Four weeks of lectures on feminism at the Union Club, entry 2.50 gourdes

In June 1934 the League put itself in front of the public. Its leaders treated the hostility they met as a problem of visibility, answerable by showing up and by publishing research. From 13 June to 14 July they ran their first large event, a four week lecture series on Haitian feminism at the Union Club in Port-au-Prince. The sessions were meant to raise social and cultural awareness and to get people arguing about current affairs, and the organisers wanted the country's philosophical quarrels dragged into action. The gatherings were advertised as democratic space where anyone could set out a vision of representative government and show competence as a citizen. Admission cost 2.50 gourdes. The month covered feminism and women's education, Haitian women in history, the modern organisation of education, and feminism in France. The speakers carried it: Jean Price-Mars, who built indigénisme; Dantès Bellegarde, diplomat and minister of public instruction; and Maurice Dartigue, director of rural education. Price-Mars was known for accusing the elite of collective Bovaryism, of dreaming themselves into France.

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.

The occupation had begun in 1915, ostensibly to collect loans and restore civil order after five presidents in four years were assassinated or driven out, and had revealed its imperial character through control of the customs houses, institutional racism and the revival of the corvee. The caco guerrilla movement under Charlemagne Peralte was crushed in 1919 and its leaders executed. At Cap Haitien the American flag was lowered and the blue and red Haitian flag hoisted. Eleven months after his New Year message Vincent validated his nationalist credentials by holding a state funeral in the same city for Peralte. The book treats both ceremonies as political theatre that could not conceal the splits inside the nationalist movement, and dates the beginning of the postoccupation conflict to this moment. Nineteen thirty-four therefore closes one struggle and opens another that runs to 1957.

Sténio Vincent named Tuesday 21 August 1934 the day of the second independence. Nobody waited for it. The balls started on the 18th at the Cercle Bellevue, carried on the next night at the Port-au-Princien, and the country went into days of bamboche. At midnight on the 20th a gun sounded from Fort National and the cheering ran from Bel Air to Morne l'Hôpital. In the morning monsignors Conan and Le Gouaze sang a Te Deum where the clergy stood white and the altar boys Black. Then the president drove through the city scattering freshly printed gourde notes into the crowd, laid wreaths at the statues of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines, and ran up the colours himself at the barracks. At the review that followed, a new Garde Présidentielle appeared under Major Durcé Armand, a relative of the president. Colonel Calixte led the officers in an oath of personal loyalty to Vincent. The oath the Americans wrote had bound them to the constitution.