The crime of El Fanguito : an open letter to President Truman on Puerto Rico

We

CRIME

OF

El Fanguito

AN OPEN LETTER TO
PRESIDENT TRUMAN
ON PUERTO RfCO

by

WILLIAM Z* FOSTER

y

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

AUSTIN, TEXAS

William Z. Foster, the author of this pamphlet, is National
Chairman of the Communist Party and a veteran leader of the
American labor movement which he has served for more than
fifty years.

Mr. Foster visited Puerto Rico in March of this year and
talked with hundreds of the people about the problems they
face. Shocked by the conditions he saw, Mr. Foster wrote this
open letter immediately upon his return to the United States.
On March 10, he addressed one of the largest meetings of
Puerto Rican workers and progressives ever held on the Island.
In a theater seeting only 1,200, over 2000 people tried to crowd
their way in and overflowed into the street.

Mr. Foster is the author of many books and pamphlets
among the latest of which are Labor and the Marshall Plan
and The Herald Tribune's 23 Questions about the Communist
Party Answered.

1

Published by NiiW Ci.Niiim IMuu.isiii us, 8gs Broadway, New York City 3.

April, 1948 ■*fl©* " ,,1) PRINTED in U.S.A.

Mr. President:

El Fanguito, as you may know, is located in San Juan,
Puerto Rico. It is the worst of the several huge slums fes-
tering in the body of the Puerto Rican capital, and it is per-
haps the most terrible destitution area in the whole western
world. El Fanguito, meaning in English, "The Mudholc,"
is the very symbol of human misery, exploitation and de-
spair. It is also, no less, the symbol of American colonial
domination over Puerto Rico.

Mr. President, I am addressing this letter to you because,
as President of the United States, you exercise an almost dic-
tatorial control over Puerto Rico, which is a colony of the
United States. You have the power to veto whatever legislation
you please of the Insular Legislature, even though it is passed
by unanimous action. With your great powers you can also
heavily influence the Legislature to pass such laws as you may
desire. Moreover, you have control over the expenditure of
huge funds in Puerto Rico and can go far toward shaping the
economic life of that island. You are, therefore, largely re-
sponsible for the continuance, if not the origin, of such slums
as El Fanguito.

El Fanguito, together with the other local slums of San
Juan, embrace an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people. This is
equal to about one-half of the total population of the capital
city itself. These terrifying slums are primarily of American
making. The worst of them, the social cancer, El Fanguito,
has, with malignant vitality, been rapidly spreading its deadly
poison far and wide during the past 15 years. These vast slums
are the inevitable result of the ruthless exploitation of Puerto
Rico by the American sugar trust, aided by reactionary Wash-
ington politicians.

Rexford Tugwell, former Governor of Puerto Rico, had the

3

^■■Bna^H

following to say about the San Juan slums in his book aptly en-
titled, The Stricken Land:

But also what shocked me, as it must any newcomer,
or any visitor, who like myself, had not come to San Juan
for some years, was the rising tide of slums which seemed
about to overwhelm the city. El Fanguito, the shack city
over the marshes beside the Martin Pena Channel, had,
in 1934, consisted of a few hundred squatters' houses;
now we saw it stretching up toward Rio Piedras miles
away in a seemingly endless spread of squalor. It had a
kind of order and governance of its own such as a
homunculus or some other low form of life has: the shacks
were in rows, that is, which left some open space for filth
to accumulate, and the tide lifted the piles of garbage and
deposited them again, in the same place, twice daily. What
a startling failure of all our efforts to outpace, with
schemes for housing and public works, the forces of dis-
integration so powerfully at work on this island. Good
lord, I thought, how glad I am that I have no part in
this.

Let me assure you, Mr. President, that this horror slum, has
not lessened any since Mr. Tugwell wrote the above words. It
is now bigger and more deadly than ever.

When you were in San Juan a few weeks back, Mr. Presi-
dent, the route to your comfortable hotel in the mountains
took you right past one edge of El Fanguito. But you made no
personal investigation of the frightful conditions prevailing
there. No doubt your yes-men told you that conditions in e!
Fanguito had been much exaggerated by observers and that,
anyway, everything possible was being done to remedy the
situation. So you passed on, and in your public speech you
cynically told the Puerto Rican people that "Too often we
had our attention directed towards Puerto Rico's problems "
You also poured forth slick flatteries about the freedom prog-
ress, and prosperity of the Puerto Rican people under Ameri-
can colonial rule. Small wonder, then, that your reception in
San Juan was so frigid and thai the people gave .you such a
cold shoulder.

