1916, July – 1918, January 1: (Corvée and Roads: Butler’s Model T, 470 Miles of Highway, and the Peasant’s Three Days’ Work): Back in 1916, when occupation a…

1916, July – 1918, January 1: (Corvée and Roads: Butler’s Model T, 470 Miles of Highway, and the Peasant’s Three Days’ Work): Back in 1916, when occupation authorities began to think about roads and routes of penetration into Caco fastnesses, a cabinet minister showed the Americans a copy of the Code Rural in which, slumbering since 1863, Geffrard’s corvée lay ready at hand: public highways and communications were to be maintained and repaired by the inhabitants in rotation in each section through which roads passed, with enforcement assigned to the police. Here was one pre-occupation statute Smedley Butler was prepared to enforce. Commencing in July 1916, a nationwide corvée went quickly into effect: peasants nominated by magistrats communaux and chef seksyon were notified by gendarmes to pay a tax or report for three days’ work — as Butler later testified, nobody had any money, so they reported for work. To offset the possibility of abuse, peasants on corvée were to be fed, sheltered, and as work proceeded diverted by bamboches, which the Americans inaccurately described as Voodoo dances. Moreover, as part of the continuing push to get Dartiguenave out of the National Palace and into regions where no president had previously set foot, Butler rattled the Model T presidential touring car out every week to some corvée, where, sharing rations of pois-et-riz and tafya, Dartiguenave would remind the paysan that they were doing this for Haiti and their own good and not as forced labor for the blan. In 1915 only three miles of road usable by automobiles existed outside the towns; when Butler left in March 1918, the Gendarmerie-operated corvée had built or rebuilt 470 miles of highway at a cost of $205 per mile, mostly for local cement for culverts and food for the workers. On January 1, 1918, a through route linking Port-au-Prince and the Cap — 180 miles — was opened by Dartiguenave and Butler in the president’s Ford, which covered the journey, including six stops for receptions, in fourteen hours. Another important route, from Port-au-Prince across the Cul-de-Sac and over Morne-à-Cabrit to Mirebalais and Lascahobas, was opened on February 23, 1918. The corvée — a Haitian law of 1863 revived under American military occupation and enforced by gendarmes whose chain of command led to Washington — embodied the structural paradox that James identified at the heart of every colonial modernization program: the infrastructure that connected the peasantry to the state also connected the state to the instruments of its own subjugation, each mile of road simultaneously a benefit to the population and a route of penetration for the occupying power, the paysan’s three days of unpaid labor producing a highway that served his market garden and the Marine’s armored car in equal measure.