Puerto Rico was densely populated—that’s one reason why hookworm spread so easily. But it wasn’t any more so in 1930 than New Jersey was. Still, the fingers pointed and heads shook. The governor believed that restricting births “among the lower and more ignorant elements of the population” was “the only salvation for the Island.”33 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt joked grimly to an adviser—at least, I think and fervently hope he was joking—that “the only solution is to use the methods which Hitler used effectively.”34
“It is all very simple and painless,” he continued. “You have people pass through a narrow passage and then there is a brrrrr of an electrical apparatus. They stay there for twenty seconds and from then on they are sterile.”
Depression, disease, accusations of overpopulation—this was the state of affairs when another mainland doctor arrived: Cornelius Packard Rhoads, “Dusty” to his friends. Rhoads had trained at Harvard (he overlapped briefly with Albizu) and then went to work for the Rockefeller Institute in San Juan as part of its global fight against hookworm. It was a bitter irony that Puerto Rico, a pioneer of deworming, was now a target in that hookworm campaign. But the island still suffered badly from anemia, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division hoped that experimental treatments might be tried.35
Cornelius P. Rhoads was a far cry from Bailey K. Ashford. Whereas Ashford collaborated easily, including with Puerto Ricans, Rhoads was testier. He was an “outspoken,36 frequently blunt” man, wrote The New York Times, with “hawk-like eyes that burn bright blue through round steel-framed spectacles.” “A man of brusque manners and few words” is how one Puerto Rican colleague described him.37
His methods differed from Ashford’s, too. Ashford had always been cautious about medical experiments. The first time he administered a deworming pill, he stayed up all night making “nervous half-hour visits” until he saw that his patient was unharmed.38 Rhoads, by contrast, appeared to regard Puerto Rico as an island-size laboratory. He saw the empire much as Daniel Burnham had: a place to try out ideas while facing few consequences.
Rhoads made the most of his carte blanche. He refused treatment to some of his anemia patients so he could compare their progress with treated patients.39 He tried to induce anemia in others (he referred to them as “experimental ‘animals’”) by restricting their diets.40 “If they don’t develop something they certainly have the constitutions of oxen,” he remarked.
Even with this extraordinary freedom, Rhoads wearied of Puerto Rico. Five months into his stay, he took his car to a party and, when he came out to get it, found it had been stripped. Days later, he wrote a letter to a colleague in Boston. It started off chattily enough, though with an air of petulance:
Dear Ferdie:41
The more I think about the Larry Smith appointment the more disgusted I get. Have you heard any reason advanced for it? It certainly is odd that a man out with the entire Boston group, fired by Wallach and as far as I know, absolutely devoid of any scientific reputation, should be given the place.
Then it took a turn:
I can get a damn fine job here and am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans—they are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far. The matter of consideration for the patients’ welfare plays no role here—in fact, all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.
Do let me know if you hear any more news.
Sincerely, Dusty
Clandestine villainy,42 an incriminating letter—it was straight out of a nineteenth-century novel. In another novelistic twist, Rhoads composed his letter at the desk of a hospital stenographer and then accidentally left it there. It circulated swiftly among the Puerto Rican staff. A lab assistant, Luis Baldoni, sent the purloined letter to his home in Utuado, a four-hour drive away.
Rhoads blanched. He drove out to Utuado in an unsuccessful attempt to intercept Baldoni. Back at the hospital, he apologized emotionally to the staff, claiming that the letter was written “in a moment of anger” and pointing out that he hadn’t actually sent it.43 “I have a high notion of Puerto Ricans,” he explained. He pressed a “loan” on Baldoni. And then he left for New York, never to return.
Rhoads surely hoped that his apology and hasty exit would mark the end of things—what happens in San Juan stays in San Juan. It very well might have ended there, too. Except that Baldoni still had the letter, and he gave it to a man who knew what to do with it.44
He gave it to Pedro Albizu Campos.
