Trinidad makes it a crime to attend a Shouters meeting

On 28 November 1917 Trinidad and Tobago enacted the Shouters Prohibition Ordinance. It made it an offence to hold, join or attend a meeting of the Shouters anywhere in the colony, indoors or in the open, at any hour, and an offence to put up a building where they met. Owners and managers of land had to report any such house or gathering to the nearest constabulary station or be charged themselves. Police could enter premises without a warrant on suspicion and take the names of everyone present. The penalty ran to fifty pounds. A magistrate decided who counted as a Shouter and his ruling was final, wording chosen because a banned group might rename itself. Introducing the bill on 16 November, the Attorney General complained of noise and indecency and said the text came from a St Vincent law. The police manual listed white headcloths, candles, bells and chalk marks on the floor as evidence. Prosecutions were brought in the court at Toco.

The treaty provided for five American services in Haiti: financial adviser, customs receivership, public works, public health and gendarmerie. The gendarmerie came first. The Haitian army was dissolved, and on 1 February 1916 the Gendarmerie d'Haïti took over policing the whole country with 1,500 men. French speaking American officers held the senior posts, while Marine sergeants and navy hospital corpsmen were made junior officers. The first commandant was Smedley Butler, whom Dartiguenave commissioned a général de division; Butler later said the rank made him chief of police. Recruits were easy to find, many of them former Cacos, because the pay arrived on time and the rations were decent. By June 1916 the force numbered 2,553 under 115 Americans. Medical examinations found malaria, yaws or syphilis in 95 percent of recruits and intestinal parasites in 85 percent. An American writing in 1919 noted that a Marine serving as a gendarmerie officer judged the civil and criminal cases of his district, paid out all national government money there, ran its schools and controlled its mayor and council.

The board of directors resolved to send James Weldon Johnson to investigate reports of atrocities. Pamphile explains why this was a departure. Until then the association had confined itself to equal rights for Black Americans and above all to the campaign against lynching. Johnson, newly in charge, added an international dimension on the conviction that racism was embedded in American policy toward Black nations and not merely in domestic practice. Haiti was his prime example of American racism exported. He was suited to the errand, having served as consul at Puerto Cabello in Venezuela and at Corinto in Nicaragua, and his maternal great-grandmother Hester Argo had left Haiti in 1802 during the war of independence. Before sailing he consulted Theodore Roosevelt, who was also unhappy with Wilson's handling of Haiti, and went with Roosevelt's blessing, taking Herbert Seligman with him.

On 9 August the State Department instructed Caperton that Haitians could hold their election whenever they wished and that the United States preferred Dartiguenave. Josephus Daniels later wrote that this amounted to America making the president. Bobo's committee played its last card. Crowds filled the streets on 10 August calling for him, and the next morning the capital woke to a printed decree dissolving the National Assembly, declaring the committee a provisional government with power to rewrite the constitution, and ordering the chamber sealed. Beach summoned the committee to the legation and dissolved it on the spot while Marines pulled the notices off the walls. That day the whole legislature, 39 senators and 102 deputies, was invited to the Théâtre Parisiana. Beach announced the committee's end to loud applause. Then the American chargé, Beale Davis, read the terms: Washington would uphold the Haitian congress, and expected in return practical control of the customs and whatever financial control over Haitian affairs it judged necessary.