Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic

By Ellen D. Tillman

In the early twentieth century, the United States set out to guarantee economic and political stability in the Caribbean without intrusive and controversial military interventions—and ended up achieving exactly the opposite. Using military and government records from the United States and the Dominican Republic, this work investigates the extent to which early twentieth-century U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic fundamentally changed both Dominican history and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Successive U.S. interventions based on a policy of "dollar diplomacy" led to military occupation and contributed to a drastic shifting of the Dominican social order, as well as centralized state military power, which Rafael Trujillo leveraged in his 1920s rise to dictatorship. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the overthrow of the social order resulted not from military planning but from the interplay between uncoordinated interventions in Dominican society and Dominican responses.

Telling a neglected story of occupation and resistance, Ellen D. Tillman documents the troubled efforts of the U.S. government to break down the Dominican Republic and remake it from the ground up, providing fresh insight into the motivations and limitations of occupation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469626963

Ellen D. Tillman

Ellen D. Tillman is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University, San Marcos.

Book preview

Introduction

In May of 1916, U.S. marines occupied Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic. Their stated pretext was the Dominican government’s repeated failure to uphold a customs agreement signed with the United States in 1907. In the midst of political confusion surrounding the invasion, as the Dominican provisional government refused to relinquish control of its military, U.S. marines began to occupy the country. The original idea of the policy of dollar diplomacy, as expressed by both Theodore Roosevelt’s and William Howard Taft’s administrations, had been to replace dollars for bullets, as Taft was to put it—to guarantee economic and political stability in the Caribbean region without the need for intrusive, and by 1905 highly controversial, military interventions. Yet the result was the exact opposite: on 29 November, U.S. Navy Captain Harry S. Knapp read his formal proclamation for U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic.

A new military government wielded power. Its first measures sought to bring order through the exertion of military control and included the disbanding of all Dominican armed and police forces, the disarmament of the population, and strict censorship of the press. As World War I concerns diverted the U.S. government’s attention toward the wider Atlantic and Europe, it left the occupation’s administration for years under control of the U.S. Navy and marines. Officers expected to improve Dominican society by building infrastructure and creating a new Dominican army modeled on the U.S. Marine Corps, but also planned in terms of larger strategic interests. Connected as it was to Washington-based foreign policies, the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924 was, at its core, a military experiment.

The Dominican experiment in dollar diplomacy also became an experiment, in the final accounting, in military exportation of U.S.-style government institutions. It was unique among contemporary U.S. occupations in the ways that U.S. government decisions made amid the lack of a treaty gave unprecedented and unequaled command of internal occupation decisions to the U.S. Navy Department during the height of direct U.S. influence. U.S. officers were well aware of this as they pushed for increased control, and, especially from the onset of full military occupation in 1916, many saw this occupation as a unique opportunity to demonstrate two major points. The first was that U.S. systems of government, military, and social order could be exported; the second was that the military was the most logical organization to export them. From the 1905–7 creation of a U.S. customs receivership to the subsequent military interventions and through the 1916–24 outright military occupation of the country, for many the Dominican experiment became a laboratory and showcase for the benefits of U.S. society, identity, whiteness, and professionalization.

Yet this original experiment in dollar diplomacy—unique in being under the complete control of the Navy Department for much of its existence—ultimately ended in the three-decade-long military dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, a man trained and elevated by the U.S. military. After the military occupation ended in 1924, Trujillo received support from members of the U.S. Marine Corps. Even after global, U.S., and Dominican resistance to outright military occupation forced the 1924 withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Dominican Republic, the military structures and alliances built during the occupation continued to heavily influence Dominican politics and society for decades.

The U.S. military’s goals of reforming Dominican political structures and uplifting Dominican society failed completely. Occupiers failed to reform political culture. Occupation forces’ efforts to break the power of the elite in society through occupation-created institutions ended with a new, centralized military component to government, creating a new and U.S.-friendly elite.

