Istwa Nou

Dartiguenave received McIlhenny warmly in 1919 and promised cooperation. His foreign minister Justin Barau then informed the American legation that the president had spoken as a private individual and that his words carried no weight. Through 1920 McIlhenny fought the Banque, the foreign merchant houses and the government over exchange controls meant to end speculation in the gourde. In July he shelved the budget. In August he put the unsigned pay vouchers of the president, the cabinet and the Council of State into his pending basket and waited. The real grievance was that Dartiguenave had enacted eleven laws without American approval, several of them restricting foreign ownership of land. Three months passed. Only when all eleven had been repealed or amended, and four American measures passed, did the president of Haiti draw his salary again. He kept his position on exchange controls all the same. McIlhenny went to Washington, stayed eighteen months without returning, and resigned on 11 October 1922. What Dartiguenave had won was an American veto over every act of his government.

Ruan left for Panama early in 1919 and Haitian government paychecks began moving again. His replacement arrived in March. John A. McIlhenny was a Louisiana politician and heir to the Tabasco fortune, a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt, a former United States Civil Service Commissioner, and he spoke no French. He knew Haiti from a single trip in 1917, when he had accompanied Roosevelt on a marine escorted ride through the interior that took in Fort Rivière. Hans Schmidt found that until late 1922 McIlhenny and Roosevelt were working on a scheme for a Haitian American trading and factoring corporation, tied to plantations they expected to acquire once the new constitution took effect. The man charged with the honest stewardship of Haiti's revenue was corresponding with a future president of the United States about profiting from the clause the occupation had inserted into Haiti's constitution by dissolving its legislature. Nothing came of the scheme. The arrangement stands on its own as a description of what the occupation was for.