The Great War ends after one thousand five hundred and sixty three days

The fighting stopped on 11 November 1918. The war had lasted 1,563 days, killed some ten million soldiers, wounded twenty million more and consumed over three hundred billion dollars. It destroyed the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Romanovs in Russia, and in its final hours new governments were forming in Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Dublin while crowds filled the streets of Berlin and Petersburg. Kennedy opens his history of the American 1930s at this date because Herbert Hoover opened his memoirs the same way. The first sentence of those memoirs states that the primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914 to 1918. Everything that followed for the United States, the debt, the tariffs, the closed door to immigrants and the refusal to join the League of Nations, was a reaction to those fifty two months.

The corvée failed where it touched Haitian officials. Magistrats and gendarmes worked out that they could exempt anyone who paid and impress anyone who could not. A peasant who finished his annual stint was given a card by the Americans; the chef seksyon would tear the card up in front of him and send him back to work with a blow from the kokomakak. By late 1918, after Butler had gone, men were being roped together and marched to distant work sites like conscripts for the old army. Educated townsmen were caught in it too. Dantès Bellegarde was still angry twenty three years later about the gendarme who knocked on Jean Price-Mars's door in Pétionville and took him away for three days. Out of this came the teledjòl that ran through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite: the blan have come to bring slavery back, and the corvée is only the beginning. Major A. S. Williams wrote that the labour system had taught peasants to hate the occupation and taught gendarmes to treat civilians as material. He abolished it on 1 October 1918. It was already too late.

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.

Eugene O'Neill's play opened at the Provincetown Playhouse and passed within a year to the young Paul Robeson, whose performance drew praise for its emotional strength, before going to Broadway in 1921. Jackson notes that Robeson had first encountered Toussaint and the revolution as a seventeen year old schoolboy in New Jersey in 1915, the year American troops landed in Haiti. The film version of 1933 opened simultaneously to segregated audiences and met immediate black criticism, with a New York paper reporting in September that Harlem objected to the constant use of a racial slur and a Philadelphia paper editorialising in November that it found not one redeeming feature in the picture. A later critic read the film as mapping its hero onto a Haitian primitivism drawn from nineteenth century colonial thinking.