Franklin I). Roosevelt, warm-hearted and generous, would

■Hum

have turned into that vast slum city and listened sympathet-
ically to the desperate stories of the unhappy people there,
but Truman did not turn in, nor did he listen. This contrast
between the two men explains why the oppressed of the world
respect the name of Roosevelt and not that of Truman. Also,
your unresponsiveness to the woes of the people is why the
workers in the United States are not going to . re-elect you to
the Presidency next Fall. The big capitalist and militarist
interests now dominating Puerto Rico doubtless felt that you
acted very "sensibly" about the unpleasant matter of El
Fanguito by ignoring it. For, indeed, you arc a man who does
not grow "sentimental" over the sufferings of poor people,
either in. Puerto Rico or in the United States.

But, Mr. President, although you as the head of the great
imperialist country which holds Puerto Rico as a colony, coldly
ignored the grave slum problem of Puerto Rican people by
callously riding past El Fanguito, I, as an American citizen
conscious of our nation's heavy responsibility to this oppressed
people, did not ride past. I went into this most wretched of
slums with its immense population and talked to many of its
its miserable inhabitants. And I saw sights and heard stories
of extreme poverty that will stay with me until my dying day.
I burned with shame that such outrageous conditions exist on
Puerto Rico and are caused by us. The overwhelming misery
and squalor of the great slum city can be compared only to the
frightful conditions in the slums of the Middle East and of
India. A modern Dante, seeking to write a new Inferno, need
go no further than El Fanguito.

EI Fanguito is sprawled out over mosquito-infested, marsh-
tide flats. The squatters' houses arc thrown together of any
material that comes to hand, and the shacks are incredibly
over-crowded. Most of the places are unfit for hogs, much less
for human beings. The houses have no toilet facilities, and
there is no garbage collection. The water supply is entirely
inadequate, consisting only of occasional community faucets,
contrived by the people themselves. Whole areas are com-
pletely dark at night, having :no street lights, and many of the
people are too poor even to buy kerosene lamps or candles.
Most of the inhabitants' homes are also practically destitute

5

of furniture. There are not even streets in the horrible slum,
except where the people themselves have carted in soil and
rubbish to build up roadways of a sort.

The whole place is an indescribable litter of garbage, tin
cans, and other refuse. From it there exudes an all-pervading,
sickening stench. But worst of all is the periodic flooding of the
place by the filth-laden tide. To escape this disgusting deluge
most of the shacks have been set up a foot or two above the
ground, but many not so raised are repeatedly flooded by the
unspeakable mess. Crazy foot bridges lead from one hovel
to another.

Children, mostly naked, with no toys and with no place to
play, wade about in the filthy water. At one place we visited,
a big city sewer belched its foul contents into an open canal,
whence the stinking flood was from time to time swept back
into the squatters' village by the rising tide. As we gazed upon
this shocking sight two little naked girls about three years old,
waded waist deep in the filthy water pouring from the sewer's
mouth. The unfortunate children are growing up mostly
untaught and illiterate, along with their other miseries and
dangers.

Actual hunger and chronic malnutrition are rampant in
El Fanguito. This was all too evident from the pinched faces
of the adults and from the rickety condition of the children.
And sickness, too, flourished— tuberculosis, hookworm, malaria,
bilharzia, and many other diseases bred of poverty, filth, and
undernourishment. The most terrible sickness hazard of all,
so the people told us, came from their naked children playing
in the germ-laden sewage water that periodically overflows the
slum area.

One thing that struck me was the unconquerable tendency
of the people to make the best of a bad situation, by sharing
their meager substance with those who were in even direr
distress, by fighting to keep clean under impossibly dirty con-
ditions, by brightening up their hovels with flowers and paint,
and by their heroically impossible efforts to build a lighting
system and a series of streets with their own too slim resources.

And who do you suppose lives in this sinister American
community, El Fanguito, Mr. President? Certainly not the

6

robbers and exploiters of the Puerto Rican people; no one
would expect that! Peasants and agricultural workers, driven
by hunger from the land, and other workers without jobs; they
are the slum dwellers. Poorer-paid employed workers also live
there. And all this suffering is because of ruthless American
colonial exploitation.