*
Albizu had changed since the First World War. After failing to get to the Paris Peace Conference, he’d finished his law degree at Harvard. But his enthusiasm for the United States had flagged. The dream of Puerto Ricans in 1898 had been that the island could become a prosperous state, on an equal footing with those of the mainland. By 1930, that dream had revealed itself to be a fantasy. Wilsonianism had yielded no change in status, poverty hadn’t budged, and mainlanders seemed plainly hostile to their fellow citizens from Puerto Rico.
When Albizu returned to the island, he joined a small political party, the Nationalists. As he saw, for Puerto Rico to flourish, it must be free.
In poverty-racked Puerto Rico, that wasn’t a hard sell. The Liberal Party sought independence, too, and it did well at the polls. The only question was pace. The Liberals, of whom the newspaper editor and rising political star Luis Muñoz Marín was the most able spokesman, sought a managed transition. Albizu and the Nationalists, by contrast, demanded a clean and immediate break.
The disagreement turned, in part, on whether the United States could be trusted. Albizu didn’t think it could, and with Rhoads’s letter in hand, he had his proof. He sent copies everywhere: to all the papers, the League of Nations, the Vatican, the American Civil Liberties Union. A cover letter by one of his colleagues explained that the United States was seeking to exterminate Puerto Ricans just as it had the North American Indians.45
Did Cornelius Rhoads actually kill eight of his patients? The question lives on to this day. Rhoads and his defenders offered multiple and contradictory excuses: he was angry, he was joking, he was drunk. The colonial governor took the matter more seriously. He deemed the letter a “confession of murder” and ordered an investigation.46
That investigation uncovered another letter, which the governor viewed as “even worse than the first.”47 But the government suppressed it, and it has never been found. Thirteen patients did die in the Rockefeller Commission’s study group (it was a hospital, after all), but they weren’t exclusively Rhoads’s patients and a review of their records showed nothing amiss. The most damning evidence presented in the investigation was a claim by Baldoni that Rhoads failed to sterilize his needles, though that was contested. In the end, the prosecutor concluded that Rhoads was “a mental case or unscrupulous person,”48 but not a murderer.
A 2003 investigation by an esteemed bioethicist at Yale, Jay Katz,49 reached a similar conclusion: Rhoads’s behavior was reprehensible, but there was no evidence that he’d killed anyone.
Still, an investigation by a government that destroys incriminating evidence and doesn’t even require the accused to participate can hardly be called fair or thorough. The 2003 inquiry was based, by necessity, on what documents remained. To this day, many Puerto Ricans are convinced that Rhoads was guilty and that the government covered up his crimes.
Many in the 1930s thought so, too. Puerto Ricans had felt the condescension and scorn of mainlanders. They’d heard the talk about “overpopulation.” And now there was this letter—a
killer’s clear confession—and yet no trial. The whole thing seemed to confirm the worst fears about U.S. imperialism. That a doctor would murder his patients out of racial hatred—to many, it seemed plausible.
The Rhoads affair was a turning point in Puerto Rican politics. Before the letter, the Nationalists were an obscure group. After it, they were a force. For centuries Puerto Rico had endured colonial rule with little direct resistance. But now, with disease and poverty ravaging the island, and with what looked like proof of an official desire to exterminate Puerto Ricans, things were different. Albizu’s insistence that independence must be seized, immediately and forcibly, was not so easily dismissed.
Waving the Rhoads letter, Albizu led the Nationalist Party in the 1932 elections. He fared poorly, although the pro-independence Liberals did very well. It was Albizu’s first and only attempt at electoral politics. Later that year, he drafted a constitution for the Republic of Puerto Rico and created a Liberation Army. The “army” didn’t appear to have any weapons—its cadets drilled with wooden replica guns. But they drilled nonetheless.
“Where tyranny is law,50 revolution is order,” Albizu declared.
