The occupation jails editors and prosecutes Haitians for feeding the lwa

Borno and Russell never mastered the Haitian press. Papers edited in the French polemical tradition attacked the occupation with a freedom the courts protected by refusing to convict editors. One journal spent part of 1925 running a daily notice counting down the days until the sanitary service would move Borno's remains to the city dump. Another advised readers to poison him. A preventive detention law of 1922 put Jolibois fils in and out of prison so often that the American diplomat Dana Munro thought he preferred it there, and Ernest Chauvet of Le Nouvelliste was locked up periodically and by one account enjoyed himself, devouring whole roast turkeys and drinking champagne. The courts went unreformed. Murder cases ended in acquittal on the plea that the victim had been a lougawou, since the penal code itself named sorcery a crime and treated zombification as real. The Garde was then turned on Vodou, arresting Haitians for preparing manje pou lesen. No senior American ever grasped that they were prosecuting the national religion.

Beginning on 19 November 1929 Hoover summoned the heads of the banks, railroads, manufacturing industries and utilities to the White House, and for nearly two weeks they came out of daily meetings repeating that the economy was sound. On 5 December he reported the results to four hundred business leaders. The Federal Reserve had eased credit through open market purchases and a lower discount rate and was refusing to discount for banks making stock market call loans. The industrialists had agreed to hold wage rates where they were, on his argument that the first shock should fall on profits. Railway and utility executives had agreed to expand building and maintenance, and he had wired governors and mayors to speed up road and public building work. No president had previously believed that the federal government carried a responsibility in a slump. Hoover believed it and said so.

Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928. He had been born on 15 October 1876 at Grand-Riviere du Nord, had trained as a physician, and had spent his adult life watching the colour line inside Haitian society do damage that no foreign enemy had needed to inflict. The book's claim is short. The two things that most plainly mark Haitian life, the Vodou religion and the Kreyol language, come out of the African past by way of colonial slavery, they are a legitimate inheritance, and Haitians should hold them rather than hide them. That was written while marines occupied the country and while American racial contempt was busy confirming the light-skinned elite in its own contempt for black Haitian custom. Price-Mars also told his readers to take pride in the only slave revolt in the Americas that finished the job. A generation of black intellectuals took the book as a charter. One of them was Francois Duvalier, who turned it into a justification for dictatorship while its author was still alive to object.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel appeared in the crown of a royal palm at Ville Bonheur, and the miracles that followed made the place a national pilgrimage. It grew after the Dominican Republic closed its frontier to the Haitians who used to cross every year to the grotto of Higuey. Because the waterfall of Saut d'Eau stood nearby, the spirits of vodou claimed the site as well. Candles and food offerings were laid at the foot of the palms beside the candles of Christian penitence, and possession trances ran through the crowd alongside the liturgical singing. The church first doubted the apparitions, then denied them, then acted. One priest set fire to the trunks of several palms and was cursed by the crowd; he is said to have lost his reason soon after. His successor called in the secular arm and had every palm cut down, and was later struck with stiffness in both legs. The pilgrims read both events as vengeance.