Waller and Butler set the tone, and the tone is contempt

Littleton Waller subdued the North and the Artibonite in three months with Cole and Smedley Butler under him. He was quick, practical and entirely without diplomacy, which served in the field and failed in Port-au-Prince. Danache, who spoke for the politicians, called him a man who had never learned courtesy and accused him of lynching Black men at home. He quoted a letter in which Waller told Dartiguenave that he was president only because the Americans were there, and that if he kept undercutting the brigade Waller would recommend pulling the marines out for a single day. As commandant of the Gendarmerie, Butler said Haiti had two classes, the one percent in shoes and the ninety nine percent without them. He called the second group the kindest people he had ever met and blamed every atrocity on the first. Waller went home in December 1916 and Cole replaced him. Butler stayed until March 1918, training gendarmes and driving the road programme that produced the worst abuses of the occupation. Colonel John Russell took over in December 1917 and ran the occupation for thirteen years.

Haiti conducted its government in French from independence in 1804 onward, and no law said so until 1918, when French was legally recognised as the official language of the nation for the first time. Nearly everyone in the country spoke Creole and only Creole. The bilingual minority who could work in French were the people who held office, drafted laws, taught school and heard court cases, so the rule put on the books in 1918 confirmed an arrangement that had already settled who could take part in public life. Creole waited another forty six years for its first appearance in a Haitian constitution. That came in 1964, and the clause permitted Creole only where the use of French would place a monolingual speaker at a disadvantage, in a courtroom for instance. Creole was recognised as a national language alongside French in 1983, and in 1987 Haiti became officially bilingual, at a point when about seven percent of Haitians actually were.

The Prix Goncourt is the most prominent literary award in France. In 1921 it went to Batouala, a novel by Rene Maran set among Africans in French Equatorial Africa. The decision mattered a long way from Paris. Black writers and artists in Haiti and elsewhere read it as evidence that African life could be the subject of serious literature in the language of the colonisers, and interest in Africa among them sharpened afterwards. Haiti at the time was six years into an American military occupation, and its intellectuals were in the middle of a long argument about where the country's culture had come from. The generation that produced Jean Price-Mars and the indigenist movement was reaching for African descent as an answer. A prize handed out in a Paris dining room supplied a piece of that case. Nicholls puts it in a Haitian political history for that reason, since the arguments Haitians were having about Africa were arguments about themselves.

Hurbon dates the first modern wave of Haitian rural exodus to the years spanning the American occupation, which he gives as 1915 to 1934. Thousands of peasants expropriated by the occupier and subjected to the corvée left to cut cane on American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The mechanism matters to his larger argument: the migration was produced by a political act, land seizure backed by forced labour, and not by a simple shortage of work. He uses this to attack the purely economic reading of Haitian emigration that dominated the literature, including Mats Lundahl's conclusion that mass migration is above all a result of poverty. If the first wave was political, Hurbon argues, then the far larger wave of his own day, driven by Duvalierist terror reaching deep into the countryside, must also be read politically. Where this account departs from the standard one: Hurbon rejects the economic explanation of Haitian migration advanced by Mats Lundahl and by common sense, insisting that political terror is the primary cause even for illiterate peasants and workers whom observers refuse to credit with political motives.