A Marine sells ten million copies of a book about the Haiti he invented

Lieutenant Faustin Wirkus, a Marine serving in the occupation, published The White King of La Gonave in 1931. It sold ten million copies in the United States, then in Europe, and as far as Japan. In it he gave an account of the damage he had inflicted in order to save Haitians from cannibalism and black magic, and he set down the operating assumption that the cacos, the armed opponents of the occupation, were practitioners of the religion. Wirkus quoted his own orders, which required a report leading to criminal action against every priest and every diviner, described in the wording of the instruction as voodoo artists. Other books followed with titles like Cannibal Cousins, and between them they established Haiti in the English-speaking imagination as the country of the living dead. A military occupation had produced a literary genre, and the genre outlasted the occupation by decades.

Beginning on 19 November 1929 Hoover summoned the heads of the banks, railroads, manufacturing industries and utilities to the White House, and for nearly two weeks they came out of daily meetings repeating that the economy was sound. On 5 December he reported the results to four hundred business leaders. The Federal Reserve had eased credit through open market purchases and a lower discount rate and was refusing to discount for banks making stock market call loans. The industrialists had agreed to hold wage rates where they were, on his argument that the first shock should fall on profits. Railway and utility executives had agreed to expand building and maintenance, and he had wired governors and mayors to speed up road and public building work. No president had previously believed that the federal government carried a responsibility in a slump. Hoover believed it and said so.

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.

When the final contingent left Haitian soil, the association's twenty-fifth annual report recalled its own part in moving American opinion against the occupation and described itself as the leading organisation in the United States campaigning both for evacuation and for an end to American banking control of Haitian finances. Pamphile is careful about the balance sheet. The concentrated NAACP effort of the early 1920s did not end the occupation; the Harding administration instead rationalised and strengthened it, even while Harding withdrew marines from Camaguey in Cuba in 1922. What the association sustained afterwards was pressure: mass meetings, distribution of information across the United States, and appeals by staff to Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt and to individual senators. Pamphile closes by calling this work for human dignity in the first Black republic a little known part of the organisation's history.