The Anatomy of Loyalty

THE STRICKEN LAND (704 pp.)--Rexford Guy Tugwell--Doubleday ($4.50).

A little greyer, considerably heavier and hopefully wiser after five years on the job, Rexford Guy Tugwell left the turbulent Puerto Rican governorship last September and retired to the peace & quiet of Chicago. As professor of political science at the University of Chicago he no longer had 2,000,000 citizens in his domain nor a 70 ft. by 30 ft. gubernatorial bedroom at his disposal. But he had time at last to review his Puerto Rican record and his relations with Franklin Roosevelt, who sent him there.

The Stricken Land is a history of his Puerto Rican years, of the friends he made and the pounding he took from his enemies ("maliciousness unique even in my experience"), of some of his views on Caribbean policy and on colonial policy in general. A fat, rambling, earnest, occasionally angry, sometimes eloquent book, it is full of Olympian judgments, professional footnotes, diary extracts and side remarks on subjects as remote as the writings of Vincent Sheean or the progress of the Pacific naval war. But the main theme is clearly and realistically developed. It may shock the kind of complacent liberal who assumes that Puerto Rico's troubles could be solved in short order if only some New Dealer would come along, ease out the "big sugar interests" and clean up the noisome San Juan slums.

The Problems. Rex Tugwell insists that he is as vigorous a planner and reformer as ever. But he admits that the island has problems not easily solved by fiat, or entirely blamable on U.S. economic exploitation--the depleted farm land, the density of population, the "hard, slick" politicos, the precious Spanish-tropical dignidad, and what Tugwell learned to call the "colonial whine."

F.D.R. In Retrospect. Tugwell had once been among Franklin Roosevelt's closest advisers, yet even when war came, the President left him sidetracked in Puerto Rico. One of the most interesting passages in The Stricken Land is Tugwell's attempt to balance his enthusiasm for F.D.R. with his marked reservations. Writes Tugwell: "It was not because he was a great mai, nor because he was always right, that I loved him. I perhaps more than others had always been critical of his methods and even his results. . . . Like other men, looked at critically, he was not infallible; and to me he had not even been kind or understanding. . . .

"[But] what good was there in probing the anatomy of loyalty? ... He had compromised, appeased, placated, been defeated again and again; he had punished friends, rewarded enemies. ... I never thought he was as great a man as Wilson, for instance, and I am sure he did not think so either. But he had better instincts than Wilson and his weight came down constantly just a little on the side of humanity--a little left of center, he said, in a moment of perception. . . .

"His was not the only way to have proceeded; it was only his way. Perhaps it was not the best. That is what I had always thought and that is why I had not been kept at his side. . . . But in the time of our greatest need, in the midst of a war which it was not always certain that we should win, there had been more unity among Americans 'than there had been for two generations. . . . That we came through as we did must now and always, I think, be attributed almost wholly to the genius and determination of Roosevelt."

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