A president's family leaves and the gold spills on the wharf

Oreste Zamor's ten months as president of Haiti ended with his family on a Dutch steamer. His brother Charles came ashore from the Prins Willem V on 29 October 1914 and found the National Palace emptied by looters and his sister in law sheltering with the Dominican minister. Charles joined the rest of the fallen cabinet in the French legation while General Polynice put together another Committee of Public Safety. The next morning the French and Dominican ministers loaded Mme Zamor, her children and their baggage into two carriages and drove them to the wharf through a crowd that shouted at her the whole way and touched nobody. The maid walked last. The crowd closed around her and tore away the bundle she carried, which held four thousand dollars in gold wrapped in a Dominican flag. The coins scattered over the pier and some went into the water. Oreste Zamor stayed below decks. In the town, Cacos looted shops and fired into the air while they waited for Davilmar Theodore.

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.

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.

American administrative control of Haiti ran from 28 July 1915 to 15 August 1934. In those nineteen years the occupation rebuilt the Haitian armed forces on an American model and laid 1,200 miles of all weather highway, much of it built by peasants conscripted under an old corvee law that the Americans revived. The same period produced Charlemagne Peralte, who led the Caco war against the occupation, was shot dead in 1919 and was then photographed tied upright to a door so that the picture could be circulated as proof. The photograph became the standing image of Haitian resistance and did the opposite of what the occupation intended. The Americans who governed treated Vodou as a police problem and never grasped how much of Haitian life ran through it. Haitians called the withdrawal of August 1934 the second independence. The phrase set the terms of every argument that followed about what exactly the country had to take back.