The commission hears the case against the occupation and little else

Forbes and his colleagues took testimony for twelve days with their instructions already settled. Complaints against the occupation went before the full commission; replies were heard by one commissioner or by staff. No treaty official could testify at all in the first week, nobody was ever allowed to cross-examine a witness, and nine tenths of the available time went to the occupation's opponents, whose case Georges Leger had organised down to identical banners in every town. Russell meanwhile proposed the exit: push Borno out, have the Conseil d'Etat elect a neutral caretaker, hold legislative elections, then let the assembly choose. Forbes agreed and required that the idea appear to be the commission's own. Told to name a neutral man, Hudicourt asked where anyone was to find such a white blackbird. Each side listed five names, and Borno, who never wrote a list, stopped at Eugene Roy. Forbes reported that the Americans had tried to plant democracy by drill and harrow and had failed to grasp the country. Russell's rebuttal was suppressed as politically awkward.

Hoover's social scientists reported that infant mortality among black Americans in 1930 was nearly double the white rate, ten per cent against six, and that black life expectancy was fifteen years shorter, forty five years against sixty. Fewer than five per cent of eligible African Americans in the eleven states of the former Confederacy were registered to vote as late as 1940. Separate waiting rooms, separate drinking fountains, separate churches and deliberately inferior schools were the ordinary furniture of life, and the few industrial jobs in the South were closed to black workers. C. Vann Woodward called the arrangement an anthropological museum of southern folkways and dated its perfection to the 1930s. The historian Ulrich Phillips wrote in 1928 that white southerners shared one settled resolve, that the region should remain a white man's country. This is the United States that occupied Haiti until 1934.

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.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.