1917, June 18–19: (The Dissolution of the National Assembly: Cole’s Proclamation, Butler’s Errand, and the Signatures One Needed a Magnifying Glass to Read):…

1917, June 18–19: (The Dissolution of the National Assembly: Cole’s Proclamation, Butler’s Errand, and the Signatures One Needed a Magnifying Glass to Read): On June 18, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels — as adept a political survivor as Dartiguenave himself — replied to Cole’s radio with a telegram vesting him with full discretionary power to accomplish the end desired without use of military force. Cole drafted a dissolution proclamation in his Naval Academy French, locked it in the brigade safe, and asked Dartiguenave whether he intended to proceed — the president, whom Cole had previously characterized as willing to promise anything, said he would. Next morning the 19th, when no decree appeared, Cole learned that the assembly, well aware the climax was at hand, had shouted Charles Zamor off the floor when he tried to counsel moderation and was racing articles through in batches, skipping others to complete the three required readings. Cole dispatched Major Butler to the palace to find out whether the decree had been signed. As Butler departed, an officer telephoned urgently that 320 of 360 articles had already passed and it would all be over in half an hour. At the palace, an aide in bright red trousers and a poisonous green coat informed Butler that Dartiguenave was sick but had ordered the Gendarmerie to dissolve the assembly. Butler entered the president’s office and insisted on a written decree — Dartiguenave pleaded he could not sign without his cabinet present, urged Butler simply to go down with military force and dissolve it, and when Butler positively refused, went out and secured four of his five ministers, who signed the decree in handwriting so small that, as Butler later recalled, one needed a magnifying glass to read the signatures. The scene enacted at the palace — the president feigning illness to avoid responsibility, the Marine officer demanding legality from a sovereign who preferred the blunt instrument of force, the cabinet ministers signing with trembling hands in script barely visible — compressed into a single morning the structural relationship that the occupation had created: a Haitian executive who possessed the juridical form of sovereignty but could exercise it only at the direction of foreign officers, his every act of state requiring the simultaneous performance of compliance and deniability.