Elite women left thin archives and studied poor women thoroughly

The women of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, an organisation founded by educated women in Port au Prince, worked on Haitian peasant, poor and working class women as researchers. They gathered data, published findings, and set the terms on which those lives entered the record, which placed them on the observing side of a study of their own countrywomen. Grace Sanders Johnson notes what the surviving papers look like as a result. The material on poor and rural women runs to many pages. The material on the elite and middle class women who did the collecting is scattered and thin, because they were never subjected to the curiosity and surveillance they directed at others, and because poorer women often refused to cooperate with it. Silences in the archives of Black women are usually the work of colonisers, foreigners or men. These particular silences were made by women about women. Sanders Johnson follows Marisa Fuentes in insisting that a historian work against that grain, and treats the act of archiving as a claim to citizenship.

A generation earlier Haitian finance ministers had gone to Paris. France in 1946 was broke, so in December a Haitian financial mission put its case to the State Department instead. It asked for the 1938 Export-Import Bank loan to be forgiven or postponed, for credits toward assorted projects, and for a pause in bond repayments. American officials noted that Haitian finances were the strongest they had been in years, and refused. Ambassador Joseph D. Charles told an American reporter afterwards that every American attempt to help had increased Haiti's poverty and confusion. Lucien Hibbert, whom Estime had made rector of the university, tried again in September 1947, asking the Export-Import Bank for twenty million dollars and being told any loan required a justified project. He replied that this was impossible for his government, accused the bank of shutting the door on Haiti, and went home. Norman Armour, who had served in Haiti and now stood high in the department, set about repairing relations. On 29 December 1948 the bank lent Haiti four million dollars on easy terms to develop the Artibonite valley for power and agriculture.

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.

Haiti's first direct presidential election was held on 8 October 1950 under rules written by a military junta and supervised by the army. Paul Magloire had the Church, the officer corps, the commercial elite and a discreet nod from the American embassy. His only organised opposition came from the communists around Nere Numa and Georges Petit. When Daniel Fignole raised the will of the people, Magloire answered him in Creole that two forces counted in this country, the army and the elite. The one other name on the ballot was an obscure architect running as Estime's heir. Rain flooded the roads, and voters walked through mud or rode burros to more than six hundred polling stations. Port-au-Prince returned 25,679 for Magloire, seven for Fenelon Alphonse and three for Papa Legba, the lwa who stands at the crossroads and opens the way. Magloire was declared the winner on 10 October with ninety nine percent. Newsweek reported that the figure probably did reflect what Haitians thought of him.