Haitianization agreement signed and martial law suspended the same day

The Haitianization agreement was signed on 5 August 1931. It provided that the Haitian government take over administration and control of the public works and health services and the Service Technique on 1 October, while an American scientific mission would handle sanitation and water chlorination in Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien as long as American troops were stationed there. The 1918 agreement requiring legislation to be submitted to the legation before enactment was abrogated, as was the requirement for the financial adviser's visa on payment orders, though Haiti recognised a continuing obligation to obtain his approval for expenditure and revenue measures. Munro notes that during the negotiation the Haitian government pressed for a protocol of evacuation and the end of martial law, which had been in force since the first days of the intervention. Washington refused a withdrawal date but agreed that martial law be suspended on the signing day.

Adolf Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated president of the United States thirty three days later, on 4 March. By 1932 some thirteen million Americans were out of work, one in four of those able and willing, and because most married women were kept out of paid work by custom, every fourth household had no earner at all. Roosevelt had been elected on a platform promising a new deal for the American people. He held office for twelve years and was elected four times, a record the Twenty Second Amendment made impossible for anyone after him. Kennedy's argument is that the two terms cannot be read apart. The Hundred Days, the reforms of 1934 and 1935, the fight over the Supreme Court in 1937 and the long argument about isolation all played out against the German dictatorship.

Legba is the youngest son of the Dahomean sky gods, the messenger who carries decisions from Mawu to the powers that execute them, and the one who can refuse to deliver a message or bend it in favour of a man who has fed him well. Every household, every village, every cult house and every individual keeps a Legba shrine, always near the entrance and always outside. A small mound of earth goes up as soon as a child is born and is enlarged when the child reaches adolescence. Missionary writing described Legba as the counterpart of the Christian Devil and explained his position outside the walls by the harm he does. Herskovits reported in 1931 that Dahomeans did not fear him and probably loved him more than any of the other great gods. Where he did hear the identification with the Devil from a Dahomean, the speaker had learned it in contact with missionaries.

In 1936 the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo was renamed Ciudad Trujillo after Rafael Trujillo, who had taken power in 1930 and would hold it until 1961. Trujillo and his supporters used the word dominicanizacion for their effort to mark the line between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, meaning to make a black Haiti and a white Dominican Republic visibly distinct. Along the frontier itself this took a practical form. His government granted peasants large tracts of land to farm and charged them with administrative duties on behalf of the state, in order to fix their loyalty and their Dominican identity in a region where daily life ran on community relationships and crossed the border constantly. The same programme had a second instrument called blanqueamiento, whitening, pursued by encouraging European immigration during the Second World War. In October 1937 Trujillo ordered the killing of dark skinned people living in the border zone, and estimates of the dead reach thirty thousand.