Fewer than one in five baptised children had married parents

In the commune of Plaisance in northern Haiti, fewer than one fifth of the children baptised by the Catholic priest in 1926, in 1931 and again in 1936 were born to parents who were legally married. Concubinage rather than legal marriage was the ordinary arrangement among the peasantry. A legal wedding cost money, and peasants named it alongside more land, more livestock and good matches for their children when they were asked what they wanted. The same ratio turns up elsewhere. Fewer than one fifth of Haitian children of any class were in school, while nearly every child of the elite was educated, often by French brothers and sisters in private schools rather than in the urban public ones. The elite spoke French and the peasantry spoke Creole, and the peasantry did not understand French. Most peasants took illness to a bocor while the privileged used doctors and pharmacies.

Zora Neale Hurston took a degree in anthropology from Barnard in 1928 and went to New Orleans that August for six months of fieldwork. She studied with nine Vodou doctors and went through six initiations. The longest, under a priest called Samuel Thompson in one of her books and Luke Turner in the other, required nine nights of preparation and then three days lying face down and naked on a couch spread with a moccasin hide, silent, a pitcher of water set at her head so that her spirit would not go wandering after any. She reported five psychic experiences inside those sixty nine hours. At eleven on the morning of 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, she was raised, led through running water, painted with a lightning mark from her right shoulder to her left hip, given eyes on her cheeks and a sun on her forehead, and crowned. At midnight a black sheep was killed and buried under her written petition.

American officials in Haiti behaved as colonial officials behaved everywhere in those years, paternal toward the poor and distant toward the elite, who returned the coldness. The Americans kept a club at Turgeau which no Haitian entered except as a servant, and from 1918 no American officer was admitted to the Cercle Bellevue. The British minister Edwards wrote in 1929 that he hated to watch his own race discredit itself, asking what respect an educated Haitian could have for people who let their women be carried home drunk in front of Haitian servants, and concluded that the American in Haiti had shown himself unfit to colonise at all. Edwards also repeated a claim that three quarters of the Americans sent to Haiti were Southerners chosen because they understood how to handle Black people. It began in a newspaper interview in 1920 and was repeated until it passed for fact. Ann Hurst checked every Marine officer who served in Haiti from 1916 to 1932 against census figures and found Southerners underrepresented. In 1930, 24 of 116 Garde officers were Southern born.

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.