Two anthropologists spend nine months in Dahomey

From January to September 1931 Melville Herskovits and Frances Herskovits travelled in Dahomey, Nigeria and the Gold Coast, working mainly in Dahomey, the kingdom on the Bight of Benin whose people the colonists of Saint Domingue had called Arada. An initial grant from Elsie Clews Parsons paid for the trip and Columbia and Northwestern universities carried it afterwards. Their chief interpreter was Prince Rene Aho Glele, a member of the family that had ruled the kingdom, and the French Residents of the districts of Abomey and Allada opened doors for them. The journey matters on a Haitian timeline because the deities, the ceremonies and most of the African vocabulary of Haitian Vodou come out of this region, and because Herskovits built the study of African survivals in the Americas from material gathered here. He arrived already carrying a knowledge of the Maroon communities of Surinam.

In December 1929 more than fifteen hundred Haitians marched on the southern port of Les Cayes carrying stones and clubs, in protest at what the world depression had done to a country that lived on coffee. Twenty United States marines held the town. They fired into the crowd and killed twelve people. Every element of the scene had been rehearsed in the Caribbean for four centuries: armed white men, unarmed black people, and a complaint about hunger treated as a public order problem. What made this repetition different was the audience. Washington now had to explain the deaths to American newspapers, and President Hoover authorised the Forbes Commission to examine the military occupation. It reached Haiti in February 1930 and recommended that Louis Borno hand power to a provisional government. Fourteen years of petitions, delegations to Congress and Senate testimony had moved the United States nowhere. Twelve bodies on a road outside Les Cayes started the machinery of withdrawal.

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.

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.