Price-Mars tells elite women that peasants hold their African past

At the LFAS workshop of June 1934 Jean Price-Mars led the session on Haitian women in history. His argument went back to a lecture he had given in 1917 called Women of Tomorrow. He sorted Haitian women into peasant and elite and held that a shared African ancestry bound the two together. He then told the elite women in front of him that they stood further from that ancestry, and that contact with peasant women would let them recover a more authentic Haitian womanhood. Peasant women's bodies and labour, he said, remained in the primitivity of African tradition, which made them the witnesses to a pure African past. He also called Haitian women the tools of Haitian men: peasant women literal tools of field and market work, elite women ornaments for a husband's reputation. He compared the arrangement to the position of a slave. His remedy was schooling. He asked women to stop drawing on a Christian tradition that left them intellectually poor and to be impregnated in their brains with civic and cultural learning, an intellectual conception in place of an immaculate one.

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.

When the occupation began planning roads into Caco country in 1916, a Haitian cabinet minister showed the Americans the Code Rural. Geffrard's corvée had been sitting in it since 1863: the people of each section were to maintain the highways running through their land, and the police were to enforce it. Smedley Butler was happy to enforce it. From July 1916 gendarmes notified peasants named by the magistrats communaux and the chef seksyon that they could pay a tax or work three days. Nobody had money, so they worked. They were supposed to be fed, housed and entertained with bamboches, which the Americans described as Voodoo dances. Butler drove Dartiguenave out to the work sites in the presidential Ford most weeks so the president could share the rice and peas and explain that this was for Haiti. In 1915 there were three miles of road outside the towns fit for a car. By March 1918 the corvée had built or rebuilt 470 miles at 205 dollars a mile. The route from Port-au-Prince to the Cap opened on 1 January 1918 and took the presidential Ford fourteen hours.

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.