When the United States took over Puerto Rico from the
Spanish in 1898 there were 60,000 land owners, but now there
are less than 5,000. The big American sugar corporations have
grabbed the land and are exploiting the people from their
offices in New York. Unemployment in Puerto Rico, in the
cities and on the land, reaches very high levels, ranging from
40 per cent to 75 per cent in the various categories of workers.
This huge jobless rate is because of the one-crop sugar-system,
and because of the anti-industrialization policies that Ameri-
can exploiters have fastened upon the island.

Wages in Puerto Rico, Mr. President, under American
pressure average only about one-third as high as they do in
New York. But living necessities cost fully as much in Puerto
Rico as in the United States, while everything of a luxury
or semi-luxury character costs very much more. The Puerto
Rican workers "solve" their high cost of living problems by
subsisting chiefly on rice, beans, and dried codfish, by living
in horrible slum shacks built of waste lumber and sheet iron,
by denying themselves and their families proper education,
relaxation, and medical attention, and by dying 10 to 15 years
before their time. It is these underpaid workers of land and
factory, a constant prey to devastating unemployment, who, in
the main, fill to overflowing the monstrous slums of El
Fanguito.

Of course everybody in Puerto Rico does not live in slums.
But, as Mr. Tugwell says, the slums are a national menace,
"threatening to overwhelm the city." The gravity of the eco-
nomic position of the masses of the people in this unhappy
country was graphically illustrated a few years ago in a Gov-
ernment report which showed that in a land where the annual
minimum budget required for a family was officially stated to
be 11,240, the average yearly income of 86 per cent of the
population was only $345 per family. This serious situation

7

has improved very little, if any, during the war and postwar
years since this survey was made.

The people of El Fanguito were amazed to see Americans
interesting themselves in their problems. Their conception of
Americans, gained by bitter experience, is that of hard-boiled
exploiters, living off the miseries of the Puerto Rican people.
Their amazement evaporated, however, when they learned
that our group was made up of Communist Puerto Ricans and
Americans. They crowded around us, eager to tell their tragic
stories and to show us their miserable homes.

"Typical among the scores whom we interviewed was one
worker who had been unemployed for several months. He was
penniless, and he had a wife and several children to feed. He
told us casually that the children lived by picking up whatever
food they could find among their impoverished neighbors. Are
you aware, Mr. President, that in Puerto Rico jobless workers
like this man receive no unemployment insurance or relief
whatsoever? When their work plays out they are thrown out on
the streets to live or die, as the case may be. The United States
Government which determines the basic laws and economic
conditions of the island is definitely responsible for this out-
rageous situation.

We went to visit another poverty-stricken family who lived
in a shack that was more like an outhouse than a home. The
father was sick and unemployed. The wife, 28 years old and
obviously once a beautiful woman, was lying in a bed of rags
and slowly wasting to death of tuberculosis. They had no
money, no food, no medical care of any kind, and, may I add,
no hope either. The woman had been refused admission to
a hospital-there was no room, they told her. The dying
mother's greatest worry was what would become of her half-
starved little children after she had passed away. Our guides,
residents of the area, told us later on that when she died the
neighbors would simply divide up the children among them-
selves. What mattered one more hungry mouth in their family
flocks? That's how they solve the orphan problem in the grim
democracy of the poor in El Fanguito.

The last place we went to was the most terrible "home" of
all. There were 11 children in the family, and the father

8

obviously far advanced in tuberculosis, had long been out of
work. There was no food whatever in the house. I was utterly
shocked at the physical condition of the children, who were
undernourished to the point of actual starvation. The several
smallest ones were particularly horrifying. Pasty-faced and
stunted, spindly-legged and pot-bellied and with fever-bright
eyes, these little babies seemed unable to smile or even to cry.
They just stared at us, bewildered at the strange world that
did not give them the milk and other nourishing food that
their tiny bodies craved. The mother and grandmother, busy-
ing themselves with. the crowded, famished children in the
bleak little hovel, were the very picture of maternal misery
and despair. The bread-winner of this American family (for
Puerto Ricans are American citizens, you know, Mr. President)
was a 12-year old boy, who earned in San Juan an average of
50 cents per day shining shoes. This stricken family was starv-
ing along on a meager diet of white rice, which costs as much
per pound in Puerto Rico as in New York.

The workers pressed us to come here and go there to see
ever-new horrors of El Fanguito. But after visiting the tragic
family of eleven, I couldn't take any more of it. I was thor-
oughly sickened by the sight of babies being murdered by slow
starvation, for the sake of American "free enterprise" and
capitalist profits. On leaving, I promised the workers in this
terrible slum that, as best I could, I would raise my voice in
their behalf in the United States.

