Hoover asks employers not to cut wages and they agree

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.

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.

Herskovits found a Dahomean who made charms for a living and who came back to him repeatedly through 1931 with new ones. For each he explained how it had been made, what had gone into it and why, the taboos attached to it, who could use it, under what conditions and to what end. Charms meant to harm were included alongside charms meant to protect. The collection reached just under forty gbo with the details recorded for every one. A gbo could be worn at the waist, neck, wrist or ankle, kept inside a house, set at the edge of a field, buried in ground a man owned, worked into cuts in his skin, or swallowed. Once a specialist had sold a client the method, the right to make that charm belonged to the buyer as much as to the seller. A Dahomean proverb says the charm holds nothing for long, while the powers of the Vodu are eternal.

Adolf Hitler had helped found the National Socialist party by 1920 and led it by 1921. It grew slowly through the decade, claiming over a hundred thousand members and 810,000 votes in the Reichstag elections of 1928. Then came the world economic crisis. German unemployment climbed to three million during 1930 and Nazi party membership doubled. At the polls in September 1930 the Nazi vote leapt to 6.4 million and Hitler commanded the second largest party in the Reichstag with 107 seats. The Weimar Republic had carried the defeat of 1918 and the terms of Versailles from its birth, had watched France occupy the Ruhr in 1923 after a reparations default, and had survived the hyperinflation that followed. It did not survive the depression. The economic collapse that put millions of Americans out of work put Hitler within reach of the German state.