A National City Bank officer becomes Bryan's private adviser on Haiti

Roger Farnham of the National City Bank of New York supplied William Jennings Bryan with what he called insights different from the ones official reports gave. Dana Munro of the State Department called him a dangerous counsellor. Bryan had built a career on hostility to Wall Street, and a Wall Street banker who read Haiti off a bank ledger was steering his Haitian policy. Farnham's steady theme was that only an American move would keep Paris and Berlin out. Germany gave the argument weight. German warships had bullied Haiti before, German merchants financed its politics, and German interest in the Mole Saint Nicolas and in the customs receipts was barely concealed. The Panama Canal opened in 1914, the same summer the European war began, and both events sharpened American attention to the passages of the Caribbean. As the war went on, that attention turned into suspicion. From the middle of 1914 the Navy Department kept a standing plan for taking charge of Port-au-Prince, and Bryan's instructions to his envoys assumed a regiment of marines within reach.

The United States Marine Corps landed in Haiti in 1915 and stayed nineteen years. President Wilson appears to have feared growing German influence, with Mole Saint Nicolas sitting opposite Guantanamo. American investment in the country was small at the time. Just before the landing, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a crowd and his torn limbs carried through the streets of the capital. It took four years to pacify the country, which required putting down the rising led by Charlemagne Peralte. The Americans then did in Haiti what they had done in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic and created a modern constabulary combining army and police under Marine supervision, the Gendarmerie d'Haiti. It became the Forces Armees d'Haiti and from the late 1930s decided how long any sitting president would remain. Elections and plebiscites held up to 1929 were all controlled by the Marines.

On 28 July 1915 a crowd broke into the French embassy in Port-au-Prince, found President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam hiding in a bathroom, dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces. The day before, Sam had ordered the killing of 167 political prisoners taken from elite families, among them the former president Oreste Zamor. Those executions produced the rising that killed him. In Washington, Woodrow Wilson learned of it and feared that Rosalvo Bobo, whom his advisers took for a German sympathiser, would take power. On 29 July he ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The stated reason was humanitarian, the restoring of order in a country said to be incapable of governing itself. The working reasons were strategic: keeping Germany out of the Caribbean during the European war, holding the Windward Passage that guards the approach to the Panama Canal, and protecting American money already placed in Haiti. The occupation ran nineteen years. A century of Haitian self government, disorderly as it had been, ended inside a week.

A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.