Plantation schemes undercut the chiefs that empire installed

From the end of the 1930s colonial administrations in Africa began pushing plantation farming on the North American model, planned in offices and imposed on rural districts. The intervention was heavy handed and it produced resentment in the countryside that lasted for decades. It also broke something political. British rule across much of Africa worked through indirect rule, which governed villages by way of chiefs recognised, paid and sometimes invented by the colonial power. Agricultural planners dealt with land, labour and quotas themselves and went around those chiefs. The authority of men who already carried the stigma of collaboration drained away, since Africans in many walks of life had long treated the whole arrangement as irrelevant to them. Colonial power was dismantling its own local scaffolding while still leaning on it. What remained was a rural population with fresh grievances and a set of traditional authorities with no credit left to spend, which cleared the ground for a generation of nationalist leaders who owed those authorities nothing.

The Service Technique de l'Agriculture et de l'Enseignement Professionnel was organised in April 1923 and became the most far reaching American programme in Haiti. Its declared functions were agricultural training, research, farm schools, advice to adult farmers, animal clinics, field experiments and vocational instruction. Russell's larger aim was to raise from the peasantry a class of Black smallholders with schooling, capital and access to markets. The record is real. Experimental stations, a cattle breeding station at Hinche, the agricultural school at Damien that one historian called a miniature Tuskegee, demonstration farms, Plantation Dauphin at Fort Liberte with the largest sisal acreage in the world, tobacco brought back as a money crop, national soil surveys, and veterinary clinics that treated more than a hundred thousand animals. The hostility it drew ran far beyond agronomy. Since 1804 the oligarchy's position had rested on the peasantry having no schooling, no capital and no market. A programme that undid any one of those undid the oligarchy, and its members understood this faster than the Americans did.

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.

When the Americans landed, Haiti carried hookworm, tuberculosis, filariasis, leprosy, malignant malaria, yaws, syphilis, smallpox, typhoid and a range of intestinal diseases. Captain Kent Melhorn, the naval officer put in charge of public health, described a country full of filth and sickness in which the few buildings called hospitals were shacks where the sick were brought to die. The Service de Santé Publique built and ran eleven modern hospitals employing 2,222 people, all but two percent of them Haitian, along with 147 rural and travelling clinics. Four further hospitals included the United States naval hospital in the capital, a building that later became the Hotel Oloffson and the setting of Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. In 1929 the service recorded 1,341,596 consultations and treatments, and nearly half of Haiti's 159 physicians worked for it. From 1926 a Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed the occupation to reorganise the national medical school, which with a new dispensers' school let Haiti train doctors and technicians to current standards. The British minister, who praised little else, called the medical work a credit to the profession.