COSTLY POSSESSIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 61, 9 September 1937, Page 9

COSTLY POSSESSIONS

THE U.S. OVERSEAS

i ADMINISTRATIVE WEAKNESS

•'• (From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YOEK, August 18. Visitors to New York often comment yon the large proportion of non-Aneri-Klan negroes at work on the docks. Dthey are Puerto Ricans, o.£ whom there are about 200,000 in the city, free to cuime and go at will, as.they are Americn'vi citizens since the Spanish-Ameri-ca \i War. Critics generally agree that Pl^rto Rico is more of a liability than an, asset. Customs and .internal revenue are retained there, a condition afl'iplying to no other American territovjf• Income and inheritance taxes do noi; apply.' Under the New Deal, 30,(ip0,000 dollars have been spent in Pu^pto Rico, where at one time it was estimated that' three-fourths of the popitilation were on relief. TJiis Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, are pne of Uncle Sam's war. babies, puraiiased at a fancy price hi 1917 for fear "that Germany might teize and use thenu' as a base for attacking the Panaitna Canal. The population, declininig for a century, is descended from slave(3» brought there in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The islands were named by Cfysristopher Columbus, who saw so many islets on the horizon that he despahied of finding a saint's name for each. o,f them. So he named them after St. Uappla and her Eleven Thousand Virginji. Women outnumber men, and prefer Mot to be married, believing they have a,,g\ceater hold over their men, as, if not \Vell treated, they can desert them. As a consequence, more than half £h»2' births on the islands are illegitiiasite. Denmark, which owned the Vir;j:Ui Islands for three centuries, sold thflifi to the United States for 25,000,00Q : dollars, or three and a half times thij" price paid for Alaska. President Hod per, after visiting the group, remarked that the United States had acquired ' "an effective poorhouse." Colonelj' Theodore Roosevelt, the younger, :who resigned from the post of Governor of the Philippines when the Democrats were elected to power in 1932, rq turned home convinced that, in withdrawing from the Philippines, the United States had left them to the mercy of Japan. He believed that the problet n would have been solved by the graiit of dominion status. "I canndt conceive of the United States having a consistent long-range colonial policy," he said recently. "Being a republic, and being on the whole parocl lially-minded, we will tend to fit our policies in our empire to our own internal political opinions. They will be judged by our legislators according to tii eir influence on votes in the United 4,'tates, and ,each political change may' (bring a change in leadership and policies. We will persist, too, in thinking of! all peoples, whose ethnological, sociaft cultural, and environmental backgii ound is totally different from ours, in (terms of the community life where we • live."