Logtown and After

With horror in their eyes 30 U. S. refugees from Puerto Cabezas on the east coast of Nicaragua arrived at New Orleans last week aboard the Standard Fruit & Steamship Co.'s S. S. Cefalu. They brought with them the bodies of two of nine U. S. citizens killed by bandit fol- lowers of Rebel Augusto Sandino. The composite story they told of last fortnight's slaughter was as follows:

Early one morning a clerk in the commissary at Logtown--tiny lumber settle-ment 70 miles inland from Puerto Cabezas --spied the attacking force coming out of the steamy jungle. He jerked off the telephone receiver, screamed "Help! Help!" to the operator at Wawa Junction on the narrow gauge railroad that runs to the coast. Then he fled. Yelling "Viva Sandino," the bandits fell savagely upon Logtown. Under a breadfruit tree they killed John Phelps, timber inspector for Standard Fruit's logging interests. They cut his body to bits. They threw Joseph Luther Pennington, another Standard Fruit Lumberman, into a river, peppered him to death with shots. Back in the logging camp they woke up Ripley Davis, planter, to murder him in cold blood, cut off his head and stick it on a fence post. Then they sacked the commissary.

The Wawa Junction telephone operator who had heard over the wire the mortal outcries at Logtown, called Puerto Cabezas for help. Out along the narrow-gauge sped U. S. Marine Captain Harlen Pefley, William Sesler, an inspector for the Standard Co. and a handful of Nicaraguan National Guardsmen. Near Logtown they were ambushed, Capt. Pefley was shot dead, Sesler mortally wounded.

The bandit alarm spread through the Standard Company's fruit plantations about Logtown. At Moss Farm, U. S. overseers and their assistants gathered to catch a company train down the narrow-gauge to safety. Before they knew it, the marauders were upon them. Overseers John Humphreys Bryan, Percy Davis. Hubert Ogelvie Wilson and William Bond Jr., all Standard employes, were butchered, their heads hacked off. Wounded. James Lloyd dived into a ditch, feigned dead until the bandits left. Cathey Wilson escaped by jumping into the Wawa River, hiding two days in the jungle.

Total fatalities: U. S. citizens, 9; other foreigners, 8.

Puerto Cabezas, with its 300 U. S. residents, was panic-stricken at the news of the Logtown raid. Next came news that Sandino's bandits had fired Gracias a Dios, 60 mi. north along the Mosquito Coast. Puerto Cabezas knew it would be next. Women and children crowded aboard the Cefalu. In the harbor civilians armed themselves for the town's defense. The night was wild with rumor. Welcome indeed were the lights of the U. S. gunboat Asheville steaming in with a detachment of Marines. These were gingerly put ashore, thereby relieving a slim force of native Guardsmen who went scurrying off into the bush on a bandit chase.

When the big new cruiser Memphis arrived, the Asheville moved up to Gracias a Dios. Down the coast at Bluefields arrived the U. S. gunboat Sacramento; from Panama hurried the Rochester, flagship of the Special Service Squadron. But what U. S. citizens along the Nicaraguan coast could not understand was why these war vessels, as on former occasions of murder and insurrection, did not immediately debark their fighting forces and plunge them into the jungle to exact eye-for-an-eye justice.

An answer to Marine inaction was being formulated in Washington by Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson. The Hoover Administration was deciding to underplay rather than overplay its military strength in Central America. Five days after the slaughter of the nine U. S. citi- zens, Secretary Stimson bluntly instructed U. S. diplomats and consular agents in Nicaragua as follows:

"You will advise American citizens that this Government cannot undertake general protection of Americans throughout that country with American forces. To do so would lead to difficulties and commitments which this Government does not propose to undertake. The Department recommends to all Americans who do not feel secure ... to withdraw from the country or at least to coast towns whence they can be protected or evacuated. Those who remain do so at their own risk and must not expect American forces to be sent inland to their aid."

Thus was modified the Coolidge policy of protecting U. S. citizens and their property by force of arms wherever under the sun they happened to be. Last February the Hoover Administration announced its intention to withdraw all U. S. Marines from Nicaragua by Jan. 1, and to leave the Marine-trained native guard to police the country. The murders at Logtown raised for President Hoover the acute question of whether the U. S. would now reverse its withdrawal program, go deeper into Nicaragua and avenge the outrages with more blood, or whether it would get on out. Mindful of the insistent clamor in the Senate that Nicaragua be left to the Nicaraguans, Mr. Hoover decided to get on out.

Aside from the civic principle involved, President Hoover has long felt that military occupation of Nicaragua damaged U. S. prestige in the rest of Latin America and created sales resistance to U. S. trade. To win new South American markets, he concluded to sacrifice the G. 0. P. tradition of protection for U. S. Nationals and their property in Central America.

Precipitated as it was by the slaughter at Logtown, the announcement of President Hoover's new policy shocked and hor- rified many a U. S. patriot and politician. Secretary Stimson was accused of "running up the white flag," of retreating under fire, of deserting U. S. Nationals at the point of death. The criticism was more against the handling than against the substance of the new policy. No official word of regret for the Logtown butchery was uttered. Complaint was also made that U. S. Nationals had not been given proper notice to secure themselves and their interests against depredation. Another angle of critical attack involved the Monroe Doctrine and the supposed duty of the U. S. thereunder to protect European as well as its own Nationals in Latin America. U. S. jingoes predicted that Britain would send warships to guard her people in Nicaragua the instant the U. S. withdrew, Monroe Doctrine or no Monroe Doctrine. Why, asked others, did Mr. Stimson contradict himself by holding back Marines with one hand and pushing forward gunboats and cruisers with the other?

