Faustin Wirkus: The Coal Cracker Who Became King

On Sunday, April 19, 1931, a huge crowd assembled at the train station in the small mining town of Dupont in Luzerne County to catch a glimpse of royalty. They watched in anticipation as the passenger train pulled into the depot and the brass band launched into a lively march. A moment later a tall man with steely eyes emerged from one of the cars and stepped onto the platform amid a chorus of whistles and applause from the audience of ten thousand onlookers. Everyone in Dupont had come down to the station to witness the arrival of King Faustin II, the former all-powerful ruler of the tropical island of La Gonave in the West Indies.

The king was not dark-skinned, nor was he attired in colorful ceremonial garb. When he addressed the crowd, he didn't speak with a foreign accent. That's because King Faustin II, who ruled over the 12,000 inhabitants of La Gonave for four years, was born and raised in the coal region of Pennsylvania. And now he was home at last. 

Thousands lined the streets of Dupont on that forgotten spring day nearly a century ago, and, after a parade of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and the 109th Regiment band had marched past the town hall, distinguished speakers rained praise down upon the Caribbean king like a tropical shower. "He went away from us not so long ago as a boy," proclaimed Peter Kanajeski, chairman of the Luzerne County American Legion. "Today, he comes back as a man whose ambition and determination to forge ahead has made him a figure of international fame." 

Faustin Edmond Wirkus was just a brown-eyed youth of seventeen, working as a breaker boy at the No. 9 Colliery in Pittston, when he ran away from his home on Stanton Street in Dupont to join the U.S. Marines in 1915. His reason for running away had nothing to do with problems at home, however; he was a well-liked boy with many friends (one of his closest teenage friends from Dupont was Rudolph Belarski, the acclaimed cover artist of mystery and science fiction novels), and while his father encouraged him to stick with coal mining, the ambitious youth wanted to see with his own eyes the world he had only read about in books.

Wirkus arrived in the West Indies at the height of the American occupation of Haiti. After rising to the rank of lieutenant he was transferred to the remote nearby island of La Gonave and placed in command of a small platoon of native soldiers selected from Haiti's disbanded army. It was not an enviable assignment; many of his own countrymen were opposed to the United States flexing its imperialist muscles in the Caribbean, while native Haitians fought ferociously to expel the Leathernecks from their sphere of influence. During the nineteen-year occupation of the island nation, 146 American soldiers would forfeit their lives, while upwards of 15,000 Haitians would either die in battle, in forced labor camps, or from illness and injury related to the occupation.

 
Kindness is King

It soon became evident to the natives that Faustin Wirkus had little in common with his fellow Marines, however. Unlike many of the American soldiers, Wirkus was not openly racist. The son of Polish immigrants, he spent his childhood among the mining patches of Luzerne County-- a true melting pot of cultures and languages during the heyday of anthracite mining. As a result of this upbringing, Wirkus became fluent in Polish, Russian, Czech and Slovenian. It was no surprise then that Wirkus had little difficulty learning the Haitian Creole spoken by the La Gonave islanders, and while other American officers had stripped authority away from the native leaders of the island's 32 villages (even placing many of them into forced labor camps), Wirkus respected their indigenous customs and cultural norms. After Wirkus was promoted to sergeant, the Marine Corps appointed him military governor of the La Gonave sub-district.

 

Queen Ti Memenne with Faustin Wirkus

A Mysterious Island and a Voodoo Queen

While La Gonave had been under Haitian control since 1801, the Kingdom of La Gonave continued to operate independently under a matriarchal system of government run by Vodou (voodoo) queens and priestesses. While voodoo was commonly practiced on mainland Haiti, it was here, on the rocky and rugged tropical island of La Gonave, where the zonbi (zombie) was regarded as more than folklore or mere superstition; as a result, Haitian government officials gave the island a wide berth, allowing the voodoo queens to remain in charge of the the day-to-day affairs of the natives.

One such queen was Ti Memenne, who was regarded as the spiritual and political leader of La Gonave. After the Americans arrived and disbanded the Haitian army, however, they sought to curb Queen Ti Memenne's influence by arresting her and charging her with sedition and assorted "voodoo offenses". She was thrown into a Haitian prison, out of sight and out of mind of all Americans but one-- Faustin Wirkus. 

From the day of his arrival on the island, Wirkus came to respect the queen and the influence she wielded not just on La Gonave, but throughout much of Haiti. He was also astute enough to realize that the American forces stood a much better chance of succeeding in their conquest if they had the queen's backing and support. Wirkus, who is widely believed to be the first white person to ever venture into the interior of La Gonave, befriended the imprisoned priestess, and, through his efforts, managed to procure her release. When Queen Ti Memenne finally returned to her island kingdom, she repaid Wirkus by asking him to attend an important tribal meeting. 

On July 18, 1926, Wirkus was approached by tribal priests who demanded that he ride in a chair carried by native warriors. He obeyed, and was conveyed before the queen. Wirkus admitted that he was scared. "I was uncertain whether the natives meant to kill me or hail me," he recalled. "There was much dancing, machete waving and black magic." At the conclusion of the three-hour ceremony, Queen Ti Memenne pronounced him King Faustin II, the new ruler of La Gonave. 

