1922–1930: (The 1922 Loan, Farnham’s Expensive Luxury, and the Bonanza That Never Was): Seven years after American assurance of a quick solution, the long-st…

1922–1930: (The 1922 Loan, Farnham’s Expensive Luxury, and the Bonanza That Never Was): Seven years after American assurance of a quick solution, the long-stalemated tangled skein of Haitian finance had been finally unraveled. With Borno’s cooperation, $16 million in Haitian bonds were floated in 1922 by the National City Bank at a record 96.50; all French loans worth $21.4 million in 1915 francs were refunded for $6.04 million, leaving $10 million working capital for the government. That albatross the Chemin de Fer National was loosened from the government’s neck, yet at a time when the company was making only $85,000 a year, Roger Farnham, its absentee president and subsequent receiver, was getting $25,000 a year while his New York legal friends Sullivan and Cromwell drew down a $20,000 annual retainer — in the verdict of economist Paul H. Douglas, later a U.S. senator, Mr. Farnham was an expensive luxury for the Haitian peasants to support. Many hopes of the early occupation had stemmed from the belief that Haiti held hidden resources that American capital might quickly exploit — the truth, as disclosed by U.S. geological surveys, was that Haiti had little or nothing except bauxite at Miragoâne and marginal copper deposits. Agriculture was the country’s only resource, yet plantation agriculture based on large-scale foreign land acquisition would outrage national feelings and could not be safely backed by investors in the absence of good titles. Peasants forcibly resisted occupation projects to conduct a cadastral survey bound to threaten tiny immemorial freeholds — in 1926, after Marine aviators had made extensive aerial photographic coverage for such a survey, the building housing the negatives mysteriously burned down. By 1930, despite attempts to diversify into cotton, castor beans, and pineapple, with sugar and sisal significant but failing, Haiti still depended on coffee as its money crop. While U.S. investment waxed almost fourfold from $4 million in 1913 to over $14 million in 1930, it had nonetheless mounted far faster in neighboring unoccupied countries during the same time, refuting dollar-diplomacy theories as to American intervention.