Haiti gets its first aircraft, and they are there to hunt Cacos

Through the winter of 1918 the Gendarmerie made more than twenty contacts with large Caco bands. Colonel Russell put Péralte's active following at five thousand men. Péralte ran the North himself and gave Benoît Batraville, once chief of police at Mirebalais, a commission as Chief Minister of the Revolution to keep the Upper Artibonite alight. Both men were in regular touch with Rosalvo Bobo in Kingston, which the Americans did not discover for some time. On 16 March 1919 Colonel Williams told his superiors he had a full rebellion on his hands, that the Gendarmerie could not manage it, and asked for the marine brigade. Russell sent six small companies to Hinche, Lascahobas, Mirebalais and Saint Michel and put a quarter of the brigade on patrol around the clock. Colonel Frederic Wise came from the United States to replace Williams. On 31 March 1919 the first aircraft ever seen in Haiti were unloaded at Port-au-Prince, seven HS-2 seaplanes for Bizoton and six Jennys. Between April and September marines and gendarmes fought 131 actions.

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.

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.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races ran study clubs in which members and outsiders read texts by people of African descent from anywhere in the world. The stated purpose was strengthening the darker races through familiarity with themselves and with one another. In practice this was an alternative curriculum, complete with research projects that placed Black women at the centre, at a time when no school in either country taught such a thing. Theodora Holly was the most requested speaker, lecturing girls and women in Haiti and in the United States on the history of Haitian women. Members also collected newspapers and photographs and mailed them across the water. Holly wrote to Margaret Washington describing a talk she gave to a girls' club in Port-au-Prince, where she held up Washington's photograph as an example of what a Black woman could be. A decade later in Paris, Jane and Paulette Nardal gathered a cercle d'amis on the same principle. An image travelling from Alabama to a schoolroom in Port-au-Prince was traffic the occupation had no method for reading.