Six Americans go to Haiti and tell Washington to leave

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races put much of its money into sending investigators abroad, and the most consequential of those journeys was Addie Hunton's visit to Haiti in 1926. Her guides in Port-au-Prince were Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain and Therese Hudicourt. Six years earlier those two had walked two hundred women through the same streets in protest; now they walked an American through the places where the occupation had done its damage. What came out of the trip was a report of 180 pages called Occupied Haiti. Its subtitle described the authors as six disinterested Americans, from organisations that were American through and through, who had looked at conditions on the ground themselves and wanted the independence of the republic given back. The conclusion was that the United States military should go, and go at once. The title alone did work that argument could not. Americans who had been told the occupation was a favour to Haiti were reading Americans who had gone to see and come home asking for withdrawal.

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.

By the 1930s African dissatisfaction with mission education was general. In South Africa the Zionist churches, which had white roots in the late nineteenth century, grew through the interwar years by folding African religious practice into Christian belief. Zionists accepted polygamy and gave women prominent roles. The mission school had no answer for people whose incomes had collapsed, and the doctrine it taught had begun to sound wrong: a white Christ, a salvation and an equality that appeared to be handed out selectively, and a demand for unconditional loyalty to the colonial state routed through the Church. Independent congregations multiplied in direct proportion to hardship. One was founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1934 by a group of unemployed men. Political argument travelled inside religious language. The Watchtower movement went into the mining compounds of southern Africa, recruited workers, offered a spiritual account of compound life and told them that at the second coming they would be among the elect. It built the first worker consciousness those compounds had, in the only vocabulary on offer.

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.