Charles W. Chesnutt to Ernest Angell, 18 March 1922
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March 18, 1922.
Mr. Ernest Angell,
50 Pine Street,
New York City.
My dear Mr. Angell:
Mr. Walter L. Flory1 as written me a letter, in which he gives extracts of your letter to him concerning the American occupation of Haiti, and asked me to sign the brief drawn up by Mr. Storey,2 of which he enclosed a copy.3
I have kept in pretty close touch through the newspapers, principally the Nation,4 with conditions in Haiti, and sign this brief very willingly indeed, my only regret being that my name cannot add greater weight to it than it will.5
I have also secured the signature of Judge F. A. Henry,6 former Judge of the Court of Appeals of Ohio, of this district. I have spoken to several other gentlemen, but find that some of them do not wish to sign for lack of any information on the other side, and some because they think it would be disloyal to suggest that the United States Government could do anything wrong. I enclose signed copy of brief.
I hope that you will secure all the signatures needed, and that the brief may accomplish its purpose. The United States ought to be able to help the Haitians out of the rut without entirely depriveding them of their hard-earned and long maintained independence.
Correspondent: Ernest Angell (1889–1973) was a White lawyer, originally from Cleveland, who worked for a prominent Cleveland law firm after service in World War I and by 1920 was working in corporate law for the firm of Hardin & Hess in New York. He represented the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society (founded in 1921) at the hearings of the 1921–22 Senate investigation on the U.S. occupation of Haiti.
1. Walter LeRoy Flory (1880–1951) was a White Cleveland lawyer, originally from Newark, Ohio, educated at Yale and the Western Reserve Law School. He began practicing in Cleveland in 1905 and was later part of the prominent law firm Thompson, Hine & Flory, founded in 1911. Flory was active in Cleveland's Citizens' League and other local civic organizations; like Chesnutt, he was a member of the Cleveland Bar Association and the Chamber of Commerce. [back]
2. Moorfield Storey (1845–1929) was a White Harvard-trained lawyer and civil-rights activist from Massachusetts who became the founding president of the NAACP (1909–1929). He practiced law in Boston and was briefly president of the American Bar Association (1895–1896). Opposed to U.S. military intervention abroad, he was active in the New England Anti-Imperialist League and chaired the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society (founded in 1921), which hired Ernest Angell as its defense lawyer. [back]
3. The sixteen-page report, entitled "The Seizure of Haiti by the United States: A Report on the Military Occupation of the Republic of Haiti and the History of the Treaty Forced Upon Her," was published by the Foreign Policy Association (New York) and distributed by the National Popular Government League (Washington, D.C.) with twenty-four signatures. It called for the U.S. to abrogate the treaty that was the basis of the occupation, for election of a new government in Haiti, and for new treaty negotiations between "free and independent sovereign states" (p. 15). [back]
4. The Nation is a weekly magazine founded by White abolitionists in 1865 at the end of the Civil War; from 1900 to 1935, its owner was Oswald Garrison Villard, who was a founding member of the NAACP, a liberal Democrat, and a regular contributor to his own weekly. The Nation covered the occupation of Haiti extensively, with over thirty articles written between 1920 and 1922 alone, including James Weldon Johnson's four-essay series, Self-Determining Haiti (Aug. 28–Sept. 25, 1920). [back]
5. Although Chesnutt agreed to sign, his name was not included in the list of twenty-four "lawyers who are signatories of the brief" when it was published. [back]
6. Frederick Augustus Henry (1867–1949) was a White Republican lawyer in Cleveland. By 1918, he was partner in a prominent local law firm then called Snyder, Henry, Thomsen, Ford & Seagrave. Like Chesnutt, he was a member of the Cleveland Bar Association and the Chamber of Commerce; he was also a trustee of nearby Hiram College. His is one of the twenty-four signatures on the Haiti brief as published in April 1922. [back]
