L'Essor makes Sténio Vincent the young nationalists' man

On 20 August 1912 the Port-au-Prince paper L'Essor ran a piece on the career and influence of Sténio Vincent. He was then a lawyer and administrator with a nationalist record, and the article presented him as a hero to the young intellectuals who opposed foreign dominance of the country. Hold on to that reputation, because it did a great deal of work later. Vincent built his standing on resistance to outside interference and kept it through the American occupation that began three years afterwards, when he took a leading part in the Union Patriotique and argued the Haitian case abroad. He became president in 1930 and presided over the departure of the Marines in 1934, which is the achievement his name still carries. He also governed by decree, rewrote the constitution to suit himself, and in 1937 settled the Dominican massacre of Haitian workers on the border for a cash payment. The readers of 1912 were at the start of a long file.

Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche was born in Haiti, sent to France as a boy to study, and qualified as an engineer. He married a Frenchwoman, Juliette, and they had two daughters. Engineering work in Europe was closed to a Black man whatever his qualifications, so the family booked passage home to Haiti, where he expected to be hired for what he could do. They boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg. He was the wealthiest Black passenger on the ship. When it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on the night of 14 April 1912, Laroche put Juliette and the girls into a lifeboat. They reached New York. He did not. For most of the twentieth century the Titanic was retold without him, in books, exhibitions and films with room for the millionaires and the steerage Irish and none for a Haitian engineer travelling first class with his family. The remembrance industry wanted its dead wealthy and white. Laroche was one of those two things.

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.