Before the planters arrived, the Mississippi River Delta was a swampy jungle. In his 1941 memoir Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy, a prominent member of the regional plantation elite, described what the Delta might have looked like in those early days, with an emphasis on the area’s fluid nature. “A still country it must have been then, ankle-deep in water, mostly in shadow, with mere flickers of sunshine, and they motey and yellow and thick like syrup.”Footnote ¹ But in the early nineteenth century, news had started to spread about the fertility of the Delta soil. The younger sons of plantation families in the eastern states, looking for new land to plant staple crops, began to move west, turning the Deep South of the United States into the vertex of the cotton frontier. In Mississippi they settled near the river, which provided transportation, information, and recreation, in the form of leisure trips to New Orleans. “The real highway was the river,” Percy wrote in his personal history of the Mississippi Delta. The steamer Pargo regularly arrived on Sunday mornings in the Delta town of Greenville. Most people would be in church then, but when the Pargo’s whistle blew, the men immediately stood up from the pews and made for the riverfront, to hear the latest news and gossips.Footnote ² Knowledge was an important cargo aboard riverboats like the Pargo.Footnote ³

Percy’s memoir demonstrates how central water was to the plantation experience in the Mississippi Delta. From the era of wetland wilderness to that of plantation empire, water constituted a formative element of the Delta ecosystem. With the development of large-scale agriculture along the river in Mississippi and Louisiana, the port city of New Orleans became an important node connecting the Delta through waterways to the wider world—“an export-processing zone mediating between the Cotton Kingdom of the Mississippi and the Atlantic,” historian Walter Johnson writes.Footnote ⁴ Other scholars highlight this mediating role and even consider New Orleans a Caribbean port city instead of a North American one.Footnote ⁵

Of course, the system of slavery on which the Cotton Kingdom of the U.S. South rested also had strong connections to water. The trans-Atlantic trade brought enslaved workers to the United States, and they did the actual labor clearing the swamps of the Delta and making the land ready for cotton and sugarcane. Water simultaneously functioned as a connector for the planter class in the U.S. Deep South, linking the region with other slaveholding societies in the Americas. Besides being citizens of the United States, southern planters considered themselves part of a circum-Caribbean community of plantation cultures, an American Mediterranean that included Cuba, “a kind of dream world for the South,” according to historian Matthew Pratt Guterl. As a global trade nexus and planter’s paradise, Cuba stood in stark contrast to Jamaica and Haiti, where rebellion and emancipation had ended slavery on both islands.Footnote ⁶

The South’s reliance on cash crops and world markets made its planter aristocracy acutely aware of global developments, while the institution of slavery created a transnational feeling of fellowship and solidarity with other plantation regimes connected through water. “As members of a pan-American slaveholding class, their apparently shared cosmopolitan interests could triumph, they sometimes assumed, over the various linguistic, racial, national, and historic chauvinisms that otherwise fractured the Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean,” Guterl writes.Footnote ⁷ Historians have argued that after the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) and the abolition of slavery, southern cosmopolitanism ended and the region turned inward, adopting an isolationist stance.Footnote ⁸ This provincial attitude led to a rather one-dimensional view on international politics that extended into the Cold War era, when racial segregation in the South—the Jim Crow system—came under increased attack from civil rights activists. “The foreign policy of the segregationists was never elaborate or comprehensive,” according to historian Thomas Noer. Segregationists were more interested in domestic race relations than in international relations, Noer argues, and in the post-World War II period they exerted no significant influence on U.S. foreign affairs.Footnote ⁹

However, if we apply the concept of the “American Mediterranean” (i.e., the circum-Caribbean community of plantation societies whose disintegration supposedly coincided with the abolition of slavery) to the Cold War period, a different picture emerges: the persistence of a transnational alliance between authoritarian regimes bordering the Caribbean Sea that had a distinct global political agenda. A comparable alliance existed during the antebellum era between proslavery forces in the Western hemisphere united in opposition to abolitionism in the region, historian Matthew Karp argues.Footnote ¹⁰ In line with Guterl and Karp, historian Mariona Lloret proposes an approach that similarly focuses on Caribbean connectivity between U.S. Deep South states like Louisiana and countries such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic, advancing it as a paradigm to break through narrowly defined ideas about American exceptionalism and study the transregional interrelations between U.S. and Latin American political traditions. Lloret observes that Louisiana had not just political traits in common with Caribbean nations, but also similarities in geography and race relations. She suggests “to transcend the political boundaries of Louisiana as merely a region in the U.S. and understand it, instead, as a place on the margins of the Gulf of Mexico, sharing a common space with the insular Latin American nations.”Footnote ¹¹ Water is central to this common space.

