1918, June 12: (The Plebiscite of 1918: The Constitution Nobody Read and the Voter Who Thought He Was Electing a Pope): Enactment of the American-sponsored H…

1918, June 12: (The Plebiscite of 1918: The Constitution Nobody Read and the Voter Who Thought He Was Electing a Pope): Enactment of the American-sponsored Héraux constitution required a year’s paperwork between Port-au-Prince and Washington — although Franklin Roosevelt later claimed parentage of the document, it was mainly the handiwork of Ferdinand L. Mayer, American chargé during one of Bailly-Blanchard’s absences, and various State Department officials. The problem of ratification without a National Assembly was solved by a device new to Haiti: a national plebiscite. To expect peasants from the hills to form opinions on a constitution was farcical. Although in form and intent the plebiscite held on June 12, 1918, was narrowly honest, Colonel John H. Russell, the brigade commander, admitted that his forces were proconstitutional and any Haitian who knew enough to vote also knew enough to vote the way the soldiers voted — the elite, deeply opposed, simply stayed home. The results — 98,225 for, 768 against — spoke for themselves: Russell wrote that it was thought all government employees voted at least once for it, and added that there might have been confusion as to the object of the process, since some voters believed they were electing a president and one thought he was voting for a Pope. The joker in the constitution lay in Title VIII, Transitory Provisions, which in effect permitted the president, without benefit of legislature, to govern indefinitely through the Council of State — the first election for the two Chambers was to be held on January 10 of an even-numbered year, leaving the president to decide which, if any, year it would be. This provision guaranteed Dartiguenave and his successors dictatorial powers free of legislative interference as long as it suited the Americans — yet this constitutional flimflam, as Heinl termed it, did not represent suppression of rights previously enjoyed, for as de la Batie had gone nearer the heart of the matter: the self-styled Haitian democracy for which they all wore mourning had never really been anything but an oligarchy imposing upon a people described as free a tyranny as abominable as it had been degrading. Read through the decolonial lens, the plebiscite of 1918 — a constitutional referendum conducted under military occupation, ratified by peasants who could not read the document and soldiers who could not oppose it, producing a charter whose central provision was the indefinite suspension of representative government — performed the epistemic operation that Wynter identified as the signature move of colonial modernity: the appropriation of democratic form to legitimate autocratic substance, the franchise deployed not as an instrument of self-determination but as a mechanism for manufacturing consent to its own abolition.