1913, May 12 – December: (Michel Oreste: Haiti’s First Civilian President and the Enemies of Reform): Michel Oreste, fifty-four, a griffe and onetime Bazelai…

1913, May 12 – December: (Michel Oreste: Haiti’s First Civilian President and the Enemies of Reform): Michel Oreste, fifty-four, a griffe and onetime Bazelaisist and Légitimist from Jacmel, was a man of popularity, intelligence, and brilliant reputation as professor of law, parliamentarian, and orator. Inaugurated on May 12 with a somewhat muted Te Deum, Oreste set out to do three things: reform the army, retire paper money, and make rural schooling a reality — himself of humble origin, self-taught and self-made, he had scaled the ramparts of elite status by hard work and hard study. Besides the historical obstacles in the way of any such program, Oreste could count one more: for the second time, the Cacos of the North had been balked by a Port-au-Prince coup that, crowning affront, had conferred the presidency on a civilian parliamentarian from the West. Everything Oreste wanted to do earned him enemies — the army resisted reform by a civilian, sinecurists in the school system were outraged at the thought of being disturbed, the Banque had no intention of yielding up its ten million francs for the currency-retirement law that Oreste got through on August 26, 1913, and the Cacos and the Zamors and their Dominican friends liked no part of any of it. Concerning the Cacos, Oreste made the mistake of continuing the payoffs of Leconte and Auguste and then abruptly cutting them off. British Minister Pyke reported to London on June 13 that these vacillations were doing Oreste immense harm — the cabinet was formed with a desire to conciliate all parties but met with almost universal condemnation and was reported to be divided into two rival camps, the president was in daily receipt of threats and warnings for his personal safety, anonymous letters were pinned to his bed and his clothes, he refused to use the throne set aside for him at the cathedral, and every Sunday a chair was carried through the town from his residence and returned there after mass. One reform of sorts did get through: the brutal and high-handed Police Administrative — little more than institutionalized zinglins — were reconstituted as a Service de Sûreté and brought under ministerial control. Yet even this improvement raised suspicion, as Furniss noted that a $60,000 gold special appropriation for “Secret Police” was withdrawn from the bank as soon as available and taken to the palace, President Oreste himself removing the money from the carriage and placing it in his private apartments.