A five dollar string of pearls buys an American railway concession

James P. McDonald revived a dead railway venture in August 1910. The Chemin de Fer National was to join the north, the Artibonite and the west, and to pay for itself from export duties on the bananas McDonald would grow on public land. He got the contract through Celestina Simon, the president's daughter, who led a Vodou society and had her father's ear. The account that survives has McDonald asking her what jewels she owned, observing that the princesses of Europe had collections, and producing a string of pearls that would be hers when the concession was signed. Antoine Simon signed that afternoon. The pearls had cost five dollars. Three sections of track went down on easy ground and never crossed the mountains, so the line never linked the regions. The National City Bank of New York took the project over in 1911, and by 1913 one executive was president of the railway and American vice-president of the national bank. His name was Roger L. Farnham, and it stayed attached to American interests in Haiti for a decade.

The Ku Klux Klan was refounded at Stone Mountain in Georgia in 1915, with the full Reconstruction era costume and cars instead of horses. It aimed its hatred at Jewish and Catholic immigrants as much as at black Americans, and by the early 1920s it claimed about five million members and controlled the politics of Indiana and Oregon for a time. That sentiment became law in 1924, when Congress cut immigration to a trickle and closed the era of nearly unrestricted entry to the United States. The ethnic neighbourhoods that had grown for a generation stopped growing from abroad and began to settle. Kennedy adds the consequence nobody could see at the time, which is that the door was shut in advance against people who would try to escape Nazi Germany in the following decade. The Haitian communities of New York and Boston grew up under the same quota system.

Colonial economies contracted during the war. Trade fell, export prices dropped, governments fixed prices and wages, and the cost of imports climbed. Add requisitioning, forced labour, compulsory crop quotas and conscription, and millions of Africans came out of the war poorer than they went in. The war was also the last high point of raw force in colonial rule. From the 1920s the soldiers went back to barracks and market pressure did more of the work than machine guns. Africans who had watched Europeans killing one another in large numbers kept that knowledge. The earliest political associations and protest identities date from these years. The South African Native National Congress, which was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress, petitioned King George the Fifth for African representation at Versailles and invoked self determination. In Egypt the British detained the nationalist Sa'ad Zaghlul, and the Wafd movement answered with violent protest across the whole territory in 1919. Similar movements stirred in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya.

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.