1920–1929: (The Garde d’Haïti: The Olympic Rifle Team, the École Militaire, and the Draining of Private Arsenals): None of the occupation’s achievements coul…

1920–1929: (The Garde d’Haïti: The Olympic Rifle Team, the École Militaire, and the Draining of Private Arsenals): None of the occupation’s achievements could have been accomplished without the public order that the Gendarmerie, backed by the Marines, had brought about by 1920. With Marines entirely withdrawn to Port-au-Prince except for a detachment at the Cap, the Gendarmerie — on November 1, 1928, renamed Garde d’Haïti — pursued its nation-building tasks: police, fire, prisons, customs and immigration, emergency communications, lighthouse service, rural medicine, and communal advisership. Enforcing firearms-control laws more drastic than those of the United States seventy years later, the Garde drained Haiti of private arsenals, a healthy condition destined to prevail until the early 1960s. Military marksmanship was raised to professional standards — dramatically underscored to great national pride when a Haitian rifle team, competing in the Olympics for the first time in 1924, tied France for second place. The occupation would later be criticized for allegedly making only perfunctory efforts to train Haitian officers, yet an École Militaire in 1922 was one of Russell’s first projects. While a few candidates got through, the story was not unlike that of Haitian seminarians in France or boursiers at the old Turgeau agricultural school: the elite found military discipline, hard work required of junior officers, and having to serve outside Port-au-Prince too demanding for persons of their class. Nonetheless, among those who stuck it out were officers destined for national distinction — Jules P. André, Démosthènes Calixte, Gustave Laraque, and Franck Lavaud, the last two top shooters of the great 1924 rifle team. By 1929, just under forty percent of the officers were Haitian.