Abstract

Issues and Men

On February 1, 1939, Das Schwarze Korps, the organ of the Black Shirts, charged that the United States authorities are using terrorism and "OGPU methods in Puerto Rico." The article then goes on to tell of the mass murder at Ponce on Palm Sunday, 1937, correctly charging that the police "turned machine-guns on crowds with a cold- bloodedness of gangsters," only it was not crowds but the members of a little independence parade. Nothing constructive is being done to remedy the fundamental conditions, which exist primarily because the United States government has from the beginning of our occupation permitted violations of the law forbidding any corporation to more than 500 acres of land. The island is another illustration of that weakness of administration which is so characteristic of the New Deal and may yet wholly wreck it.