Legal marriage handed a woman's money to her husband

Marriage in Haiti could widen a woman's freedom or narrow it, depending which kind she entered. A legal marriage placed her earnings and property under her husband's economic authority. A common law union, or a long standing plasaj contract, let her reach a partner's land while keeping her own income under her own control. Every arrangement carried compromises, including the loosest ones. The economist Mireille Neptune-Anglade described rural unions involving several partners as social contracts that tended to lock families out of class mobility. The feminist Myriam Merlet warned against romanticising the economic freedom of peasant women, given how much labour was demanded of them. That warning was aimed at outsiders who saw independence where the women themselves counted hours. A woman who could farm from dawn until dark, carry her produce to market and keep the proceeds had something the married bourgeois woman lacked. She also had a working day that would have broken most of the people admiring it.

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.