United States marines land at Port-au-Prince and stay nineteen years

United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 28 July 1915, hours after a crowd had killed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The last of them left in 1934. Washington gave two reasons, the collapse of order in the capital and the strategic value of the Windward Passage in the second year of the European war. Nobody met the landing party at the waterfront with a rifle. Parts of the capital received the marines with relief. Syrian traders whose shops had been looted in every recent revolution wanted troops in the streets. Members of the mulatto elite, who had just buried relatives killed in the prison yard, feared what Bobo and his Caco army would do if he reached the palace, and preferred American marines to him. That preference was stated in private and almost never in public, because saying it aloud was dangerous. Nineteen years of foreign administration began on an afternoon when the Haitians best placed to object had their own reasons for silence.

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.