A trade journal wishes a soap manager well in the next revolution

In 1902 Lifschitz was managing the Tropical Soap and Candle Manufacturing Company of Saint-Marc when what a Milwaukee trade journal called a recent revolution brought him to Port-au-Prince. The paper told its American readers that it did not know whether the revolution had landed him at the top, and that if not, the next revolution must necessarily do so, adding its best wishes. Casey reads the notice as evidence that foreigners understood Haitian political instability as an engine of their own advancement. He lines up other cases: in 1905 Michael J. Kouri and two others affiliated with the soap company went to trial in Haiti for counterfeiting currency, and the following year the government of Nord Alexis accused an American named Theodore Behrmann of sheltering behind his privileges as a foreign resident while acting for the government's enemies. Where this account departs from the standard one: Casey argues that American citizens used the same destabilising techniques as Germans and others before the occupation, which were the very actions the United States claimed the occupation would halt.

A set of ordinary statutes was turned against Vodou healers in New Orleans in the decades around 1900. From 1909 federal mail fraud law was invoked against practitioners who did business by post, and conviction carried a penitentiary sentence. The Louisiana Board of Health prosecuted people for practising medicine without a licence under the Medical Practice Act of 1894, and a revision in 1929 set a fine of fifty to a hundred dollars or ten to ninety days in the parish prison. The city passed its own statutes against fortune telling and obtaining money under false pretences in 1897, in 1916 and again in 1924. This ran in parallel with the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the persecution of Vodou leaders there. Stories circulated in the United States about bloodthirsty rites and human sacrifice, told to justify the occupation, supplied the reasoning for the prosecutions in Louisiana.

African objections to colonial rule in the early twentieth century travelled through channels that were not political in form. Carving is one. By the 1930s African artists were producing work that mocked Europeans and the administration they ran, and taking supposedly European styles into African hands was itself a claim about who owned the form. Newspapers are another. The earliest African papers appeared in South Africa in the 1900s, an African press followed in West Africa, and by the years between the wars those papers were the main forum for anti colonial argument. Literacy limited who could read them directly, and villages worked around that by gathering while one person who could read went through the paper aloud. The educated men who wrote for these papers understood how the colonial economy was arranged and resented their exclusion from it. Before the early 1940s few of them asked for independence. They asked for a place inside the system. Colonial schooling had produced its own critics, and the war produced the rest.

At the start of the twentieth century Haiti had 594 public schools, a figure that had shrunk to 465 by 1913. The private system moved the same way, from 82 schools in 1905 to 53 ten years later. The numbers meant little in practice, because the state of politics made it impossible to allocate money to schooling at all. By the time the American occupation began the public system was near total ruin, the literacy rate for the country stood well below ten percent, and in the countryside almost everyone was illiterate. A 1931 survey of rural schools found rooms with hardly a bench, possibly no blackboard, certainly no maps, and a teacher who was illiterate and could not perform the four arithmetical operations. The census of 1950 put illiteracy at around ninety percent among Haitians over fifteen, ninety three percent in rural districts, and ninety seven to ninety eight percent in some of them.