Academic regalia is the costume and accomplishment is the beauty

The League built its leaders' public selves in two media, prose and photographs. La Voix des Femmes ran images of Madeleine Sylvain, Alice Garoute and the others in positions of authority, in professional clothing or academic gowns, at desks and lecterns. The standard of beauty the paper applied was scholastic and professional attainment. A woman was presented as admirable because she held a degree, a practice, a caseload or a printed argument. Alongside that, the leadership offered Haitian women's citizenship as something any woman could reach through education and civic participation, which was the organisation's central promise and its central problem. The gowns and the diplomas in the photographs were expensive. Most Haitian women had no route to either, and every picture that made professional accomplishment the measure of a woman also put the national distribution of wealth on display. The pictures argued for universal citizenship in a visual language a few hundred women in the country could speak.

Heinl asks what the Americans left when they went, and answers that the visible changes were real and the political ones were absent. Haiti in 1915 had been cut off from the world for a century. Haiti in 1934 had roads, hospitals, a functioning treasury and a modern army. Underneath that, the occupation had built no way for Haitians to govern themselves except the old ways. High Commissioner John Russell wrote to Forbes in 1930 that material rehabilitation had advanced enormously and that the Haitian people were little better fitted for self government than they had been in 1915. In March 1934 the British minister wrote that Vincent, inaugurated for his love of liberty, had become an admirer of dictatorship and thought Haiti unsuited to parliamentary government. Élie Lescot, then Haitian minister in Ciudad Trujillo, ordered five gross of military buttons in July 1934 while planning to fly in and seize the presidency with Trujillo's backing. Doctors in the newly Haitian health service were already selling government medicine privately.

Comparison with 1804 was unavoidable and it did not hold. The Haiti of 1804 was ruined and shunned. The Haiti of 1934 was solvent, built up and treated politely by its neighbours, and it had defeated nobody, since the occupiers went home undefeated. Power this time sat with the light skinned elite. Several questions were left standing. The national bank was owned in New York, which no nationalist could tolerate indefinitely. The Garde had a Black commandant, mostly light skinned officers and overwhelmingly Black rank and file, plus a new presidential guard whose commander told Calixte that requests to the president should come through him first. The departing occupation took away a payroll of seven hundred thousand dollars, a tenth of the national budget, and the country's only brewery shut down and spent the next forty years making ice. In November Rafael Trujillo arrived on a state visit with officers carrying submachine guns and offered Vincent the use of his navy.

Vincent's chief business in 1935 was staying in office past May 1936. He told Trujillo the plan: dissolve the legislature, rewrite the constitution, put it to a plebiscite, then elect a legislature of reliable men. The trial run was the Banque. City Bank was willing to sell its Haitian operation for a million dollars and the Senate refused to pass the purchase. Vincent held a plebiscite in February 1935, carried it 454,357 to 1,172, and moved exclusive control of economic policy into the palace. He closed the sale, then removed eleven senators including Price-Mars, Pradel and Pierre Hudicourt, explaining that opposing him placed them in rebellion against the popular will. On 2 June 1935 a new constitution passed the same way. It let the president dissolve the legislature and rule by decree, ended the separation of powers, made the executive the sole authority of the state, and by a single article gave Sténio Vincent a second term from 15 May 1936. The British minister called the referendum more of a farce than most.