite charges of imperialism from the increasingly anti-interventionist community of Latin American nations. So the debate over dictatorship broke along regional lines: to oppose European and Asian fascism, the United States required a bloc of allies to the south, especially in the region of the Panama Canal, which happened to include several dictatorships. The authoritarian regimes of the Caribbean were integral to US. war planning and preparedness against the authoritarian regimes of Europe and Asia, a fact that significantly altered the role of "good neighbor." The urgency to erect a "Fortress America" against European and Asian fascism came to dominate the Good Neighbor policy in the late 1930S, and the antidictatorial scruples of Roosevelt's diplomats were set aside. Subsequently, the agenda of Trujillo and his US. military allies prevailed in relations between the two countries. The Navy and Marines feted Trujillo on visits to Washington, and he concluded a series of agreements with the United States that removed its objectionable customs receivership from the Dominican Republic (the Hull-Trujillo Treaty of 1940) and established a military alliance in its place. Trujillo's skillful handling of Dominican foreign relations allowed him to perpetrate his genocide of Haitians resident in the Dominican Republic in 1937 without serious diplomatic damage, and to profit from the onset of another crisis, the Second World War, which

Introduction

5

brought loans from the Export-Import Bank and an air force from the Lend-Lease Act. Although diplomats would temporarily halt the flow of u.s. arms to the Trujillo regime after the war ended, the military culture Trujillo shared with ranking u.s. admirals and generals assured his later place as a Cold War ally of the United States.

CHAPTER ONE

+ Dominican History, the United States in the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Good Neighbor Policy

The western Atlantic Ocean washes a wide arc of land formed by the coast of North America and the archipelago of the Greater Antilles, five thousand miles of shoreline rarely viewed from the sea before the sixteenth century. The native inhabitants of the small (and often seasonal) settlements on the shore built only small craft for fishing and local travel, and only infrequently did they navigate around the stormy capes that lay between the populated estuaries in the north or cross the windy passages between the large islands in the south, called Siboney (Cuba), Quisqueya (Hispaniola), and Borinquen (Puerto Rico) by the Taino people living there.! Visitors from the eastern edge of the Atlantic came very rarely, and the ocean remained a virtually insurmountable barrier until the Spanish invasion initiated by Columbus. The admiral's beachhead was the island he named Hispaniola, and the city of Santo Domingo on the south coast became the capital of Spanish colonization in the region and the base from which armies of warriors conquered the neighboring islands and the mainland along the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

COLONIZATION

Santo Domingo's years as the center of Spanish expansion were few, however, partly owing to the devastation of the native Taino population from disease and slavery in mines that held little gold or silver. Also, the mineral booty of Mexico and Peru far outstripped the profits of sugar and tobacco cultivation on Hispaniola, and the geographical advantages of the port of Havana, situated near the Gulf Stream on the north coast of Cuba,

Dominican History and the Good Neighbor Policy

7

exceeded those of Santo Domingo, which lay at the mouth of the floodprone Ozama River far from the transatlantic sea-lanes. As a result, the colony stagnated on the margin of the Spanish empire, which continued to spread southward across South America into the seventeenth century. And although the traffic of ships between Spain and the principal ports of the Caribbean increased and gained importance as the Spanish empire grew, the connections ~etween Spain's Antillean outposts and the landmass to the north, which Spain claimed but did not occupy, remained few. The seventeenth century brought settlers defiant of Spanish authority to the North American coast and the Lesser Antilles, the chain of small islands running south from Puerto Rico to the coast of South America. English, Dutch, and French colonists from Canada to Cura