Bayonets in the assembly and a president who signs what he is given

On 12 August 1915 American Marines stood inside the Haitian National Assembly with fixed bayonets until the members confirmed Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave as president. Dartiguenave, born on 6 April 1863 into a wealthy light skinned family, had been president of the Senate when Sam was killed. The Americans refused Rosalvo Bobo, the man most likely to win, and settled on Dartiguenave as someone who would cooperate. He was the first light skinned southerner to hold the office since 1879, and he governed as a proxy for American officials who ran the money, the armed forces and foreign policy. He signed a treaty giving the occupation legal form and placing Haitian finances under American control. The Haitian army was dissolved and replaced by a national guard armed, trained and commanded by the United States. That guard administered the corvée, which required peasants to work without pay on the national roads, a compulsory labour system imposed on the grandchildren of people who had fought a revolution to end compulsory labour.

The fighting stopped on 11 November 1918. The war had lasted 1,563 days, killed some ten million soldiers, wounded twenty million more and consumed over three hundred billion dollars. It destroyed the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Romanovs in Russia, and in its final hours new governments were forming in Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Dublin while crowds filled the streets of Berlin and Petersburg. Kennedy opens his history of the American 1930s at this date because Herbert Hoover opened his memoirs the same way. The first sentence of those memoirs states that the primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914 to 1918. Everything that followed for the United States, the debt, the tariffs, the closed door to immigrants and the refusal to join the League of Nations, was a reaction to those fifty two months.

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.