Istwa Nou

On 5 December 1908 Antoine Simon entered Port-au-Prince, apparently as surprised as anyone that it had worked, and was proclaimed chef du pouvoir exécutif. On the twentieth the Senate, ringed by soldiers as a precaution, gave him 117 votes with none against. Simon had started as a peasant chef de section outside Les Cayes, which made him the first head of state in a long while who came from the rural majority rather than from the towns. The foreign press fixed on his goat, said to be a sacred animal that accompanied him, and used it to run the primitive-president story for three years. Meanwhile the actual business of those years was the National Bank concession, the railroad contracts, and the customs revenue, which is to say the machinery that put Haiti in default and brought the marines in 1915. The goat got the coverage. The concessions did the damage.

Antoine Simon entered Port-au-Prince on 5 December 1908 and was proclaimed head of the executive. On 20 December a Senate ringed by soldiers gave him 117 votes and nothing against. He had begun as a rural section chief outside Les Cayes, had run the South for years without much cruelty, and had used his soldiers to work the old plantations he had collected. The American minister Henry Furniss thought him plain, decent and reasonably shrewd, and surrounded by officials who wanted only to fill their pockets fast. Simon could not read and spoke little French. In Les Cayes that had cost him nothing. In the capital the educated class turned his Creole and his manners into a running joke. He also served the spirits, and Furniss reported that as military governor of the South he had persuaded a bishop to say a mass over a dead white goat carried into the cathedral in a closed coffin. His own finance minister told Furniss that he had known there were thieves in the government and had not expected a den of them.