Dartiguenave takes office with no Te Deum and an American beside him

Dartiguenave swore his oath under a storm, and for the first time anyone could remember there was no Te Deum, which observers read as the Catholic church declining to bless the arrangement. He refused to let the inaugural carriage move until Captain Beach sat beside him. Americans took this for courtesy. Haitians who had watched presidents installed and pushed out read it as fear. Beach wrote that the capital looked as though the Marines owned it outright. The new president had reason to be nervous. He was a civilian with no army of his own and the first light skinned elite man from the south to hold the office since 1876, in a country where the presidency had gone almost without interruption to Black generals from the north and the Artibonite. At the first cabinet meeting, held in the widowed president's bedroom, Beach announced that a second Marine regiment was landing. Dartiguenave assented. His foreign minister Pauléus Sannon shouted him down, demanding to know by what right an American admiral put troops ashore without asking the Haitian government.

In 1920 the critics of the occupation emerged in force. James Weldon Johnson, poet, novelist and field secretary of the NAACP, went to Haiti and published a severe critique in a national weekly under the title Self-Determining Haiti, which also set out to direct American attention to the dignity of the Haitian peasant, the accomplishment of educated Haitians and above all the grandeur of Haitian history. Johnson later claimed he had encouraged a new literary interest in Haiti, and Renda agrees, tracing his influence into the work of O'Neill, Vandercook, Seabrook, Hughes and Cook. In the first five years of the occupation almost no critical voices had been raised, with Jane Addams and the Women's Peace Party, Du Bois at the Crisis and Fort-Whiteman at the Messenger among the very few exceptions. She notes the irony that writers who admired Haiti and writers who defamed it both turned it into an exotic object of desire.

In 1916 the United States disbanded the Haitian army and created the Gendarmerie d'Haïti in its place, a force trained, armed and officered by American personnel. The army it replaced had taken part in twenty uprisings between 1908 and 1915, which was the argument for abolishing it. The new body crushed the Caco rebellion, enforced the corvée, and kept the order the occupation required. It was renamed the Garde d'Haïti in 1928. When the marines left in 1934 the Garde became the whole of Haiti's armed forces, and in 1947 it was renamed the Armée d'Haïti. The institution built to hold the country down for a foreign power became the machine every Haitian strongman afterwards used to take it. Paul Magloire came out of it, François Duvalier bent it to his purposes, and Raoul Cédras used it in 1991. The Americans had removed the one instrument capable of overthrowing a Haitian government and put a better trained one in its place, then handed it over on their way out.

On 28 July 1915 a crowd broke into the French embassy in Port-au-Prince, found President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam hiding in a bathroom, dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces. The day before, Sam had ordered the killing of 167 political prisoners taken from elite families, among them the former president Oreste Zamor. Those executions produced the rising that killed him. In Washington, Woodrow Wilson learned of it and feared that Rosalvo Bobo, whom his advisers took for a German sympathiser, would take power. On 29 July he ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The stated reason was humanitarian, the restoring of order in a country said to be incapable of governing itself. The working reasons were strategic: keeping Germany out of the Caribbean during the European war, holding the Windward Passage that guards the approach to the Panama Canal, and protecting American money already placed in Haiti. The occupation ran nineteen years. A century of Haitian self government, disorderly as it had been, ended inside a week.