Most rural Haitian marriages were never registered with anyone

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain spent the 1930s doing fieldwork on marriage in the Haitian countryside. She found that the majority of rural unions had no standing in law. Couples lived in plasaj, a common law arrangement with rules of its own, or in open relationships carrying no formal tie at all. What decided the shape of a union was land. Access to a plot, whether through family inheritance or through a partner, let a woman raise produce and sell it, and selling produce meant income and the right to travel with it. Market prices and the chance of movement therefore ran through every question of who lived with whom and on what terms. This is the practical base under a great deal of Haitian women's independence. The state had a marriage law and the countryside had a system older and more widely used, in which a woman's standing was measured by what she could plant and carry to market rather than by a certificate held at a registry.

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.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel appeared in the crown of a royal palm at Ville Bonheur, and the miracles that followed made the place a national pilgrimage. It grew after the Dominican Republic closed its frontier to the Haitians who used to cross every year to the grotto of Higuey. Because the waterfall of Saut d'Eau stood nearby, the spirits of vodou claimed the site as well. Candles and food offerings were laid at the foot of the palms beside the candles of Christian penitence, and possession trances ran through the crowd alongside the liturgical singing. The church first doubted the apparitions, then denied them, then acted. One priest set fire to the trunks of several palms and was cursed by the crowd; he is said to have lost his reason soon after. His successor called in the secular arm and had every palm cut down, and was later struck with stiffness in both legs. The pilgrims read both events as vengeance.