Oreste funds a new palace he will never see finished

The National Palace had been a temporary structure since the explosion, and Tancrède Auguste did nothing about it. Michel Oreste held a design competition, which the Haitian architect Georges Baussan won against French and local rivals, and got three hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of the legislature in August 1913 to build with. Work began on 20 May 1914. Oreste was gone by then. Closing out the year, the British minister Pyke told the Foreign Office that nothing had changed except for the worse, that the peasants' famous patience under their rulers had probably spared the country a repeat of the previous century's massacres, and that Haitian distrust of foreigners was the standing obstacle to any development that might keep the state solvent. On 1 January 1914 a rising broke out at Thomazeau, timed with a failed attempt to burn Port-au-Prince. Government troops went out in cane cars behind the little wood burning locomotives of the railway, took nineteen rebels and a general, and shot them where they stood.

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 1919 the American Federation of Labor set aside its usual contempt for the unskilled and led a strike to organise an industrial union in steel. United States Steel sent agents into the mill districts around Chicago and Pittsburgh to set native born workers against immigrants, and recruited some thirty thousand black southerners, who wanted jobs that had always been closed to them, to cross the picket lines. The strike failed and the Federation went back to organising skilled craftsmen only. The weapons available to employers went further than that. The yellow dog contract bound a worker never to join a union as a condition of employment, and after the Supreme Court upheld the practice in 1917 those contracts were enforceable at law. Half of all labour injunctions issued in the fifty years after 1880 were handed down in the 1920s. Union membership fell from five million to under three and a half million by 1929.

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.