Cornelius P. Rhoads - Scandal and Controversy

Scandal and Controversy

On 10 November 1931, while working in Puerto Rico, Rhoads got drunk at a party and left to find his car vandalized. Subsequently he wrote, signed, and left on his desk, a letter disparaging Puerto Ricans. The letter was address to a colleague in the States. The next day a lab assistant found the letter and passed copies of it to colleagues and later gave a copy to Pedro Albizu Campos, the president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Albizu Campos sent copies of the letter to the League of Nations, the Pan American Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, newspapers, embassies, and the Vatican.

The letter referred to unethical human experimentation and presented a racist view of Puerto Ricans. Albizu distributed the letter to the media, along with a letter of his own which was published in a two-page spread in the Porto Rico Progress titled "Charge Race Extermination Plot." He also used the opportunity to attack American imperialism and exploitation: "The mercantile monopoly is backed by the financial monopoly... The United States have mortgaged the country to their own financial interests. The military intervention destroyed agriculture. It changed the country into a huge sugar plantation..." Albizu accused Rhoads and his country of attempting to exterminate the native population, comparing them to Native Americans and Hawaiians, whom he alleged were "nearly extinct." "Evidently, submissive people coming under the North American empire, under the shadow of its flag, are taken ill and die. The facts confirm absolutely a system of extermination." "It has in fact been working out a plan to exterminate our people by inoculating patients unfortunate enough to go them with virus of incurable diseases such as cancer."

Albizu Campos did not invent these accusations; they arose directly from Rhoads' letter which said, in part:

I can get a damn fine job here and am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans. They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far... The matter of consideration for the patients' welfare plays no role here - in fact all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.

Upon learning of it, the then Governor of Puerto Rico James Beverley, characterized the letter as a "confession of murder" and "a libel against the people of Puerto Rico", and ordered an investigation. Rhoads, who was by then back in the United States mainland, released an official response to the media and the governor. He insisted that he was joking in his letter, calling it a "fantastic and playful composition written entirely for my own diversion and intended as a parody on supposed attitudes of some American minds in Porto Rico," explaining that nothing "was ever intended to mean other than the opposite of what was stated." Rhoads offered to return to clear things up, but never did, because the inquiry concluded that Rhoads did not commit the crimes he boasted about in his letter.

Rhoads and his work were investigated with several of his patients testifying as well as his colleagues. According to Lederer, "records at Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Rhoads had performed his research, revealed no patients in the young pathologist's care had died under suspicious circumstances." Additionally, the investigators were "unable to confirm Rhoads's other claim (omitted in Time 's account) that he had transplanted cancer into several patients.'" Rhoads was subject to separate investigations ordered by the acting American governor of Puerto Rico James R. Beverley and the Rockefeller Institute, and "neither…was able to uncover any evidence that Dr. Rhoads had exterminated any Puerto Ricans."

During the investigations, Ivy Lee and the Rockefeller public relations team began a campaign to defend Rhoads' reputation. Lee had access to pre-published versions of both The New York Times and Time magazine and was able to influence enough editing that the magazine eliminated the words "and transplanting cancer into several more", from its published version of the letter. Also, based on the positive testimony of some patients, The New York Times published a piece called "Patients Say Rhoads Saved Their Lives." After Rhoads returned to New York, where he resumed work at the Rockefeller Foundation, the scandal quickly faded away. In 1950, however, when Puerto Rican pro-independence activists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attempted to assassinate President Truman one of them cited Rhoads's letter as motivation for becoming a militant.

Reaction to the Rhoads scandal and controversy was mixed. His colleagues did not believe Rhoads's spin that his letter was a "fantastic and playful composition...intended as a parody." His superiors, on the other hand, dismissed the incident as a case of local ingratitude. The press sided with his superiors: Time magazine, for example, headlined the incident as "Porto Ricochet" to imply that Rhoads's noble efforts in Puerto Rico had come back to bite him.

In 1982, Puerto Rican social scientist and writer Pedro Aponte Vazquez found new information at various archives, including those at the Rockefeller Foundation, which he felt raised doubts about the investigations. Most prominent among his findings was a 1932 letter that Governor Beverly had written to the Rockefeller Foundation's associate director stating that Rhoads had written a second letter "even worse than the first" and which, according to Beverley, the government had suppressed and destroyed. Rhoads's superior, however, had conducted a case-by-case investigation of the 13 patients who died under Rhoads's tenure but found nothing suspicious. Still, Aponte Vazquez argued that the evidence he found of a "pervasive old-boy attitude" suggested that investigators should not have accepted those reports on face value. Aponte Vazquez added that "Here is a case in which the perpetrator spontaneously wrote a confession, and they did not even exhume the bodies ." Aponte Vazquez asked the Puerto Rico Department of Justice to reopen the case, but was told that it was no longer worth pursuing given that Rhoads had been dead for so long.

In 2002, controversy over the letter and the alleged experiments arose once more when Edwin Vazquez, a biology professor at the University of Puerto Rico, contacted the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) about the incident and demanded that Rhoads's name be removed from the award. Others also contacted the AACR, including Puerto Rico's Secretary of State Ferdinand Mercado. Many other Puerto Ricans expressed outrage when they learned of the letter. In a 16 October 2002 letter to the AACR, Washington DC attorney Flavio Cumpiano stated that "Cornelius Rhoads is to Puerto Ricans what Josef Mengele is to Jews." The AACR commissioned an investigation led by Jay Katz, a bioethicist. Oncology Times reported that "although there was no evidence of Dr. Rhoads' killing patients or transplanting cancer cells, the letter itself was reprehensible enough to remove his name from the award." In 2003 the AACR renamed the award, stripping the honor from Rhoads posthumously. The AACR indicated that once a new name for the award was established it would be retroactive and that past awardees would receive new, updated plaques.