The order to kill the prisoners in the Port-au-Prince jail

Vilbrun Guillaume Sam had been president of Haiti for four months. He had spent them holding several hundred men from prominent families as hostages against a rising in the north led by Rosalvo Bobo. On 27 July 1915, with a coup under way in the capital, he ordered the prisoners in the Port-au-Prince gaol killed. Nicholls puts the number at 167. The work was done inside the yard by the police under Charles Oscar Etienne. Almost every family in the Port-au-Prince elite lost someone that morning, several lost more than one, and the bodies were carried home on planks through the streets. The order destroyed the government it was meant to protect. Within a day a crowd that included relatives of the dead pulled the president out of the French legation and tore him apart in the street, and American marines were ashore before the following nightfall. The killing of the hostages is the hinge on which the nineteen year occupation turns.

The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919. John Maynard Keynes named three fatal defects in it that same year. It transferred German coal, iron and steel properties to France and barred German industry from using them, which struck at the organisation of production itself. It stripped Germany of colonies, foreign investments and merchant shipping and limited her control of her own waterways and tariffs. Then it charged this weakened country some thirty three billion dollars in reparations. Article 231 required the Germans to accept sole responsibility for the war. Prince Fumimaro Konoye of Japan, then twenty seven, published an article urging his countrymen to reject a peace built around Britain and the United States which refused to write racial equality into the settlement. Two decades later Konoye was premier and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

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.