A bomb went off at the governor’s country estate, though nobody was hurt. Then the chief of insular police, Francis Riggs, found four sticks of dynamite in the garden of the governor’s mansion—only a defective fuse had prevented them from exploding.51
This was just the start. A 1934 sugar workers’ strike nearly paralyzed what remained of the economy. Tellingly, the strikers chose Pedro Albizu Campos as their spokesman. With the strikes, the bombs, the poverty, and Albizu’s men marching in the streets, mainlanders felt the colony slipping from their grasp. “The sit. is getting worse daily,” Riggs wrote to Senator Millard Tydings.52 “Can’t go on much longer!” “Help me!!!!!!” he added at the bottom of the letter. (Five days later: “The situation is getting worse … Chaos and anarchy!!!!”).
“Public order,”53 warned Luis Muñoz Marín, “hangs by a thread.”
Nineteen thirty-five was the year of the bomb: at National City Bank (today known as Citigroup), at post offices, at police stations. They exploded on holidays—New Year’s Day,54 the Fourth of July—or directly after Albizu’s speeches. Nobody was killed and nobody was convicted, but it wasn’t hard to guess who was responsible.
“Some night,55 here, we will rise,” Albizu promised in a radio speech. “There must be placed into the hand of each Puerto Rican a dagger, an arm in order that he may make valid the rights of his country.”
In the same speech, Albizu berated students at the University of Puerto Rico for adopting mainland ways. He called the men effeminate and the women prostitutes. When a group of students organized a protest against Albizu, five nationalists drove to the university. What they intended to do is unclear—the police who intercepted them said they were planning to bomb the campus. Someone started shooting, and the police killed four of them, plus a bystander.
Francis Riggs, the chief of police, hinted at more to come. He promised “non-stop war” against “criminals.”56
“There will be war,”57 Albizu agreed. But it would be “war against the Yankees.”
As Riggs made his way home from Mass one Sunday morning, two nationalists shot and killed him. The police captured the assassins, took them back to the station, and killed them there. The official story is that they were “trying to escape.”
The insurgency continued, with police and nationalists trading fire in the streets. More bombs went off. Luis Baldoni, the lab technician, got into a shoot-out with the police.58 A U.S. congressman requested a contingent of marines to accompany him to Puerto Rico; he promised to “clean up” the “Puerto Rican situation” in a week.59 No troops were forthcoming, but J. Edgar Hoover sent FBI agents to the island to follow Albizu—the start of three decades of continuous surveillance.
To no one’s surprise, Albizu was arrested. He was charged with conspiring to overthrow the government—a charge that guaranteed a federal trial. The U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico, A. Cecil Snyder, described it to Roosevelt as “the most important criminal case ever tried in Puerto Rico.”60 When the jury, which included seven Puerto Ricans, failed to convict, Snyder arranged a second trial the next week, this one with a hand-picked jury containing only two Puerto Ricans.61 It worked. The judge chided Albizu for wasting his Harvard education and sentenced him to ten years in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta.
On Palm Sunday 1937, while Albizu languished in prison, the Liberation Army marched in the streets of Ponce. The marchers carried no weapons, but their opponents did: Ponce’s small police force swelled to five times its usual size as more than a hundred officers arrived carrying rifles, gas bombs, revolvers, clubs, and Thompson submachine guns (“tommy guns”). They surrounded the nationalists on all sides. As the marchers began to move, gunfire erupted,62 and the police let loose a minutes-long fusillade from all directions. Eighteen demonstrators and onlookers died, and two policemen were killed in the cross fire. Probably more than 150 people were wounded.
The governor insisted that the Nationalists had fired first. But an FBI agent reported privately to J. Edgar Hoover that it was a “common fact” that the police were “almost 100 percent to blame.”63 Indeed, an independent investigation, headed by the general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out glaring holes in the government’s story. It concluded that the affair was not an unfortunate mishap, but rather a “massacre.”64
Corpses of bystanders lie in the street after the shooting in Ponce.
