The 1946 assembly was only the third Haiti held with no foreigners in the room

The constitutional assembly of 1946 was the third Haitian assembly to sit free of foreign intervention since the American occupation ended. Between 1915 and 1934 the United States had dissolved the national assembly, taken over the banking system, and rewritten the constitution of 1805, the revolutionary text that abolished slavery and declared Haitians Black and independent of France. When the Marines left, new political parties appeared, along with new organisations, new cultural and intellectual institutions, and a boom in literature and journalism. The historian Matthew Smith calls the twenty years after the occupation the moment of greatest political promise in Haitian history. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale grew out of that opening. Trained teachers and women of means came together in 1935 to build a movement for social improvement and to speak for Haitian women of every class. They spent a decade petitioning the government for the right to buy property, keep their own professional wages and vote in local and national elections, and they expected the energy of the 1946 revolution to reach them as well.

Captain Beach went ashore with orders from Caperton to lodge in the legation, give whatever orders he judged necessary, haul down no Haitian flag under any circumstances, find where the government money was kept and protect it, and locate every weapon in the city. He met the Comite Revolutionnaire each morning and noticed that it answered some questions and slid past others, particularly about funds and about the soldiers. On 4 August 1915, while Beach kept the Comite talking through a long meeting, marines went to the barracks and the arsenal, disarmed everyone they found, loaded some 3,000 rifles and four million rounds of ammunition into mule wagons, walked the soldiers out of town and handed each man a ten gourde note. These were men recruited with rope and club. They tore off the red tape that marked their clothes as a uniform, and when they understood that they were being paid, the noise was enormous. The Comite was on its feet protesting, and its power was gone.

The Haitian legislature had become the gathering point for elite opposition to the occupation, and the president had no way to buy it off. Coups were impossible while the marines held the country, and American auditors had closed off the palace patronage and the contract fraud that earlier presidents used to manage the chambers. In February 1916 Sudre Dartiguenave and Louis Borno went privately to Admiral Caperton and asked for backing if the president dissolved the legislature and replaced the constitution of 1889. Their interests matched for the moment. Dartiguenave wanted his critics gone, and Washington wanted the Dessalinian ban on foreign land ownership gone. On 5 April 1916 the president locked the senators out, turned the deputies into a constituent assembly, and named a council of state of twenty one men. Elections in January 1917 were held with gendarmes unarmed at the polls, and some northern districts tried to elect marines. When Washington returned the Héraux draft it had removed the property bar and added a clause ratifying every act of the occupation. Sténio Vincent's assembly began writing its own.

On 18 June 1917 Josephus Daniels cabled Colonel Cole full discretion to end the National Assembly without using troops. Cole wrote a dissolution decree in the French he had learned at the Naval Academy, put it in the brigade safe, and asked Dartiguenave if he meant to sign. The president said yes. Next morning no decree appeared, and Cole learned that the assembly, knowing what was coming, had shouted down Charles Zamor when he counselled moderation and was racing its own constitution through in batches. Cole sent Major Butler to the palace. As Butler left, an officer telephoned that 320 of the 360 articles had passed and the rest would take half an hour. At the palace an aide in red trousers and a green coat said the president was sick but had ordered the Gendarmerie to do the job. Butler insisted on a written decree. Dartiguenave asked him to go and use force instead. Butler refused, and the president produced four of his five ministers, who signed in handwriting so small that Butler said afterwards he needed a magnifying glass to read the names.