Istwa Nou

On 18 June 1917 Josephus Daniels cabled Colonel Cole full discretion to end the National Assembly without using troops. Cole wrote a dissolution decree in the French he had learned at the Naval Academy, put it in the brigade safe, and asked Dartiguenave if he meant to sign. The president said yes. Next morning no decree appeared, and Cole learned that the assembly, knowing what was coming, had shouted down Charles Zamor when he counselled moderation and was racing its own constitution through in batches. Cole sent Major Butler to the palace. As Butler left, an officer telephoned that 320 of the 360 articles had passed and the rest would take half an hour. At the palace an aide in red trousers and a green coat said the president was sick but had ordered the Gendarmerie to do the job. Butler insisted on a written decree. Dartiguenave asked him to go and use force instead. Butler refused, and the president produced four of his five ministers, who signed in handwriting so small that Butler said afterwards he needed a magnifying glass to read the names.

With the decree in his pocket, the question was who would carry it into the chamber. Héraux thought the bearer might be shot. The politicians nominated Butler, on the grounds that he held a Haitian commission in the Gendarmerie. He walked in through jeering and hissing. Before reading the document from the tribune, Sténio Vincent delivered an attack on Butler and on all Americans, calling them foreign dogs and devils who had come to dissolve the assembly. As he reached his peroration the gendarmes, most of them former soldiers who knew how such scenes ended, began loading their rifles. Deputies overturned tables and chairs and took cover. Butler ordered the rifles unloaded, quieted the room with the speaker's traditional dinner bell, and Vincent read Dartiguenave's decree. Then he walked out white with rage and dropped the paper, which Butler picked up and kept. The National Assembly of Haiti was closed by a United States Marine commanding Haitian gendarmes, and Dartiguenave governed afterwards with a Council of State he had appointed himself.