1919–1920: (McIlhenny’s Paycheck Embargo: The Foreign-Exchange Battle, Dartiguenave’s Backsliding, and the Eleven Laws): No evidence appeared that either Roo…

1919–1920: (McIlhenny’s Paycheck Embargo: The Foreign-Exchange Battle, Dartiguenave’s Backsliding, and the Eleven Laws): No evidence appeared that either Roosevelt or McIlhenny acted or profited improperly from their plantation trading scheme, but it was surprising to find an Assistant Secretary of the Navy expressly charged with Haitian responsibilities collaborating with the incumbent U.S. financial adviser to promote plans — which never materialized — to make money out of Haiti. When McIlhenny reached Port-au-Prince he was cordially received by Dartiguenave, who vouchsafed heart-warming assurance of forthcoming cooperation, but euphoria dissipated when McIlhenny learned that Foreign Minister Justin Barau had immediately notified both the Washington legation and Bailly-Blanchard that Dartiguenave had spoken only as an individual, not as president, and that his fair words were of no effect. As 1920 began, the new financial adviser found himself locked in a three-sided wrangle with the Banque, foreign banks and mercantile houses, and the government — supported at points by the British, French, and Italian legations — over American proposals for foreign-exchange controls designed to end the time-honored speculation in gourdes that had enriched so many private parties at Haiti’s expense. Just as he had resisted Conard’s similar steps, Dartiguenave dragged his feet. In July 1920, McIlhenny pigeonholed the pending budget; a month later, when the government still balked, he put the unsigned pay vouchers of the president, cabinet, and Conseil d’État in his pending basket and awaited developments. The reason for this drastic action — undertaken, according to Sumner Welles, on the basis of certain oral and confidential instructions by Lansing — had less to do with currency reform than with Dartiguenave’s recent backsliding: the president had initiated the enactment of objectionable laws without the American minister’s approval, and eleven such measures, including provocative limitations on foreign land-ownership, had found their way to the statute books in 1920. Not for three months, and not until all eleven laws had been rescinded or amended and four desired ones enacted, did the paychecks leave the pending basket and the president of Haiti again draw his own salary. Even so, Dartiguenave successfully resisted the foreign-exchange curbs that had started the row — in vain McIlhenny stalled two further annual budgets on the issue, as the State Department bureaucracy, not as tough-minded as Lansing, deprived him of his one effective weapon, the paycheck embargo. McIlhenny’s influence waned: justifying his absence by the difficulties of consummating the 1922 loan, he left Haiti, and following over eighteen months in Washington without returning to his post, on October 11, 1922, he finally resigned. What Dartiguenave gained seems hard to see — his 1918 campaign to bring the blan to terms had provoked a disastrous response: American veto, nowhere intimated in treaty or constitution, over all actions by the government of Haiti, and henceforth the occupation would initiate and disapprove legislation, treat pre-occupation laws as invalid at convenience, and enforce these prerogatives with the power of the purse or, at the stern heart of the matter, in the provost courts. The paycheck embargo — an American financial adviser withholding the salary of a sovereign head of state until that head of state rescinded laws enacted by his own government — represented the reduction of Haitian sovereignty to its most elemental absurdity: the president of the republic could not draw his own pay without the countersignature of a foreign official whose authority derived not from any Haitian law or constitution but from the brute fact of military occupation, a condition that Fanon would recognize as the defining feature of the colonial situation — the native ruler permitted to exist as a juridical fiction precisely so long as he served the administrative convenience of the occupier.