An American writer finds the Champ de Mars strewn with Judases

William Seabrook published The Magic Island in 1929, a book about Haiti written during the American occupation. In it he described an Easter morning on the Champ de Mars, the park beside the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince. The lawns were littered with torsos, arms, legs and heads. All of them were life sized figures of Judas and of Pilate's soldiers, and all of them leaked sawdust and straw. Seabrook had met one of these figures before the holiday. A whole small community had built him out of an old coat, a shirt, trousers packed with straw, shoes and gloves, and a cloth head with a face painted on it and a pipe in its mouth. He sat propped in a chair by the door and was introduced to callers as Monsieur Judas, an honoured guest of the house, because he had not yet betrayed anyone. On the Saturday the men came with machetes and clubs, the women with knives, and hunted him through the neighbourhood.

Beginning on 19 November 1929 Hoover summoned the heads of the banks, railroads, manufacturing industries and utilities to the White House, and for nearly two weeks they came out of daily meetings repeating that the economy was sound. On 5 December he reported the results to four hundred business leaders. The Federal Reserve had eased credit through open market purchases and a lower discount rate and was refusing to discount for banks making stock market call loans. The industrialists had agreed to hold wage rates where they were, on his argument that the first shock should fall on profits. Railway and utility executives had agreed to expand building and maintenance, and he had wired governors and mayors to speed up road and public building work. No president had previously believed that the federal government carried a responsibility in a slump. Hoover believed it and said so.

African mine workers began striking in numbers once they stopped being migrants and started being residents. The 1927 walkout at the Shamva mine in Southern Rhodesia was run by Nyasa men who had lived on the property for years and had worked out how it functioned. On the Northern Rhodesian copper belt the pits sat close together, so news and plans moved between them, and the big stoppages came in 1935 and 1940. The second of those landed while the Royal Air Force was fighting over southern England. The miners knew nothing about that battle and everything about the fact that Britain could not do without copper, and the terms they extracted proved the point. No trade unions existed to call any of it. The organising ran instead through the Watchtower church and through Mbeni dance societies, formed for amusement, which split members into rival teams with uniforms and mock official titles borrowed from the men in the offices. Women danced and organised alongside men. Mbeni members served as go-betweens during the copper belt strikes.

In December 1929 more than fifteen hundred Haitians marched on the southern port of Les Cayes carrying stones and clubs, in protest at what the world depression had done to a country that lived on coffee. Twenty United States marines held the town. They fired into the crowd and killed twelve people. Every element of the scene had been rehearsed in the Caribbean for four centuries: armed white men, unarmed black people, and a complaint about hunger treated as a public order problem. What made this repetition different was the audience. Washington now had to explain the deaths to American newspapers, and President Hoover authorised the Forbes Commission to examine the military occupation. It reached Haiti in February 1930 and recommended that Louis Borno hand power to a provisional government. Fourteen years of petitions, delegations to Congress and Senate testimony had moved the United States nowhere. Twelve bodies on a road outside Les Cayes started the machinery of withdrawal.