Market women handled money better than the women with degrees

Marie-José N'Zengou-Tayo, a scholar of the francophone Caribbean, compared the financial competence of Haitian women across the classes and found the advantage at the bottom. Market women, farmers, day labourers and domestic workers handled money, credit and risk with more independence and more entrepreneurial skill than urban middle class women who worked for salaries. The pattern is documented in Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's account of a woman she called Adelsia, whose life shows the competence and its limit together. Adelsia's story also records that wealthier women had far more access to social mobility than any peasant or working class woman could reach. Daily practice with money did not convert into climbing. A woman could run credit, stock and pricing in her head for thirty years and finish where she started, while a woman who had never bargained for anything rose because of the family she was born into. Skill was distributed one way in Haiti and opportunity another.

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.