American forces land eighteen months before the occupation is declared

The editors open by fixing the chronology against which the whole discussion runs. American military forces landed in Haiti on this date. The formal occupation was declared on 28 July 1915 and lasted until 1 August 1934, and it followed a long history of American interference reaching back to the founding of the country. Fatton later refers to the occupation of Haiti in 1914 rather than 1915, which is consistent with treating the earlier landing as the real beginning. The dating matters for the argument the participants build, since it undercuts the official account in which the occupation was a reaction to the killing of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in July 1915. If troops were already coming ashore a year and a half earlier, the assassination functioned as the occasion rather than the cause, which is Dupuy's central contention about American motives. Where this account departs from the standard one: The roundtable treats the 1915 invasion as long planned and the murder of President Sam as a pretext rather than a trigger.

On 28 November 1917 Trinidad and Tobago enacted the Shouters Prohibition Ordinance. It made it an offence to hold, join or attend a meeting of the Shouters anywhere in the colony, indoors or in the open, at any hour, and an offence to put up a building where they met. Owners and managers of land had to report any such house or gathering to the nearest constabulary station or be charged themselves. Police could enter premises without a warrant on suspicion and take the names of everyone present. The penalty ran to fifty pounds. A magistrate decided who counted as a Shouter and his ruling was final, wording chosen because a banned group might rename itself. Introducing the bill on 16 November, the Attorney General complained of noise and indecency and said the text came from a St Vincent law. The police manual listed white headcloths, candles, bells and chalk marks on the floor as evidence. Prosecutions were brought in the court at Toco.

At Versailles in 1919 the victorious Allies divided Germany's African colonies among themselves. Britain and France split Togo and Cameroon. Britain took Tanganyika. Belgium took Rwanda and Burundi. South Africa was given German South West Africa to administer. The rhetoric of the 1880s was no longer usable, so the treaty said these territories would be administered on behalf of the new League of Nations, held in trust, with the administering power preparing them for eventual self-government and protecting the interests of the people who lived there. The Mandate system had no means of enforcing anything, since the two most powerful members of the League were the two largest colonial empires, but the secretariat did send inspection teams and ask for reports. The principle it established was guardianship: that some peoples were less developed and required managing until they reached political maturity. That idea outlived the League by a century. Its vocabulary is still audible in the language of development and capacity building used about countries under foreign supervision, Haiti among them in the same decade.

In 1919 the American Federation of Labor set aside its usual contempt for the unskilled and led a strike to organise an industrial union in steel. United States Steel sent agents into the mill districts around Chicago and Pittsburgh to set native born workers against immigrants, and recruited some thirty thousand black southerners, who wanted jobs that had always been closed to them, to cross the picket lines. The strike failed and the Federation went back to organising skilled craftsmen only. The weapons available to employers went further than that. The yellow dog contract bound a worker never to join a union as a condition of employment, and after the Supreme Court upheld the practice in 1917 those contracts were enforceable at law. Half of all labour injunctions issued in the fifty years after 1880 were handed down in the 1920s. Union membership fell from five million to under three and a half million by 1929.