Rexford Tugwell’s “Report on American Tropical Policy”

Background: In 1934, U.S. economist Rexford Tugwell prepared a report, excerpted here, assessing the economic conditions of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories in the Caribbean. A high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Tugwell advised the Roosevelt administration regarding the role the federal government could play in the country’s economic recovery. He later helped develop the Resettlement Administration, a branch of the New Deal Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which focused on relocating agricultural workers to newly established communities. In 1941, Tugwell was appointed to serve as the governor of Puerto Rico. In that post, he worked to realize many of the goals outlined in this earlier report.

General Conclusions

We can learn far more than we can teach in the tropics. The best that we can do in this region is to supply better economic, administrative, technical and sanitary techniques than could be developed on the basis of insular resources.

We can obtain, in return, a vitalizing contact with the abundant and prodigious life of the tropics and thereby become a more mature and happier race of men ourselves. Contact with the tropics has historically always tended to modify the insularity, the dogmatism and the tendency to confuse the end with the means of life which are characteristics of northern races. Especially as we contrast the unabashed fertility of these regions, the intense breeding, the amazing variety and persistence of all forms of created live, with our own dwindling birth-rate and social discontent, we may recapture the racial impulse which once made our people great and which must be revived if our breed is not to vanish from the face of the earth.

For the lesson of the tropics is the object of the New Deal: a more abundant life. If we, by social control of wealth, can confer upon our people a similar accessibility to wealth to that which is enjoyed by the inhabitants of these islands, we may re-establish a civilization in which women do not fear to bear children and men do not hesitate to undertake family responsibilities. Without that, our race is doomed to degeneration and decay.

Source: “Report on American Tropical Policy, With Special Reference to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands,” from Rexford Tugwell to President Roosevelt, Roosevelt Official Papers, Appointments 400, 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York, 19, para. 3.