The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, April 7, 1919, Page 11

L . 'y % I oS e A LN e Man to Investigate Porto Rlco Congressman Young of North Dakota to Be One of a Party of Twenty House Members to Study Causes of Colonial Unrest Washington Bureau, Nonpartisan Leader ONGRESSMAN GEORGE M. YOUNG of North Dakota is one of a party of 20 members of the house who have ar- month, in order to discover just what conditions- in that unhappy dependent:y need im- provement. - Except for Rep- resentatlve “Billy” Mason of Illinois, nobody else in the party seems likely to learn anything of in- terest to the public on the journey, unless it be the extent of the federal patronage list down there. Porto Rico is under the American flag, but it belongs to the sugar companies, the coffee trust and the tobacco trust, with a few Span- ish grandees as minority stockholders. It is densely populated, and its people have been undernourished for generations past. That is, all who work on the plantations, in the mills, and in the towns. Governor Arthur Yager is not undernourished, nor are his federal patron- age subordinates, nor the constabulary with which he breaks the annual strike of the sugar workers and the - coffee plantation or tobacco plantation hands. The agents of the American and Spanish corpoerations that draw the wealth .out of the island are able to live well too. But the rest of the folks are hungry all their lives, ‘and they go ragged and unschooled from the time they get big enough to require any clothes. Thirty cents a day used to be a fine wage in Porto Rico. Then an agitator - named Santiago Iglesias, coming from General Weyler’s fine old prison in Ha- vana, landed in"San Juan and started to promote trade unions. The Spanish governor locked him up, just as a Pitts- burg police judge would have done. The American general who took charge of Porto Rico in 1898 let Iglesias go free, and from that day to this he has been talking trade unionism- and boost- ing Americanism in every corner of the island. @ Wages have gradually in- creased, due to the stubborn fighting of these hungry plantation hands and town laborers, until now: a -dollar a day is quite common, and some trades pay a dollar and a quarter! IGLESIAS COMES TO WASHINGTON When the Wilson administration came along, Iglesias raised the price of a steamer ticket to the States, and found his way to Washington. He asked the American Federation of La- bor to help him get a territorial form of government for Porto Rico. The labor officials here investigated his statement of conditions in the island, and saw that wage conditions down there were as bad as in some parts of the Orient. If Porto Ricans were not organized and helped to demand a’ liv- ing wage, the sugar and tobacco work- ers here- would eventually’be injured. They helped him, and the territorial bill was introduced and started through - the house when Governor Yager threw. . a monkey wrench into the machinery. Yager is a Kentucky politician of the: job-grabber type. He s strong on social entertainment of federal officials who visit his pal- ace, but he is densely ignorant of human rights. The agents of big " business—Spanish as well as . American—took him into camp al- most as soon as he set foot on the island. They have closely sur- rounded him ever since. And when they suggested in San Juan that the new constitution for Porto Rico ~ must disfranchise the illiterate - workers, who made up four-fifths “of the population, Yager set out for Washington to plead for that : _ proposition. The house committee, after long hearmgs of Yager and his fnendl, and ranged to visit Porto Rico, next. Those who remember the great wave of market speculation in Cuban and Porto Rican sugar, coffee and tobacco stocks, which was at its height in early 1916, will not need to inquire further to understand why these two islands are badly shaken up industrially and politically. . The story on this page shows how our special interests have become the real owners of the islands, and not the people there or the United States government. In the last three 'years the special interests have been driving down living conditions for the people to get dividends on the watered stock they issued in the speculative period. Are we going to fail as a pro- : tector of weaker countries under ocur control? in spite of the impassioned protest of Iglesias, voted to report a bill which would disfranchise the workers, and would insure a big business govern- ment down there for 50 years:to come. The labor .group in the house took up the fight, made it an issue n the house floor, and finally got the bill amended so that the workers who had already voted should continue to vote, regardless of literacy. tem of lighting is’ very notleeable in tlns v:ew. PAGE m.zvnu l THE NATION’S CAPITOL AT NIGHT I This picture shows- the Washington capitol building, illuminated at night before the last presidential inauguration by the new flood lighting system. In this method the source of light is placed outside the object to be illu- minated, and the difference between this and the old sys-- The first election held under the new law re- sulted in Iglesias going to the Porto Rican senate, elected by a big majority, as the choice of the labor movement of the island. He is a senator in the legislature today, and the big business papers admit that he. speaks for three-fourths of the adult male population of Porto Rico, but they are still hunting pretexts for throwing him into jail. YAGER SUPPORTED : BY ARMY OFFICIALS Governor Yager has lots of time to attend tea parties and to listen to the band, because he is securely backed by the war department. Major General McIntyre, who for many years has been in charge of the insular bureau of the war depart- ment, is the active ruler of the island. Under the law passed when Porto Rico was acquired from Spain, the insular bureau has Porto Rico and the Philippines under its wing. General MecIntyre looks with good-humored tolerance upon the ef- forts of these millions of miserable, half-fed, half- clothed, wretchedly-housed Porto Ricans to win mdustrlal liberty. He admits that they are born to a pitiful existence, and his heart is grieved that it must be so. But he thinks that the only solution is the removal of large numbers to other lands, or an impossible decrease in the birth rate. Iglesias made a notable plea to President Wilson, through Samuel Gompers, about a year ago, for the immediate investigation of the situation. He charged the grossest oppression and cruelty toward strikers by Yager and his well-paid con- stabulary. He charged that the major- ity of the people were in industrial serfdom, and that the government at Washington could remedy the condi- tions. Especially he asked that a hu- . mane governor be put in Yager’s place. But General- McIntyre reported against any such inquiry. He thought it would ‘merely stir up further unrest and protest from workers in Porto Rico.- Secretary of War Baker passed McIntyre’s letter along to the presi- dent, with a comment. of his own show- -ing full confidence in the general. Baker knew nothing of this misery among a vast number of people com- mitted to the charge of his depart- ment; he acted as though he did not want to learn anything about it. Un- der the circumstances the president likewise felt that he could not be held responsible. Secretary of Labor Wilson, at the imstance of Gompers, did send a number of strike mediators to San Juan, as the tide of industrial battle ebbed and flowed. But that was all. Their reports were per- sonal and fragmentary. The gen- eral facts have never been dis- closed by any governmental in- quiry. The whole governmental attitude of neglect has been made possible by the attitude of reactionary Republicans such as Clarence Miller, recently re- tired from the house by the voters of the Duluth and Mesaba district. Mil- ler .took up the fight in the house to prevent the workingmen in ‘the island from retaining their established right to vote.- He described them as a “mon- grel breed,” and likened them to the negro population of Mississippi. In point of fact, there is more pure Span- ish blood among the workers on these plantations than among the ruling aristocracy in many of the cities of Porto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica and the re- publics of Central America, Contrast- ed with the hate and msuft voiced by these reactionary Republicans toward the trade unionists of the island, the administration’s policy has been - civi- lized. It is to be hoped that Young and Mason, at least, will bring home from their trip a plan for safeguarding the children down there, by better indus- - trial opportunity and better schools.