Haiti's Congress rejects the new treaty to humiliate Vincent

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.

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

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.

American military officers told investigators that the corvée existed in order to build roads and that the roads had not been laid out for military purposes, while conceding that they carried great military value. The reports those same officers filed as the work went on discuss the whereabouts of insurgents, the mood of each community, and where sympathisers with the occupation might be recruited. Road building and surveillance were one operation. Every cleared path and rebuilt bridge extended the reach of the occupation into districts that had governed their own movement until then, and the people most exposed were the women who used those roads every day. Grace Sanders Johnson reads the official denial as part of the method. The occupation described its engineering as commerce and improvement while its paperwork recorded who lived where, who was armed and who could be turned. The roads carried goods. They also carried soldiers, informants and files.