Munro served in the State Department's Latin American division and then as United States minister in Port-au-Prince from 1930 to 1932, and he recounts the unwinding of the American protectorate largely from inside the legation.

Washington had wanted out since the end of the Wilson years but found ending an intervention harder than beginning one: bondholders had been promised that American officials would keep collecting customs, and nobody wished to leave a government behind that could not hold the country together. By 1929 elite resentment, new excise taxes falling on the peasantry and Borno's refusal to allow elections converged in a student strike and street demonstrations violent enough to bring the marines out again, and Hoover asked Congress for an investigating commission.

Munro follows the negotiations from there to the Haitianization of the Garde and the marines' departure in 1934, with financial control surviving under a fiscal representative into the 1940s. Poverty and illiteracy, he concludes, were left untouched.

By 1928 American rule in Haiti amounted, in Cooper's reckoning, to a joint dictatorship weighted heavily toward Washington. High Commissioner John H. Russell held effective power, President Louis Borno legislated with his consent through a hand-picked Council of State, and the legislature closed by the Marines in 1918 had not met since. Educated Haitians shut out of office attacked it in the press, their only remaining outlet.

The unravelling began with a student strike at the Damien agricultural school in late 1929, which spread into wider protest and ended in bloodshed at Les Cayes. Hoover sent the Forbes Commission, negotiations followed, Stenio Vincent took the presidency, and the last Marines sailed in 1934.

Cooper canvasses the reasons for leaving: defence needs that no longer required the island, finances judged repaired, deeper change conceded unattainable, isolationist opinion at home, and Haitian insistence. His own judgment is that the occupation left little behind and cost the United States standing across Latin America.