Gourds and Dollars; R. Bradford

The time, to be sure, was far down the centuries from Jonah's day, and did not arrive till 1807. The place was a steamy but beautiful little island of the Caribbean. By that time the original Caribs had long since perished, and were replaced by Europeans, especially by Spanish in the east and French in the west and by black slaves all over the place. Slavery, of course, is always hate ful and cruel; but there are degrees to the degradation it imposes; and the planters who had settled in the Artibonite Plaine of Saint Domin gues had brought its horrors to a Mr. Bradford, of Ocala, Florida, Is well known as a writer, poet, speaker, and business organization consultant. Gourds and Dollars new depth of savagery. At long last came the inevitable explosion. Sud denly the whole countryside was in flaming revolt. And the slaves had able leaders: Oge, Boukman, Chavannes, and others of lesser fame-all of whom were soon killed. And then came three compelling figures, former slaves all, whose names were to be inscribed, quite literally, in blood: Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe.

Toussaint was nicknamed L'Ouver ture because as a general he always seemed able to H open" things up for victory-or for escape. His two great lieutenants were: Jean-Jacques Des salines, unlettered and ferocious, but a great battle tactician; and Henry Christophe, a physical giant with the gift of leadership. Christophe was born, it is be lieved, on the British island of St. Kitts, which at that time was still called Saint Christopher. This may account for his last name, and also for the fact that though he was French in speech and name and senGOURDS AND DOLLARS 461 timent, he always spelled his first name with the terminal English ~~y" instead of the French ni." Most likely he pronounced it Dnree, but he spelled it Henry. So much for the main actors. In a few swift and bloody years the dark drama of the tragic little black na tion moved to its denouement. Tous saint was tricked, captured, and al lowed to die miserably in a frigid French prison. Dessalines, after a grotesque brief masquerade as ~~Emperor ," was murdered by his own people. That left the towering Christophe, who became head of state, and who finally made himself king. But the king business came later.

In 1807 this ex-slave stable boy and sometime waiter was named President of the newly-created Re public of Haiti. It was a moment of glory for the dignified man who, as a menial, had been slapped and treated to other indignities. But it was also a moment of great prob lems and sharp decisions. For one thing, he headed a com pletely bankrupt government. The land had been· laid waste by the ravages of the revolt against the landed proprietors, the revolution against France, the wars with the Spaniards on the eastern end of the island, and by their own internecine butcheries. There was no currency system, and Christophe had no money and no reserves of any kind. Needless to say, he could secure no credit abroad. But Christophe was both a re sourceful military leader and an able administrator. He could not read, but he knew the absolute necessity of a workable currency system. And he knew something else-namely, that the people he governed relied greatly on the homely gourd vine in their domestic economy, using its fruit, when dried and free of seeds and pulp, to make all kinds of household utensils bottles, decanters, bowls, saucers, cups, even spoons and plates. The gourd, indeed, was about the nearest thing to a constant and general necessity in the simple life of the Haitian peasants. And the gourd utensils wore out quickly, broke eas ily, and had to be replaced often.

As Christophe ascended to power a green crop of gourds was ripening. So he issued an edict that all gourds were the property of the state. He sent out collectors to seize them, and in a short time they had brought in and ~~deposited" the year's crop at Cap Francois. That became the (~re serve" in Christophe's ((treasury," and he put an arbitrary value of 20 sous on each gourd, which estab lished the ratio of five gourds to the French Franc. Then he waited a while.! lSee pages 108-9 of John Vandercook's excel lent book, Black Majesty, Harpers, 1928.

462 THE FREEMAN Gourds to Coffee to Gold Soon the important coffee crop ripened. Coffee, along with cane for sugar, were the money crops of the island. But there was little sugar as yet, because the sugar mills had all been burned down in the wars. When the coffee beans were brought to market, Christophe bought them-and paid for them with the gourds he had previously expro priated, sometimes from the coffee growers themselves! Then he resold the coffee to foreign traders-for gold; and before long he had a sub stantial metal reserve and could put a gold-supported currency into cir culation. As one result of this re markable adventure into sophis ticated governmental finance, after 170 years the unit of currency in Haiti is still called the gourde. More significantly, the Christophe technique had become a potent, if unrecognized and unacknowledged, fixture in that form of fiscal legerdemain known today as deficit financing.

Not many Americans raise gourds these days, and converted cucur bitaceous shells have little impor tance in our national economy. But the gourds of Christophe are sym bolic of other possessions of ours that are systematically diverted from their normal use by a modern and deadly version of the Christophe process. Those possessions are the dollars which we have earned and tried to save and invest, but which are taken away from us by the hidden and insidious seizures of debt-created in flation. No analogy is here intended or implied between the Haitian trea sury dilemma of 1807 and the mul titudinous, mountainous, and worldwide profligacies of our own government. We are not here con cerned with those balance-of-pay ment problems occasioned by our many international involvements, but with the simple arithmetic of a perpetually unbalanced national budget, and the resultant gnawing away of our substance by the steady and relentless debasement of our money in relation to the things we would purchase with it.

Henry Christophe seized the peo pIe's gourds to underwrite his money. That was the law less proce dure of a dictator, a piece of hard fisted brigandage. But it was a one time expedient to meet an emer gency, and was never repeated. Even so, it was an illegal act of ruthless seizure. And yet ... And yet . . . as between two methods of expropriation, the one lawless but visible and not con tinued, the other legal but hidden and ruinously perpetuated-maybe there is something to be said, after all, for Christophe and his gourds! , \\GrId inthe gURQfan Iuea, Clarence B. Carson 20. The United States: Business as an Llnstrumentof PoliticalPower BRIDLES for horses are equipped with blinkers. They are flaps on both sides of the horse's head at the level of the eye. Horses are skittish animals, and the purpose of the blinkers is to shut off peripheral vision so that the horse will not attend to or be startled by some thing seen out of the corner of the eye.