Four presidents sign with American banks without counting the cost

The bourgeoisie emerged from the occupation with no programme beyond opening the country to foreign investment and continuing to grow raw materials for export. The book names the sequence of presidencies, Vincent from 1930 to 1941, Lescot from 1941 to 1946, Estime from 1946 to 1950 and Magloire from 1950 to 1956, and says each engaged in many transactions with American banks and made significant concessions to American companies without seriously assessing short or long term costs and benefits. The argument is structural rather than biographical. Having failed in the nineteenth century to build a domestic base of accumulation, the class had accepted its own marginal status and looked to foreign capital to act as the prime motor of growth, instead of reducing dependence by creating national industries. The colour conflict that reopened after the occupation is set inside that constraint.

On 9 August 1946 the National Constitutional Assembly in Port-au-Prince was debating whether women would have the vote. A section of the hall had been set aside for women, partitioned off from the rest of the audience, and in it sat members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, Haiti's first women's rights organisation, whose members came from elite and middle class families. A woman recorded only as a femme du peuple, a woman of the people, pushed through the crowd of politicians and onlookers toward that section. A soldier of the Garde d'Haiti stopped her at the threshold. The Ligue members protested and the crowd backed them, and she was escorted out of the building. Assemblyman Castel Demesmin, a noiriste, used the incident at once, telling the chamber that a woman of the people would always be rejected by these women, then urging his colleagues to save the revolution by saving the country from women. Her removal became the argument for denying the vote to every woman in Haiti.

The constitutional commission of 1946 set aside the demands the Ligue feminine d'action sociale had put before it, on pretexts its president found false. On 16 July 1946 Alice Garoute answered in a public letter. She recorded the League's astonishment that the commissioners had so lightly brushed aside the ideals of justice and liberty of the revolution of 7 January, reminded them that Haiti had signed the accords of Lima and Chapultepec, the San Francisco agreements and the United Nations Charter, all of which hold that men and women are born and remain equal, and wrote that the verdict of inferiority pronounced against women since 1804 disgusted and revolted her. She ended with a line that reads as a manifesto: we will no longer resign ourselves to being reproduction machines and servants of the lord and master. Garoute was born in 1874, daughter of Pauline Brice, and had grown up among exiles arguing politics in Kingston.

After the ejection, the assembly stopped debating suffrage and began examining the women themselves. Representatives questioned whether women were politically sincere, intellectually capable, loyal to the nation and able to control themselves at a ballot box. Emile St. Lot, a noiriste who led the leftist Front Revolutionnaire Haitien, called the women bad mothers and dictators. A newspaper writer asked sarcastically whether women would now serve in the army, which ignored the women who had fought in the revolutionary armies of the nineteenth century and as cacos against the American occupation. The word feminisme was used in the chamber as an insult. Members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale then left the hall on their own, followed by jeering and by a military escort. When the assembly finished its work there were no women in it. Le Nouvelliste reported that the Ligue members had been assaulted. No paper mentioned the woman whose removal had started the whole thing.