Renda's subject is what the occupation of Haiti did to the United States. Between 1915 and 1934 marines had to be recruited not merely into the corps but into a particular relation to the country they were sent to govern, and paternalism supplied the language for it. Smedley Butler told a Senate committee that Haitians were wards and the marines trustees of an estate belonging to minors; Faustin Wirkus described the strain of playing father and big brother. Such statements are evidence of a working cultural technology rather than excuses added afterward, assembled out of age, class, race, gender and sexuality, and serving as a vehicle for violence rather than a softening of it. The book then follows the occupation home, into the vogue for Haiti in American fiction, theatre, film and even wallpaper, and into the very different uses African American artists and intellectuals made of Haitian history.