Sport is recommended to improve the beauty and vigour of the race

Haitian girls should be placed in sports organisations of every kind, Comhaire-Sylvain wrote, to improve the beauty and vigour of the race. The phrase locates the campaign. A girl's body was being discussed as public property, its condition standing in for the condition of her family, her district and her country. This was 1939, and the language of racial vigour was in circulation everywhere, in the journals of the noiriste writers in Port-au-Prince and in the state programmes of Europe. Haitian intellectuals had their own reasons for reaching for it. A century of foreign writing had described them as a degenerate people, and the marines had sailed five years earlier. Answering that charge with a fitness campaign accepted its terms. Girls were told to swim and to cycle so that the nation would present well, and their health was worth having because of what it demonstrated.

At Les Cayes on 18 December 1938 Stenio Vincent told an audience that Haitians would no longer choose their presidents by plebiscite, that the mentality of the people was too arrested for democracy, and that the elite lived in their own country as tourists. He praised the forced agricultural labour Toussaint Louverture had imposed and recommended it for the twentieth century. Ferdinand Mayer, the American minister, reported to Washington that the tone of the speech was Hitlerian. Haiti spent almost the whole of Vincent's rule under a constitutional state of siege. The press was controlled, mail was opened, public assembly was forbidden, and the fund for the secret police grew five times over. Mayer wrote in 1940 that seven years after the marines left, the administration was as venal as any on earth. The succession was settled abroad. Elie Lescot, the Haitian minister in Washington, sat on Trujillo's payroll and had been telling the State Department since 1938 that he differed with his president. When the American legation withheld its blessing in March 1941, Vincent discovered he was ill. Fifty six of the fifty eight scraps of paper in the urns carried Lescot's name.

Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published their findings on racial determinism in Les Griots in 1939. Their argument was that the political history of Haiti could be understood only through a scientific analysis of racial characteristics, which meant that the country's coups, constitutions and civil wars were expressions of biology. Two groups were held to be at work: the black majority carrying the African inheritance, and the light skinned elite descended in part from Europeans. Everything since 1804 was read as friction between them. The word scientific is doing heavy lifting there. Denis and Duvalier were borrowing the apparatus of European racial anthropology, the same apparatus that had been used for a century to explain why Haiti should never have existed, and turning it to the advantage of the majority. It handed a small circle of writers a complete theory of the nation and a rule for deciding who belonged inside it.

In October 1939 Les Griots ran a series under the title Considerations on our historical origins. The articles built out what its writers called the black legend, in which the light skinned elite of Haiti appears as a group whose loyalties lie abroad and whose presence in the country amounts to a kind of occupation. On that reading, the mulatto families who had held the presidency, the ministries and the trading houses were foreign in their tastes, foreign in their schooling and foreign in their interests, and the history of Haiti since independence was a history of their betrayals. The account had material behind it. Colour and property had lined up in Haiti for a century and a half, and those families had spent the American occupation doing business with the occupier. Turning that record into an inherited trait converted a political grievance into a permanent one.