In contrast with the focus of Guterl and Karp on the nineteenth century, Lloret applies the concept of a transnational community consisting of states in the U.S. Gulf South and countries in the Caribbean to the twentieth century, in particular the 1920s and 1930s. This essay follows Lloret’s temporal shift from an antebellum “American Mediterranean” to an analogous circum-Caribbean system during the Cold War through a brief case study of U.S. segregationist sentiments regarding the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961) in the Dominican Republic. Such a case study may illuminate how “water relations” continued to serve as a conduit in the Cold War American Mediterranean, manifesting themselves as a transnational alliance of authoritarian plantation societies in the Greater Caribbean. Instead of an isolated backwater, the twentieth-century Mississippi Delta was in fact a globally entangled region and the regional planter class William Alexander Percy belonged to was very much aware of world affairs and the importance of finding economic and ideological allies abroad, from the Americas to Africa and Europe.Footnote ¹²

During the 1950s, a marked change in the attitude of the U.S. government toward the Dominican Republic developed. A series of incidents led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to reconsider cooperation with Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo, also with regard to trade. For years, the United States had considered the dictator a stalwart ally in the global fight against communism. But Trujillo’s increasingly erratic behavior evoked protest from other Caribbean countries. The United States now had a choice: keep Trujillo in the saddle on the basis of his anticommunist credentials, or restore U.S. credibility in the area by withdrawing support for his autocratic regime through the sugar trade. A debate about this Dominican question evolved in Congress during the later years of the Cuban Revolution (1953–1959). This debate reveals how U.S. segregationist spokespeople extended their fight for the traditional southern way of life into the Caribbean. Segregationists were part of a strong lobby—bankrolled by Trujillo—for the state-owned Dominican sugar industry.Footnote ¹³ Politicians from the U.S. South played a pivotal role in determining diplomacy and trade with the Trujillo regime and often chose the side of the Caribbean dictator.

In a 1957 address, for instance, Representative George S. Long (D-LA) explained the transnational nature of southern traditionalism and how it related to overseas trade relations. The speech was a response to Representative Charles Porter (D-OR), who had accused the Trujillo regime of complicity in the killing of Jésus de Galindez, a lecturer at Columbia University and author of a critical dissertation about the Dominican dictator, and Gerald Murphy, a young U.S. pilot who had flown Galindez back to the Dominican Republic. Long took the floor to defend Trujillo, claiming that Porter based his allegations on hearsay. The Trujillos “have always and unequivocally been on the side of God and Christianity,” Long stated. “They have been to us a vital and necessary bulwark against the encroachment of atheistic communism in its diabolical attempt to infiltrate and destroy our Nation through our eastern seaboard.”Footnote ¹⁴ Long had another reason why Porter had little authority to speak about Dominican matters. “Oregon lies some three thousand miles from the Dominican Republic, while that island Republic lies only a few hundred miles from my own State of Louisiana,” said Long. “The Dominican Republic means much more to us of Louisiana than it does to those of other great states of our Union.”Footnote ¹⁵

By emphasizing his own state’s closeness to the Dominican Republic, George Long, brother of the famous Louisiana governor and U.S. senator Huey Long (1893–1935), classified the Bayou State and the Trujillo regime as part of a circum-Caribbean coalition that shared ideological values and had a common understanding. This proximity was the reason why, according to Long, Louisianans truly grasped “the Government and people of the proud island Republic of Santo Domingo” and were “aware of their true nature.”Footnote ¹⁶ Because Trujillo was an anticommunist, he was a friend of the United States, Long claimed, despite his ruthless politics. Long’s remarks indicate how water functioned as a placemaking mechanism, the physical basis for an imagined community where not only plantation goods like sugar circulated, but also ideas about social hierarchy and political control. Gulf South states like Louisiana thus functioned as a liminal space, connected by land with the rest of the United States and by water with likeminded regimes in the Caribbean. Representative Long of Louisiana amplified the latter maritime link when he declared he felt a deep connection with the “great free and independent nations, our next door neighbors, so to speak, which border on the legendary Caribbean Sea.”Footnote ¹⁷

Travels in the Cold War American Mediterranean strengthened bonds between the U.S. Deep South and its Caribbean counterparts, such as the Dominican Republic. In 1957, Senator Olin Johnston (D-SC) paid a visit to the country and contrasted the “communistic-inspired” instability in neighboring Haiti with the “stable, firm, and well organized” situation under Trujillo’s authoritarian regime.Footnote ¹⁸ Senator Allen Ellender (D-LA) went to the island of Hispaniola a year later and drew a similar conclusion. “What a far cry between Haiti, and the Dominican Republic,” Ellender wrote. “There is no comparison between the two places… The chief difference is in the type of leadership … [Haiti] has no leadership … and I cannot see much chance for improvement.”Footnote ¹⁹ Although the senator acknowledged that the Dominican Republic operated “under a form of government of which we do not necessarily approve in this country,” he was impressed with its “visible progress” and was surprised to find out Trujillo ran “one of the largest sugar factories in the world.” Ellender thought that “many of the countries of Latin America require the leadership of men such as Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, if results are to be obtained.”Footnote ²⁰