If such poverty can exist in these postwar boom days in
Puerto Rico, one can imagine, then, what frightful conditions
there will be in this island when the coming economic crisis
hits the United States and ruins Puerto Rico's market for

sugar.

The most terrible of all my experiences in EI Fanguito
however, was the workers' answer to our question as to what
could be done to improve their horrible situation. With one
voice the two or three dozen who were there gathered about
us declared that most of all the poverty-stricken thousands
wan ed to be assured of the right to remain in El Fanguito.
On this demand they were all united. Food they wanted and
medicine, and water, and lights, and streets, and schools,' and

9

especially they wanted a dike to hold back the frightful Hood
of filth that periodically engulfs them—but most of all, they
wanted the right to live in this terrible slum. This shocking
demand they made because they were constantly being harassed
by threats of the politicians to dispossess them, to drive them
out of their slum houses, and to demolish El Fanguito. Evic-
tion would force upon them the even worse fate of being
driven back into the country or out onto the streets to starve.
El Fanguito, for all its horrors, meant to these poor people at
least a roof over their heads, their families' being held to-
gether, a community solidarity with others in like misery, and
a chance to earn an occasional dollar in the city.

As for myself, I was literally sickened and made speechless
listening to these poverty-stricken slum-dwellers, American
citizens all, who were plagued by famine, sickness, and every
hardship of poverty, and who made it their big demand that
they be allowed to live in the hell hole of El Fanguito. What
do you think of it, Mr. President? Does it give you a feeling
of pride as an American, as the political head of a country
which is literally choking in its hoarded wealth?

When I inquired of the inhabitants of this great slum
whether the extensive housing project now going on on the
outskirts of San Juan would ease their conditions, as many
people were claiming, they laughed cynically. They said they
were altogether too poor to pay the rents asked for these
new places, which would be grabbed up by middle-class ele-
ments and the better-paid , state functionaries. So the workers
of El Fanguito cling to their shanties and hovels as the only
real perspective they can see. Obviously, together with other
urgent measures of relief, there is a burning necessity in
Puerto Rico for broad housing projects at a very low rental,
Or a free occupancy basis, such as have not yet been undertaken
by the Federal or Insular Governments.

The great shame of the United States is that it has not only
permitted its capitalists to rob the Puerto Rican people with-
out limits, but it also stubbornly refuses to grant them the
most elementary economic and political reforms. Under Gov-
ernor Tugwell's regime some efforts were made to introduce
some phases of New Deal legislation into Puerto Rico, but

10

even these limited measures were fought as sheer Bolshevism
by the Sugar Trust and its many lackeys in Congress.

The only social insurance the Puerto Rican workers got
during the New Deal reform period was a $7.50 per month
pension law for a few old workers paid by the Puerto Rican
Government. This skinflint measure the workers spit upon
with contempt. It is significant, however, that the American
Sugar Kings have no trouble in having the Taft-Hartley
slave labor law cover Puerto Rico. But the bulk of the workers,
members of the U.G.T., are militantly and successfully oppos-
ing its application.

It was quite in line, Mr. President, with American reac-
tionary resistance to the demands of the Puerto Ricans for
the most elementary economic and political reforms that you
made your cold-hearted statement that "Too often we had our
attention directed towards Puerto Rico's problems." That
cynical remark should haunt you every time you think of
Puerto Rico. Overfed American businessmen and tourists go
their ways in the island unconcerned over the Puerto Rican
people's woes. And why should they be disturbed in their
pleasures? For does not American ruling capitalist class phi-
losophy hold to the brutal principle of free enterprise, that
everybody shall fend for himself and let the devil take the
hindmost? Since when, then, have we become our brothers'
keepers? You, too, Mr. President, were unconcerned about
the welfare of the hard-pressed people of Puerto Rico. True to
the interests of American imperialism, all you had to offer
was a petulant complaint that you had heard more than
enough about Puerto Rico's problems. Did not Marie Antoin-
ette reply once in this manner to an impoverished people
demanding bread? Remember?

American reactionaries make much of the fact that the
Puerto Ricans, after long struggle, were grudgingly granted
American citizenship (in 1917) and the right to elect their
own Governor (in 1947). But the plain reality is that, hedged
about as they are by a colonial type of legal restrictions, the
Puerto Rican people now have less political freedom than-
they had under the Spanish charter of 1897, instituted one
year before the American occupation. Our American Declara-

11

tion of Independence might well have been written to express
the complaints and aspirations of Puerto Rico, except that
the grievances of the Puerto Rican people are more numerous,
more deep-cutting, and more devastating than were those of
the American colonists against King George III.

