Istwa Nou

Roger Farnham of the National City Bank of New York supplied William Jennings Bryan with what he called insights different from the ones official reports gave. Dana Munro of the State Department called him a dangerous counsellor. Bryan had built a career on hostility to Wall Street, and a Wall Street banker who read Haiti off a bank ledger was steering his Haitian policy. Farnham's steady theme was that only an American move would keep Paris and Berlin out. Germany gave the argument weight. German warships had bullied Haiti before, German merchants financed its politics, and German interest in the Mole Saint Nicolas and in the customs receipts was barely concealed. The Panama Canal opened in 1914, the same summer the European war began, and both events sharpened American attention to the passages of the Caribbean. As the war went on, that attention turned into suspicion. From the middle of 1914 the Navy Department kept a standing plan for taking charge of Port-au-Prince, and Bryan's instructions to his envoys assumed a regiment of marines within reach.

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.