The loan Haiti was promised in 1915 arrived seven years late

The occupation could not arrange the foreign loan Haiti needed. The plan, begun by Paymaster Conard and taken up by the financial adviser Addison Ruan in 1916, was to consolidate the French debts of 1875, 1896 and 1910, whose face value came to about 23.3 million dollars and whose market price was about 16 million. Buying in those bonds, clearing the internal debt, restarting payments suspended since 1914 and finding capital for reconstruction called for an American loan of 30 million. Washington did not assemble it until 1922, seven years after the landing, and the delay hardened Haitian feeling against the United States. The administrative record explains part of the failure. Between 1915 and 1922 Haiti passed through two financial advisers, four gendarmerie commandants, six commanders of the Marine brigade and four senior naval officers, while the State Department's Latin American division had six chiefs of its own. Arthur Millspaugh, himself a later financial adviser, judged that a more disorganised state of affairs could hardly be imagined.

When the occupation began planning roads into Caco country in 1916, a Haitian cabinet minister showed the Americans the Code Rural. Geffrard's corvée had been sitting in it since 1863: the people of each section were to maintain the highways running through their land, and the police were to enforce it. Smedley Butler was happy to enforce it. From July 1916 gendarmes notified peasants named by the magistrats communaux and the chef seksyon that they could pay a tax or work three days. Nobody had money, so they worked. They were supposed to be fed, housed and entertained with bamboches, which the Americans described as Voodoo dances. Butler drove Dartiguenave out to the work sites in the presidential Ford most weeks so the president could share the rice and peas and explain that this was for Haiti. In 1915 there were three miles of road outside the towns fit for a car. By March 1918 the corvée had built or rebuilt 470 miles at 205 dollars a mile. The route from Port-au-Prince to the Cap opened on 1 January 1918 and took the presidential Ford fourteen hours.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races put much of its money into sending investigators abroad, and the most consequential of those journeys was Addie Hunton's visit to Haiti in 1926. Her guides in Port-au-Prince were Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain and Therese Hudicourt. Six years earlier those two had walked two hundred women through the same streets in protest; now they walked an American through the places where the occupation had done its damage. What came out of the trip was a report of 180 pages called Occupied Haiti. Its subtitle described the authors as six disinterested Americans, from organisations that were American through and through, who had looked at conditions on the ground themselves and wanted the independence of the republic given back. The conclusion was that the United States military should go, and go at once. The title alone did work that argument could not. Americans who had been told the occupation was a favour to Haiti were reading Americans who had gone to see and come home asking for withdrawal.

Modern methods of manufacturing concrete spread around the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the first reinforced concrete structures in Port-au-Prince were expensive showpieces. The Cathedrale Notre Dame de l'Assomption was completed in 1914. The National Palace was finished in 1920, under United States military occupation. Both were high cost projects that announced what the material could do. By the 1940s architects with reputations, among them Albert Mangones and Robert Baussan, were designing concrete houses in the international style for wealthy Haitian clients. Cement was still imported and still a luxury. Concrete entered the city from the top, as the stuff of cathedrals, palaces and villas, and that association stayed with it long after it became the ordinary material of ordinary houses. Buildings that Mangones designed were among those that collapsed in the earthquake of January 2010.