Diaquoi founds the Griots and tells Haitians to stop imitating whites

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.

Herbert Hoover called Congress into special session on 15 April 1929 to deal with the agricultural depression that had run for a decade. He refused any revival of the McNary Haugen plan for dumping surpluses abroad, which Coolidge had twice vetoed, and demanded an institution with real authority and money instead. Congress obliged in sixty days. On 15 June he signed the Agricultural Marketing Act, creating a Federal Farm Board with capital of five hundred million dollars to build cooperatives among growers of cotton, wool and other commodities, backed by stabilization corporations that would buy surpluses the cooperatives could not absorb. Hoover told the board on 15 July that no industry had ever been given such resources by the American government. Prices then fell faster than the board could buy. It went out of existence in 1933 having lost some 371 million dollars trying to hold them up.

Haitian men avoided the main roads to escape the labour draft. Women could not, because they were the market sellers, the caregivers, the landowners, the shopkeepers and the domestic servants whose work required travel. American records and Marine photograph albums are full of pictures captioned as the typical country woman on a burro. Some men used that familiarity for cover. The Caco general Theophil toured the north recruiting while dressed as a market woman, travelling with a burro. General Petit Severe, wanted by the authorities in Cap-Haïtien, came and went from the town as he pleased in the same disguise, moving seven burro loads of rifles across the Dominican border. The performance made attacks on American officers possible. Visibility cut the other way as well, and girls and women travelled in groups for safety. Madame Benoît, wife of the Caco leader, went regularly to Mirebalais, Lascahobas and Port-au-Prince for supplies in the company of other market women, riding a bay mule and carrying a revolver under her dress.

The treaty signed at Port-au-Prince on 3 September 1932 would have replaced the Garde and financial articles of the 1915 treaty with two protocols on 31 December 1934: Protocol A completing Haitianization of the Garde and withdrawing the marines and scientific mission at that date or earlier, Protocol B substituting a fiscal representative for the financial adviser and general receiver, fully Haitianizing internal revenue and depositing government funds in the National Bank. Munro resigned as minister immediately after signing and expected ratification, since all the deputies had been elected as administration supporters in January 1932 and there was little public criticism of the terms. Vincent, however, made no effort to line up support, and when the text reached Congress some leaders decided to humiliate him by opposing it with a show of patriotic indignation. Nobody dared appear unpatriotic, and the joint session rejected it unanimously.