Secretary Stimson was deeply pained by the outcry against him. He had not meant to offend national pride, but he did want to get the U. S. Marines out of the jungles of Nicaragua. His survey and report on Nicaragua for President Coolidge in 1927, while calling for protection of U. S. citizens and property, called also for the Marines' withdrawal when the country should be rehabilitated. Now he explained: Nicaragua was a "special case"; the principle of U. S. protection for U. S. interests had not been abandoned, but the Sandino bandits were no better than Mohawk Indians in Colonial times* last fortnight's butchery could not be compared to the civil war of 1926 when two regular armies were in the field and the Marines were used to guard neutral zones for the protection of foreigners. The Monroe Doctrine had nothing to do with the case. Asserting, as he has so often had to assert, that he had been "misunderstood and mis- interpreted," Secretary Stimson issued a public statement. Excerpts:

"The problem before the Government today is not a problem of the protection of its citizens from a war but from murder and assassination. . . . We have a situation where small groups of confessed outlaws are making their way through the jungle with the avowed intention of murdering and pillaging. The terrain is one of the thickest jungles in the world, a region where it would be almost impossible for regular troops to operate. ... In 1926 there was no Nicaraguan constabulary. . . . [Now] that force has been raised from 1,850 to 2,100. . . . The most effective way to protect American and foreign civilians is to give them warning of the danger and an opportunity to escape. . . . It is a problem with which the sovereign Government of Nicaragua is primarily concerned and a problem which it is the right and duty of that Government to solve. . . ."

Hardest hit by Nicaraguan banditry and the new Hoover policy was Standard Fruit & Steamship Co. of New Orleans. Controlled by the Brothers Vaccaro, Standard Fruit has a $13,000,000 investment in northeastern Nicaragua, including 180,000 acres of banana and timber land and 65 mi. of railroad. Seven of its employes had been murdered. Fifty thousand "stems" (bunches) of bananas were rotting for lack of transportation. Inland plantations were paralyzed. Activities at Puerto Cabezas were suspended. Vainly in Washington did William Cyprien Dufour, Standard Fruit's attorney, plead for military protection in land. Washington Irving Moss, Standard's chairman, telegraphed urgently to the White House from New Orleans. When Secretary Stimson announced withdrawal, Standard officials in New Orleans expressed "profound disappointment," predicted that Nicaraguan bandits would now dare greater depredations.

An observer of last week's developments who was quite as intensely interested as the Standard Fruit men, was Boston's Victor Macomber Cutter, president of far-flung United Fruit Co. With $1 26.000,000 invested in Central American tropics, with 1.500 mi. of railroad, with 115 "Great White Fleet" ships plying the seas, with nearly 3,000,000 acres of unimproved land, Mr. Cutter had reason to wonder what effect the new Hoover policy of non-pro- tection would have throughout Central America. He was less concerned about Nicaragua where United Fruit's holdings are smallest (some 10,000 acres in bananas on the southeast coast near Bluefields), than he was about such countries as Honduras with 95,300 acres in banana cultiva- tion, Guatemala with 21,442 acres, Costa Rica with 27,228 acres in Cacao. Though the United Fruit had exercised its own form of diplomacy in these countries when civil trouble arose, it was always a com- forting thought to Mr. Cutter to know that U. S. Marines would come if needed. Now would there be no more Marines?

United Fruit did not have to wait long for its answer. Exactly one week after the Logtown outrage--over the weekend, as is customary in Latin America--civil war suddenly erupted in Honduras just north of Nicaragua against the government of President Vincente Mejia Colindres. Rebel forces under Generals Diaz and Ferrera fell upon the north coast towns of Tela, Progreso and Ceiba, were repulsed by loyal troops, seized fruit company locomotives, cars, tracks. Standard Fruit (Honduras holdings: 164,000 acres in bananas; 250 mi. of railroad) and United Fruit ordered its ships to stand by at the ports to take off U. S. refugees.

Heaviest U. S. investments ($70,000,000) are in Honduras.* Besides the fruit companies, Tropical Timber Co., New York & Honduran Rosario Mining Co., West End Opetceca Mining Co., U. S. Continental Mines Co., Copper Consolidated and American Chicle Co. are extensive owners and operators in the country. Secretary Stimson quickly differentiated between "banditry" in Nicaragua and "revolution" in Honduras. He conferred with the Navy Department, had three big fast cruisers (Memphis, Marblehead and Trenton) despatched to Honduran ports to protect U. S. life and property. In the Navy orders, however, were specific instructions that U. S. forces should guard only the coast towns, should not venture inland.

Assured of cruisers, United Fruit, from its Boston headquarters, announced that no U. S. lives or property were so far endangered by the fighting in Honduras. While hecklers charged that the revolt was directly connected with the withdrawal order for Nicaragua, Secretary Stimson was advised by U. S. Minister Lay at Tegucigalpa that the uprising had no large political backing, would soon "fizzle out."

*President Hoover likened them to the Iroquois.

*Other U. S. investments in Central America: Guatemala $69,000,000; Salvador, $29,000,000; Costa Rica, $22,000,000; Nicaragua, $19,000,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.