THIS BOOK ARGUES that early twentieth-century U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic fundamentally changed both the course of Dominican history and the way U.S. foreign policy was conducted. In the Dominican Republic, successive U.S. interventions contributed to a drastic shifting of the social order and centralized state power through the military, as well as a military/civilian polarization that Rafael Trujillo used in his 1920s rise to dictatorship. In U.S. foreign policy, the Dominican experiment became a laboratory for colonial experiments by the U.S. Navy and was instrumental in defining early dollar diplomacy. The overthrow of the social order resulting from the occupation was a product, not of military planning, but of how the occupation inserted itself into social issues, and how social issues inserted themselves into occupation plans—for both occupiers and Dominicans, a clash whose method was unintentional. Most Dominicans resisted either actively or passively, while the Dominican elite sought to reject the occupation entirely, often trying to conduct business as though the occupation were not occurring. Occupying officers at the highest levels, intent on their programs and plans, sometimes tried to replace Dominican culture and social norms with a new, model social order—an approach fed at times by ideas about race and geographical determinism. They seldom recognized that their struggle to build a new order was being informed by the broader Dominican contemporary struggle between centralization and regionalism. From Dominican rejections of the centralizing occupation to guerrilla warfare and scattered cooperation, the occupation became an extension of an ongoing Dominican civil war. The result was drastic change through constantly evolving force, negotiation, and compromise.

Despite the sometimes powerful references to nationalism in some occupiers’ justifications and in Dominican opposition to occupation, the story is at its core a transnational one. Besides being influenced by Dominican regional and class interests, developments in U.S.–Dominican relations were also informed by U.S. imperial concerns and global economic competition during World War I. These wider contexts affected actions within the Dominican Republic as the two countries’ politics and economies became increasingly intertwined. U.S. occupation stood as a direct response to long-term civil war that, because of European interests and a growth of U.S. investments in the Dominican Republic, seemed to threaten U.S. regional hegemony. The civil war itself was partly a reaction against the foreign presence, magnified by Dominican sectional tension that was in this period intensified by an entrenched class hierarchy and a failing economy. These problems had long plagued the newly developing country, becoming more pronounced and contested after the 1890s, just as U.S. investment and naval expansion were growing exponentially throughout the Caribbean region. The occupation intended to create the institutional means by which regional differences would be managed, thereby ameliorating long-standing regional tensions through the creation of new governmental and military structures. The unintended results and cultural clashes that ensued are reminiscent of other contemporary U.S. occupations, but the Dominican occupation was also exceptional due to the power of naval officers who sometimes sought to replace the structures of Dominican society with a militarily enforced, modernized, and U.S.-style government and culture, to use the occupation not only for strategic interests but also to make of it an example of what U.S. military force and efficiency could do, given free reign.

This study therefore provides insight not only into Dominican history during this era and early U.S. attempts to reform other nations politically through military force, but also lends a unique view into the power and goals of U.S. naval officers and administrators during expansive naval growth and the early twentieth-century concern about Caribbean security. Though not a general history of the Dominican occupation, this book tells the story of the military elements so central to that occupation and the intersections of those elements with social trends. Military policy makers during the occupation did not have the luxury of separating the military from the rest of society—much as they may have tried. The interactions and negotiations of military and civilian individuals in each year of the occupation, rather than policy or expectations, decided the results of this experiment.

