Piquion credits Price-Mars with a whole generation's self respect

On 18 May 1932 René Piquion published a piece called The Sacred Flame in L'Action Nationale, written as a tribute to Jean Price-Mars. His claim was that Price-Mars had inspired an entire generation of young Haitians to take pride in their African origins. Price-Mars was a physician, diplomat and ethnographer whose book Ainsi parla l'oncle, published in 1928, argued that the peasant culture the Haitian elite dismissed as backwardness was a coherent inheritance from Africa, and that a country ashamed of nine tenths of itself could not think clearly about anything at all. Piquion was one of the young men that book reached. The tribute appeared while the American occupation still held the country, which gives the word generation its weight here. Haitians who came of age under marine rule were the ones who took the argument up, and nearly every intellectual movement in Haiti for the next forty years traced itself back to that one doctor.

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.

From the end of the 1930s colonial administrations in Africa began pushing plantation farming on the North American model, planned in offices and imposed on rural districts. The intervention was heavy handed and it produced resentment in the countryside that lasted for decades. It also broke something political. British rule across much of Africa worked through indirect rule, which governed villages by way of chiefs recognised, paid and sometimes invented by the colonial power. Agricultural planners dealt with land, labour and quotas themselves and went around those chiefs. The authority of men who already carried the stigma of collaboration drained away, since Africans in many walks of life had long treated the whole arrangement as irrelevant to them. Colonial power was dismantling its own local scaffolding while still leaning on it. What remained was a rural population with fresh grievances and a set of traditional authorities with no credit left to spend, which cleared the ground for a generation of nationalist leaders who owed those authorities nothing.

Sténio Vincent visited Washington in the spring of 1934 and was received at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt returned the call on 5 July, coming ashore from the USS Houston at Cap Haïtien in heat near a hundred degrees and walking the wharf on legs that polio had taken most of the use of. The two presidents drove through crowds to the Union Club and agreed a memorandum whose main effect was that the marines would be gone by the middle of August. On 1 August, in front of Vincent, the cabinet and ten thousand people on the Champ de Mars, Colonel Démosthènes Calixte took command of the Garde d'Haïti from Colonel Vogel. On 14 August the American flag came down at brigade headquarters, twenty one guns sounded from Fort National, then twenty one more while the Dessalinienne played and the Haitian flag went up. The Americans left their weapons and equipment behind. Next morning the marines marched to the transports.