Lescot calls plasaj polygamy and the ethnographers call it marriage

President Élie Lescot justified changes to Haiti's marriage law by saying he meant to combat polygamy. The practice he had in mind was plasaj, the common law union of the Haitian countryside, which sometimes involved more than one partner and often did not. In his account it was no honourable union at all. The fieldwork showed a system with rules. In the 1930s and 1940s a plasaj required an extended negotiation between two families, a contract, an exchange of gifts, and a courtship that usually passed through recognised stages, rinmin for dating and fiyansé for engagement, before any household was formed. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain concluded that peasant society treated plasaj as a form of marriage and that from a sociological standpoint it was as respectable as a civil ceremony. A head of state described as disorder an arrangement his own country's ethnographers had documented as law. It had been working before the Haitian state existed, and it outlasted his presidency.

Seabrook's travel narrative The Magic Island, built around the marine sergeant Faustin Wirkus and Seabrook's own fanciful account of Haitian religion, was chosen by the Literary Guild as its featured book for January 1929 and became a national bestseller. Renda uses its reception to show how empire was absorbed at home. Seabrook printed Wirkus's address, and schoolboys in Pennsylvania wrote to the man they understood to be a king, identifying with him as a Pennsylvanian, a working class boy and a Boy Scout, and asking about wild animals and chief exports. The Guild editor Carl Van Doren praised the book as a work in the literature of American empire and told readers they were citizens of an empire reaching far beyond their own continent. Renda notes that in 1929 empire was no longer debated in the United States, it was a point of pride.

Munro records the promotion as a demonstration staged to keep negotiations moving. The Vincent administration felt it had a mandate to insist on the earliest possible restoration of independence, though the president and his foreign minister Pauleus Sannon said they wanted the incoming Haitian administrators properly trained, which was what Washington also claimed to want. Progress in the Garde had been slow because few literate upper-class men wanted a police career; at the time of the Forbes Commission's visit only thirty-five to forty percent of officers were Haitian and none ranked above captain, though the commission approved a plan to replace all American officers by 1936. Early in December 1930 the Haitians were pleased when one of the five military departments was placed under Major Demosthenes Calixte, who had enlisted as a private in 1915.

Munro describes the compromise that averted bloodshed and the pressure that secured it. Both General Russell and the commission concluded there might be violence if the demand for a popular election were refused, so Russell worked out a plan with Borno and the commission persuaded the opposition leaders to accept it. Eugene Roy, a businessman who had not been active in politics, would be elected by the Council of State to succeed Borno on the understanding that he would resign once a Congress had been chosen by popular vote, after which that Congress would name a new president. Roy was duly elected in April 1930, but Munro records the decisive detail: only after the American government had made clear that it would install him in the presidency itself if the Council of State rejected him.