Pan American Day becomes a holiday and a women's movement stage

After Pan American Day was established as a Haitian national holiday, each April young girls donned the flags of the twenty-one countries of the Pan-American Union, walked to each national anthem and recited facts about the countries. Sanders Johnson shows the League converting this state pageantry into a site of transnational citizenship curation, staging model rural homes and folkloric dance so that national and regional audiences would witness what it presented as the real conditions of Haitian women. She is direct about the cost. By adopting the scripted forms of international political pageantry the organisers risked erasing the lives of the very women whose homes, food and dances were on display, since the artefacts stood in for people who were themselves absent. She traces the display convention back to the Haitian Pavilion at the 1937 Universal Exposition in Paris. Where this account departs from the standard one: The book dates the political alliance between president Alexandre Pétion and Simón Bolívar to 1806 and attributes the planning of the first Pan-American Conferences to James Monroe and James E. Blaine in 1823, both of which sit oddly against the usual chronology in which Pétion took office in 1807, hosted Bolívar in 1815 and 1816, and Blaine was not born until 1830.

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.

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.

In 1932 Louis Diaquoi announced the formation of a group he called the Griots, after the West African keepers of oral history. Its purpose was to rehabilitate African values in Haitian national life and to work out what the group called the country's collective personality. Its most quoted instruction to Haitians was to stop trying to be ridiculous little whites and to accept the inheritance they actually had. Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier were among its members. The setting matters. The American occupation was in its seventeenth year and had governed Haiti on the premise that its people required supervision, and the Haitian elite had spent a century presenting itself to Europe as French in everything except address. The Griots answered both at once. Diaquoi made the argument as a cultural one. Within a generation Duvalier had converted it into a claim about who was entitled to hold power in Haiti, and he held that power for fourteen years.