Churchill puts Britain back on gold and New York pays for it

As chancellor of the exchequer in 1925 Winston Churchill returned Britain to the gold standard at the prewar rate of four dollars and eighty six cents to the pound. The rate was too high. It made British exports dear and imports cheap and threatened to drain the Bank of England of gold. Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reasoned that cheaper money in America would stop the flow of gold from London to New York and steady an international financial system still recovering from the war, so the Federal Reserve flooded the American banks with liquidity in 1927. His reasoning was sound and the side effect was enormous. The same cheap money financed the speculative borrowing that carried the New York stock market into the sky. Hoover called Strong a mental annex to Europe, which is also a statement about where he thought the blame belonged.

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.

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.