A dead colonial road law is revived and the countryside rises again

In 1917 Butler turned to forced labour to carry out a large road building programme meant to link communities and make military and police operations easier. The Gendarmerie ran the system, resting it nominally on a long defunct corvee law that required peasants either to work on the roads or pay a road tax. Renda's causal claim is direct. The Caco war, which had been worn down by superior force while Caperton was still in command, found new strength in a population inflamed by the insults and assaults that came with the corvee, and under Charlemagne Peralte and Benoit Batraville the rebels gained momentum and forced the marines into a war for control of the very population they had come to assist. She notes the parallel constitutional project, since overturning Haiti's prohibition on foreign land ownership was a primary American goal and one of the hardest obstacles the treaty officials faced.

The Haitian legislature had become the gathering point for elite opposition to the occupation, and the president had no way to buy it off. Coups were impossible while the marines held the country, and American auditors had closed off the palace patronage and the contract fraud that earlier presidents used to manage the chambers. In February 1916 Sudre Dartiguenave and Louis Borno went privately to Admiral Caperton and asked for backing if the president dissolved the legislature and replaced the constitution of 1889. Their interests matched for the moment. Dartiguenave wanted his critics gone, and Washington wanted the Dessalinian ban on foreign land ownership gone. On 5 April 1916 the president locked the senators out, turned the deputies into a constituent assembly, and named a council of state of twenty one men. Elections in January 1917 were held with gendarmes unarmed at the polls, and some northern districts tried to elect marines. When Washington returned the Héraux draft it had removed the property bar and added a clause ratifying every act of the occupation. Sténio Vincent's assembly began writing its own.

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.

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.