The twentieth president removed by force since independence

On 2 December 1908 Francois Antoine Simon drove Pierre Nord Alexis out of the presidency. Nord Alexis went to Jamaica and died there on 1 May 1910. He was the twentieth Haitian head of state removed by armed force since independence in 1804. The sequence had been running since the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, and by this point an armed march on the capital was the only method of succession the country actually recognised, whatever the constitution said. Simon held office until 1911, when Cincinnatus Leconte, a great-grandson of Dessalines, raised troops and removed him in turn. I keep this on the timeline as a count rather than as a story. The men fighting over the palace in 1908 were the heirs and descendants of the men who had won the country its freedom, and they were competing for a state none of them could hold steady. Counting the coups is the shortest way to see what a century of that costs a country.

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.

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.

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.