The Nation names it a massacre and Hoover asks for a commission

The Nation gave the killings at Cayes the name that stuck, and self-defence stopped being an available explanation. On 7 December, with the strike already breaking under the marine brigade and the cruiser Galveston up from Guantanamo showing the flag, President Hoover asked Congress to set up a body that would work out when the United States could leave Haiti and how it should behave until then. He had wanted out since his inauguration in March. Within ten days the curfew ended, the papers reappeared, the Damien quarrel was settled and Dr Freeman was finished. On 7 February 1930 Hoover named five men under W. Cameron Forbes, a Boston lawyer who had governed the Philippines and who noted privately that his instructions had been made very clear to him. The commission landed at Port-au-Prince on 28 February to a nineteen-gun salute and to banners from the Union Patriotique demanding the occupation end. General Russell's reception the next day was boycotted. Roumain published his refusal, saying the negro Jacques Roumain did not condescend to mix with whites.

Hoover's social scientists reported that infant mortality among black Americans in 1930 was nearly double the white rate, ten per cent against six, and that black life expectancy was fifteen years shorter, forty five years against sixty. Fewer than five per cent of eligible African Americans in the eleven states of the former Confederacy were registered to vote as late as 1940. Separate waiting rooms, separate drinking fountains, separate churches and deliberately inferior schools were the ordinary furniture of life, and the few industrial jobs in the South were closed to black workers. C. Vann Woodward called the arrangement an anthropological museum of southern folkways and dated its perfection to the 1930s. The historian Ulrich Phillips wrote in 1928 that white southerners shared one settled resolve, that the region should remain a white man's country. This is the United States that occupied Haiti until 1934.

Dahomean society was organised into patrilineal sibs, each with a founder who was often an animal, a set of food taboos built around that founder, and a head who ruled through his access to the group's dead. Herskovits collected the names and origin stories of thirty seven of them in 1931 and thought the list incomplete. He wrote that no other part of Dahomean life met such resistance, including his questions about human sacrifice at the royal court. The information came only near the end of the stay, once his Dahomean friends had decided they could trust him, and it came at all because he could name deities his informants recognised from earlier fieldwork among the descendants of runaways in Dutch Guiana. The royal sib was called children of the panther, people of Allada, and its members were forbidden the meat of any spotted animal.

Ainsi parla l'Oncle, essais d'ethnologie, was printed at Compiegne in France in 1928, four preliminary pages and 243 pages of text. Its preface is dated Petionville, 15 December 1927, and states the aim: to raise the value of Haitian folklore in the eyes of the Haitian people. Haiti had then been occupied by the United States for thirteen years, and educated Haitians had spent a century trying to be coloured Frenchmen, in a country where the word African was the most humiliating thing one could say to a compatriot. The book took the beliefs, songs, tales, dances and ceremonies of the peasantry, traced them to Dahomey and the Kongo, and handled them with the apparatus of ethnography. It gave a generation of Haitian writers a defensible reason to look at their own country. A second edition appeared in New York in 1951, a Spanish translation in Havana in 1968, a third edition in Montreal in 1973, and an English translation in Washington in 1984.