Critics say mulatto politicians run the black nationalist's government

Nord Alexis held the presidency from 1902 to 1908 with the standing of a black nationalist, and his critics spent those six years alleging that his government was directed in private by mulatto politicians. The accusation was standard equipment in Haitian politics, and it was rarely made without material. A president out of the northern black officer tradition still had to govern through the customs houses, the banks and the import merchants, and those institutions were staffed and financed by the mixed race commercial families of the capital. Cabinet posts went to men who could deal with them. Younger writers of noiriste conviction, who wanted the black republic to be black in its administration as well as in the person of its president, treated the arrangement as betrayal, and the case they made against Nord Alexis is the same one made against every government until Estime's in 1946. The distance between a leader's colour and a state's composition is a permanent Haitian subject.

The first Pan-African Congress met in London in July 1900, convened by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, with delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and the United States. Haiti was represented by Benito Sylvain, a journalist and diplomat from Cap-Haitien who had worked in Paris and served the Ethiopian emperor Menelik. The congress issued an address to the nations of the world warning that the problem of the twentieth century would be the colour line, a formulation W. E. B. Du Bois carried into his own writing three years later. Haiti's presence in that room carried weight. For delegates who came from colonies with no self government, a black republic that had beaten a European army was the standing proof that the argument could be won. The congress commanded nothing and legislated nothing. It named the central question of the century a few months after the century opened, and it did so with a Haitian at the table.

Pierre Nord Alexis was elected president of Haiti on 21 December 1902, at the age of eighty, after a violent contest over the succession that had run most of the year. He was a general with a long career behind him and a lineage that carried weight in the north. His father had been a dignitary in the kingdom of Henry Christophe, and Nord Alexis was born at Cap-Haitien while that kingdom still stood. Supporters read his election as the return of the northern tradition, austere, military and black, set against the commercial families of Port-au-Prince. He governed until 1908, when he was driven out at the age of eighty six, and he died in exile in Jamaica the following year. The most consequential act of his presidency was the consolidation of the foreign debt, which deepened Haiti's obligations to French and German creditors and helped produce the fiscal crisis the United States later used as its reason for landing marines in 1915.

The world depression of the 1930s cut the prices paid for African export crops, and the farmers who grew them for European buyers drew the obvious conclusion about the system they had been recruited into. Across the continent people formed self help associations with economic, religious and ideological purposes. Craftsmen who refused wage employment set up small workshops of their own. Any single one of these bodies was a nuisance to a district officer and nothing more. Taken together they amounted to a withdrawal of consent from colonial rule. What frightened the administrations was the prospect that peasants would stop selling into the market altogether, which would end the export earnings and the tax revenue in one stroke. So the colonial state went into the business it had claimed to leave to merchants. Marketing boards were created to fix the price paid to the grower and to handle exports. Agricultural departments began instructing farmers on technique. Rule by administration expanded, and the machinery it built was inherited later by nationalist governments.