A constitution nobody could read is ratified 98,225 to 768

The Héraux constitution took a year of paperwork between Port-au-Prince and Washington. Franklin Roosevelt later claimed to have written it. It was mostly the work of Ferdinand L. Mayer, the American chargé, and officials of the State Department. With no National Assembly left to ratify anything, the occupation used a device Haiti had never seen, a national plebiscite, held on 12 June 1918. Colonel John Russell, commanding the brigade, admitted that his forces were openly in favour and that any Haitian who knew enough to vote knew how the soldiers had voted. The elite stayed home. The count came back 98,225 in favour and 768 against. Russell thought every government employee had voted at least once, and noted that some voters believed they were choosing a president while one believed he was voting for a Pope. The trap sat in Title VIII, the transitory provisions, which let the president govern through his Council of State until he chose to call elections, in whatever even numbered year he liked. Dartiguenave never chose one.

Eugene O'Neill's play opened at the Provincetown Playhouse and passed within a year to the young Paul Robeson, whose performance drew praise for its emotional strength, before going to Broadway in 1921. Jackson notes that Robeson had first encountered Toussaint and the revolution as a seventeen year old schoolboy in New Jersey in 1915, the year American troops landed in Haiti. The film version of 1933 opened simultaneously to segregated audiences and met immediate black criticism, with a New York paper reporting in September that Harlem objected to the constant use of a racial slur and a Philadelphia paper editorialising in November that it found not one redeeming feature in the picture. A later critic read the film as mapping its hero onto a Haitian primitivism drawn from nineteenth century colonial thinking.

The corvée failed where it touched Haitian officials. Magistrats and gendarmes worked out that they could exempt anyone who paid and impress anyone who could not. A peasant who finished his annual stint was given a card by the Americans; the chef seksyon would tear the card up in front of him and send him back to work with a blow from the kokomakak. By late 1918, after Butler had gone, men were being roped together and marched to distant work sites like conscripts for the old army. Educated townsmen were caught in it too. Dantès Bellegarde was still angry twenty three years later about the gendarme who knocked on Jean Price-Mars's door in Pétionville and took him away for three days. Out of this came the teledjòl that ran through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite: the blan have come to bring slavery back, and the corvée is only the beginning. Major A. S. Williams wrote that the labour system had taught peasants to hate the occupation and taught gendarmes to treat civilians as material. He abolished it on 1 October 1918. It was already too late.

Around forty thousand Haitian peasants took up arms against the American occupation in 1918. Nothing on that scale had happened on Haitian soil since the war of independence. The grievance was the corvée, the unpaid road labour the occupation had revived from an 1863 statute, which the peasantry read as the return of the forced work their great grandparents had fought a revolution to destroy. The fighters were called Cacos, after a bird of prey, and they marked themselves with patches of red cloth. They had been a factor in Haitian politics for decades, hired and paid by presidential candidates from the North to march on the capital. In 1918 they turned on the Americans instead. Their leader was Charlemagne Péralte, born at Hinche on 10 October 1885, who had commanded the garrison at Léogâne when the marines landed in 1915. Sentenced to five years of hard labour for destroying United States property, he escaped and built the insurgency. The same year a constitution drafted under American supervision was promulgated over a population that had no part in writing it.