A clerk slams the vault and asks the magistrate if he can be of service

After the gold went to New York, and after the Banque Nationale and the foreign merchants refused the newsprint gourdes, the Haitian government moved against the bank. On 23 December 1914 it took away the Banque's contract to handle the treasury. On the twenty eighth an investigating magistrate walked in with a warrant and a file of soldiers behind him. Desrue, the French assistant manager, saw what was coming, heaved the main vault door shut, threw the tumblers, spun the dial, then turned around and politely asked the magistrate what he could do for him. The cash drawers and lock boxes yielded 66,910 dollars in gold, and that is what the state carried out. Behind the sealed door lay 400,000 dollars, the remainder of the currency retirement fund. The manager reckoned it would take five or six days of work to open it. With the bank paralysed, Haitian public finance stopped, and on 29 January 1915 the republic announced default on its foreign debt.

The fighting stopped on 11 November 1918. The war had lasted 1,563 days, killed some ten million soldiers, wounded twenty million more and consumed over three hundred billion dollars. It destroyed the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Romanovs in Russia, and in its final hours new governments were forming in Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Dublin while crowds filled the streets of Berlin and Petersburg. Kennedy opens his history of the American 1930s at this date because Herbert Hoover opened his memoirs the same way. The first sentence of those memoirs states that the primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914 to 1918. Everything that followed for the United States, the debt, the tariffs, the closed door to immigrants and the refusal to join the League of Nations, was a reaction to those fifty two months.

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.

During the first United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934, opposition in the countryside was often led by Vodou priests and priestesses. Bellegarde-Smith puts the number of Haitians who died fighting the invading army at perhaps fifty thousand, and describes the religion as the popular vehicle of a wider culture of refusal. He reads the missionary side of the occupation as policy. Detaching Haitians from Roman Catholicism and from the French hold on the Haitian elite was expected to turn enemies into friends, and the written record of the period carries the argument openly. Washington had tried the same approach in Puerto Rico after 1898, where replacing Spanish and Catholicism with English and Protestantism was supposed to pacify the island. The French bishops who ran the Haitian church were nervous accordingly. Decades later Francois Duvalier replaced every French bishop with a Haitian of his own choosing and brought American fundamentalist Protestants in against Rome.