A manbo predicts Borno's death and his council returns him 19 to 0

Louis Borno's opponents began plotting as soon as he entered the National Palace, and he enlarged their ranks himself each time he reshuffled the cabinet and the Conseil d'Etat. Through 1924 the capital's elite passed rumours of makandalism, meaning organised poisoning of mulatto families by Black Haitians, alongside talk that the marines might leave Haiti as they were leaving Santo Domingo. When Borno toured the south in 1925, Antoine Pierre-Paul and other opponents at Les Cayes tried to hang the town in black, sent word to the peasantry that the visit was cancelled, and stove in the drums of people preparing to dance for him. Before the 1926 election a leading manbo, Madame Lespasse, announced that if the council returned Borno then one member would fall dead in the palace and the president would follow. Russell noted that her informant was the mistress of a rival candidate. Borno then dismissed eighteen of the twenty one councillors, and the new body re-elected him nineteen votes to nothing.

The New York Stock Exchange estimated in 1929 that twenty million Americans owned stock, and Frederick Lewis Allen used that figure in the popular history he published in 1931. It was wildly wrong. The chief actuary of the Treasury calculated that about three million Americans, under two and a half per cent of the population, held securities in 1928, and brokerage firms reported 1,548,707 customers in 1929. Pension funds did not yet exist to give workers an indirect stake. So the crash by itself did almost nothing to the finances of the ordinary American, who owned nothing to lose. Stock prices recovered about a fifth of their losses by April 1930 and no major bank or company had failed. Kennedy's point is that the crash and the depression are two different events, and that the most careful students of 1929 have never demonstrated a causal link running from one to the other.

The original occupation treaties said nothing about education, an omission Rayford Logan called almost inexplicable, and the Service Technique became the American attempt to repair it. What existed in 1915 was two systems. Government schools enrolled about thirty thousand pupils, largely on paper, staffed where staffed at all by appointees who could not read. Religious schools, mostly Catholic, taught about twelve thousand and belonged to the elite, apart from a hundred or so presbyterial schools where Breton priests gave a few thousand peasant children the rudiments. Three obstacles stood in the way of anything better. The peasantry saw little use in it. The elite feared what an educated Black majority would do, and feared more that such a majority might prefer foreigners who fed them to Haitians who did not. And teachers taught in French, the language of advancement, to children who spoke Kreyol. Dantes Bellegarde then made Haitian education a national redoubt against further American encroachment. Keeping peasants illiterate suited everyone with the power to change it.

In 1925 a young man of the Haitian elite studying engineering at Zurich sent the Union Patriotique a letter asking to be enrolled. He was a grandson of the former president Tancrede Auguste and his name was Jacques Roumain. He returned to Haiti in 1927 and threw himself into the intellectual resistance, launching the literary magazine La Revue Indigene. When that folded in 1928 he founded a plainer paper, Le Petit Impartial, which called itself an organ of the masses and spoke for a student body he had created, the Ligue de la Jeunesse Patriote Haitienne. No American and few Haitians knew that the Communist Party had recruited him in France. His constituency was a generation of elite students whose inherited pride in French culture and inherited contempt for both American materialism and Black Haitian life had been ground down by fourteen years of occupation. When members of the Ligue defaced the statue of Dessalines in 1929, a Garde officer reported that these young people were against everything, Dessalines included.