Dartiguenave sets Borno on the Americans and loses the treasury

The 1918 constitution had removed Dartiguenave's domestic opponents, which left him free to fight the Americans. The cabinet he named on 24 June 1918 gave Finance and Foreign Affairs to Louis Borno, Public Works to Eugène Roy and Education to Dantès Bellegarde. Borno was the weapon, and money was the ground he chose. Haitians held almost none of their own revenue. American advisers were certain that any revenue Haitians did hold would be stolen. Both readings had evidence behind them. Since 1916 the treaty officials had taken the power to hire and fire customs staff, to collect internal revenue, to write the budget and to control what both governments spent. In August 1918 the American minister added a rule that any bill touching treaty matters be shown to him first. In October the adviser Ruan demanded a law barring Borno from approving a voucher without his visa. The Council refused and rejected the budget. On 13 November Colonel Russell ordered the Banque to release nothing without his signature. Borno resigned on 24 November.

The Greeks of Anatolia were the last of the minorities to leave, exchanged in 1924 for the Turkish population living in Greece. What remained was a country in which Turks were an overwhelming majority. The state had arrived before the nation, and the new leadership then had to find something that would hold the population together. The Turkish language was declared a national characteristic and stirred very little feeling. Islam was what actually commanded loyalty and produced internal unity, so the officially secular state made full use of it. The working test of Turkishness was religion rather than language, which shows in the reluctance to encourage the immigration of the Turkish speaking Christian Gagauz of Bessarabia and in the willingness to let the Turkish speaking Christian Karamanlis depart. Property left by the departing minorities was sold cheaply under a special law to the craftsmen, small merchants and local notables who became the new middle class.

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.

Haiti conducted its government in French from independence in 1804 onward, and no law said so until 1918, when French was legally recognised as the official language of the nation for the first time. Nearly everyone in the country spoke Creole and only Creole. The bilingual minority who could work in French were the people who held office, drafted laws, taught school and heard court cases, so the rule put on the books in 1918 confirmed an arrangement that had already settled who could take part in public life. Creole waited another forty six years for its first appearance in a Haitian constitution. That came in 1964, and the clause permitted Creole only where the use of French would place a monolingual speaker at a disadvantage, in a courtroom for instance. Creole was recognised as a national language alongside French in 1983, and in 1987 Haiti became officially bilingual, at a point when about seven percent of Haitians actually were.