1929, October 31 – December 3: (The Damien Strike: The $25 Bourses, the Danbala Banner, and the Re-Awakening of the Haitian National Soul): The Service Techn…

1929, October 31 – December 3: (The Damien Strike: The $25 Bourses, the Danbala Banner, and the Re-Awakening of the Haitian National Soul): The Service Technique’s show window was its Central School of Agriculture at Damien, where in a program intended to create a cadre of teachers, students from elite families were taught agronomy — though with no more appetite for the dunghill side of agriculture than their predecessors at Turgeau. To overcome such reservations, each student received $25 a month in bourses, and as Dr. Freeman was later quoted, they were virtually hired to go by means of scholarships — this incentive notwithstanding, student boursiers concentrated on academic work while hired peasants dug ditches, cleaned stables, slopped hogs, and shoveled manure. The arrangement might have continued indefinitely but for the fact that 1928 was a bad year for coffee and 1929 ended as a bad year for everything. Dr. Freeman made a three-way decision: to reduce by $2,000 the $10,000 set aside for Damien bourses, to divert this amount to peasant students at Hinche and other experimental stations, and to require that boursiers do their own bucolic labor. Simultaneously stung in pocketbook and amour-propre, the students were outraged. On October 31 at 3:00 PM, all 215 students at Damien, accompanied by Haitian instructors, struck and trooped into town, thus launching the first serious disturbance in Haiti in nearly a decade. Within ten days, the elated students — inflamed by Roumain and Pradel and their respective leagues — were being treated like heroes, backed by sympathy strikes in the J. B. Damier industrial school, the schools of law, medicine, and applied science, and the normal school. The action of the students, reported Magowan, was lauded to the skies as signifying the re-awakening of the Haitian national soul. Strikes were swiftly orchestrated at the Cap, at Jacmel where a Danbala banner of green snake on red background became the student flag, at Gonaïves, and at St. Marc — when bands tried to play the Dessalinienne, student leaders howled it down and called instead for Occide Jeanty’s fierce 1804. As November wore on, the capital was plagued by demonstrations, mobs, and spot strikes at the Banque, the wharves, and the ever-turbulent douanes. Borno’s announcement that he would not be a candidate in 1930 seemed to have little effect, and on December 3 Russell telegraphed Secretary of State Stimson that the loyalty of the Garde was now very questionable and requested that the brigade be immediately increased by 500 until after the inauguration of the new president.