Everything Oreste tried to reform made him another enemy

Michel Oreste was fifty-four, from Jacmel, a professor of law with a reputation as parliamentarian and orator, and he had climbed into the elite from nothing by study. Inaugurated on 12 May 1913, he set out to do three things: reform the army, retire the paper currency and put real schools in the countryside. Each one cost him. The army would not be reorganised by a civilian. The men holding paper posts in the school system did not want inspecting. The Banque had no intention of releasing the ten million francs in gold that the currency law of 26 August required of it. The Cacos of the North, balked a second time by a capital that had handed the presidency to a lawyer from the West, wanted their payments kept up, and Oreste kept them up and then stopped them dead. Pyke reported to London in June that anonymous threats were being pinned to the president's bedclothes and that he no longer used his chair at the cathedral.

Joseph argues that the occupation left a mark on the national psyche that Haitian thought has kept alive, and that the writing produced during it did lasting damage. Travel narratives, novels, memoirs and plays by American writers and artists between 1915 and 1934 repeated the ideas of Haiti's strangeness, tragedy and vast darkness, and presented the Black republic as a headless figure, an object of experimentation and of the foreign gaze. He cites J. Michael Dash's judgement that the American literary imagination of Haiti and its revolutionary history was both misguided and misrepresented, and amounted to a restatement of long-standing stereotypes. Joseph places this within a nineteenth-century American discourse about the Black republic that spread across the Atlantic world, and compares it explicitly to the way Europe invented exotic images of the Middle East, invoking Said's account of Orientalism.

In 1917 the United States bought the Danish West Indies, the islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix, and renamed them the Virgin Islands. The purchase was strategic. The Panama Canal had opened in 1914, and Washington wanted no European power holding a harbour on the approaches to it, least of all with a war running in Europe and German submarines at sea. Nicholls files the transaction alongside the occupation of Haiti and the occupation of Nicaragua, because all three belong to one policy. The Caribbean was being converted into an American lake, and the instrument varied with the case: a cheque to a small European state, a treaty extracted from a government the marines had installed, a landing party. Haiti's place in this was geographic. It sat on the sea lane that mattered to the United States at the moment the United States decided that sea lane would answer to nobody else. Anything Haitians did or failed to do in those years was read in Washington through that single consideration.

In 1914 the American State Department received reports that German merchants controlled roughly eighty percent of all commerce in Haiti. The community numbered only a few hundred people and had made itself indispensable in the one way the law allowed. Foreigners could not own Haitian land, so German traders married Haitian women, held the import business, financed governments at high interest and lent to whichever faction looked likely to win. By 1914 they were the working bank of Haitian politics. Washington read this as a strategic problem rather than a commercial one. Europe went to war that August, the Panama Canal opened in the same month, and the prospect of a German-leaning republic sitting on the Windward Passage was the argument that carried in the American cabinet. The occupation that began in July 1915 is usually explained by Haitian disorder. The disorder was real enough. The eighty percent is what made it urgent.