Lescot rewrites the constitution and postpones the Four Freedoms

In October 1943 Élie Lescot toured Montreal, Ottawa, Washington, New York and Havana, and stayed at the White House, where Franklin Roosevelt called him a very old friend and talked about turning the Môle into a free port. Edward Stettinius put American spending on Haiti between 1938 and 1946 at forty million dollars. On 19 April 1944 the National Assembly rewrote the constitution: no elections until peace had been signed with every enemy power down to Bulgaria, the presidential term lengthened from five years to seven, and Lescot continued in office until 15 May 1951. His decrees began to open with the royal plural, Nous, Élie Lescot. In his address of 15 May 1945 he said his people were naive and poor, that they wanted the Four Freedoms Roosevelt had proclaimed, and that they would receive them once they had learned how to use them. A plot in the Garde was broken up in July, and seven enlisted men were shot at Fort Dimanche.

French territories south of the Sahara had been decisive for Charles de Gaulle during the war. They supplied soldiers, and they supplied the land and air routes across the continent that made a Free French war effort possible at all. African nationalists knew what that was worth. At Brazzaville in 1944 de Gaulle was obliged to promise political reform once the fighting ended, a package of concessions that African military and economic contributions had forced and that also acknowledged how much France would need its colonies to rebuild. The promise was aimed at keeping the empire steady and intact. Meanwhile inflation, broken trade routes and low export prices piled onto hardship left over from the 1930s. African workers had discovered their own leverage and were using strikes and new trade unions to real effect, above all in the mining zones. The British answered with film, radio, newspapers and pamphlets, which required presenting the colonial state as good and its enemies as evil. An empire that had demanded obedience now had to ask, and a request can be refused.

The Comite Executif Militaire that replaced Lescot had three members: Colonel Franck Lavaud of Jeremie, Major Antoine Levelt of the Artibonite, and Major Paul Magloire, who commanded the presidential guard. Lavaud and Levelt were mulatres, Magloire was noir. They dissolved the legislature Lescot had assembled and made Sylvio Cator, the Olympic long jumper and owner of the Cafe Savoy, mayor of Port-au-Prince. Crowds attacked elite shops, including the Bata store, and the committee offered power to the supreme court, which declined it. Parties appeared by the dozen. Strikes hit SHADA, Plantation Dauphin, the wharf and the HASCO sugar mill, where a former mathematics teacher named Daniel Fignole could move the working districts of the capital with a sentence. Fignole's party was the Mouvement Ouvriers Paysans, and its secretary general was a silent country doctor, Francois Duvalier, who had published political tracts a decade earlier under the name Abderrahman. Legislative elections on 12 May put communists into the Senate and defeated Fignole. The liberal constitution of 1932 was revived on 12 August and the presidential vote set for the 16th.

In 1938 the anthropologist Jose Imbelloni proposed that the native people of the West Indies formed a distinct race, which he called Amazonid, and traced their biological descent from the Amazon basin, north through the Orinoco valley, and out along the island chain. The route is roughly right. Archaeology has since confirmed that direction of settlement, with pottery, languages and crops moving up the Antilles from the South American mainland. The racial classification is the part that has gone. Imbelloni belonged to a school that sorted humanity into fixed biological types with measurable skulls and firm edges, and running that machinery over the Caribbean produced a category nobody uses now. I keep it on a Haitian timeline for what it shows about the period. In 1938 a sound migration history and a false science of race arrived in the same sentence, and a reader had no easy way to take the one without the other.