Positivism reaches Le Matin and young men ask for a science of society

On 28 April 1908 Le Matin published an essay called Evolution et mentalite, arguing that Haiti should approach social change by scientific method. The piece belongs to a wave. Positivism, the school founded in France by Auguste Comte, held that societies pass through stages and can be studied and administered like any other natural object. It reached educated young Haitians in the years around 1900 and gave them a vocabulary for what they wanted, which was a country run by measurement and expertise, and no longer by generals and their godchildren. The appeal is easy to understand. In the same season the government was jailing its critics and shooting poets in the cemetery. Positivism also carried a ranking of peoples inside it, and European writers used that ranking against Haiti constantly, which is why Antenor Firmin had spent a whole book in 1885 taking it apart. Haitian thinkers took the method and then argued for thirty years about how much of the rest of it they were obliged to accept.

On a Sunday morning in 1910, in a Baptist chapel of people of colour in the northwest of Washington, a pastor was promising the worst of disasters to members of his flock whose conduct had drawn down the anger of God. He asked whether, if Christ appeared before them, they would not crucify him too, as the Pharisees of the present day, and hand him over to the hatred of the crowd like new Pontius Pilates. A voice begged for mercy. He went silent for a full minute, then pointed straight in front of him and cried out that Christ was there. The congregation turned as one towards the empty place. A woman rose, wailed, and began to dance and sing, then a second and a third, until two thirds of the room were leaping in a circle and shouting for mercy at the tops of their voices. It lasted half an hour. An American friend explained it afterwards: they were happy.

Haiti was much as it had been. The region around it was being rebuilt. The Spanish American War of 1898 confirmed the United States as the ruling power of the Caribbean, and American editors were already calling the sea Mare Nostrum after the Romans. Marines occupied and pacified Cuba twice between 1900 and 1910. Puerto Rico was an American possession, so was the Panama Canal Zone, and Washington was negotiating control of the customs houses of Honduras, Nicaragua and neighbouring Santo Domingo. Two ideas carried the policy. The Roosevelt Corollary held that no European power would be permitted to intervene in the Americas and that the United States would itself end the disorder and theft that invited such intervention. Dollar Diplomacy, stated plainly by Secretary of State Knox in May 1911, made American money the instrument of stability in the small republics near the canal. Haiti was poorer and less settled than any of its neighbours, sat astride the main approach to the canal, and was believed in Washington to be a German target. That combination decided the next twenty years.

South Africa needed African labour in the mines and needed Africans confined to the reserves when the mines had no use for them. The pass system did both jobs, and it also produced the earliest sustained organised protest on the continent outside Islamic North Africa. In 1912 a group of educated men founded the South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress in 1923. Its reach was narrow at first, though it worked with Indian and Coloured organisations and laid ground for something larger. Mass action came from elsewhere. In 1919 huge demonstrations against the pass laws showed what popular participation could look like, and in 1920 some forty thousand mineworkers struck. That industrial strength made the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union possible, founded in 1919 and claiming a hundred thousand members by the middle of the decade. Internal splits broke it before the decade ended. The worker consciousness it exposed had been formed in the compound and down the shaft.