In defense of Wall Street's war plans of imperialist domi-
nation of the world, American reactionaries— tongue in cheek
—are expressing very great concern about establishing democ-
racy and prosperity in Greece, Korea, the Balkans, China and
many other countries. Why not, then, grant this democ-
racy and prosperity to Puerto Rico, right at our own front
doorstep? The Voice of America radio is blaring forth to the
world about the glories of American capitalism. I suggest,
therefore, Mr. President, that the story of Puerto Rico be
added to its program.

Puerto Rico, a sub-tropical land of eternal summer, is one
of the most beautiful islands in the world. It could be a veri-
table paradise, but American capitalist exploitation has
turned it into a green hell for its people. That's why, in re-
cent years, about 350,000 of its citizens have fled to the United'
States. This big migration of Puerto Ricans resembles the
mass flight of the hunger-driven Irish during the past century
to America to escape from British exploitation and tyranny.
The inhabitants of El Fanguito, the gigantic slum city, arc
simply those Puerto Ricans who lack the money to flee from
American colonial oppression.

Puerto Rico is one of the many islands in the broad Carib-
bean area that have been exploited to the point of exhaustion
by American, British, French, Dutch, and Canadian imperial-
ism. These robbed countries total altogether some 15,000,000
people. If this vast area is not now seething with such revolu-
tionary liberation movements as are shaking India, China,
Burma, Indo-China, and Indonesia, the main reason therefor
is that the various Caribbean peoples are separated by wide
sea distances and are split up by a diversity of languages
and imperialist controls. Certainly, however, their grievances
against their imperialist masters are hardly less deep than
those of the oppressed people of the Far East.

What American imperialism has done to Puerto Rico it is

12

yBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

AUSTIN, TEXAS

now trying to do to all of Latin America. This is the signifi-
cance of the various new measures of policy now in force
between the- United States and the countries of Central and
South America. Thus the forcing of "free trade" upon these
countries by the United States will render their weak indus-
tries helpless before the powerful American trusts; the accord-
ing of free access of American capital, on its own terms, for
investment in the several countries can only give Wall Street
financial domination in Latin America; the, so-called stand-
ardization-of-arms agreement means to subject the whole mili;
tary forces of Latin America to the control of the United
States, and the Inter-American "defense" pact of the 21 Re-
publics of the Hemisphere is nothing but a scheme to trans-
form the Latin- American countries into puppets of the
United States in the war that our warmongers, with you as one
of their chief spokesmen, are now organizing against, the
Soviet Union. With these measures now going into effect,
several of the Latin American nations already have left hardly
more than a shadow of their national independence. No
wonder, as Sumner Welles said in the New York Herald
Tribune a couple of days ago, that anti-American sentiment
is rapidly spreading throughout Latin America. Let El Fan-
guito, with its oppression and misery, be a warning to the
peoples of Latin America of what Wall Street imperialism
holds in store for them.

In San Juan the American flag flies serenely above all this
unspeakable mass misery, exploitation and slum life that our
capitalism has brought to the Puerto Rican people. But I did
not see any American flags flying in El Fanguito itself. There,
as far and wide in Puerto Rico, the people hate bitterly all
aspects of American rule, including you, Mr. President. They
hate our bitter exploitation of their country; they hate our
dictating to them what laws they shall and shall not enact;
they hate our arrogance in forcibly holding their country as
a colony; they hate us for compelling them to teach their chil-
dren in English instead of Spanish; they hate our attempts to
force the infamous Jim-Crow system upon their people. In a
word, they are demanding national independence. And, Mr.
President, they don't want "liberal colonialism," "statehood,"

3628/^3

or "dominion status," or vague promises of being granted
self-determination some day, such as you made. All these de-
vices they rightly consider as only fancy schemes for continuing
American domination.

We Americans, I think, in view of our own revolutionary
past, should be able to comprehend and grant this demand
for freedom from an oppressed people. And our people would
do this if they knew the truth about the Puerto Rican situa-
tion. Our holding Puerto Rico by force as a colony— and this
•is precisely what we are doing-means not only to work grave
hardships upon this little nation, but also to violate our own
Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It means also
to trample upon our best national revolutionary traditions
and to repudiate the glib promises of liberation that we made
to the Puerto Rican people when our army conquered their
beautiful island half a century ago.

