Family names were harder to ask about than human sacrifice

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.

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.

The Fordney McCumber Act of 1922 had already set American import duties at prohibitive levels, and both parties promised more in 1928. Hoover wanted higher duties on farm imports and a tariff commission with power to adjust rates by half, which he thought would take the tariff out of congressional bargaining. What Congress produced was the Hawley Smoot Tariff of 1930, raising duties to the highest levels in American history. One thousand economists signed a petition asking for a veto. Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan said he had almost gone down on his knees to beg the president to reject it, and that the act sharpened nationalism everywhere. Hoover signed it in June 1930. Walter Lippmann wrote that the president had surrendered everything and got nothing. For countries that lived by selling coffee, sugar and other commodities into the American market, the door had just narrowed.

Neither side could work out a dignified ending. The commission was barely over the horizon when the opposition, having won everything it asked for, called a meeting at the Theatre Parisiana on 20 March to elect Eugene Roy itself and make the agreed vote by the Conseil d'Etat meaningless. Borno replied by putting it about that the arrangement was unconstitutional. With a month of the term left, Russell told his old collaborator that the United States would simply seat Roy on 1 May if it came to that. Ten members of the Conseil were replaced, and on 21 April the remainder elected Roy. The weeks that followed brought arson and handbills, including mourning cards announcing the death of the beast, struck down by Hoover's plan. On 15 May 1930 power changed hands constitutionally for the third time in 126 years. Roy swore his oath at the Autel de la Patrie, went through cheering streets to a Te Deum grander than the very Catholic Borno had ever been given, and Borno was booed at the palace gates.