Albizu’s birthplace, once known for being “delirious” with enthusiasm for the United States, was now etched in memory as the site of the Ponce Massacre. To this day, it remains the bloodiest shooting by police in U.S. history.
*
Puerto Rico in the 1930s continued to simmer: an attempt to assassinate the judge who sentenced Albizu, an attempt on the governor’s life, more bombs, strikes. But it happened without Albizu, who was sent to Atlanta and would spend most of the rest of his life behind bars.
Things turned out differently for Cornelius Rhoads. News of the scandal had followed him back to the mainland, though in a muted way. The Washington Post reported that Rhoads had written a “jocular letter,”65 which Puerto Rican nationalists had blown out of proportion. Time printed the letter but,66 at the urging of the Rockefellers’ public relations firm, omitted the more disturbing sentences and described the letter as a parody. Touting Rhoads’s research, the magazine predicted that the doctor’s six months on the island would come to be seen as “one of the best things that ever happened to the populace there.”
The coverage surely embarrassed Rhoads, but it didn’t impede him.67 Not only was he never tried, he wasn’t even fired: he continued to work for the Rockefeller Institute. In 1940 he was made director of Memorial Hospital in New York. In 1942 he was elected vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine. Then, with the United States at war, Rhoads was commissioned as a colonel in the army.
The military was an interesting place for a man of his expertise. Ever since Fritz Haber released chlorine gas at Ypres in 1915, the threat of chemical warfare had hung in the air. Roosevelt pledged that the United States wouldn’t be the first to use gas in the Second World War, but the military prepared for a chemical war nonetheless. That meant not only manufacturing poison gas but testing it, too. And the chief of the Chemical Warfare Service’s medical division was Cornelius P. Rhoads.
It was an important post. Though the Chemical Warfare Service ran tests on animals—goats were a favorite—it insisted that all gases and equipment be ultimately tested on humans.68 Those humans were soldiers, recruited with modest inducements such as extra leave time or appeals to patriotism.
They participated in three types of tests. In the drop test, liquid was applied to their skin. In the field test, planes sprayed them from overhead. In the chamber test, sometimes called the “man-break test,” participants were locked in gas chambers and gassed
until they faltered. Those inhaling gas usually had protective gear, but the tests often pushed past the point where that gear functioned. In some cases, that meant days in gas chambers or in the jungle with gas bombs dropping overhead. Participants seeking to leave midway through were threatened with court-martial.
During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men.
These tests were secret. They rarely appeared on service records, and participants were firmly instructed never to speak of them. By and large, the men complied. Although many suffered debilitating aftereffects—cancer, lung disease, eye problems, skin abnormalities, psychological damage, scarred genitals—the extent of the program remained unknown until the 1990s. Some participants told their families only on their deathbeds.
After the revelation of the tests themselves came another revelation: some of the experiments were race based.69 African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were tested to see if they would fare differently than whites against mustard agents.
Beyond the experimental use of Puerto Ricans in racial tests, the Chemical Warfare Service relied on them for field tests at its “jungle” testing site: San José Island off Panama, an entire island for testing chemical weapons. The Puerto Ricans weren’t brought there because of their race per se. They were brought because they were easy to get. The Military Personnel Division refused to send enough men “from the Continental Limits” for the tests but was happy to send Puerto Ricans.70 One GI who participated in the tests on San José Island (and later developed stomach and throat cancer) observed that more than two-thirds of his fellow soldiers had Spanish surnames and couldn’t understand the instructions in English.71
Jay Katz, the Yale bioethicist who made the 2003 study of the Rhoads affair, also took part in a review of the chemical warfare tests. Those experiments, he concluded, ran on the principle of the “cheap availability of human beings,”72 with little thought given to how to minimize harm. The soldiers were “manipulated, exploited, and betrayed.” What happened, in his judgment, was “unconscionable.”
How to Hide an Empire Page 17