TERRITORIES: Luis and Rex

Big, brooding Luis Muñoz Marin, President of Puerto Rico’s Senate, disembarked in Manhattan, looking mournful, as usual. But he was full of hope. If the U.S. Senate confirms his good friend Rexford Guy Tugwell as Governor of Puerto Rico, it will be another milestone in the peaceful, ballot-box revolution which Luis Muñoz Marin started three years ago.

When Muñoz Marin went back to his native Puerto Rico in 1931, he did not like what he saw there. The poverty-stricken jibaros lived in misery and squalor. There were no gay tropical restaurants in Puerto Rico, no swank hotels.

Luis Muñoz Marin spent four years in the Puerto Rico Senate as a Liberal, worked hard for practical democracy. When the Liberal Party ran him out, he organized his own Popular Democratic Party. Thirty months later this new party of his was in the saddle, and Luis Muñoz Marin became President of the Senate.

Debonair Rex Tugwell has been interested in sugar since 1933. He first got interested in Puerto Rico back in 1934 when with Muñoz Marin ‘s help he set up the commission which drafted a plan to redistribute some 200,000 corporately held acres of Puerto Rico’s 300,000 acres of sugar-cane land in tracts of 500 acres or less. Then Tugwell fell from Roosevelt favor and relapsed into political obscurity — from which Secretary Harold Ickes rescued him last winter by sending him to Puerto Rico to study land use.

Muñoz Marin engineered Dr. Tugwell’s election as chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, upped the chancellor’s salary from $7,500 to $15,000. Puerto Rico’s Governor Guy J. Swope resigned to take a post as Director of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions in Secretary Ickes’ Interior Department. To succeed him, Franklin Roosevelt nominated Chancellor Tugwell.

Once more in favor with the President, Dr. Tugwell will serve without pay if the Senate confirms him, will continue to draw his salary from the university. His first job will be to help Muñoz Marin get those lands distributed.

Says Luis Muñoz Marin proudly: “I think that we have created democracy in Puerto Rico. It was there on paper before. But we have brought it into practice.”