Roumain and Beaulieu go to New York for party funds

Roumain had detached himself from the nationalist movement by 1931 and had been arguing in print, under a pseudonym, that class rather than colour was the central problem of Haitian politics. He wrote to Tristan Remy that he had completely revised his political conceptions, called himself a communist, said he was not militant because the cadres for a political struggle did not yet exist in Haiti, and renounced his origins as the son of large landowners. He and Christian Beaulieu, both in their twenties, travelled to New York seeking financial help from the Communist Party of the United States. Support was promised on condition that an underground party be formed. They returned and began meeting students and organising clandestinely in La Saline and Bel-Air, with a following that the surviving evidence suggests was small and drawn mainly from privileged students.

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.

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.

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.