Antenor Firmin sees Haiti for the last time from a French steamer

On 7 August 1911 Antenor Firmin came within sight of the Haitian coast aboard a French steamer. Cincinnatus Leconte was already in Port-au-Prince with the army behind him, and Firmin did not land. He died in exile on St Thomas five weeks afterward. In 1885 Firmin had published De l'Egalite des Races Humaines, a direct answer to Arthur de Gobineau's ranking of human races, written by a Haitian living in Paris and then ignored for a century by the discipline it had corrected. As foreign minister in 1891 he refused an American demand for a naval station at the Mole Saint-Nicolas while Admiral Gherardi's squadron sat in the harbour. He was the ablest man in Haitian public life and he never governed it. Three times his supporters rose and three times the army beat them. His weapons were seized in New York in 1908, his men were cut down outside Gonaives, and the last he saw of his country was a coastline from the deck of someone else's ship.

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.

Soon after taking office in 1913, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan asked John Allen of the Banque Nationale to come and explain Haiti to him. Bryan said he was very interested in the place and asked who the people were, then stopped and asked where it was. Two hours later, as Allen was leaving, Bryan shook his head over the discovery that there were Black people who spoke French. American policy towards Haiti for the next two years was built on that foundation. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations had held that small republics could be steadied by customs control imposed from Washington. Woodrow Wilson added instruction in democracy, remarking of Mexico that he meant to teach the Latin Americans how to elect good men. Bryan's information about Haiti came almost entirely from Roger Farnham, a vivid talker who ran the National City Bank's interests there. The occupation was assembled out of ignorance, condescension and a banker's balance sheet, which hold together far better than malice.