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President Stenio Vincent, a poet-nationalist elected on an oust-the-U.S. platform when the Marines supervised an honest election in 1930, picked Lieut. Magloire for his aide-de-camp. But Vincent's government stumbled in 1937, when the Dominican Republic's Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, in a moment of rage, let his forces massacre an estimated 15,000 Haitian cane-cutters who had crossed the border to seek harvest work. The Haitian President settled for an indemnity of $550,000 from Trujillo. With murdered Haitians thus officially priced at $37 each, Haiti soured on Vincent, and his government succumbed in 1941. The next President was Elie Lescot, a member of the elite, who chose Magloire first to be chief of the national police, then head of the palace guard, a key position.
Tableau in the Palace. President Lescot was snobbishly antiblack, and word got around that he had accepted favors, up to & including a $35,000 gift from the hated neighbor. Dictator Trujillo. One day early in 1946, blacks appeared in the streets carrying signs "A bastesmulatres!" Stores hastily shuttered their windows and women in the hills refused to come to town with food for the market.
Soon Magloire and other officers called on the President. The scene that followed had the studied formality of an 18th-century tableau. Magloire informed the President that he could not fire on the people. The military men offered Lescot safe conduct to the airport and a ticket to Canada. Lescot, essentially a logical man, accepted. Thus ended a classic Haitian coup de langue—a "tongue revolution" in which rumors of discoatent, troubles or violence brewing in the capital bring on a spontaneous general strike and shake the regime down.
To rule the country, the officers first set up a temporary military junta, then ordered an election for Congressmen who would choose a President. One candidate was a brooding, ulcer-afflicted lawyer named Dumarsais Estime, son of black peasant parents who lived in the voodoo-haunted pine forests near Mount La Selle. His strongly anti-mulatto position made him the idol of the blacks, and won him the election.
Heyday of the Authentiques. Black Haiti entered a time of tumultuous transformation. For his peasants, his "authen-tiques," (his "real" Haitians) Estime schemed to smash the elite and create a new ruling group of rich, powerful blacks. The authentiques quickly caught the idea: the soul of Africa began to show itself in novels and paintings. A written form of Creole was devised. Voodoo, which elite laws passed under Catholic pressure had driven underground, was openly tolerated again. Estime dreamed big: schools, hospitals, roads, docks, industrialization. He did succeed in raising wages for black workers. But all he really built was a rainbow-painted fairgrounds for a pathetically unsuccessful 1950 International Exposition. He crippled the U.S.-owned Standard Fruit Co.'s Haitian operation, then found that the country had no banana business left. Meanwhile, official corruption got out of hand; a few insiders got rich quick; word got around that $10 million of the $26 million spent for the fair had never been accounted for. The big wheel that turns once and flips out a Haitian President began to move.