The intervention happened in phases defined by Dominican responses or changes in external attention, whether from the State Department, the U.S. public, or international movements. In different phases, occupation officials applied varying centralizing tools in their attempts to consolidate central government administration and control. The constabulary was only one of these, and in fact at times was sidelined by occupation forces, but would become one of the most important occupation institutions by the time of withdrawal. In original calls for intervention, such a force was considered central, both by the State Department and U.S. officers and representatives in the Dominican Republic, based on the belief that military organization was sufficient to bring stability to Caribbean societies. It was at times neglected, during the early occupation, for similar reasons. With the many complications of the occupation, troops on the ground struggled to bring control. They found it more efficient to do so through use of present and already-trained U.S. troops. Finally, when withdrawal became necessary, military expediency and the need for stability and order returned officers’ focus to the training of the Dominican military. Negotiation and compromise among the population allowed for this growing reliance on control through a new Dominican military force. In a deeply entrenched class system in which occupation officials had often worked to exclude the Dominican elite, the constabulary late in the occupation presented an opportunity for some in the middle class to negotiate and cooperate with U.S. forces and initiatives and thereby find new power in society. For this reason, this book takes up a closer examination of the constabulary. Despite historical literature’s frequent emphasis on Washington-based policy, on changing U.S. presidencies and shifting U.S. national needs—all of which were influential—much of this occupation was envisioned, designed, and carried out by U.S. officers and shaped by Dominicans through the constabulary or opposition to the force.

Many histories of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean during this period have treated the U.S. expansionist impulse as the primary focus in the historical process, often with an emphasis or reliance on U.S. sources. These studies reveal, through specific instances, the experimental nature and flexibility of U.S.–Latin American relations.¹ They focus little, however, on the active participation of Latin Americans or their motivations in the broader development of international relations, thus neglecting deeper underpinnings of Latin American contributions to U.S.–Latin American relations and U.S. foreign policy. This integrated study of Dominican and U.S. sources complicates the idea that U.S. actions, decided by U.S. needs, provide constraints to Latin American action. While this is certainly true in part, the active negotiation and renegotiation between Latin American actors and U.S. actors has provided as much fuel for change as U.S.-based economic or security needs. In early U.S.–Dominican relations, the active resistance of Dominicans decisively changed U.S. security needs in ways that a U.S.-centered study cannot show.² As historians begin to take a much more synthetic approach to the historical study of U.S.–Latin American relations elsewhere, it is crucial to view U.S.–Dominican relations through this lens as well.³

A transnational synthesis of U.S. and Dominican sources for this period demonstrates that U.S. structures gradually reshaped the Dominican government and military, a process unique compared to other contemporary occupations because of the population’s extensive rejection of U.S. methods. Dominican adaptation was often unintentional and centered on contestations of power in civil-military relations, which in the end often excluded the Dominican elite. Despite internal conflicts and civil war similar to those occurring in countries such as Nicaragua, upper-class Dominicans widely rejected the intervention. Their lack of cooperation allowed U.S. military officers to plan without reference to treaties or collaborating forces in society. This occupation also magnified the continuing civil conflict in the Dominican Republic at a crucial time in the country’s national development. Even as the length of the occupation gradually led many to adapt, years passed before varying groups began to coalesce with some unity of purpose to force U.S. withdrawal. For many, the motivation for cross-regional or cross-class alliances was specifically to restore regional sovereignties. For others, opposition to the occupation presented an opportunity to unite Dominicans for major reform in society. Yet even those groups who angled for change rejected U.S.-defined change.

This crucial period in Dominican history, long silenced by the post-occupation dictatorship and its successors, has come under increased study in recent decades. Much of the new work, examining the vast changes in Dominican society from the 1880s through Trujillo’s regime (1930–61), challenges the dependency approach that long dominated Dominican historical study.⁴ These works show how central state policy was repeatedly remade through active opposition in regions removed from the capital city and in conversation with U.S. interventions. Since shortly after his death, biographies of Trujillo and studies of his regime have examined twentieth-century change in the Dominican Republic. Tracing the development of Trujillo’s government and his use of terror in the late 1920s and early 1930s, biographers have showed how his regime was militarily forced on the population,⁵ while more recent studies have expanded this scholarship by examining specific aspects of Trujillo’s regime and its methods of control.⁶ None of these new works, however, delve into the origins of that centralized military and state power, or the ways in which the U.S. occupation changed the country and facilitated some of these very elements of his rule.

