War
Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts
Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, Harvard
Medical School, joined the newly formed Rockefeller Anemia Commission to set up
a research laboratory in San Juan Presbyterian Hospital. Shortly after his
arrival in San Juan, on the night of November 10, 1931, Rhoads got drunk at a
party. He emerged to find his car stripped and the tires flat. When he returned
to his lab that night, in a foul mood and still drunk, he scrawled a note to a
friend named Fred Stewart, who was a medical researcher in Boston:
I can get a damn fine job here
and I am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Puerto Ricans –
they are beyond a doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish
race of men to inhabit this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same
island with them. They are even lower than the Italians. What the island needs
is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate
the entire population. It might not be livable. I have done my best to further
the process of their extermination by killing off eight and transplanting
cancer into several more… All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture
of the unfortunate subjects.
The letter was discovered and
created an uproar. La Democracia and El Mundo published a photograph of
Rhoads’s letter. Copies were sent to the governor of Puerto Rico, the League of
Nations, the Pan-American Union, the American Civil Liberties Union,
newspapers, foreign embassies, and the Vatican. They were offered as evidence of
systemic and lethal US racism toward Puerto Ricans.
Rhoads was never indicted and
suffered no professional consequences for his actions. During WWII, he was
commissioned as a colonel and assigned as chief of medicine in the Chemical
Weapons Division of the US Army. It positioned him as a talented biological
warrior and created a niche for him in US medical and military circles. In
1949, Rhoads was featured on the cover of the June 27 issue of Time magazine.
Puerto Ricans, to their astonishment, realized that exterminating eight Puerto
Ricans and transplanting cancer into several more had been an excellent career
mover for Rhoads.
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