An illiterate peasant general takes the palace and the elite mocks his Creole

Antoine Simon entered Port-au-Prince on 5 December 1908 and was proclaimed head of the executive. On 20 December a Senate ringed by soldiers gave him 117 votes and nothing against. He had begun as a rural section chief outside Les Cayes, had run the South for years without much cruelty, and had used his soldiers to work the old plantations he had collected. The American minister Henry Furniss thought him plain, decent and reasonably shrewd, and surrounded by officials who wanted only to fill their pockets fast. Simon could not read and spoke little French. In Les Cayes that had cost him nothing. In the capital the educated class turned his Creole and his manners into a running joke. He also served the spirits, and Furniss reported that as military governor of the South he had persuaded a bishop to say a mass over a dead white goat carried into the cathedral in a closed coffin. His own finance minister told Furniss that he had known there were thieves in the government and had not expected a den of them.

Joseph argues that the occupation left a mark on the national psyche that Haitian thought has kept alive, and that the writing produced during it did lasting damage. Travel narratives, novels, memoirs and plays by American writers and artists between 1915 and 1934 repeated the ideas of Haiti's strangeness, tragedy and vast darkness, and presented the Black republic as a headless figure, an object of experimentation and of the foreign gaze. He cites J. Michael Dash's judgement that the American literary imagination of Haiti and its revolutionary history was both misguided and misrepresented, and amounted to a restatement of long-standing stereotypes. Joseph places this within a nineteenth-century American discourse about the Black republic that spread across the Atlantic world, and compares it explicitly to the way Europe invented exotic images of the Middle East, invoking Said's account of Orientalism.

Nineteenth century Haitian governments borrowed abroad in 1825, 1874, 1875 and 1896. The first of those was an indemnity France forced on the country. The rest were floated for purposes that had in common a private benefit to the ruling clique and a heavy cost to the state, since none could be placed except at a steep discount, and they were accompanied by domestic loans on similar terms. The practice continued into the new century. In 1910 a further foreign loan, the last before the American occupation, was floated at a discount of thirty eight percent. Between 1912 and 1914 six domestic loans finished off whatever creditworthiness remained. That record shaped the economic policy of the occupation administration, which put the interests of the American bondholders who held the consolidated debt ahead of everything else. The external debt was halved between 1924 and 1930 and paid off entirely in 1947.

Wages fell across Africa through the 1930s, in the mines, on white-owned plantations and in the towns that Africans were moving to in growing numbers. South Africa recorded serious African unemployment for the first time since the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. Prices fell too, which softened the blow on paper and made little difference in a household. Inflation in several territories hit town workers hardest, and real wages did not rise again until the second half of the 1940s, so the decade of hardship ran on for fifteen years. Poor whites suffered alongside them. Commercial farming had pushed tens of thousands of white families off the land and into the cities, where they competed with Africans for the same work, which is why the colour bar laws exist. Those who stayed on their farms scraped by growing maize for the towns. This population, urban and rural, became the constituency that Afrikaner nationalist politicians set out to win, and the winning of it reshaped South Africa.