libtool seems to assume when you do the initial build that it knows where the final link/install will be... even though the actual DESTDIR=... doesn't get provided until "make install ..." happens.
As a result, libtool seeds libusbpp.la with incorrect values for the relink_command.
There are probably other (and maybe even more serious) side-effects to this assumption.
For instance, I noticed that even though I'm doing a cross-compile, libtool always generates "-rpath /usr/lib" as if the install destination will be local.