The last American flag comes down at Cap Haitien

The occupation had begun in 1915, ostensibly to collect loans and restore civil order after five presidents in four years were assassinated or driven out, and had revealed its imperial character through control of the customs houses, institutional racism and the revival of the corvee. The caco guerrilla movement under Charlemagne Peralte was crushed in 1919 and its leaders executed. At Cap Haitien the American flag was lowered and the blue and red Haitian flag hoisted. Eleven months after his New Year message Vincent validated his nationalist credentials by holding a state funeral in the same city for Peralte. The book treats both ceremonies as political theatre that could not conceal the splits inside the nationalist movement, and dates the beginning of the postoccupation conflict to this moment. Nineteen thirty-four therefore closes one struggle and opens another that runs to 1957.

American troops had been in Haiti since 1915, and Jackson traces the black American response through the whole period, from Du Bois writing that the country was more civilised than Texas, through the protest of 1920 against the occupation, to the Pan-African Congress that Du Bois presided over in Paris in 1919. The withdrawal did not end the literary consequences. Langston Hughes had described the country for New Masses in 1931 as a small tropical place of mountains and sea, marines, mulatto politicians and a world of black people without shoes, while calling the Citadel a splendid monument to the genius of a black king, and his poem of 1932 argued that conditions would be the same for black people everywhere until black workers united. The occupation also produced a wave of sensationalist American fiction and travel writing.

Sténio Vincent named Tuesday 21 August 1934 the day of the second independence. Nobody waited for it. The balls started on the 18th at the Cercle Bellevue, carried on the next night at the Port-au-Princien, and the country went into days of bamboche. At midnight on the 20th a gun sounded from Fort National and the cheering ran from Bel Air to Morne l'Hôpital. In the morning monsignors Conan and Le Gouaze sang a Te Deum where the clergy stood white and the altar boys Black. Then the president drove through the city scattering freshly printed gourde notes into the crowd, laid wreaths at the statues of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines, and ran up the colours himself at the barracks. At the review that followed, a new Garde Présidentielle appeared under Major Durcé Armand, a relative of the president. Colonel Calixte led the officers in an oath of personal loyalty to Vincent. The oath the Americans wrote had bound them to the constitution.

The last United States marines sailed from Haiti on 14 August 1934, closing nineteen years of military occupation. The Americans had built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools, piped clean water into Port-au-Prince and strung telegraph line between the main towns. They had also killed more than two thousand Haitians putting down the Caco rebellion, revived forced labour through the corvée, shut the Black majority out of political life, and left the mulatto elite holding the economy more securely than they had found it. The institution that mattered most was the national guard, trained and armed by the United States. Every strongman of the next half century reached for it first. No part of the political system had been reformed, and the poverty produced by the French indemnity and a century of bad government was untouched. Two organisations founded that same year, the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale and the Haitian Communist Party, are the better measure of what came out of 1934.