1914: (Qu’il Nous Faut un Maître Étranger: Joseph Justin’s Fatal Words and the Mob at the Senate): How thin the ice was for any politician contemplating conc…

1914: (Qu’il Nous Faut un Maître Étranger: Joseph Justin’s Fatal Words and the Mob at the Senate): How thin the ice was for any politician contemplating concessions to a foreign power was demonstrated on December 3, 1914, when Foreign Minister Joseph Justin was attempting to explain to the Senate the squeeze into which American demands were compressing the government. Justin said it had long been said the country could not govern itself, that the finances were disorganized — then he spoke the fatal words: qu’il nous faut un maître étranger, that we need a foreign master. With cries of “Vive la Liberté!” the audience with one accord, armed with canes, knives, and revolvers, surged toward the speaker. In the melee Justin received several blows, and except for protection offered him by other cabinet members he would have been assassinated. Next day, swept away by charges that he had proposed to sell out the country — vendre le Pays — to the blan, Justin resigned. The episode distilled into a single sentence the structural impossibility that every Haitian government faced in its relations with the United States: the material conditions of the republic demanded external financial assistance, but the political culture of the republic — forged in the revolution of 1804, tempered by the indemnity of 1825, and reinforced by every subsequent act of gunboat diplomacy — made the acceptance of that assistance equivalent to treason, so that the very words that described Haiti’s predicament became unspeakable in the institution charged with resolving it.