Le Nouvelliste announces the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale

Sanders Johnson anchors the League's public arrival to a notice in Le Nouvelliste on 12 June 1934, in the same weeks that the urban papers were carrying arguments over indigénisme against liberalism. She reads the League into that debate rather than outside it, showing Price-Mars's criticism of elite men and women's material consumption and mutual vanity working on the founders, and Dantès Bellegarde's insistence that Haiti's cultural debt was to France rather than Africa pulling the other way. The League had no formal headquarters until the 1940s and met in members' homes, frequently Alice Garoute's. Sanders Johnson's larger point is that Haitian feminism was assembled inside an argument about what the nation was, which is why its members produced folklore studies, Creole dictionaries and rural fieldwork alongside petitions.

When the final contingent left Haitian soil, the association's twenty-fifth annual report recalled its own part in moving American opinion against the occupation and described itself as the leading organisation in the United States campaigning both for evacuation and for an end to American banking control of Haitian finances. Pamphile is careful about the balance sheet. The concentrated NAACP effort of the early 1920s did not end the occupation; the Harding administration instead rationalised and strengthened it, even while Harding withdrew marines from Camaguey in Cuba in 1922. What the association sustained afterwards was pressure: mass meetings, distribution of information across the United States, and appeals by staff to Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt and to individual senators. Pamphile closes by calling this work for human dignity in the first Black republic a little known part of the organisation's history.

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.

Heinl asks what the Americans left when they went, and answers that the visible changes were real and the political ones were absent. Haiti in 1915 had been cut off from the world for a century. Haiti in 1934 had roads, hospitals, a functioning treasury and a modern army. Underneath that, the occupation had built no way for Haitians to govern themselves except the old ways. High Commissioner John Russell wrote to Forbes in 1930 that material rehabilitation had advanced enormously and that the Haitian people were little better fitted for self government than they had been in 1915. In March 1934 the British minister wrote that Vincent, inaugurated for his love of liberty, had become an admirer of dictatorship and thought Haiti unsuited to parliamentary government. Élie Lescot, then Haitian minister in Ciudad Trujillo, ordered five gross of military buttons in July 1934 while planning to fly in and seize the presidency with Trujillo's backing. Doctors in the newly Haitian health service were already selling government medicine privately.