The Power of a Name

Of course, there was more to the Luzerne County soldier's destiny than the kindnesses shown to Ti Memenne and her people; it also helped that he had the right name. In 1847, a Haitian soldier named Faustin Soulouque became the nation's president, before declaring himself emperor two years later. King Faustin reigned over Haiti until 1859, when he was exiled to Jamaica. That a white man named Faustin should appear out of nowhere to procure Ti Memenne her freedom didn't seem like an accident to the Vodou queen-- to her, it seemed more like reincarnation. 

And, during his coronation, Wirkus even came close to believing it himself, when the long-dead king was conjured through a voodoo ritual.

"He was in ghost form, this Faustin," he explained. "The president of Haiti was a big black named Soulouque. He got ambitions to be more than a president, so he burned the constitution and declared himself emperor. King Faustin I, he called himself. Some of the old islanders who remembered him thought it was significant that I was named Faustin, too. That was one reason I was king. That, and being a Marine." 

As for Faustin's mother, Anna Wirkus, she never cared for the name. Faustin's sister, Helen, once explained that her brother had been named after the parish priest. "It was his name and I can remember my mother crying because she didn't like the name," Helen recalled.

Wirkus took to his new role as King Faustin II like a duck to water. One of his first orders of business as king was to banish government tax collectors from the island. Instead, he instituted his own system of taxation, which the natives readily embraced, and under his less-than-brutal collection methods was able to generate more tax revenue in one year than the previous strong-armed government collectors had been able to collect in twenty. In his first two years as king, Wirkus collected $55,000 in taxes; during the preceding two decades, the Haitian government had only been able to collect $2,000 from the La Gonave islanders.

Before long, the living conditions on the island began to improve, especially after he taught irrigation techniques to the farmers and introduced new breeds of pigs and new strains of crops to the island. When he explained to his subjects that he needed a few volunteers to help construct a wharf on La Gonave, more than five hundred natives answered the call. Just four days later, the island had a completed harbor and a new capitol building. The superstitious natives even began attributing "supernatural" powers to the pale-skinned king, who was referred to as "He Who Was to Come".

 

Trouble on the Horizon

If anything, King Faustin II proved a little too successful in his new role. The rapid development of the once-forbidden isle attracted the attention of Louis Borno, the recently elected president of Haiti, which had fallen heavily into debt. Rather than emulate King Faustin's leadership style, Borno grew jealous and went so far as to complain to President Hoover that, if left unchecked, Faustin would become a tyrannical dictator. The United States government was inclined to agree, and Faustin Wirkus was reassigned and recalled from La Gonave, thereby ending his four year reign. 

Ironically, it was Louis Borno who ultimately became the despot; he refused to organize free elections, and appointed close friends and allies to Haiti's 21-member Council of State. Journalists who dared to criticize Borno promptly found themselves imprisoned in the National Penitentiary at Port-au-Prince. And when the Great Depression forced a change in American foreign policy and a reduction in financial backing, Haitian farmers who had once supported American occupation detected a change in the air and called for the Americans to leave. Angered by Borno's despotism and his close relationship with President Hoover, about 1,500 Haitians marched on the port city of Les Cayes on December 6, 1929. The protesters were met by the U.S. Marines and things turned ugly. When the smoke cleared, over a dozen Haitian peasants and farmers lay dead. In Washington, the long occupation of Haiti was declared a total failure, and the last American soldiers were recalled from the island in 1934.

Haitian president Louis Borno

The Later Years of Faustin Wirkus

Upon relinquishing his crown, Wirkus returned to the United States and wrote a memoir, entitled The White King of La Gonave. He spent a few years on the lecture circuit, charging a $125 speaking fee per lecture, before taking a job on Wall Street. In 1935 he directed a Broadway play, "Dance With Your Gods", which was staged at the Mansfield Theatre on West 47th Street. For a time he also was engaged in importing rum from the Caribbean. In 1937 he married Yula Webster Fuller, a widow from Atlanta, Georgia. Their only child, a son named Faustin Wirkus, Jr., would eventually become a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In December of 1939 Wirkus reenlisted as a Marine Corps recruiter. When the Second World War broke out he reenlisted again, this time at the age of 45, to accept the position of aviation gunnery instructor at the Naval Flight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "I felt like a fire horse when the alarm sounded," explained Wirkus.

But while the former king's young recruits were battling foes on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, the coal cracker king was waging a private war against cancer. He lost his battle only a month after the formal surrender of Japan, passing away at the Brooklyn Naval Hospital on October 8, 1945, at the age of 48. He was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. 

Sources:

Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, March 31, 1931.
Scranton Tribune, April 20, 1931.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Oct. 19, 1934.
Pittston Gazette, Dec. 13, 1939.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, May 12, 1942.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Oct. 9, 1945.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Oct. 10, 1945.
The Scrantonian, Feb. 14, 1982.