A falsified plebiscite ratifies a constitution written in Washington

Renda names the rigged vote that approved an American-drafted constitution as the clearest instance of a contradiction running through the occupation. Centralisation was presented as rationalising Haitian politics along American lines of wage labour, resource extraction, agricultural industrialisation and infrastructure, and it belonged to a broader Progressive commitment that combined social engineering, hostility to corruption, faith in experts and expansion of the state. In practice the same programme produced the forced labour of the corvee, the campaign against Vodou, the encouragement of Protestant missions, censorship and imprisonment. Renda notes that in occupied Haiti as in the United States criminal conviction served both to secure labour and to humiliate Black people with what the occupiers called pretensions. The same Progressive vocabulary was being used at home to justify segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans on the argument that Black politics were inherently corrupt.

The Greeks of Anatolia were the last of the minorities to leave, exchanged in 1924 for the Turkish population living in Greece. What remained was a country in which Turks were an overwhelming majority. The state had arrived before the nation, and the new leadership then had to find something that would hold the population together. The Turkish language was declared a national characteristic and stirred very little feeling. Islam was what actually commanded loyalty and produced internal unity, so the officially secular state made full use of it. The working test of Turkishness was religion rather than language, which shows in the reluctance to encourage the immigration of the Turkish speaking Christian Gagauz of Bessarabia and in the willingness to let the Turkish speaking Christian Karamanlis depart. Property left by the departing minorities was sold cheaply under a special law to the craftsmen, small merchants and local notables who became the new middle class.

Charlemagne Masséna Péralte of Hinche was a graduate of Saint Louis de Gonzague, a former commandant de la place at Port-de-Paix and at Léogâne, and a brother in law of Oreste Zamor, which made him an enemy of Dartiguenave. In early 1918 he was convicted of taking part in a night raid on Gendarmerie headquarters at Hinche, where a payroll of twelve thousand dollars had just arrived. Caught at Ouanaminthe before he could reach the border, he was sentenced to five years of hard labour in the civil prison at the Cap and set to sweeping the gutters under guard. On 3 September 1918 he persuaded his guard to run with him into the mountains behind the Plaine du Nord. He gathered Bobo's old Cacos and Zamorist bands from Hinche and declared war to drive the invaders into the sea. On the night of 17 October a hundred Cacos wearing the scarlet badge of Ogoun attacked Hinche and lost thirty five dead to a garrison that had been warned. On 10 November sixty of them took Maïssade.

The Héraux constitution took a year of paperwork between Port-au-Prince and Washington. Franklin Roosevelt later claimed to have written it. It was mostly the work of Ferdinand L. Mayer, the American chargé, and officials of the State Department. With no National Assembly left to ratify anything, the occupation used a device Haiti had never seen, a national plebiscite, held on 12 June 1918. Colonel John Russell, commanding the brigade, admitted that his forces were openly in favour and that any Haitian who knew enough to vote knew how the soldiers had voted. The elite stayed home. The count came back 98,225 in favour and 768 against. Russell thought every government employee had voted at least once, and noted that some voters believed they were choosing a president while one believed he was voting for a Pope. The trap sat in Title VIII, the transitory provisions, which let the president govern through his Council of State until he chose to call elections, in whatever even numbered year he liked. Dartiguenave never chose one.