A Haitian rifle team ties France at the 1924 Olympic Games

By 1920 the gendarmerie, with marines behind it, had produced enough order for the rest of the occupation's programme to proceed. The marines pulled back to Port-au-Prince, keeping only a detachment at the Cap, and the gendarmerie, renamed the Garde d'Haiti on 1 November 1928, took on police work, fire, prisons, customs, immigration, emergency communications, the lighthouses, rural medicine and advice to the communes. It enforced firearms laws stricter than anything in the United States and emptied the country of private arsenals, a condition that held into the early 1960s. Marksmanship was pushed to professional standard. A Haitian team went to the Olympic Games for the first time in 1924 and tied France for second place. An Ecole Militaire opened in 1922, one of Russell's earliest projects, though elite families found the discipline, the junior officer's workload and the prospect of a posting outside the capital beneath them. Jules Andre, Demosthenes Calixte, Gustave Laraque and Franck Lavaud came through it. By 1929 just under forty percent of officers were Haitian.

The composer Clarence Cameron White and the librettist John Frederick Matheus travelled to Haiti for six weeks in search of musical materials for an opera. White completed the score in 1932 after a fellowship took him to Paris to study, and although it was performed in concert form in Chicago that year it was not staged until 1949. Jackson gathers the same year's other Haitian works to show how concentrated the moment was. Vandercook's life of Christophe appeared with drawings of the revolt that later fed Jacob Lawrence's paintings, and it moved Countee Cullen so deeply that he wrote the poem Black Majesty, published that May in the magazine of the National Urban League. The Haitian past had become working material for the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson treats the trip as the start of a sustained American musical engagement with Haiti.

Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928. He had been born on 15 October 1876 at Grand-Riviere du Nord, had trained as a physician, and had spent his adult life watching the colour line inside Haitian society do damage that no foreign enemy had needed to inflict. The book's claim is short. The two things that most plainly mark Haitian life, the Vodou religion and the Kreyol language, come out of the African past by way of colonial slavery, they are a legitimate inheritance, and Haitians should hold them rather than hide them. That was written while marines occupied the country and while American racial contempt was busy confirming the light-skinned elite in its own contempt for black Haitian custom. Price-Mars also told his readers to take pride in the only slave revolt in the Americas that finished the job. A generation of black intellectuals took the book as a charter. One of them was Francois Duvalier, who turned it into a justification for dictatorship while its author was still alive to object.

American marines had held Haiti since July 1915, and the armed answer to them came from the cacos, the peasant fighters of the northern and central hills. Benoit Batraville led them after Charlemagne Peralte was killed in 1919. In May 1920 he was shot dead in a fight with marine and gendarmerie patrols, and organised guerrilla resistance to the occupation ended with him. Nicholls draws attention to what was found among his personal papers. Batraville understood the peasant struggle in religious terms and sought spiritual protection for the men who followed him, which is to say the campaign was fought with the resources the countryside actually had. The occupation would last another fourteen years. It was ended by lawyers, newspapers, fundraising committees and a general strike, and no peasant army took the field against the marines again. Those papers record the last moment when the war was still being waged the old way, by men in the hills asking the spirits for cover.