What we should do about this whole Puerto Rican matter,
Mr. President, can be said briefly, under three heads. First,
there must be unqualified national independence granted to
the Puerto Ricans, who are a nation of over 2,000,000 people.
Second, we should at once withdraw our military forces from
the island, leaving the defense of the Panama Canal to the
care of the United Nations. And third, we should make all nec-
essary financial grants to enable the Puerto Rican people to
build up an industrial system and a diversified agriculture in
the island that will provide them with a developing prosperity.
On the third point, let me say that it would be a constructive
thing if Congress were to take the $450,000,000 now being
squandered on building up the big Puerto Rican military
base and give these funds to the Puerto Rican people as a
first installment on the cost of the reconstruction of their
economic system. But then, I am very well aware, Mr. Presi-
dent, that neither you nor the reactionary Congress will do
voluntarily any of these things. To get them done will be the
task of the Puerto Rican people and of the growing labor and
progressive movement in the United States. The Communist
Party will continue to give it's full support to this liberation
struggle.

You and your big capitalist friends, Mr. President, are ex-

14

tremely alarmed at the rapid growth of the new democracy
and Socialism in many parts of the world. This is not surpris-
ing, for your capitalist' system, which bred two world wars,
fascism, and the world's most terrible economic crisis, all
within one generation, is obsolete and is passing off the world's
historical stage. Now to put across your imperialist program,
you are trying to organize a third world war. Your desperation
is to be measured by the fact that under the Truman-Marshall
Plan, you are not only promoting civil war in various lands
and openly bringing pressure to dictate other countries' elec-
tions, but you are now proposing to consider it as a cause for
war when nations, such as Czechoslovakia and Italy, freely
and by their own internal democratic proceedings, decide to
elect Communist leadership for their peoples. You are militar-
izing our own country and turning it over to the mercy of the
worst jingoes and reactionaries. Capitalism's imperialist wars
of exploitation have laid the world in ruins, and have forced
a billion people into a deepening starvation. All that dying-
world capitalism has to offer humanity is EI Fanguito, the
"Mudhole," on an ever-widening scale. And El Fanguito, the
symbol of misery and oppression, the world's masses will never
accept, nor can they be forced to do so, even with all of Wall
Street's money and hypocrisy and bayonets. The tragic sig-
nificance of Puerto Rico is that it plainly shows American
imperialism for what it is, in all its brutal tyranny and ex-
ploitation. It is a warning to the democratic world what Wall
Street domination would signify.

Your speech on March 17 to the joint session of Congress,
Mr. President, was a bra/en call for war. Already facing defeat
in the Presidential election, you are trying to secure re-election
and to defeat the third-party movement by creating a wave of
war hysteria and fascist-like reaction. You are deliberately
rejecting peaceful relations with the U.S.S.R. Your attempt to
turn the whole world into a vast Puerto Rico, exploited by
Wall Street, is being defeated by the stubborn resistance of
the world's democratic peoples. Your "blitz-krieg" of atom-
bomb diplomacy, aimed at intimidating the democratic world,
has failed; your Truman doctrine of cultivating civil war in
various countries has suffered shipwreck in Greece and China;

1 r,

your MarshallPlan of dominating Europe by the economic
power of the United States is also failing. So now, you and
your Wall Street military clique would try to accomplish your
imperialist purposes by plunging the world into a new war.

But look carefully before you leap, Mr. President. Where
Hitler failed Truman will not succeed. The first world war
lost one-sixth of the capitalist world to Socialism-the U.S.S.R.
The second world war has resulted in turning half of Europe
toward building Socialism and has shattered the great im-
perialist-colonial systems of the Far East. A third world war,
such as you are trying to provoke, would culminate m the
downfall of world capitalism altogether. The outraged demo-
cratic peoples would put a final end to the capitalist system
and start the whole world on the way to Socialism. The great
masses, lovers of democracy and defenders of peace are ad-
vancing on to higher forms of democracy and to Socialism.
And you cannot stop them by imperialist war. You can only
speed up the tempo of their forward-march.

Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad. Amer-
ican capitalism, now in the hands of the warmongers, is in
a state of frenzy. War is not inevitable, nevertheless. The great
decision for peace or war still rests with the people. But now
is the time, before it is too late, when the people must speak
out and utterly smash the imperialists of Wall Street who
would' extend a Puerto Rico-like slavery all over the world.

Very truly yours,

Wm. Z. Foster, National Chairman,
Communist Party U.S.A.

16