Haitian weddings followed the coffee harvest and the corn

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain recorded that everyone eats well at a Haitian wedding, and that the rites around it included a water ceremony in which the parents asked the lwa, the spirits of Vodou, to protect the couple. Practices of that kind crossed the lines observers liked to draw. People who served the lwa and people who did not both used them, and they were found in the towns as well as the countryside. Comhaire-Sylvain also settled a question her informants raised. Women in Port au Prince spoke of a wave of marriages at the end of 1943 and the start of 1944 as though it were a contagion. It was the calendar. Across the twentieth century marriage rates in Haiti rose with the first coffee harvest in November and stayed high through February, and rose again during the corn harvest between August and October. Weddings happened when there was money and food, which is to say when the land had just paid out.

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.

The Service Technique de l'Agriculture et de l'Enseignement Professionnel was organised in April 1923 and became the most far reaching American programme in Haiti. Its declared functions were agricultural training, research, farm schools, advice to adult farmers, animal clinics, field experiments and vocational instruction. Russell's larger aim was to raise from the peasantry a class of Black smallholders with schooling, capital and access to markets. The record is real. Experimental stations, a cattle breeding station at Hinche, the agricultural school at Damien that one historian called a miniature Tuskegee, demonstration farms, Plantation Dauphin at Fort Liberte with the largest sisal acreage in the world, tobacco brought back as a money crop, national soil surveys, and veterinary clinics that treated more than a hundred thousand animals. The hostility it drew ran far beyond agronomy. Since 1804 the oligarchy's position had rested on the peasantry having no schooling, no capital and no market. A programme that undid any one of those undid the oligarchy, and its members understood this faster than the Americans did.

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.