1923–1930: (The Service Technique: The Miniature Tuskegee, Plantation Dauphin, and the Noir Yeomanry That Terrified the Elite): The most far-reaching and con…

1923–1930: (The Service Technique: The Miniature Tuskegee, Plantation Dauphin, and the Noir Yeomanry That Terrified the Elite): The most far-reaching and controversial of American programs was the Service Technique de l’Agriculture et de l’Enseignement Professionnel, organized in April 1923. Its functions, as stated by Russell, were higher agricultural education for the training of experts, research workers, teachers of farm schools, and farm advisers, along with rural farm schools, advice to adult farmers, direct aid through animal clinics and demonstrations, experiments in all phases of agricultural activity, and vocational industrial education. In more general terms, the goal the Service Technique set itself was creation from among the peasants of a class of noir yeomanry — obviously a matter of extreme social sensitivity for the elite. Its undeniable achievements included agricultural experimental stations, a cattle breeding station at Hinche, the school of agriculture at Damien — which Rotberg called a miniature Tuskegee — demonstration farms and extension service, Plantation Dauphin at Fort Liberté which for years was the world’s largest sisal acreage, the reintroduction of tobacco as a money crop, nationwide soil and resources surveys, and veterinary clinics that healed more than 100,000 sick beasts. That so many good intentions and good works should have ignited such hostility, so deepened divisions, and in the end left so little behind was not least among the tragedies of intervention — and of Haiti. The Service Technique’s ambition to create a noir yeomanry — an educated, landowning peasant class capable of economic self-sufficiency — struck at the structural foundation of the elite’s power: since 1804, the oligarchy’s dominance had rested on the peasantry’s exclusion from education, capital, and market access, and any program that threatened to break that exclusion threatened to break the elite itself, which explains why a program ostensibly devoted to agricultural improvement provoked a reaction indistinguishable from that which greeted the corvée — the elite recognized in the American agronomist the same structural threat that the peasant had recognized in the American gendarme.