1918, June 24 – 1919: (Dartiguenave Balks: The New Cabinet, Borno the Bulldog, and the Financial Struggle’s First Phase): The 1918 constitution, whatever els…

1918, June 24 – 1919: (Dartiguenave Balks: The New Cabinet, Borno the Bulldog, and the Financial Struggle’s First Phase): The 1918 constitution, whatever else it did, took Dartiguenave’s opponents out of play and freed him from domestic constraint, leaving him corresponding maneuver room to take on the Americans. In the new cabinet he appointed on June 24, 1918, were Louis Borno at Finance and Foreign Affairs, Eugène Roy at Public Works, and Dantès Bellegarde at Education, Agriculture, and Cults — the bulldog he intended to set upon the Americans was Borno. To lead the Council of State Dartiguenave picked the aged Légitime — seventy-five, but ever at Haiti’s service. The government’s proclaimed objects were enhanced freedom of action and an end to surrender to the occupation, with financial control as the terrain of battle. The conflict, somewhat papered over in the harmonious relationship between financial adviser Ruan and Borno’s predecessor Dr. Héraux, arose from the Haitians’ irreconcilable feelings that they had hardly any of the national revenues within their control, and just as adamantly from the American advisers’ conviction that any funds remaining at the government’s disposition would be spent in the old improper, corrupt fashion — both parties were right. What became a two-year struggle between the government and the Americans had three phases of conflict, each ending in greater power for the occupation. The earliest encroachments — as with some justice the Haitians called them — began in 1916 when treaty advisers took power to hire and fire all Haitians in the customs houses, to receive not only customs but internal revenues, and to work out the budget, allocate funds between government and treaty services, and control expenditures by both. Then on August 24, 1918, Bailly-Blanchard extracted the further concession that any project of law bearing upon treaty objects must be communicated to the American representative before being presented to the legislature. In October 1918, frustrated by irregularities in the Finance Ministry, Ruan called on the Conseil to pass a law forbidding the Minister — that is, Borno — to approve any voucher without the adviser’s visa. Borno gagged; the Conseil stalled; worse still, when Ruan presented the new budget, the Conseil rejected it and challenged the adviser’s right to control expenditures at all. Without a budget the treaty services would legally be without funds — backed by his sword, Russell’s pen gave prompt answer: on November 13, the brigade commander simply directed the Banque to make no disbursements except by his order. Within the week, Russell with Bailly-Blanchard in tow called on Dartiguenave to demand Borno’s head. On November 24, the Finance Minister resigned, and nine days later the government conceded final authority of the financial adviser’s visa on all payments. During the month’s deadlock not a gourde moved into the government’s pocket. At the height of the clash, Solon Menos — still vigorously protesting from the Washington legation — dropped dead, and the U.S. Navy returned his body to Haiti in pomp aboard a cruiser, but Ruan would not authorize a penny for his undertaker’s bills or the travel vouchers of his children and widow. When Henri Chauvet, fiery editor of Le Nouvelliste, hopefully printed the rumor that Ruan had been disavowed and recalled, he was marched off to provost court by gendarmes, fined $300, and locked up for three months — and Le Nouvelliste was shut down for the same term. The structural logic of the financial struggle — an American adviser empowered to starve the Haitian state of its own revenues until the Haitian government submitted to American fiscal control — reproduced at the administrative level precisely the mechanism that the indemnity of 1825 had inaugurated at the sovereign level: the conversion of Haiti’s fiscal capacity into an instrument of external leverage, the forms of Haitian self-governance persisting only so long as the substance of Haitian fiscal policy aligned with the wishes of the metropole.