Dorsainvil calls possession a psycho neurosis and then changes ground

Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil published a study of vodou in the journal Haiti Medicale in 1912 and 1913, the first attempt to treat the possession crisis as a clinical question rather than a moral one. He defined it as a religious and racial psycho neurosis marked by a doubling of the self, with functional alteration of sensibility and of movement, and a predominance of symptoms curable by persuasion. In 1924 he brought out at Port au Prince a philological explanation of vodou which took a different road. There he showed that vodoun is a Dahomean word meaning spirit, that the whole religion of the Fon flows from the cult of the vodoun, and that this cult stands as high as the most spiritualist. He asked at the end whether it was too much to say that such a people had arrived at a clear and precise monotheist conception. The two positions sit badly together, and the twelve years between them measure how fast the ground was moving.

Back from Haiti, Addie Hunton reported that important people were paying attention and that her quiet propaganda on Haiti's behalf might come to something. Quiet is the wrong word for what she then did. Inside the same year she spoke about Haiti to the California state convention of the National Association of Colored Women, to the National Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, to the NAACP convention in Chicago, and to the National Association of Colored Women again at Oakland. The following year she carried the subject to the Pan-African Conference in New York. Malbranche-Sylvain and Hudicourt were working the same circuit from the other end, through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, so that what happened to a woman in Port-au-Prince could be described in a hall in California within months. The speed of the reporting did nothing to slow the occupation. While Hunton toured, Haitian girls went on being harmed by the men garrisoned in their towns, and the list of their names went on getting longer.

At three in the morning on 7 August 1912 an explosion shook Port-au-Prince and a column of fire went up from the National Palace. The Italian powder Antoine Simon had left in the basement finally caught, and with it a million rounds of ammunition and other explosives stored there by a run of presidents who preferred their munitions underfoot to out of reach. The floor of President Cincinnatus Leconte's bedroom dropped into the fire. His daughter and son-in-law got out of a window before the building came down. The dead included his grandson and three hundred men of the presidential guard. Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, who had no affection for Haitian politicians, wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that Leconte's had probably been the best administration Haiti had seen in many years, and that the bank once reckoned ninety percent of customs duties were actually reaching the treasury. Leconte had told him officeholders were threatening his life over exactly that.

Under its charter the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti owed the government its revenues only at the close of the fiscal year, while the government needed cash every month. Cincinnatus Leconte asked for a supplementary convention to keep the old arrangement running. The bank refused, hinting that a monthly allowance might follow some form of control over the customs. Its New York group, run by Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, assured the State Department that no such thought had crossed anyone's mind. A convention was patched together anyway, and honest collection under Leconte and Tancrède Auguste left the government square with the bank and more than eight hundred thousand dollars in hand when the 1913 fiscal year closed. The bank opened a second front instead. It held ten million francs in gold meant to retire the debased paper gourdes, was lending that gold at twelve and a half percent, and would not give it up. When the assembly closed the loopholes, the bank called in loans and stopped making new ones.