American intelligence watched the men and missed the women

In October 1924 United States military intelligence in Haiti filed a report on a political group in the United States, consisting of James Weldon Johnson and others of the Garvey circle, which had sent word to the anti occupation men of Port-au-Prince, naming Sylvain, Hudicourt and Cauvin, telling them to spread news throughout Haiti that the occupation was about to end. The rumour did spread and produced demonstrations across the country. The report is useful for what it saw and for what it missed. It saw an alliance forming between the NAACP, Garvey's UNIA and the Union Patriotique. It assumed that alliance ran between men. The correspondence being tracked passed through women, among them Theodora Holly, who translated much of it, and the money and the testimony had been collected by women's committees. Perceval Thoby understood the press better than his watchers did and used it to embarrass the Coolidge administration over attacks on Haitian women. In 1927 Normil Sylvain, Max Hudicourt, Arthur Holly, Jacques Roumain, Emile Roumer and Jean Price-Mars founded La Revue Indigene.

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.

Legba is the youngest son of the Dahomean sky gods, the messenger who carries decisions from Mawu to the powers that execute them, and the one who can refuse to deliver a message or bend it in favour of a man who has fed him well. Every household, every village, every cult house and every individual keeps a Legba shrine, always near the entrance and always outside. A small mound of earth goes up as soon as a child is born and is enlarged when the child reaches adolescence. Missionary writing described Legba as the counterpart of the Christian Devil and explained his position outside the walls by the harm he does. Herskovits reported in 1931 that Dahomeans did not fear him and probably loved him more than any of the other great gods. Where he did hear the identification with the Devil from a Dahomean, the speaker had learned it in contact with missionaries.

These identifications were collected in the north of Haiti and hold for that region, since the pairings shift from one part of the country to another. Legba, the great master, the father, the familiar god of the Dahomeans, became Saint Anthony, probably Anthony the hermit, since the saint is shown with a black cock in place of a pig. Ougou Balindjo became Saint James the Greater. Agomme Tonnerre became John the Baptist. Daguy Bologuay became Saint Joseph, prayed to in words asking him to lead the petitioner as he led Mary into Egypt. The King of Aoueseau became Saint Louis, king of France. Grande Mambo Batala became Saint Anne. Maitresse Erzulie became the Virgin, and specifically the Virgin of the Nativity. La Sirene became the Assumption. Pierre d'Ambala became Saint Peter. Lesser deities found their own counterparts among the blessed, and a whole literature of written prayers followed the same road.