Indigenism runs out of politics and its authors turn to Marx

Jacques Roumain and Therese Hudicourt's nephew, the lawyer Max Hudicourt, had helped launch La Revue Indigene in 1927. Their cofounder Normil Sylvain, brother of Madeleine Sylvain, died in 1929, and the movement he helped start went on without him. By 1933 its position was secure in argument and empty in practice: it had shown that Haitian culture, language and religion were worth study, and it had produced no programme anyone could act on. Roumain and Hudicourt went looking for one in Marxism. What they came back with moved the discussion off colour and onto money, and proposed rebuilding the country by restoring the productive capacity of the people who did its work. Sthenio Vincent, president after the marines left, treated this as an attack on his own nationalism and answered with surveillance, raids and prison. The two men were arrested in 1932 and jailed in 1933 for spreading communist propaganda and plotting against the occupying government. Vincent had watched the Americans govern for fifteen years, and he had learned the method.

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.