Two journals appear and send Haitian writing to the countryside

Two reviews came out in 1927, La Trouee and La Revue Indigene, and between them they gave Haitian literature a new subject. The doctrine they carried was called indigenism. Its claim was that the real material of Haitian art lay with the peasant working land in the hills, with his speech, his religion, his labour and his songs, and that a national literature which ignored him was a provincial imitation of France pretending to be something else. Haitian writing up to that point had been produced by a small city class educated on French models and judged by French standards. Turning to the countryside meant turning to Kreyol, to Vodou and to a way of life the same class had spent a century apologising for. The timing was not accidental. American marines had been in the country for twelve years and had made it plain what they thought of Haitians of any class. Writers who had once expected to be received in Paris as Frenchmen went looking closer to home for something to be.

The New York Stock Exchange estimated in 1929 that twenty million Americans owned stock, and Frederick Lewis Allen used that figure in the popular history he published in 1931. It was wildly wrong. The chief actuary of the Treasury calculated that about three million Americans, under two and a half per cent of the population, held securities in 1928, and brokerage firms reported 1,548,707 customers in 1929. Pension funds did not yet exist to give workers an indirect stake. So the crash by itself did almost nothing to the finances of the ordinary American, who owned nothing to lose. Stock prices recovered about a fifth of their losses by April 1930 and no major bank or company had failed. Kennedy's point is that the crash and the depression are two different events, and that the most careful students of 1929 have never demonstrated a causal link running from one to the other.

Between the wars a class of educated Africans in the French territories began arguing about politics in print, and the administration worried that they would find a rural following. Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, an activist and for a time a communist, wrote about the emerging African proletariat and about nationalism. He belonged to a set of men across French western and equatorial Africa who ran newspapers, built the first trade unions and corresponded with Marcus Garvey and with George Padmore, the Trinidadian who took charge of the African section of the Comintern in 1927. Plenty of African politicians in these years worked with the colonial order. Blaise Diagne, elected to the French assembly from Senegal in 1914 on rural votes, made himself an ally of France and defended its policies in public, conscription included. Andre Matswa built a society in the French Congo in the late 1920s demanding French citizenship and the rights attached to it, and by the early 1930s the administration had broken both him and it. Dockers struck at Conakry in 1919 and railwaymen in 1925 and 1938.

Two groups of Haitian intellectuals reorganised the country's politics between 1926 and 1937, along the fault lines of class and colour. Jolibois fils wrote to Moscow in 1926 and the Comintern ignored him. In 1930, under French party sponsorship, Jacques Roumain founded the Haitian Communist Party with Max Hudicourt. President Vincent jailed Roumain in 1934, released him two years later, and outlawed the party by decree in November 1936. Its members, with the notable exception of Jacques Alexis, were mulatto men of the literary elite: Jean Brierre, Jules Blanchet, Roumain himself. French Marxism did not reach the second group. Black professionals and bureaucrats produced by the occupation, and by Russell's effort to build a Black middle class, were looking for Haiti's roots in Africa, and in 1937 they took the name Les Griots. Jean Price-Mars, Lorimer Denis and Doctor J. C. Dorsainvil led them, and a young ultranationalist physician named Francois Duvalier was among them. The Griots had the constituency the communists could never reach, and they used it.