The occupation built a club at Turgeau that Haitians entered only to serve

American officials in Haiti behaved as colonial officials behaved everywhere in those years, paternal toward the poor and distant toward the elite, who returned the coldness. The Americans kept a club at Turgeau which no Haitian entered except as a servant, and from 1918 no American officer was admitted to the Cercle Bellevue. The British minister Edwards wrote in 1929 that he hated to watch his own race discredit itself, asking what respect an educated Haitian could have for people who let their women be carried home drunk in front of Haitian servants, and concluded that the American in Haiti had shown himself unfit to colonise at all. Edwards also repeated a claim that three quarters of the Americans sent to Haiti were Southerners chosen because they understood how to handle Black people. It began in a newspaper interview in 1920 and was repeated until it passed for fact. Ann Hurst checked every Marine officer who served in Haiti from 1916 to 1932 against census figures and found Southerners underrepresented. In 1930, 24 of 116 Garde officers were Southern born.

The composer Clarence Cameron White and the librettist John Frederick Matheus travelled to Haiti for six weeks in search of musical materials for an opera. White completed the score in 1932 after a fellowship took him to Paris to study, and although it was performed in concert form in Chicago that year it was not staged until 1949. Jackson gathers the same year's other Haitian works to show how concentrated the moment was. Vandercook's life of Christophe appeared with drawings of the revolt that later fed Jacob Lawrence's paintings, and it moved Countee Cullen so deeply that he wrote the poem Black Majesty, published that May in the magazine of the National Urban League. The Haitian past had become working material for the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson treats the trip as the start of a sustained American musical engagement with Haiti.

The Caco rising began in earnest in 1918, and its cause was the corvée. Peasants were being taken by gendarmes and set to work without pay on roads the occupation wanted for moving troops. Charlemagne Péralte gave the resistance a command and a political programme. Nicholls calls it the most serious armed opposition the American occupation ever faced. Peasant irregulars turned out in thousands across the Central Plateau and the North, and the Gendarmerie, created two years earlier so that marine garrisons would be unnecessary, proved unable to hold the country without marine reinforcement. That failure is the point of the entry. The occupation had built a Haitian force to do its policing, and the first serious test showed the force could not police Haitians who had decided to fight. What followed was a campaign of nearly two years, fought by United States Marines with aircraft, machine guns and paid informers, against people armed mostly with what they could take from the posts they overran.

On 1 November 1919 United States Marines killed Charlemagne Péralte. His body was stripped, lashed to a door and photographed in a posture that read as a crucifixion, and the picture was circulated around Haiti so that anyone thinking of joining the rebellion would see it. The French had done the same thing in 1791 with Boukman's head on a pike outside Cap Francais. The result was the same both times. Péralte became a permanent figure in Haitian memory and his image the standard picture of resistance to foreign occupation, reproduced by Haitian painters for the rest of the century. More than two thousand Haitians died in the Caco rebellion. Fewer than a hundred Americans and gendarmes were killed. The disparity brought the campaign to the attention of the United States Senate, which held an inquiry in 1921 and concluded that the marines should stay. They stayed another fifteen years.