Davilmar Theodore reaches the palace and cannot pay the men who put him there

Davilmar Theodore came into Port-au-Prince by train from Saint Marc on 6 November 1914. The bells rang and the old muzzle loading guns at Fort National fired salutes. He was sixty seven, a Caco general from the north, and the National Assembly elected him without a dissenting vote on 7 November. He took office on the tenth. His fighters had come south with him to collect on ten months of war, and there was nothing in the treasury to give them. Large districts of the north and centre stayed in the hands of armed Zamorists at Hinche, Maissade, Pignon, Ranquitte and Valliere. No foreign government recognised him. The United States had been preparing to intervene on behalf of the Zamors when the Zamors fell, and the European powers were busy with their own war. The American chargé Livingston reported that Theodore's followers would not believe a head of state could be unable to find money, decided he was withholding it, and turned on him. Within weeks he was the most unpopular man in Haiti.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.

In 1914 the American State Department received reports that German merchants controlled roughly eighty percent of all commerce in Haiti. The community numbered only a few hundred people and had made itself indispensable in the one way the law allowed. Foreigners could not own Haitian land, so German traders married Haitian women, held the import business, financed governments at high interest and lent to whichever faction looked likely to win. By 1914 they were the working bank of Haitian politics. Washington read this as a strategic problem rather than a commercial one. Europe went to war that August, the Panama Canal opened in the same month, and the prospect of a German-leaning republic sitting on the Windward Passage was the argument that carried in the American cabinet. The occupation that began in July 1915 is usually explained by Haitian disorder. The disorder was real enough. The eighty percent is what made it urgent.

During the first United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934, opposition in the countryside was often led by Vodou priests and priestesses. Bellegarde-Smith puts the number of Haitians who died fighting the invading army at perhaps fifty thousand, and describes the religion as the popular vehicle of a wider culture of refusal. He reads the missionary side of the occupation as policy. Detaching Haitians from Roman Catholicism and from the French hold on the Haitian elite was expected to turn enemies into friends, and the written record of the period carries the argument openly. Washington had tried the same approach in Puerto Rico after 1898, where replacing Spanish and Catholicism with English and Protestantism was supposed to pacify the island. The French bishops who ran the Haitian church were nervous accordingly. Decades later Francois Duvalier replaced every French bishop with a Haitian of his own choosing and brought American fundamentalist Protestants in against Rome.