1919, March: (McIlhenny Arrives: The Louisiana Politician, the Tabasco Scion, and Roosevelt’s Haitian Trading Scheme): Ruan left for Panama in early 1919 and…

1919, March: (McIlhenny Arrives: The Louisiana Politician, the Tabasco Scion, and Roosevelt’s Haitian Trading Scheme): Ruan left for Panama in early 1919 and government paychecks again circulated. His successor arrived in March — Louisiana politician and Tabasco scion, wealthy intimate of Franklin Roosevelt and a former U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, non-French-speaking John A. McIlhenny had only limited experience for a most demanding and sensitive post. The new financial adviser was not entirely new to Haiti: he had first come to the country in 1917 as Roosevelt’s traveling companion on an adventurous Marine-escorted tour through the backcountry, including a visit to Fort Rivière. Until late in 1922, as Hans Schmidt disclosed, Roosevelt and McIlhenny were to have their heads together on a scheme to set up a Haitian-American trading and factoring corporation tied in with development of plantations to be acquired as a consequence of the new constitution’s elimination of the prohibition against foreign land ownership. That the new financial adviser — the man charged with honest stewardship of Haiti’s revenues — was simultaneously conspiring with the future President of the United States to exploit the very constitutional provision that the occupation had imposed by dissolving the National Assembly and ratifying through a farcical plebiscite, revealed the structural circularity of the occupation’s logic: the Americans had rewritten Haiti’s constitution to permit foreign land ownership, then appointed as financial custodian a man whose private interest lay in acquiring the land that the rewritten constitution now made available, a self-dealing arrangement that Fanon would recognize as the characteristic mechanism of colonial administration — the colonizer simultaneously writing the rules, enforcing the rules, and profiting from the rules, with the colonized reduced to spectators of their own dispossession.