A legislature meets for the first time since 1918 and picks Vincent

On 18 November 1930 the National Assembly of Haiti chose Stenio Vincent as president. The vote mattered as much as the man. The American occupation had disbanded the legislature in 1918 and governed through a compliant executive for twelve years, so this was the first Haitian head of state selected by a working parliament since then. Vincent was born in Port au Prince on 22 February 1874 into a light skinned family of Spanish descent, trained as a lawyer, and was president of the Chamber of Deputies when American troops landed in 1915. He took office with one stated priority, which was to get the occupation ended. His method was to stay close to Washington. He cultivated Franklin Roosevelt, backed American policy across Latin America, and put his faith in the Good Neighbor Policy and its promise that the United States would stop intervening in the internal affairs of its neighbours. Haiti had been handed that kind of promise before, and it had always carried conditions and an expiry date.

The Fordney McCumber Act of 1922 had already set American import duties at prohibitive levels, and both parties promised more in 1928. Hoover wanted higher duties on farm imports and a tariff commission with power to adjust rates by half, which he thought would take the tariff out of congressional bargaining. What Congress produced was the Hawley Smoot Tariff of 1930, raising duties to the highest levels in American history. One thousand economists signed a petition asking for a veto. Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan said he had almost gone down on his knees to beg the president to reject it, and that the act sharpened nationalism everywhere. Hoover signed it in June 1930. Walter Lippmann wrote that the president had surrendered everything and got nothing. For countries that lived by selling coffee, sugar and other commodities into the American market, the door had just narrowed.

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.

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.