1922–1929: (The Material Achievements of the Russell-Borno Years: Roads, Lighthouses, Telephones, and Pan American Clippers): Seven years after Russell’s arr…

1922–1929: (The Material Achievements of the Russell-Borno Years: Roads, Lighthouses, Telephones, and Pan American Clippers): Seven years after Russell’s arrival, British Minister Edwards assessed the occupation in 1929: what had America done for Haiti in fourteen years — primarily, maintained peace and allowed the peasant to work in safety. To Edwards, little else save overelaborate public buildings and a few roads — not comparable, he sniffed, with those of Jamaica — had been the result. The facts, however, were otherwise. Financed entirely from efficiently managed Haitian revenue — foreign aid was a concept then unknown to the United States and dependencies were expected to pay their own way — the material achievements of the Russell-Borno years were substantial. By 1929, the Travaux Publics, directed by a handful of U.S. Navy civil engineer officers, had built and were maintaining over a thousand miles of all-weather roads suitable for traffic by the 3,000 motor vehicles that had followed Furniss’s original 1913 touring car; there were 210 major bridges and airfields at Port-au-Prince, Gonaïves, Les Cayes, Jacmel, Cap Haïtien, Port-de-Paix, Hinche, Jérémie, St. Marc, and numerous auxiliary landing fields. In 1920 the lighthouses of all Haiti amounted to three kerosene-burning relics at Port-au-Prince and one at the Cap; nine years later there were fifteen automatic acetylene lighthouses, fifty-four buoys, ten harbor lights, and extensive aids to navigation, while at the Cap, Gonaïves, St. Marc, Jérémie, and Les Cayes modern reinforced-concrete docks had replaced aged timber wharves. Russell arranged weekly first-class steamer service on the Panama Line’s New York–Colón run, and in 1929 Pan American clippers from Miami commenced service to seaplane ramps near old Fort St. Clair. About 1912 the French telephone system and telegraph had sputtered into silence; ten years later Port-au-Prince could take pride in the first automatic telephone exchange in any city in Latin America, soon followed by a second such system at the Cap — by 1929 there were 1,250 miles of telephone long lines connecting twenty-six local exchanges. Jacmel’s famous streetlights shone again, as did those of the capital, the Cap, and Gonaïves, and in 1926 Haiti’s first radio station, HHK, went on the air at Port-au-Prince. Ten towns enjoyed potable running water and sixty-four villages had clean wells or springs, eighty-two miles of new irrigation canals had been dug in the Artibonite Valley, and among agricultural reforms were national forests, extensive mahogany and pine reforestation, soil conservation, the introduction of sisal, and the revival of sugar and cotton as significant exports.