Butler goes to the palace and comes back with a signed decree

On 18 June 1917 Josephus Daniels cabled Colonel Cole full discretion to end the National Assembly without using troops. Cole wrote a dissolution decree in the French he had learned at the Naval Academy, put it in the brigade safe, and asked Dartiguenave if he meant to sign. The president said yes. Next morning no decree appeared, and Cole learned that the assembly, knowing what was coming, had shouted down Charles Zamor when he counselled moderation and was racing its own constitution through in batches. Cole sent Major Butler to the palace. As Butler left, an officer telephoned that 320 of the 360 articles had passed and the rest would take half an hour. At the palace an aide in red trousers and a green coat said the president was sick but had ordered the Gendarmerie to do the job. Butler insisted on a written decree. Dartiguenave asked him to go and use force instead. Butler refused, and the president produced four of his five ministers, who signed in handwriting so small that Butler said afterwards he needed a magnifying glass to read the names.

What the marines were doing to Haitian girls became a concern for Black women across the region, who recognised the methods from their own countries. By 1920 Margaret Washington and Mary Church Terrell, who presided over the National Association of Colored Women, had swung their organisation toward anti-Black violence in the Caribbean and at home. In August 1922 a small group of them set up the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. It took in Terrell, Washington, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mme. Charles Dube, a Haitian teacher and philanthropist, and Theodora Holly, an African American activist living in Haiti who edited the French pages of the Negro World for Garvey's association. The council spent its first year on Haitian women and children. Holly ran most of the investigation. She was the daughter of Bishop James Theodore Holly, whose family had emigrated from the United States to Haiti to get away from American racism, and she worked in English and French. Black women were assembling the machinery for holding an empire to account.

By the 1930s African dissatisfaction with mission education was general. In South Africa the Zionist churches, which had white roots in the late nineteenth century, grew through the interwar years by folding African religious practice into Christian belief. Zionists accepted polygamy and gave women prominent roles. The mission school had no answer for people whose incomes had collapsed, and the doctrine it taught had begun to sound wrong: a white Christ, a salvation and an equality that appeared to be handed out selectively, and a demand for unconditional loyalty to the colonial state routed through the Church. Independent congregations multiplied in direct proportion to hardship. One was founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1934 by a group of unemployed men. Political argument travelled inside religious language. The Watchtower movement went into the mining compounds of southern Africa, recruited workers, offered a spiritual account of compound life and told them that at the second coming they would be among the elect. It built the first worker consciousness those compounds had, in the only vocabulary on offer.

Around forty thousand Haitian peasants took up arms against the American occupation in 1918. Nothing on that scale had happened on Haitian soil since the war of independence. The grievance was the corvée, the unpaid road labour the occupation had revived from an 1863 statute, which the peasantry read as the return of the forced work their great grandparents had fought a revolution to destroy. The fighters were called Cacos, after a bird of prey, and they marked themselves with patches of red cloth. They had been a factor in Haitian politics for decades, hired and paid by presidential candidates from the North to march on the capital. In 1918 they turned on the Americans instead. Their leader was Charlemagne Péralte, born at Hinche on 10 October 1885, who had commanded the garrison at Léogâne when the marines landed in 1915. Sentenced to five years of hard labour for destroying United States property, he escaped and built the insurgency. The same year a constitution drafted under American supervision was promulgated over a population that had no part in writing it.