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.