Edmond Polynice fires three times, one round for each son

Nobody settled how many were killed in the Port-au-Prince prison. The American chargé Davis said nearly two hundred, the French minister Girard reported 160, the British minister Kohan said 168, and H. P. Davis gave 167. Charles Oscar Etienne and his men fired a last volley into the yard, pretending to be rescuers so that the wounded would move, and then left for the Dominican legation. When the crowd marched to the jail to free the prisoners, which was a normal stage of a Haitian revolution, it found the yard full of bodies. Almost no family in the elite was untouched. Survivors walked the town behind pairs of men carrying a corpse on a plank. Edmond Polynice went to see what had been done to his three sons, then put on a morning coat and gloves, called at the Dominican legation, sent in his card to Etienne, and shot him three times when he appeared at the door. The crowd took the body apart and burned what was left of it in the gutter the next morning.

In 1920 the critics of the occupation emerged in force. James Weldon Johnson, poet, novelist and field secretary of the NAACP, went to Haiti and published a severe critique in a national weekly under the title Self-Determining Haiti, which also set out to direct American attention to the dignity of the Haitian peasant, the accomplishment of educated Haitians and above all the grandeur of Haitian history. Johnson later claimed he had encouraged a new literary interest in Haiti, and Renda agrees, tracing his influence into the work of O'Neill, Vandercook, Seabrook, Hughes and Cook. In the first five years of the occupation almost no critical voices had been raised, with Jane Addams and the Women's Peace Party, Du Bois at the Crisis and Fort-Whiteman at the Messenger among the very few exceptions. She notes the irony that writers who admired Haiti and writers who defamed it both turned it into an exotic object of desire.

In 1916 the United States disbanded the Haitian army and created the Gendarmerie d'Haïti in its place, a force trained, armed and officered by American personnel. The army it replaced had taken part in twenty uprisings between 1908 and 1915, which was the argument for abolishing it. The new body crushed the Caco rebellion, enforced the corvée, and kept the order the occupation required. It was renamed the Garde d'Haïti in 1928. When the marines left in 1934 the Garde became the whole of Haiti's armed forces, and in 1947 it was renamed the Armée d'Haïti. The institution built to hold the country down for a foreign power became the machine every Haitian strongman afterwards used to take it. Paul Magloire came out of it, François Duvalier bent it to his purposes, and Raoul Cédras used it in 1991. The Americans had removed the one instrument capable of overthrowing a Haitian government and put a better trained one in its place, then handed it over on their way out.

On 28 July 1915 a crowd broke into the French embassy in Port-au-Prince, found President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam hiding in a bathroom, dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces. The day before, Sam had ordered the killing of 167 political prisoners taken from elite families, among them the former president Oreste Zamor. Those executions produced the rising that killed him. In Washington, Woodrow Wilson learned of it and feared that Rosalvo Bobo, whom his advisers took for a German sympathiser, would take power. On 29 July he ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The stated reason was humanitarian, the restoring of order in a country said to be incapable of governing itself. The working reasons were strategic: keeping Germany out of the Caribbean during the European war, holding the Windward Passage that guards the approach to the Panama Canal, and protecting American money already placed in Haiti. The occupation ran nineteen years. A century of Haitian self government, disorderly as it had been, ended inside a week.