Two recent works about Dominican armed forces indicate most clearly the need for further study of the occupation military. Challenging previous interpretations, Bernardo Vega’s 1992 Trujillo y las fuerzas armadas norteamericanas brought an abundance of new evidence in the historiographical quest to understand Trujillo’s long-lasting presence at the forefront of Dominican life. Vega argues conclusively that the 1924 U.S. military withdrawal was incomplete, that Trujillo’s close relationships with U.S. marine officers not only propelled him to the top ranks of the Dominican military but contributed forcibly to his ability to remain in power for so long. U.S. officers who had overseen the constabulary during the occupation often visited the Dominican Republic as distinguished guests and intervened on Trujillo’s behalf with the U.S. State Department and successive U.S. presidents. Vega’s study shows how the U.S.-created constabulary therefore remained a somewhat foreign military even after the occupation, which makes clearer the need to understand the formation of that military and the relationships Vega examines.

While Vega’s research emphasizes the new military’s strong break with the past, historian Valentina Peguero’s interpretation instead stresses the continuity of the military’s prominence in Dominican society. She shows the ways in which early Dominican history was militarized, alongside a closer examination of the militarization in society under Trujillo’s regime, to illustrate the similarities and argue that a long pattern of militarized culture paved the way for Trujillo’s military dictatorship.⁷ Both of these works focus on the military and provide crucial reappraisals of the previous scholarship but demonstrate the lack of scholarship about the U.S. occupation and its role in the formation of this centralized military. Peguero, for example, provides only an overview chapter of major military developments during the occupation, using the scarce secondary literature to argue simply that the occupation enforced militarization in Dominican culture.

Helping to explain the apparent contradiction between Vega’s work and Peguero’s, this study shows that the apparent similarities are more the product of propaganda than reality, born of a history rewritten by military and occupation forces in the late years of the occupation to make the new military upon U.S. withdrawal palatable.⁸ Dominican histories demonstrate that military leaders before the occupation, as well as the constituents they governed, stressed regional sovereignties. The question remains, therefore, what forces came into play to allow such a proudly regional country to change drastically enough to permit the centralized rise of Trujillo.

I argue that the delicate balance of foreign imposition and Dominican opposition opened a way for change that could only occur once both Dominicans and U.S. officials reached a point of compromise and negotiation. The pre-occupation military was a thoroughly different institution, with a very different place in Dominican society—but it was also Dominican, not simply an imposed and externally supported force. In essence, the heavy scholarly emphasis on the Trujillo era has contributed to a lack of research and publications about the U.S. occupation whose reshaping of institutions brought Trujillo to power. The infrastructure for Trujillo’s relationship with the peasantry and his cultural propaganda were largely products of the distinct military complex created during the occupation. In the Dominican Republic the Trujillo dictatorship silenced many who might have published examinations of those years, while in the United States the changes in foreign policy and direction in the 1920s and 1930s discouraged further research.⁹

Contemporary sources or those written during the Trujillo era were the sole sources about the occupation until Bruce Calder’s 1984 The Impact of Intervention. Calder’s work analyzed sources from both the Dominican and the U.S. national archives, producing a valuable monograph about the occupation’s political economy, including its relationship to the guerrilla resistance of the eastern provinces.¹⁰ My research complements this work by incorporating extensive military records from both countries. While Calder showed the ways in which U.S. officials sought to bring stability in the least intrusive way possible, not seeking to fundamentally alter Dominican society, the military records demonstrate that some U.S. officers in administrative posts were interested in changing fundamental structures in Dominican society and government. They saw this both as a way to guarantee stability and, at times, as a way to showcase what U.S. military power could do toward creating stable societies. This, and the need to make the occupation-created constabulary a powerful force upon U.S. withdrawal, did fundamentally change central aspects of Dominican society, even if it did not do so on the occupiers’ terms.

