Twelve dead at Les Cayes end what protest could not

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.

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.

From January to September 1931 Melville Herskovits and Frances Herskovits travelled in Dahomey, Nigeria and the Gold Coast, working mainly in Dahomey, the kingdom on the Bight of Benin whose people the colonists of Saint Domingue had called Arada. An initial grant from Elsie Clews Parsons paid for the trip and Columbia and Northwestern universities carried it afterwards. Their chief interpreter was Prince Rene Aho Glele, a member of the family that had ruled the kingdom, and the French Residents of the districts of Abomey and Allada opened doors for them. The journey matters on a Haitian timeline because the deities, the ceremonies and most of the African vocabulary of Haitian Vodou come out of this region, and because Herskovits built the study of African survivals in the Americas from material gathered here. He arrived already carrying a knowledge of the Maroon communities of Surinam.

The Ottoman empire left its successor states a debt owed mostly to French financiers. The new Turkish Republic negotiated its own share down by half. Syria and Lebanon, held under French mandate, went on paying theirs in full, and 164 million francs left the common revenue fund between 1929 and 1934. The same fund carried the Armee du Levant, estimated at 40,000 men in 1926, together with irregular units, the gendarmerie and a large body of imported experts and administrators. Taxes raised locally were held above what the civilian side of government was allowed to spend, and the difference paid for soldiers and creditors. That transfer was 16 percent of civilian revenue in 1928. By the mid 1930s it had reached 30 to 40 percent, and in 1937 it approached 70 percent. Customs rates in the mandate stood near 30 percent of import value while Egypt, Palestine and Iraq charged 15 to 20.