Say what you will about Villard, at least he formed an anti-imperialist league and used the Nation to object to intervention in Haiti:
http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ail/haiti_sd_soc.html
Now all the Nation is capable of is running this totally inane and condescending piece prior to Aristide's fall and nothing subsequent:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040301&s=wilentz
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The Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society By Jim Zwick
The Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society grew out of concerns within both the Anti-Imperialist League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) about the U.S. Marine occupations of those countries. Its officers and advisory committee included people from both organizations, and it was centered around The Nation, the progressive weekly owned and edited by Oswald Garrison Villard. It was founded in the fall of 1921 just as the Anti-Imperialist League was formally disbanding. Moorfield Storey, its chairman, was president of both the Anti-Imperialist League and the NAACP. Others with previous affiliations with the League included Robert Herrick, its treasurer, and Felix Adler and Villard of its advisory committee. Six were affiliated with the NAACP: Storey, Villard, James Weldon Johnson (vice-chairman), Paul Kennaday, Mary White Ovington, and John E. Milholland. From the editorial staff of The Nation, Lewis S. Gannett was its assistant treasurer, and Ernest Gruening was on its advisory council.
People within both the Anti-Imperialist League and the NAACP responded to the occupations of Haiti (1915-1934) and Santo Domingo (1916-1924) long before the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society was formed. In 1915 W. E. B. Du Bois unsuccessfully sought NAACP support for an investigative trip to Haiti and Villard pressed for a congressional investigation. Storey and Villard corresponded about conditions in Haiti in 1916 and Storey addressed the situations there and in Santo Domingo in his annual address to the Anti-Imperialist League that year.
In his address, Storey condemned the invasions on traditional anti-imperialist grounds. He highlighted the hypocrisy of the Wilson administration's stated claim to support the national rights of the American republics by pointing out that the National Geographic had published a photograph of the Haitian Assembly in session with a U.S. Marine standing watch in the background. "Not only do these acts violate international law and our solemn professions, but they violate our own constitution.... To make war without a declaration of war by Congress is open usurpation, and it has been done too often in recent years." Later revelations of Marine brutalities in Haiti also echoed the League's criticism of atrocities in the Philippines. Reports published in 1920 pointed out that the Marines killed more than 3,000 Haitians while suffering only thirteen deaths themselves. For Villard, "this was the completest proof that it was not war that was waged in Haiti."
Storey, Villard, and others affiliated with the NAACP were also concerned that the interventions were racially motivated. They did not expect racist Americans to treat people of color in the Caribbean with justice, and they saw the occupation of Haiti, in particular, as undermining an important symbol of resistance to slavery and racial injustice in the Americas. The issue of slavery became one of the most powerful indictments against the U.S. occupation of Haiti when it was revealed that the Marines had implemented a corvée labor system to build a military road through the country. James Weldon Johnson wrote that "the Occupation seized men wherever it could find them, and no able-bodied Haitian was safe from such raids, which most closely resembled the African slave raids of past centuries. And slavery it was -- though temporary."
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