The extent of military control over this occupation, particularly during World War I, provides important insights into the effects of wider war on U.S. foreign policy and Caribbean development, contemporary changes in the U.S. military, the power struggle between U.S. governmental departments, and the role of naval interests in the fate of dollar diplomacy. Coming at a crucial time of shifting roles for the U.S. Navy and especially the Marine Corps, this occupation demonstrated the expectations of what U.S. military action could accomplish and the effects and concerns about U.S. public opinion on this diplomacy. More generally, a study of this occupation provides insight into early twentieth-century issues of military supply, operational problems, military–civil relations, diplomacy, and asymmetrical warfare, as well as distance command in a foreign country. Armed with an understanding of U.S. institutions as superior—backed by the training manuals that reiterated paternalist ideas and the remnants of an evolving Manifest Destiny that often meshed with ideals of scientific racism—military governors issued decrees and orders that sought to emplace U.S. patterns of society. Although official State Department policy was to avoid severe intrusion into Dominican civil life, the needs of occupation forces, the differences in cultural understandings, and the desires of some U.S. officers to carry out a great experiment made this unlikely or impossible.¹¹

The primary U.S. approach was military, as was the end solution upon withdrawal. The compromises of this occupation were crucial to the development of the militaries of both the Dominican Republic and the United States. U.S. officers’ ideas of foreign occupation were reshaped, and enlisted men were exposed to drastically distinct ways of life and military service. Among Dominicans, the occupation not only reinforced the emphasis on military power, as Peguero argues, but also reshaped society and reinforced an already strong culture of resistance to foreign rule. Eight years of contentious occupation created an anti-imperial atmosphere that U.S.-military-trained Rafael Trujillo was able to take advantage of, by promising a military that could protect sovereignty. In other words, the distaste for foreign rule was so strong by occupation’s end that Trujillo was able to claim continuity with earlier Dominican military culture. He contrasted his rule with that of the occupation so effectively that, despite persistent U.S. military involvement and backing, his regime’s promise of continued independence allowed the tempered change toward centralization to continue successfully for decades.

Ultimately, it is impossible to fully comprehend the occupation or U.S.–Dominican relations in the preceding years without a study of the military. The Dominican military was frequently the central point of concern and focus, both for U.S. policy makers and for Dominicans. Foreign involvement, emerging from U.S. investment in the late nineteenth century and compounded by U.S. national security concerns in the early twentieth century, ultimately honed in on the question of military control and culminated in the occupation constabulary and marine involvement in the post-occupation Dominican military. Significantly, though perhaps not surprisingly, the official Dominican history of the armed forces skips over the occupation years completely in its timeline overview of Dominican military history, picking back up in 1928 as though occupation events have no place in developing a historical understanding of the Dominican armed forces. Ultimately, however, occupation military and social history were always intertwined, and cannot be thoroughly understood without considering their mutual effects on each other. Forces of negotiation that allowed the new military to function in, and even to change, Dominican society remain unexplained. This synthetic investigation of the occupation years and their aftermath clarifies the socioeconomic and cultural impact of U.S. involvement in Dominican affairs. The history of the military during these transformational years provides a window through which to see how the struggle between continuity and change played out, leading to a creative dialogue that incorporated structures both U.S. and Dominican by the 1920s.

Chapter One: Markets, Militaries, and Modernization

U.S.–Dominican Relations to 1899

In the last half of the nineteenth century, trade and investment drew the United States and the Dominican Republic into an increasingly close relationship. The character of U.S. involvement and investment in the Dominican Republic, a product of U.S. economic expansionism of the time, was to be deeply shaped by Dominican military, governance, and tradition. As U.S. banks and investors turned increasingly to foreign markets, they understood and explained the evolving U.S. global role in terms of modernization defined by the period’s focus on scientific and professional progress. In the same period, the language among many Dominican merchants took on similar shades. As many in the United States argued for naval expansionism to compete in the global economy and protect burgeoning commerce, a growing number among the Dominican elite classes argued that Dominican regional traditions were backward and hoped to encourage foreign investments to modernize structures in their own country and take advantage of the globalizing world market.

