The Ottoman empire signs its defeat on a ship at Mudros

The armistice signed at Mudros on 30 October 1918 by the government of Ahmed Izzet Pasha marked the Ottoman defeat in the First World War. Officers and intellectuals had seen the outcome coming since 1917 and had begun to think about what would follow, since a multinational Ottoman state could not be rebuilt and a Turkish national state barely existed as an idea. The Allies had already agreed among themselves how to divide the empire. Allied troops landed at Istanbul on 13 November 1918 and set up a military administration. In the spring of 1919 French forces moved into Ayntab, Marash and Adana, the Italians landed at Antalya and the British at Samsun and the Dardanelles. Sultan Mehmed VI accepted the occupation and turned to persecuting the surviving Union and Progress leaders. An empire that had lasted six centuries was being taken apart by agreement among its conquerors.

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.

Franklin Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy and the Democratic candidate for vice president, told an audience that he had had something to do with running a couple of small republics and that he had written Haiti's constitution himself. Pamphile places the remark in a sequence. On 9 August a NAACP delegation including Johnson had met Harding at Marion, Ohio, putting to him an agenda of anti-lynching legislation, federal aid, voting rights and an end to the occupation; Harding took little interest in any of it except Haiti, which Johnson said he treated as a gift off the Christmas tree. Roosevelt's boast gave him his opening. On 17 September Harding promised he would not authorise an assistant navy secretary to draft a constitution for helpless West Indian neighbours and force it on them at marine bayonet point, and in his Constitution Day speech he called the admission a confession of the rape of Haiti and Santo Domingo.