Building codes under the occupation push Port-au-Prince out of wood

During the United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934, city officials in Port-au-Prince wrote building codes that discouraged wooden construction. The stated reason was fire, which had destroyed the capital repeatedly since colonial times and stayed its most familiar catastrophe. Wood was also becoming physically harder to obtain. The international hardwood trade had stripped Haitian forests for export, and the charcoal industry, which supplied the fuel most households cooked on, took what remained. A country heavily wooded at independence had very little timber left to build with by the early twentieth century. Regulation and environment pushed in the same direction. The city that had been ordered out of stone in 1770 was now being pushed out of wood as well, and what remained was concrete, which arrived in Port-au-Prince at the same moment as the American marines.

The Caco rising began in earnest in 1918, and its cause was the corvée. Peasants were being taken by gendarmes and set to work without pay on roads the occupation wanted for moving troops. Charlemagne Péralte gave the resistance a command and a political programme. Nicholls calls it the most serious armed opposition the American occupation ever faced. Peasant irregulars turned out in thousands across the Central Plateau and the North, and the Gendarmerie, created two years earlier so that marine garrisons would be unnecessary, proved unable to hold the country without marine reinforcement. That failure is the point of the entry. The occupation had built a Haitian force to do its policing, and the first serious test showed the force could not police Haitians who had decided to fight. What followed was a campaign of nearly two years, fought by United States Marines with aircraft, machine guns and paid informers, against people armed mostly with what they could take from the posts they overran.

On the morning of 26 August 1915, a month after the Marines came ashore, Caroline Dagille sent Ludowick Jeudi, aged seventeen or nineteen, out on errands. Her instructions took him toward the corner of Rue du Pont and Rue Oswald Durand in Cap-Haïtien. On that same morning a man named Louie Joseph was being held at the American regional headquarters in the railway station on Rue du Pont, accused of stealing a cow. When the woman who had accused him arrived to make her statement, Joseph saw her and ran. Corporal Fred Parsons drew his pistol and fired twice down a busy street. People scattered after the first shot, apart from a few children crouching at the west end of the bridge. Joseph stopped and gave himself up. Ludowick had just turned the corner. He was hit, ran along Rue Oswald Durand and dropped. Dagille found him sitting in a chair against a wall some two hundred yards off, his body cooling to the temperature of the stone behind him. His parents lived in the country and had trusted her with him.

Davilmar Theodore, short of money and short of allies, could not refuse Vilbrun Guillaume the post of military delegate for the north and northwest. Cap Haitien was full of unpaid Cacos drifting back from the capital and attaching themselves to the Zamorist faction, now led by Bussy Zamor and by Charlemagne Peralte, Charles Zamor's brother in law. On 15 January 1915 Guillaume called the leading citizens of the Cap together, announced that he was a candidate for the presidency, and told them a Caco army was approaching and the government had given him nothing to stop it with. The morning paper reported that the Capois had unanimously entrusted their fate to him. The Caco general Metellus appeared the same day at Barriere-Bouteille with a thousand men and several cannon. He paraded them in front of the cathedral, went inside, marched around the town and looted nothing. On the nineteenth his guns fired a seventeen gun salute, and Guillaume declared himself head of the executive power.