VIII
Nicaragua is a lowland of tropical heat. It has the least invigorating climate in Central America. The natives are not particularly blessed with energy or industry, and are consequently rather eager to blame their lack of initiative to the stifling effect of their subserviency to the United States.
Individually they are quite ready to be friendly to any American. Collectively they love to damn the gringos. And the newspapers of Managua and León cater regularly to their taste by soaking every Yankee who attains prominence in the republic.
These papers, like the dailies of Guatemala, are mostly four-sheet publications with the flavor of rural journalism. They are printed, usually at a loss, by gentlemen of political aspirations who desire an organ for self-expression. The reporters, inspired by the same vanity, editorialize in every news report. In mentioning the arrival of an actress, they felicitate her and wish her success. In describing the arrest of some petty criminal, they express the hope that he may be convicted and hanged and dealt with not too leniently in purgatory. In attacking Americans, however, they reach their highest flights of eloquence. No article on politics or finance is complete without an allusion to “the oppressive hand of the American banker.” And when the banker has been exhausted as a source of indignant outpourings, they give their attention to the other American residents.
On one occasion they flamed out against young René Wallace, the son of a Yankee merchant, because he had organized a league of basket-ball clubs among the young ladies of Nicaraguan society. They proclaimed indignantly that he was trying to deprive the local señoritas of all modesty and gentleness by arraying them in bloomers and teaching them the hoydenish games wherein no self-respecting woman could indulge.
On another occasion they flamed out against Dr. Daniel M. Molloy, of the Rockefeller Foundation, because the name of Rockefeller suggested to them another capitalistic invasion. This Foundation has been active throughout Central America, particularly in combating hook-worm, wherewith nearly all the barefoot inhabitants are infected. It suppressed a yellow fever epidemic which swept throughout these countries in 1918. It has built hospitals, improved water supplies, taught hygiene, and worked in many other ways for the betterment of the various republics. The ignorant peons, indifferent to hygiene, had always regarded sickness and disease as something inevitable, to be accepted with fatalistic patience. In infant mortality, Mexico surpasses all the world’s civilized communities, while its total death-rate is thrice that of the United States, and it is safe to assume that the Central-American republics—in the absence of statistics—keep pace with Mexico. The educated classes have never made much effort to relieve this situation. In Tegucigalpa a recently appointed director of a government hospital had to begin his work by removing forty-two cans of garbage left in the hospital patio by the last director. The Rockefeller Foundation there, in employing a new native physician of high standing in the community, discovered that he had never studied bacteriology and had but a vague idea that any diseases were caused by germs. In lands where such conditions prevail, the Foundation should have been hailed as a God-send, especially since it came largely at its own expense. But a newspaper in León published daily editorials attacking Dr. Molloy, and insisting that Rockefeller would presently be demanding oil concessions. When no such demands were forthcoming, the editor found another argument in the fact that Dr. Molloy was advocating new methods in sewerage disposal.
“Aha!” he shouted on his front page. “We see the nigger in the woodpile. This gringo is a secret representative of a manufacturing firm that hopes to sell us American plumbing devices!”