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Exit the Marines. There was much in the occupation to trouble the U.S. conscience. Puppet Presidents, all of the elite class, were shuttled in & out. With almost embarrassing speed, the U.S. gave Haiti a new constitution, masterminded by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt; the document removed the defiant clause of all 16 previous Haitian constitutions forbidding foreigners to own land. Officers from the U.S. South ("they know how to handle the blacks, you know") humiliated highbred Haitians.
But the Marines effectively ended the cycle of revolutions, disarmed rebels and bandits in mountain warfare (the death toll: 1,500 Haitians), restored peasants to the land, improved health and sanitation, built roads. Setting up a small gendarmerie, they lifted from Haiti the crushing burden of an army that once had 6,500 general and staff officers. They trained civil servants, building a nucleus of Haitians competent to run the machinery of government. Most important, they set up rural schools, where peasants could begin to get the education they needed to compete with the elite. Such was the reputation of the Americans for efficiency that the surname of Dr. W. W. Cumberland, customs receiver, became an accepted Creole word meaning shortcut.*
With the Good Neighbor policy, occupation became obsolete. In 1934, Roosevelt visited Port-au-Prince, ordered the Marines to run down the U.S. flag and pull out. For Haiti, it was the end of one era, the opening of another.
Under the Citadel. When the marines were first splashing ashore at Port-au-Prince in 1915, Paul Eugene Magloire had just turned eight years old. His birthplace was Quartier-Morin, a few miles southeast of Cap-Haitien. His father was Eugene Magloire, a peasant so energetic that he rose to be one of the many generals then running Haiti's army. The general was killed in a shooting accident in 1908, and the infant Paul was brought up by two brothers in Cap-Haitien. The Brothers of Christian Instruction gave him a Catholic education, stressing French and Latin, while in his family's fields he learned the peasant's ways and Creole tongue. Cap-Haitien, "Paris of the New World" under the French but since burned and sacked a dozen times, gave him a sense of past glory and present despair.
Magloire got a degree in arts and letters from the National School in Port-au-Prince and taught school for a year, but soon concluded that he could not live on a teacher's pay. He transferred his ambitions to the military, and graduated from a Marine-supervised gendarmerie training school. Soon Magloire's political education began.