The last leaf of Christophe's tree governs by printing press

Firmin sailed for exile at Saint Thomas on 17 October 1902, and Nord Alexis entered Port-au-Prince on 14 December. Three days later the army acclaimed him and the assembly agreed without a dissenting voice. He was past eighty, born in 1820 while Henry Christophe still ruled the north, and his wife was Christophe's niece and the daughter of President Pierrot. He could read, disliked intellectuals, distrusted foreigners on principle, and reduced politics to three words: independence, the fatherland, the ancestors. Four months in, he dissolved the Chamber of Deputies with rifle volleys. Afraid of the debt collectors who arrive with warships, he refused foreign loans and ran the treasury on printed paper. Retail trade had been passing into the hands of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants since the 1880s, so in 1903 crowds led by soldiers looted their shops, and by April 1905 every Syrian business was ordered shut and the owners put on boats. What preoccupied him most was the hundredth anniversary of independence, then two years off.

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.

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.

In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt announced that the United States held a duty, divinely conferred, to protect and regulate the small states of the Caribbean. The wording did the important work. A duty cannot be declined, and a duty that comes from God cannot be argued with on the merits, so any future landing of American troops in the region could be presented as an obligation discharged instead of a decision taken. Underneath sat the assumption that the countries concerned could not run themselves and that their disorder threatened the prosperity of everyone nearby, including the American investors and creditors whose claims were the usual occasion for sending a warship. Haiti had been independent for a century and was the oldest of these states. It carried the largest debts and had the least stable government, which put it near the top of any list drawn up on Roosevelt's principles. The doctrine was announced in 1904 and applied to Haiti in 1915.