Two American missions to Haiti fail inside five months

On 13 January 1915 Woodrow Wilson wrote to Bryan that the United States had a duty to act in Haiti as it had acted in Santo Domingo, sending a commissioner to say firmly that Washington would not stand by while revolutions went on. He chose John Franklin Fort, who had preceded him as governor of New Jersey, and Charles Cogswell Smith. They arrived in the gap between the fall of Theodore and the rise of Guillaume Sam. Foreign Minister Ulrick Duvivier asked to see their credentials, Bryan had given them none, and Duvivier showed them out. Fort was sixty three, hated the heat and the open gutters, and left within the week. Wilson then sent Paul Fuller Junior with a proper commission. Fuller proposed in May that Haiti take American advice on its internal affairs, keep the Mole Saint Nicolas from any other power, and arbitrate American claims. The Haitian counter proposal accepted American help in keeping order on condition that the troops leave whenever Haiti asked. Fuller went home on 5 June.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.

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.

A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.