Injured Innocence

When Col. Lindbergh garlanded the Caribbean with Good Will, he especially expected and especially received a felicitous reception in Puerto Rico, the brick-shaped, easternmost member of the Greater Antilles. There he landed among fellow countrymen. Puerto Ricans have been, by act of Congress in 1917 or by act of God (birth) since then, citizens of the U. S. A.

Nevertheless, an outstanding episode during the Lindbergh visit occurred when the visitor's swart compatriots made him the bearer of a concurrent resolution of their Legislature, addressed to President Coolidge, asking that Puerto Rico be separated from the U. S., as an independent State, so that its people should be "Americans" no longer. The reason given was that a "grave economic situation" existed. There were jobs for only one in three of Puerto Rico's 1,250,000 inhabitants and this, charged the native politicos, was the fault of the U. S.

Col. Lindbergh, punctual messenger, delivered the resolution when he reached Washington. President Coolidge also received a cablegram from President Antonio Barcelo of the Porto Rican Senate and Speaker Jose Toussoto of the Puerto Rican House, confirming the resolution's import. Disappointed, hurt, President Coolidge delayed answering until last fortnight, when he wrote a long letter to Horace Mann Towner, the onetime (1911-23) Congressman from Iowa whom President Harding made Governor of Porto Rico five years ago.

Perceiving that what President Coolidge had written would not please Puerto Ricans, Governor Towner withheld publication of this letter until after the conclusion of festivities held last week on the 25th anniversary of the University of Puerto Rico.

When the letter came out, President Coolidge was revealed as a champion of injured innocence, for he frankly pointed to the incomparably "considerate" treatment Puerto Rico had enjoyed from the U. S. and imputed ingratitude to critics of that treatment.

It was a long, long letter. It harked back to the Treaty of Paris in 1899, under which Puerto Rico came from Spain to the U. S. It reminded Puerto Ricans that the U. S. never promised to make the island an independent state. It reminded Puerto Ricans what Puerto Ricans were like 30 years ago in the unpleasant language of a Puerto Rican (Dr. Cayetano Coll y Teste) who wrote in 1897:

"Only the laborer, the son of our fields, one of the most unfortunate beings in the world, with a pale face, bare feet, lean body, ragged clothing and feverish look, walks indifferently, with the shadows of ignorance in his eyes, dreaming of the cockfights, the shuffle of the cards or the prize in the provincial lottery. No, it is not possible that the tropical zone produces such organic anemia; this lethargy of body and soul is the offspring of moral and physical vices that drag down the spirit and lead our peasants to such a state of social degradation. In the miserable cabin, hung on a peak like a swallow's nest, this unhappy little creature comes into the world; when it opens its eyes to the light of reason it does not hear the village bell reminding him to lift his soul to the Divine One and render homage to the Creator of worlds; he hears only the hoarse cry of the cock crowing in the early morning, and then he longs for the coming of Sunday to witness the strife and knavery of the cockfights. When a man, he takes up with the first woman to be found in the neighborhood and makes her his mistress to gratify his amorous lusts. In the wretched tavern the food he finds is only the putrid salt meat, codfish filled with rotten red spots, and India rice, and the man who harvests the best coffee in the world, who helps to gather into the troughs the sweetest grains of nature and takes to pasture in the fields and meadows the beautiful calves, cannot raise to his lips the bit of meat, because the municipal tax places it out of his reach and almost duplicates the price of the tainted codfish; coffee becomes to him an article of luxury through its high price, and of sugar he can only taste that filled with molasses and impurities. . . ."

President Coolidge's letter then described the swift coming of order, justice, health and light taxes under the U. S. military occupation. Next came the civil government, then citizenship and the present organic laws, under which Puerto Ricans enjoy greater liberty--at least in fiscal matters--than any other State or Territory. The obvious benefits to Puerto Rico of U. S. tariff protection were the burden of the last part of the letter, and President Coolidge said:

"There is a feeling . . . that the United States is entitled to a good name in its dealings with Puerto Rico. . . . Perhaps nowhere else has progress been so marked and so apparent as in Puerto Rico. We are certainly entitled to a large part of the credit for this situation."

Perhaps what annoyed Puerto Ricans most--for, as Governor Towner had anticipated, they were annoyed--was this frankly patronizing conclusion:

"There is no disposition in America, and certainly not on my part, to discourage any reasonable aspiration of the people of Puerto Rico. The island has so improved and its people have so progressed in the last generation as to justify high hopes for the future. . . ."

Such are the uses of charity that, once raised up, the patient spurns the hand that healed him. President Barcelo of the Puerto Rican Senate and Speaker Jose Toussoto of the Puerto Rican House proclaimed that President Coolidge's picture of Puerto Rican inferiority would "sweep the island" for their party in next autumn's election.

With quaint impropriety, they called President Coolidge a "thundering Jupiter." They promised to write long answers to "Jupiter's" long reprimand.