France stops buying coffee and the Zamor government runs out

Beating Théodore should have secured the Zamors. It did not, because they had sixty-two thousand dollars left in cash. The Banque again refused to release collected revenue before the fiscal year ended, and the outbreak of war in Europe froze exchange dealings in Paris, which supplied a further reason for keeping money tight in Port-au-Prince. Shipping dislocation and blockade wrecked the coffee export on which the customs depended, and France stopped buying Haitian coffee altogether. By the middle of October the government was finished. Charles Zamor dropped the last pretence and offered Washington whatever it wanted on customs in return for keeping the family in power, and got no answer. He left Cap-Haïtien by sea on 18 October. The next morning Rosalvo Bobo walked out of the German consulate, declared himself civil chief of the revolution and welcomed Théodore, who was proclaimed president on the spot. The Zamors sailed from Gonaïves on 28 October. At four the following morning machine gun fire announced the change in the capital.

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.

Wages fell across Africa through the 1930s, in the mines, on white-owned plantations and in the towns that Africans were moving to in growing numbers. South Africa recorded serious African unemployment for the first time since the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. Prices fell too, which softened the blow on paper and made little difference in a household. Inflation in several territories hit town workers hardest, and real wages did not rise again until the second half of the 1940s, so the decade of hardship ran on for fifteen years. Poor whites suffered alongside them. Commercial farming had pushed tens of thousands of white families off the land and into the cities, where they competed with Africans for the same work, which is why the colour bar laws exist. Those who stayed on their farms scraped by growing maize for the towns. This population, urban and rural, became the constituency that Afrikaner nationalist politicians set out to win, and the winning of it reshaped South Africa.