The new financial adviser is planning a plantation company with Roosevelt

Ruan left for Panama early in 1919 and Haitian government paychecks began moving again. His replacement arrived in March. John A. McIlhenny was a Louisiana politician and heir to the Tabasco fortune, a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt, a former United States Civil Service Commissioner, and he spoke no French. He knew Haiti from a single trip in 1917, when he had accompanied Roosevelt on a marine escorted ride through the interior that took in Fort Rivière. Hans Schmidt found that until late 1922 McIlhenny and Roosevelt were working on a scheme for a Haitian American trading and factoring corporation, tied to plantations they expected to acquire once the new constitution took effect. The man charged with the honest stewardship of Haiti's revenue was corresponding with a future president of the United States about profiting from the clause the occupation had inserted into Haiti's constitution by dissolving its legislature. Nothing came of the scheme. The arrangement stands on its own as a description of what the occupation was for.

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.

Colonel Wise told Major Meade in the North to get Péralte, and the job went to Gendarmerie Captain Herman Hanneken, a marine sergeant commanding at Grande Rivière. Finding one man in a country that was on his side, guarded by people who moved him every night through mountains nobody had mapped accurately, was the assignment. In August 1919 Jean-Baptiste Conzé, a former Caco general living at Grande Rivière, left town after letting everyone know he had finished with the blan. A Gendarmerie deserter, Private Jean-Edmond François, went with him. Conzé occupied Fort Capois with rum, rations and money, and Cacos joined him. The money came out of Hanneken's own pocket, and every week François or Conzé slipped back into town to report. Péralte was suspicious, which was why he was still alive. Hanneken then led an attack on Fort Capois that failed as conspicuously as he could arrange, and went about afterwards with his arm bandaged and stained with issue red ink. Péralte sent Conzé congratulations and a commission as général de division. On 26 October he brought twelve hundred men to Fort Capois.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races ran study clubs in which members and outsiders read texts by people of African descent from anywhere in the world. The stated purpose was strengthening the darker races through familiarity with themselves and with one another. In practice this was an alternative curriculum, complete with research projects that placed Black women at the centre, at a time when no school in either country taught such a thing. Theodora Holly was the most requested speaker, lecturing girls and women in Haiti and in the United States on the history of Haitian women. Members also collected newspapers and photographs and mailed them across the water. Holly wrote to Margaret Washington describing a talk she gave to a girls' club in Port-au-Prince, where she held up Washington's photograph as an example of what a Black woman could be. A decade later in Paris, Jane and Paulette Nardal gathered a cercle d'amis on the same principle. An image travelling from Alabama to a schoolroom in Port-au-Prince was traffic the occupation had no method for reading.