1930, October 14 – November 18: (The Recessional: The Nationalist Landslide, Vincent Prevails, and the Ministère de Combat): President Roy made a completely …

1930, October 14 – November 18: (The Recessional: The Nationalist Landslide, Vincent Prevails, and the Ministère de Combat): President Roy made a completely clean sweep of the Borno administration, appointing a new cabinet that the American chargé Stuart Grummon described as largely composed of Black Haitians of extreme anti-American antecedents. All summer the campaign rolled on in a welter of tafya, cockfighting, and bamboche, but apathy prevailed — only a half dozen out of any hundred voters could read, write, or speak French. All candidates ran against the occupation; otherwise the underlying issue was as old as 1804, whether mulâtre Liberals or noir Nationalists were to get control. When elections for the two Chambers were held on October 14, 1930, it was what Magowan called the appeal to the Black man’s blackness that carried the day — the Nationalists won in a landslide. The reaction of the defeated mulâtres, who had labored so long and often so mischievously to release this imp from the bottle, was surprise and dismay — two eminent elite visitors told Grummon that they considered it inevitable that it would be but a brief time after the withdrawal of the intervention when political strife would again break out and Haiti would revert to the chaotic condition of 1915. There followed frantic jockeying, culminating on November 18 when, on the fourth ballot, Sténio Vincent — ironically the lightest-colored man in the Chamber save perhaps the distinguished Fombrun — prevailed over Pradel and Jean Price-Mars and in so doing assured continuance, for a time at least, of mulâtre hegemony. Jolibois fils, alumnus of three lunatic asylums, was elected president of the députés. The first piece of business of the new legislators was to vote themselves a monthly expense allowance of $100 retroactive to November of the previous year; the next — a resolution that both Vincent and the American legation simply ignored — was to declare the treaty of 1915 invalid. Vincent’s cabinet, who pointedly referred to themselves as un ministère de combat, included Sannon as Foreign Minister, Perceval Thoby at Finance, and Auguste Turnier representing one of Jacmel’s most distinguished noir families at Interior. It had been the American expectation that the remaining period of occupation would be devoted to orderly retrocession of authority to carefully prepared Haitian officials until the treaty expired in 1936 — vain hope, for the Vincent regime felt obligated to repudiate Borno and all his works, and the best way to publicize this policy was noncooperation with the blan, a tactic both Vincent and Sannon blunted under the table whenever it was possible to work with Dana Munro without being caught at it.