A Haitian writes to London a year before the Marines land

On 20 August 1914 Tribonien Saint-Juste wrote to the British government warning that the United States was preparing to occupy Haiti, and asking for international support to protect the country's independence from what he called Yankee expansionism. Europe had been at war for three weeks. Britain, France and Germany were the three powers with standing claims in Haiti and the only ones who might have objected to an American move. All three were now fully occupied with one another, and the last external check on Washington in the Caribbean had gone. Saint-Juste was right about the intention and eleven months early on the date. The Marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 28 July 1915 and stayed until 1934. His letter sits in the Foreign Office files as evidence that Haitians saw the occupation coming and put it in writing to anyone who might listen.

On 28 November 1917 Trinidad and Tobago enacted the Shouters Prohibition Ordinance. It made it an offence to hold, join or attend a meeting of the Shouters anywhere in the colony, indoors or in the open, at any hour, and an offence to put up a building where they met. Owners and managers of land had to report any such house or gathering to the nearest constabulary station or be charged themselves. Police could enter premises without a warrant on suspicion and take the names of everyone present. The penalty ran to fifty pounds. A magistrate decided who counted as a Shouter and his ruling was final, wording chosen because a banned group might rename itself. Introducing the bill on 16 November, the Attorney General complained of noise and indecency and said the text came from a St Vincent law. The police manual listed white headcloths, candles, bells and chalk marks on the floor as evidence. Prosecutions were brought in the court at Toco.

At Versailles in 1919 the victorious Allies divided Germany's African colonies among themselves. Britain and France split Togo and Cameroon. Britain took Tanganyika. Belgium took Rwanda and Burundi. South Africa was given German South West Africa to administer. The rhetoric of the 1880s was no longer usable, so the treaty said these territories would be administered on behalf of the new League of Nations, held in trust, with the administering power preparing them for eventual self-government and protecting the interests of the people who lived there. The Mandate system had no means of enforcing anything, since the two most powerful members of the League were the two largest colonial empires, but the secretariat did send inspection teams and ask for reports. The principle it established was guardianship: that some peoples were less developed and required managing until they reached political maturity. That idea outlived the League by a century. Its vocabulary is still audible in the language of development and capacity building used about countries under foreign supervision, Haiti among them in the same decade.

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.