A law reserves certain retail trade for Haitians by birth

A Haitian law of 1935, revised several times afterwards, provided that only people who were Haitian by birth could sell certain articles at retail. Germans and Syrians made up the bulk of the foreign merchant population and had handled much of the retail business as well as most of the importing and exporting, and the new rule cut into their volume. The entire foreign population of the country came to perhaps four or five thousand people, most of them in Port-au-Prince. In 1937 three German physicians and a German photographer were living permanently in the capital. Syrians were the most isolated of the foreign groups, sharing almost no social life with Haitians or with other foreigners, and members of the Haitian elite accused them of dishonest dealing. German merchants carried a different charge, that they had financed nineteenth century revolutions by lending money to ambitious military leaders at ruinous rates of interest.

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.

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.

Vincent's chief business in 1935 was staying in office past May 1936. He told Trujillo the plan: dissolve the legislature, rewrite the constitution, put it to a plebiscite, then elect a legislature of reliable men. The trial run was the Banque. City Bank was willing to sell its Haitian operation for a million dollars and the Senate refused to pass the purchase. Vincent held a plebiscite in February 1935, carried it 454,357 to 1,172, and moved exclusive control of economic policy into the palace. He closed the sale, then removed eleven senators including Price-Mars, Pradel and Pierre Hudicourt, explaining that opposing him placed them in rebellion against the popular will. On 2 June 1935 a new constitution passed the same way. It let the president dissolve the legislature and rule by decree, ended the separation of powers, made the executive the sole authority of the state, and by a single article gave Sténio Vincent a second term from 15 May 1936. The British minister called the referendum more of a farce than most.