The observations by Johnston and Ellender fit in a pattern of racialized thinking about Haiti that finds its origins in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century circum-Caribbean circulations, demonstrating that ideas formed in the antebellum American Mediterranean persisted in the twentieth century. These ideas began to materialize when the enslaved population on the island successfully toppled the French colonial regime in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and a plantation system based on forced Black labor, large-scale agriculture, and the cultivation of export crops became dominant in the U.S. South.Footnote ²¹ In the Dominican Republic, the sugar plantation economy expanded during the early twentieth century. An increasing number of migrants from Haiti began to cross the border to work in the cane fields, causing anti-Haitianism to grow more virulent among Dominicans. They associated cane cutting with slavery and, because many of the plantations were owned by U.S. corporations, the Dominican population also connected the sugar industry with imperial occupation. Historian Lauren Derby argues that between 1910 and 1920, “the stereotype of Haitians as indigent cane cutters became univocal and hegemonic, as Haitians in the Dominican Republic came to reside at the bottom of the new status hierarchy that emerged with the rise of sugar monoculture.”Footnote ²² The contract-labor system introduced in the Caribbean around the turn of the twentieth century by businessmen from the United States relegated Haitians to the status of indentured servants, transported to plantations and policed in the bateyes by the Dominican army.Footnote ²³

Southern politicians contrasted Dominican progress with stagnation in Latin American and Caribbean countries that did not align with the Jim Crow political agenda. The racial politics (exemplified in the discrimination against Haitians by the Dominican government) and anticommunist credentials of the Trujillo regime combined with the fact that the Dominican strongman forcefully ran his country as his own (sugar) plantation formed a natural connection with states in the U.S. Deep South. From the segregationist point of view, Haiti was the antithesis of the Dominican Republic. Allen Ellender, who grew up on a sugar plantation in Louisiana’s Cajun country and was an outspoken defender of the Jim Crow system, saw race as an important factor in the differences between the neighboring countries. “The people here are shiftless,” he described the Black citizens of Haiti, “which is more or less a characteristic of their race.”Footnote ²⁴

In contrast, the Dominican Republic was integrated into a hemispheric Caribbean brotherhood characterized by right-wing governments that were racist, anticommunist, and highly personalistic in nature. Political machines under the command of strongmen (Governor George Wallace in Alabama, U.S. Senator “Big Jim” Eastland of Mississippi, Dixiecrat leader Leander Perez in Louisiana) were powerful in the U.S. Deep South and often were not afraid to employ state violence to protect the socioeconomic status quo. At the end of the 1950s, after Fidel Castro had taken over power in Cuba, this hemispheric cooperation between authoritarian states in the transnational Gulf South translated into strong U.S. southern support for reallocating Cuba’s sugar quota to the Dominican Republic, instead of to other Caribbean countries. A plantation commodity like sugar thus became a geopolitical weapon in bolstering reactionary regimes around the Gulf of Mexico. Plantationocene features such as large-scale monocrop agriculture, a coercive labor structure in which the authorities policed Black workers, and autocratic, race-based leadership characterized the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. These features created feelings of kinship between Jim Crow’s representatives and dictators in other parts of the Americas.

By foregrounding the Caribbean Sea as a zone of connectivity between various authoritarian regimes, often involved in plantation agriculture, an image of the Jim Crow South emerges that challenges its characterization as isolated and inward-looking. Jim Crow ideology had clear transnational and global tendencies, as its advocates sought political partners and economic associates in other parts of the world. The Caribbean operated as an aquatic conduit for these exchanges and the mutual reinforcement of economic, political, and racial regimes.Footnote ²⁵ Such an approach to the Jim Crow system corresponds to calls by scholars for an “Archipelagic American Studies” or to consider the U.S. Deep South as the northern edge of the Caribbean.Footnote ²⁶ And although plantation agriculture in the United States diminished in economic importance during the Cold War, especially in comparison to the antebellum period, the institution itself remained an important blueprint for the (racialized) distribution of political power and the division of labor in the Greater Caribbean.

In his personal history of the Mississippi Delta, William Alexander Percy described how the plantation replaced the primordial swamp. “Forests were cleared, roads constructed (such dusty or muddy roads!), soil shaped into fields, homes built,” he wrote in 1941.Footnote ²⁷ The contradiction between swamp and plantation, between an unruly, rebellious space and a heavily controlled environment, continued to resonate in the Cold War American Mediterranean, as the agents of Jim Crow and their allies in the Caribbean Basin sought to preserve their hierarchical social structures through calls for law and order and the repression of those who wanted to change the world the plantation had wrought—with water as a medium.