Senate Inquiry Occupation Haiti Santo Domingo

The Senate inquiry of late 1921 and early 1922 was the major U.S. congressional investigation into the occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo, carried out by a special Senate Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo chaired by Medill McCormick. The hearings publicly documented forced labor, censorship, military violence, and occupation contradictions — the corvée system, the Caco war, censorship — without actually ending the regime they exposed. Anti-occupation organizers including Ernest Gruening, James Weldon Johnson, Georges Sylvain, the Union Patriotique, and the Haiti-Santo Domingo Independence Society all helped shape how the Haitian case reached the committee, making the inquiry a bridge between occupation violence on the ground and the transnational advocacy network that tried to expose it.