La Presse writes up the manoeuvres that removed Borno

La Presse printed its account of the political dealing that ended the Borno presidency on 31 March 1930. What the paper described was a handover arranged between the Americans, the outgoing president and the opposition leaders, and it noted the character of the men coming in: the traditional elite of Port-au-Prince, returning to the palace after years in which the occupation had chosen who governed. The report is worth having for what it takes for granted. A newspaper could now describe such manoeuvres in print, which it could not have done in December, when martial law and censorship were in force. The lifting of those controls after the Cayes killings gave Haitian papers a few months of genuine freedom, and they used the interval to write down how power in the country was actually distributed. The answer they recorded is the one that had held since 1804. Foreigners could suspend the constitution and shoot in the streets, and when they were finished, the same families came back.

The Fordney McCumber Act of 1922 had already set American import duties at prohibitive levels, and both parties promised more in 1928. Hoover wanted higher duties on farm imports and a tariff commission with power to adjust rates by half, which he thought would take the tariff out of congressional bargaining. What Congress produced was the Hawley Smoot Tariff of 1930, raising duties to the highest levels in American history. One thousand economists signed a petition asking for a veto. Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan said he had almost gone down on his knees to beg the president to reject it, and that the act sharpened nationalism everywhere. Hoover signed it in June 1930. Walter Lippmann wrote that the president had surrendered everything and got nothing. For countries that lived by selling coffee, sugar and other commodities into the American market, the door had just narrowed.

Herskovits found a Dahomean who made charms for a living and who came back to him repeatedly through 1931 with new ones. For each he explained how it had been made, what had gone into it and why, the taboos attached to it, who could use it, under what conditions and to what end. Charms meant to harm were included alongside charms meant to protect. The collection reached just under forty gbo with the details recorded for every one. A gbo could be worn at the waist, neck, wrist or ankle, kept inside a house, set at the edge of a field, buried in ground a man owned, worked into cuts in his skin, or swallowed. Once a specialist had sold a client the method, the right to make that charm belonged to the buyer as much as to the seller. A Dahomean proverb says the charm holds nothing for long, while the powers of the Vodu are eternal.

Roy cleared out the Borno administration and appointed ministers the American charge described as black Haitians with long anti-American records. The campaign ran all summer on rum, cockfights and bamboche, and hardly anyone voted, since six people in a hundred could read or speak French. Everyone stood against the occupation, so the real contest was the one running since 1804, between light-skinned Liberals and black Nationalists. The Nationalists took the chambers in a landslide on 14 October. The defeated elite, who had spent decades stirring exactly this feeling for their own purposes, were astonished, and two of them told the American legation that Haiti would collapse back into 1915 as soon as the marines sailed. On 18 November, at the fourth ballot, Sthenio Vincent beat Pradel and Jean Price-Mars, and the lightest-skinned man in the chamber thereby preserved elite control. The new legislators voted themselves a hundred dollars a month backdated a year, then declared the 1915 treaty void, which everyone ignored. Vincent called his cabinet a ministry of combat.