Gourde notes fly from the president's car on the second independence

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.

Just after 1900, West Indian immigrants made up about one percent of the Black population of the United States, and most of them lived in New York City. By 1930 there were 72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and more than half were in New York. The flow then stopped almost completely. A federal immigration law passed in 1924 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 cut Caribbean arrivals through the 1940s and 1950s. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed the quotas that had done the blocking, and the numbers recovered fast enough that by 1980 more than 50,000 West Indians of various origins were entering the United States each year. They came mainly from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti and Martinique. The concentration of that migration in one city is why Black politics in New York has never been a single constituency, and why coalitions there have to be built rather than assumed.

In 1934 a young Haitian doctor writing under the name Abderrahman published a page of complaint and defiance. He described what it was to come from the class of youth the elite dismissed as misbegotten, rejected with mistrust and contempt for having emerged out of the lower depths of the real Haiti, pushed back among the homeless and the hungry, worn down daily by poverty and by the arrogance of people newly arrived at money. The writer was François Duvalier. Heinl treats the passage as the key to everything that came after, and it is hard to argue with him. Twenty three years separate it from Duvalier's presidency. The doctrine that grew out of it holds that the light skinned elite had forfeited the right to govern by existing, its offence being its presence ahead of any particular act of misrule. Private humiliation had been converted into political theology. A reader in 1934 would have called it the cry of an angry young man.

Mustafa Kemal allowed a second party, the Liberal party of Fethi Okyar, to be founded in 1930. It drew unexpected popular support and was dissolved in November of the same year, largely because the Republican party hierarchy convinced Kemal that religious reaction was coming. Travelling for three months afterwards, Kemal found that the discontent in the countryside came from economic stagnation and from party members taking the profitable positions for themselves. The failure of that experiment coincided with the world economic crisis of 1929, which struck Turkey through its agricultural exports, and with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe. A reform movement that had been aimed since 1839 against autocracy, and that had treated the western parliamentary order as its goal, turned instead to strong measures and quick results. The opposition went back to the countryside to wait, and waited until 1946.