Washington offers Haiti a plan that was built for Santo Domingo

Woodrow Wilson disliked what he knew of Haitian politics, and disliked more the way Haitian and Dominican quarrels ran into each other. On 4 November 1914, with his approval, Acting Secretary of State Robert Lansing sent the American minister in Port-au-Prince a lightly edited version of the scheme Washington had just used to settle Dominican politics. Dana Munro of the State Department said plainly why it would not travel. Santo Domingo had organised parties with real followings. In Haiti the men who competed for power commanded paid bands of fighters, the mass of the population was outside politics altogether, and a popular election was out of reach. On 12 November, William Jennings Bryan offered Davilmar Theodore money and recognition in exchange for a list: American control of the customs houses, settlement of the railway and the Banque Nationale, guarantees about the Mole Saint Nicolas, and payment of private American claims. Once Haiti agreed, the State Department would ask the Banque to loosen its hold. Every item on the list required a government with revenue, and the Banque was the reason there was none.

The armistice signed at Mudros on 30 October 1918 by the government of Ahmed Izzet Pasha marked the Ottoman defeat in the First World War. Officers and intellectuals had seen the outcome coming since 1917 and had begun to think about what would follow, since a multinational Ottoman state could not be rebuilt and a Turkish national state barely existed as an idea. The Allies had already agreed among themselves how to divide the empire. Allied troops landed at Istanbul on 13 November 1918 and set up a military administration. In the spring of 1919 French forces moved into Ayntab, Marash and Adana, the Italians landed at Antalya and the British at Samsun and the Dardanelles. Sultan Mehmed VI accepted the occupation and turned to persecuting the surviving Union and Progress leaders. An empire that had lasted six centuries was being taken apart by agreement among its conquerors.

United States marines landed at Port-au-Prince in 1915 and stayed until 1934. German and French capitalists were eliminated from the country in favour of American interests defined by the Monroe doctrine. In the plains American companies monopolised sugar, fruit and sisal for export, and large landed property consolidated around them. Peasants were dispossessed of land they occupied or rented. The occupiers restored compulsory labour for building roads and railways. The consequences ran in four directions. Smallholding peasantry broke up. The labour freed by that process became seasonal hands on the plantations. Migrants left for Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where cheap Haitian labour served capital in both countries. Others gathered in the towns, above all in Port-au-Prince, which from then on concentrated economic activity. Inside the state the senior posts filled with light-skinned men at the same moment as the economic position of the same families strengthened. The colour question came back into political life through that door.

On 28 July 1915 the American vessel Washington cast anchor in the harbour of Port-au-Prince and its troops landed. They described themselves as liberators. The occupation lasted until 1934, and its central difficulty was what the Marines called the pacification of the peasantry. Thousands of country people were forced into hard labour on the roads and thousands were killed. In the north large numbers were sent to a concentration camp at Chalbert. Among the improvements the occupiers took credit for was the looting of temples and the destruction of the images of African ancestors. The link that American opinion had already drawn between race, religion and despotism is what prepared the ground for the landing, and the men who came ashore had read the same books the public had. When the Americans withdrew in 1934 the work of civilising the country was handed to a police force they had built, which was the most durable thing they left.