While the coinciding of these discourses opened the door in limited ways to increased U.S. investment in the Dominican Republic, those Dominicans who hoped to centralize the country were up against an often militant regionalism in a country that lacked modern infrastructure. The general lack of regulation for U.S. investments abroad helped those in the Dominican Republic who sought to draw U.S. investors into a modernizing alliance in the very decades when U.S. postbellum expansionist discourse looked toward eventual annexation of surrounding countries to the United States. Talk of U.S. naval expansion and possible annexation added apparent security to Caribbean investments. While U.S. investment in this period was minimal compared to such investment in Cuba and other countries, it was enough to involve some Dominicans deeply in the change. While at first Dominican elites hoping to increase revenue struggled against caudillos protecting regional traditions, Dominican patterns of social class and status actually encouraged one such caudillo to take the lead in encouraging foreign investment. The result was a rapid and haphazard growth of U.S. and Dominican economicties that, by the late 1890s, began to force changes in both Dominican traditions and U.S. foreign policy.

THE PERSISTENCE OF CAUDILLO RULE and decentralization in the Dominican Republic can be traced to many factors, from the country’s colonial heritage to the terrain of the island of Hispaniola. Terrain complicated colonial administration, as it later would nineteenth-century governance. The tallest mountain range in the Caribbean, the Cordillera Central, runs through the center of the island, contributing to regional separation by making communication between regions difficult. Colonial administrators found that enslaved workers often escaped into the interior mountains, and soon found that production of sugar and control of the labor force were much easier in the neighboring colony of Cuba. The Spanish government allowed its colony on Hispaniola to fall into deep neglect that left land tenure through most of the territory undefined and unmonitored. From the sixteenth century on, the population spread out into regions that became increasingly autonomous units ruled by local elites or left to the care of cattle ranchers and subsistence agriculturalists. Over time, regional cultures defined law and order, and many Spanish elite families left for more lucrative colonies. Occasional Spanish attempts to regain control over the original colony by forcibly concentrating populations, especially after the French seizure of the western end of the island, only further damaged its economy.

The long Dominican struggles for independence increased the tendency toward caudillo rule. No sooner did the sparsely populated colony declare its independence from Spain and offer to become a part of Gran Colombia than it was overrun by armed forces from the recently formed Haitian government on the other side of the island. The Haitian government dominated a reticent Spanish-speaking population from 1822 to 1844, during which time controversial reforms and reimposition of foreign government fed a broadening movement to reassert independence. In the early 1840s, Dominicans fought a new independence war to free themselves from Haitian rule. Joining forces with Haitian antigovernment groups, they succeeded in bringing an end to Haitian rule after a long series of military campaigns in 1843–44. This long, second fight for independence left the fledgling country with a deep fear of another invasion, and the extensive revolutionary experience elevated military heroes. The new Dominican government prized military experience as a characteristic of good leadership and a guarantee for continued independence.

Combined with the already regional character of society, this emphasis on strong military leaders lent itself to caudillo rule, in which a weak central state maintained authority through acquiescence to pockets of local military rule. As the capital city of Santo Domingo was situated about two hundred miles from the Haitian border, central governments needed strong military forces on both sides of the Cordillera Central to protect against invasion. Lacking the central state apparatus and revenue to fund and monitor such forces, they depended on local leaders to field forces along the border. This in turn encouraged a strengthening of the regional caudillo system: the country’s first national leaders exemplified the period’s Latin American caudillos, military-political leaders who rose from regional to national prominence through charisma and military prowess. They retained political power by building strong support networks through patronage and bribing and supporting local military leaders, who in turn recruited local militia or guards throughout the scattered provinces.¹ Extensive regionalism allowed caudillismo to persist in the Dominican Republic through the nineteenth century when it was declining throughout much of Latin America. The regional government system meant a lack of infrastructural development connecting the provinces and contributed to the growth of multiple distinct cultures and hierarchies, separated north to southeast or by their proximity to the Haitian border.

