The anniversary of the battle is worth half a day off work

Le Glaunec measures the standing of the battle in official memory by what the state was willing to spend on it. In 1929, under the presidency of Louis Borno during the American occupation, the anniversary of 18 November was marked with a half day off rather than a full public holiday. He also notes that the enthusiasm generated in that period faded once Borno left office, in contrast with the wave of commemoration that followed the celebrations of 1954, which did not subside. The comparison sets up his account of what changed under the Duvalier state, when the same date was upgraded to a full day of national commemoration by constitutional provision. The calendar, in his treatment, is a record of political investment, and the length of the holiday tracks how badly a given government needed the ancestors of the war of independence on its side.

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.

Legba is the youngest son of the Dahomean sky gods, the messenger who carries decisions from Mawu to the powers that execute them, and the one who can refuse to deliver a message or bend it in favour of a man who has fed him well. Every household, every village, every cult house and every individual keeps a Legba shrine, always near the entrance and always outside. A small mound of earth goes up as soon as a child is born and is enlarged when the child reaches adolescence. Missionary writing described Legba as the counterpart of the Christian Devil and explained his position outside the walls by the harm he does. Herskovits reported in 1931 that Dahomeans did not fear him and probably loved him more than any of the other great gods. Where he did hear the identification with the Devil from a Dahomean, the speaker had learned it in contact with missionaries.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.