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On 28 July 1915 United States Marines landed in Port-au-Prince, beginning a military occupation of Haiti. Washington had watched Haiti's chronic instability with growing impatience: since 1911 the republic had seen seven presidents, and the immediate pretext came when a mob killed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam after he had ordered the massacre of political prisoners. Behind the pretext lay strategy - fear that Germany, whose merchants dominated Haitian trade, might gain a base near the Panama Canal in wartime - and finance: the National City Bank of New York had acquired Haiti's national bank, and in December 1914, months before the landing, American Marines had already carried half a million dollars of the republic's gold reserve aboard the USS Machias to New York.
The occupation remade the Haitian state by force. The United States imposed a treaty giving it control of Haiti's finances, customs, and police; dissolved the army and replaced it with an American-officered gendarmerie; and in 1918 pushed through a new constitution, drafted with the help of the young assistant Navy secretary Franklin Roosevelt, that struck down the old ban on foreign landownership. When Haiti's legislature balked at the constitution, the Americans had it dissolved, and President Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave ruled by decree.
Haitians resisted in arms. The corvée - forced labour gangs building the occupation's roads - revived memories of slavery and provoked the great uprising of the cacos, the country fighters of the north, under Charlemagne Péralte, a former gendarmerie officer who deserted to lead them. From 1918 to 1920 Péralte's army of thousands fought the Marines and gendarmerie across the countryside, until he was betrayed and killed in October 1919; his body, photographed crucified against a door, became a martyr's icon. Benoît Batraville kept the rebellion alive until his death in 1920. Thousands of Haitians died in the suppression.
Through 1924 the occupation ground on under the treaty of 1915: roads were built, the budget balanced, sanitation improved, and elections choreographed by the American high command, which governed in partnership with a small elite while censoring the press and jailing critics. The occupation deepened the colour and class divisions of Haitian life, centralized power in Port-au-Prince at the expense of the countryside, and provoked a nationalist and noiriste intellectual awakening.
U.S. State Department Office of the Historian: U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Haiti, 1915-34
Britannica: Haiti