Roosevelt boasts he wrote Haiti's constitution, arming Harding

Franklin Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy and the Democratic candidate for vice president, told an audience that he had had something to do with running a couple of small republics and that he had written Haiti's constitution himself. Pamphile places the remark in a sequence. On 9 August a NAACP delegation including Johnson had met Harding at Marion, Ohio, putting to him an agenda of anti-lynching legislation, federal aid, voting rights and an end to the occupation; Harding took little interest in any of it except Haiti, which Johnson said he treated as a gift off the Christmas tree. Roosevelt's boast gave him his opening. On 17 September Harding promised he would not authorise an assistant navy secretary to draft a constitution for helpless West Indian neighbours and force it on them at marine bayonet point, and in his Constitution Day speech he called the admission a confession of the rape of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

The plan for the night of 31 October 1919 was that Conzé would attack Grande Rivière while Péralte waited at Masère in the river gorge. The marines knew both halves of it. Meade brought gendarmes and a machine gun section quietly into the barracks at Grande Rivière, and blocking positions went out on every trail from Saint Raphaël to Vallière. Hanneken took eighteen picked gendarmes and Lieutenant William Button, dressed them as Cacos in worn denim, and blacked his own face and Button's with burned cork. Seven hundred Cacos filed past their ambush and Péralte was not among them. Jean-Edmond François then brought word that Péralte was waiting in camp for a detachment to fetch him in. Hanneken's party became that detachment and climbed through six Caco outposts using the password General Jean, chosen as a compliment to Conzé. At the last one a sentry tried to inspect Button's automatic rifle and Button snapped at him in Creole and pushed on. François pointed out a man in a blue shirt beside a small fire. Hanneken shot him twice through the heart.

The Summary Conviction Offenses Ordinance of 19 May 1921 defined obeah in Trinidad as any pretended assumption of supernatural power or knowledge for fraudulent or illicit ends, for gain, or to injure a person. Conviction before a magistrate carried up to six months in prison, with or without hard labour. A man could be sentenced to corporal punishment on top of it. A woman could be held in solitary confinement, three days at a stretch and a month in all. A justice could issue a warrant on the oath of one credible witness to search any premises by day or night and seize what was found. The police manual advised that convictions usually needed paid informers, and noted that no intent to defraud had to be proved. The same ordinance forbade drums, gongs, tambours, bangees and chac-chacs between ten at night and six in the morning, banned the bongo dance, and set a penalty of ten pounds with the instruments forfeited.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the export crops of tropical Africa came off small African farms. The change of those two decades was the lorry. Roads spread, motor transport followed them, and commercial agriculture reached villages the railways had left alone. Market towns filled up. African cultivators, mostly men using the labour of the women in their households, opened new ground for export crops. After a generation of conquest the 1920s were steady and comparatively prosperous, and the population grew. The communities forming out of this were part peasant and part capitalist, and European administrations disliked them. Officials preferred chiefs they had appointed and were wary of African businessmen who would eventually want politics as well as profit. The weakness in the arrangement was visible before the crash came. African producers had no way to move a world price, and what Africa sold remained crops, timber and minerals. In parts of West Africa the trade of the nineteenth century simply carried on under a new flag.