Three foreign investigators of the occupation are met by Haitian women

Haitian women worked on the campaign against the American occupation from the start. From the founding of the Union Patriotique in July 1915 and through the spread of its forty one provincial branches, they collected funds in houses, markets and public places, money that paid both for the campaign inside the country and for sending delegates to the United States to put Haitian grievances before people who mattered there. In 1926 the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom decided to open its own inquiry into an occupation that was drawing steadily more criticism, and sent Paul Douglas, Emily Greene Balch and Grace Watson to Port-au-Prince. They were received and guided by the League's representatives in Haiti, Madame Eugenie Malebranche-Sylvain and Madame Pierre Hudicourt. In 1930 Madame Perceval Thoby, Therese Vieux-Clesca and Madame Justinien Ricot organised the large peaceful demonstration that marched through the capital to tell the Forbes Commission that Haitians wanted the occupier gone.

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.

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.

The Service Technique de l'Agriculture et de l'Enseignement Professionnel was organised in April 1923 and became the most far reaching American programme in Haiti. Its declared functions were agricultural training, research, farm schools, advice to adult farmers, animal clinics, field experiments and vocational instruction. Russell's larger aim was to raise from the peasantry a class of Black smallholders with schooling, capital and access to markets. The record is real. Experimental stations, a cattle breeding station at Hinche, the agricultural school at Damien that one historian called a miniature Tuskegee, demonstration farms, Plantation Dauphin at Fort Liberte with the largest sisal acreage in the world, tobacco brought back as a money crop, national soil surveys, and veterinary clinics that treated more than a hundred thousand animals. The hostility it drew ran far beyond agronomy. Since 1804 the oligarchy's position had rested on the peasantry having no schooling, no capital and no market. A programme that undid any one of those undid the oligarchy, and its members understood this faster than the Americans did.