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"Rich Port." Under a blistering sun President Hoover and Governor Roosevelt got into the first car of a long motorcade and started the five-hour journey across the island by the old Spanish military road to San Juan, the capital. By prearrangement, in the front of the crowds that lined the way were children, the brown, half-naked, half-starved little creatures who are Governor Roosevelt's chief concern.— Beggary is a pastime among these youngsters whose cry ("Gimme moan-ee") is known to every tourist.
As he moved along the highway the President could see wide fields of sugar cane, with tobacco on higher ground and coffee cultivation on the uplands of the red clay mountains which caused the elder Roosevelt on his 1906 visit to call the island the "Switzerland of America."
At San Juan, President Hoover was a guest at La Fortaleza, the 499-year-old Governor's Palace overlooking the harbor which Ponce de Leon called "Rich Port" when he established the first colony for Spain in 1508. Native politicians crowded about for conferences with El Presidente.
When the U. S. took Porto Rico from Spain in 1898 and made it an adjunct of the War Department, the island's population was suffering from four degrading centuries of misrule, neglect and exploitation. Quick crude efforts by hack administrators to '"Americanize" these people, part Spanish, part Negro, produced more resentment than results. In less than two years, however, Governor Roosevelt has done more to win their confidence than others in the last 20 years. He learned Spanish. He traveled over the islands. He set up relief stations, went to the U. S. to collect funds, to fight Porto Rico's battles before an indifferent Congress. He addresses the natives as "We Porto Ricans." Altogether his administration has been an extraordinary success.
But untouched remains Porto Rico's basic problem—over-population. On the island live 1,543,913 persons, or 450 to the square mile as compared with 40 in the U. S. (In Barbados it is 1,000 to the square mile.) In one decade the population has increased 18%,. The result is that Porto Rico's resources, natural and economic, are exhausted. Birth Control, seriously agitated in the insular government, is blocked by the dominant Roman Catholic Church. Poverty and hunger are on all sides. A laborer is lucky to make $150 per year. Hookworm and tubercu- losis take a heavy toll. The hurricane of 1928 (called "San Filipe" by the natives) struck the island a $100,000,000 blow from which it is still staggering. The 1929 sugar price slump hit the island's chief source of income. Tourist trade, despite the fine big Condado-Vanderbilt Hotel in San Juan, is negligible because Porto Rico, as part of the U. S., is nominally Dry. Even the natives' greatest sport—cock fighting—is illegal, although this month the insular Senate passed a bill to permit it.