A wage law for wives reaches one Haitian woman in four

About a quarter of Haitian women were in marriages recognised by the state or the church. The rest lived under other arrangements, which meant the campaign to let a married woman control her own wages addressed a minority from the start. The justice committee of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale identified who stood to gain. It was the woman who earned her own living, sometimes kept children on that income, could not afford a divorce, and could not spend her salary as she chose because her husband held legal guardianship over it. Set out that way, the law was a real instrument of freedom for the women it covered. Its reach followed the shape of the class that drafted it. Haitian women's economic and political room to move ran through their work and their family networks, and the professional and educated women of the towns were the ones asking where the money a woman earned actually went. The other three quarters were living under rules the state had never written.

Herbert Hoover called Congress into special session on 15 April 1929 to deal with the agricultural depression that had run for a decade. He refused any revival of the McNary Haugen plan for dumping surpluses abroad, which Coolidge had twice vetoed, and demanded an institution with real authority and money instead. Congress obliged in sixty days. On 15 June he signed the Agricultural Marketing Act, creating a Federal Farm Board with capital of five hundred million dollars to build cooperatives among growers of cotton, wool and other commodities, backed by stabilization corporations that would buy surpluses the cooperatives could not absorb. Hoover told the board on 15 July that no industry had ever been given such resources by the American government. Prices then fell faster than the board could buy. It went out of existence in 1933 having lost some 371 million dollars trying to hold them up.

Munro records the promotion as a demonstration staged to keep negotiations moving. The Vincent administration felt it had a mandate to insist on the earliest possible restoration of independence, though the president and his foreign minister Pauleus Sannon said they wanted the incoming Haitian administrators properly trained, which was what Washington also claimed to want. Progress in the Garde had been slow because few literate upper-class men wanted a police career; at the time of the Forbes Commission's visit only thirty-five to forty percent of officers were Haitian and none ranked above captain, though the commission approved a plan to replace all American officers by 1936. Early in December 1930 the Haitians were pleased when one of the five military departments was placed under Major Demosthenes Calixte, who had enlisted as a private in 1915.

Munro describes the compromise that averted bloodshed and the pressure that secured it. Both General Russell and the commission concluded there might be violence if the demand for a popular election were refused, so Russell worked out a plan with Borno and the commission persuaded the opposition leaders to accept it. Eugene Roy, a businessman who had not been active in politics, would be elected by the Council of State to succeed Borno on the understanding that he would resign once a Congress had been chosen by popular vote, after which that Congress would name a new president. Roy was duly elected in April 1930, but Munro records the decisive detail: only after the American government had made clear that it would install him in the presidency itself if the Council of State rejected him.