Lifschitz is killed on the road before his second deportation

Travelling at night from the port of Aux Cayes to his home at Saint Louis du Sud, Lifschitz grew tired, sent his wife, niece and two servants ahead, and was killed some time afterwards. The wound that killed him was a deep cut across the back of the neck that severed the spinal cord, and two hundred dollars in American money, a silver watch and chain, and several important papers were missing. Casey notes the political stakes made the response immediate: fourteen arrests within two days, including a servant girl Eugenia Lifschitz had suspected, and an official investigation closed sixteen days after the murder concluding that a Haitian or Haitians killed him in revenge for real or fancied wrongs in his land deals, with the robbery committed separately by passers-by who saw the body. Nobody was convicted. Where this account departs from the standard one: The Nation asked openly whether Haitians or Americans had killed a man known for indicting the occupation, and argued the marine commanding officer was the last person qualified to investigate, a view Casey reports alongside evidence that Lifschitz had in fact been protected by the marines in his final months.

Testifying before the Senate select committee that investigated the occupation in 1921 and 1922, General Smedley Butler said that the men who ran it understood themselves as trustees of a large estate belonging to minors, that Haitians were wards and that the Americans were building a rich and productive property to be handed over when their own government saw fit. Renda builds her argument on this. Historians have treated paternalism either as a genuine benevolence, or as a mitigating factor, or as rhetoric to be seen through, and she rejects all three. Paternalism was a whole constellation of images and values that shaped American relations with former European colonies, an assertion of authority and control expressed through the metaphor of fatherhood, structured as much by discipline as by care. On her reading it was not opposed to violence but one of the cultural vehicles for it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda rejects both the view that paternalism softened the occupation and the view that it was mere cover story, arguing it was an operative mechanism of violence.

Between the wars a class of educated Africans in the French territories began arguing about politics in print, and the administration worried that they would find a rural following. Tiemoko Garan Kouyate, an activist and for a time a communist, wrote about the emerging African proletariat and about nationalism. He belonged to a set of men across French western and equatorial Africa who ran newspapers, built the first trade unions and corresponded with Marcus Garvey and with George Padmore, the Trinidadian who took charge of the African section of the Comintern in 1927. Plenty of African politicians in these years worked with the colonial order. Blaise Diagne, elected to the French assembly from Senegal in 1914 on rural votes, made himself an ally of France and defended its policies in public, conscription included. Andre Matswa built a society in the French Congo in the late 1920s demanding French citizenship and the rights attached to it, and by the early 1930s the administration had broken both him and it. Dockers struck at Conakry in 1919 and railwaymen in 1925 and 1938.

Dartiguenave held the presidency through the most violent years of the occupation under American military supervision. By 1922 he was protesting the transfer of Haitian money into American banks, and Washington removed him, installing Louis Borno alongside Major General John Russell as high commissioner. The Borno and Russell government ran the country, ignored the violence around it, and denied what it could not ignore. Under Major Smedley Butler the Americans revived the corvée, a labour draft with precedents in French colonial rule and in Henry Christophe's building of the Citadelle. Conscription was indiscriminate. Butler wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it would not do to ask too many questions about how the work was done. People walked long routes through the mountains to keep off the roads. The brutality filled the ranks of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville, who took their tactics from Dessalines. Fighting between Cacos and Marines killed more than 2,250 Haitians in the first decade, some in combat and some at the hands of careless or predatory Marines.