Istwa Nou

Roy cleared out the Borno administration and appointed ministers the American charge described as black Haitians with long anti-American records. The campaign ran all summer on rum, cockfights and bamboche, and hardly anyone voted, since six people in a hundred could read or speak French. Everyone stood against the occupation, so the real contest was the one running since 1804, between light-skinned Liberals and black Nationalists. The Nationalists took the chambers in a landslide on 14 October. The defeated elite, who had spent decades stirring exactly this feeling for their own purposes, were astonished, and two of them told the American legation that Haiti would collapse back into 1915 as soon as the marines sailed. On 18 November, at the fourth ballot, Sthenio Vincent beat Pradel and Jean Price-Mars, and the lightest-skinned man in the chamber thereby preserved elite control. The new legislators voted themselves a hundred dollars a month backdated a year, then declared the 1915 treaty void, which everyone ignored. Vincent called his cabinet a ministry of combat.