Dominica gets a Peasant Information Bureau and a planter to run it

Sir Francis Watts reported on agricultural conditions in Dominica in 1927 and recommended a Peasant Information Bureau under an appointed Peasant Adviser, charged with supervising the cultivation and export of crops grown by small proprietors. The bureau opened the following year and one of the island's most prominent planters, J. C. MacIntyre, took the post of Adviser under the local executive. On 17 October 1928 the administrator asked the Colonial Office for permission to move five hundred pounds from Loan Board funds to the bureau to set up a Vegetables Growers Association. It was granted. MacIntyre drafted the by laws himself. The associates would be the peasants, whom he described as more or less illiterate and whose attendance at meetings he called undesirable; they would be represented by the heads of their local centres, and the Adviser would sit as chairman, treasurer and secretary at once. Ninety years after abolition the word peasant was finally respectable in Dominica, and the first institution built around it kept a planter at its head.

American administrative control of Haiti ran from 28 July 1915 to 15 August 1934. In those nineteen years the occupation rebuilt the Haitian armed forces on an American model and laid 1,200 miles of all weather highway, much of it built by peasants conscripted under an old corvee law that the Americans revived. The same period produced Charlemagne Peralte, who led the Caco war against the occupation, was shot dead in 1919 and was then photographed tied upright to a door so that the picture could be circulated as proof. The photograph became the standing image of Haitian resistance and did the opposite of what the occupation intended. The Americans who governed treated Vodou as a police problem and never grasped how much of Haitian life ran through it. Haitians called the withdrawal of August 1934 the second independence. The phrase set the terms of every argument that followed about what exactly the country had to take back.

Prices broke on Wednesday 23 October 1929 in a wave of selling that moved over six million shares and wiped out about four billion dollars on paper, with the ticker running two hours behind. On Black Thursday, 24 October, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded, losses reached nine billion by noon and the ticker finished four hours late at eight minutes past seven in the evening. On Tuesday 29 October, 16,410,000 shares changed hands, a record that stood for thirty nine years. The slide went on for three more weeks. Buying on margin had multiplied gains on the way up and it worked the same way in reverse, since a small fall in a price forced the loan to be called and the stock to be sold. By the middle of November some twenty six billion dollars, roughly a third of the value recorded in September, had gone.

Every Dahomean who died became a god of his family, and each year the household performed the customs for its ancestors. Herskovits recorded in 1931 that the sacrifices were not confined to the dead whose names people could still recite. At a separate altar, food was given to the spirits of those who had been sent into slavery and to their descendants, together with others whose names had been lost. As the offering was made, the names of New World countries were spoken in order to call the family dead. The practice was still running in the villages of Dahomey more than sixty years after the Atlantic trade ended and well over a century after the last large shipments to Saint Domingue. Herskovits singled it out as the most significant thing the field trip produced for anyone studying the relation between Africans and people of African descent in the Americas.