Adding to geographically defined regionalism were strong divisions fed by partisanship and the traditional social class structure.² The country shared the liberal-conservative party divisions common throughout nineteenth-century Latin America, although party loyalties were often less important than loyalty to party leaders. Over the decades following independence, the conservative parties were made up primarily of the southern caudillos and commercial class and the bureaucracy of the capital, whereas the liberal parties were made up primarily of northern politicians and caudillos and the small but growing middle class. In all regions, urban society and much of the countryside were controlled by what some have called a caste system, separating the population between the traditional elite families, or gente de primera, and the gente de segunda. The former were defined by their descent from the early elite Spanish families and controlled military officership, while the latter were those from families that had gained some education and prominence in society, but whose lineage did not allow them entry into the ranks of the gente de primera. Outside of the cities, often working for elite landowners and some gente de segunda who had achieved prominence as rural merchants, the peasants formed the majority. From the years before Dominican independence, a large and vital peasantry that resisted urban domination was essential to the nation’s development, creating what historian Richard Turits has called a protonational sense of local or creole culture in the Dominican countryside based on subsistence agriculture, free access to land, and opposition to external control.³ Peasant autonomy, however, was tempered by region depending on the character of local rule.

In this highly divided system, which dominated nineteenth-century Dominican history, national leaders depended both on regional elites and on the placement of popular military-political leaders as vice presidents with their offices in the Cibao Valley, on the other side of the Cordillera Central from the capital city. Many nineteenth-century presidents only maintained a national base of support by allowing vice presidents to rule the Cibao separately, although leaders from the Cibao tended toward more liberal rule, widening the division of the country. In conjunction with the lack of roads and the difficulties of traveling in the 1800s, this led to a political system based largely on compromise between distinct regions. The history of larger landholdings in the south and east led to a larger conservative elite class and less free land for peasants, while the historical lack of regulation in the north allowed for a proliferation of subsistence landholdings. Along the Haitian border in the northwest and southwest, too, power dynamics were different. These regions grew in relative isolation from the capital, their economies connected more closely to foreign trade with Haiti or through their own ports than to primary Dominican cities. They developed distinct cultures as well as economies, often centered on fluid border populations that defied both Dominican and Haitian central government interests. With a general lack of infrastructure connecting them to the major cities, and a sometimes prosperous border trade, these regions fell under the leadership of caudillos who built growing landholdings and oversaw local government.⁴

In all regions, the differences between urban and rural society were notable, and those elite families who owned rural land were close to cities, where they had access to formal education. In the countryside, especially in the north, peasants worked on shared lands called terrenos comuneros and shared state lands for their agricultural needs—a tradition that encouraged peasant autonomy. Even as they entered the world market through the growing of tobacco, they maintained their subsistence plots and their autonomy in the countryside into the twentieth century. The wide autonomy of Cibao peasants allowed the integration, rather than destruction, of peasant production in the north. As Michiel Baud has convincingly argued, peasantries of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were formed within, but not by, the modern capitalist system.⁵ The availability of open land, with lack of regulation on land ownership, also contributed to peasant autonomy throughout the country; when their land was encroached upon, peasants simply moved their small landholdings, or conucos, farther into the mountains or onto other unclaimed land. In the south and east, as sugar began to dominate, communal landholdings came into conflict with expanding sugar plantations, and Dominican peasants became agricultural laborers competing for work; the seasonal nature of sugar production meant spikes of high unemployment when each sugar harvest ended.

As merchants from among the gente de segunda began to push for foreign investments, a growing population came to depend economically on foreign trade, primarily with Germany and the United States. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, customs revenues became the source of funding for a centralizing national government. Trade with foreign buyers allowed this early growth but also contributed to regional division, as the interior and north oriented their trade toward tobacco and German markets whereas the south and southeast grew primarily sugar and gradually became more oriented toward U.S. investors and buyers.⁶ Because regionalism was often more divisive than class in Dominican society, late-nineteenth-century entry into the international market increased divisions between the Cibao and the southeast. The increasing connections of Dominican production to the world market in the late 1800s presented a new set of regionally defined complications even as decades of European and U.S. capitalist expansion brought major changes to society. Many Dominican investors and merchants developed a preference for changes that allowed for modernization in the economy, connecting Dominican trade to the benefits of