In the 1930s he worked in Puerto Rico with a Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board contingent. He helped develop chemical weapons during his stint with the U.S. military in World War II. He became a highly celebrated American pathologist and oncologist. He served as director of Memorial Hospital for Cancer Research in New York, and as the first director of Sloan-Kettering Institute, becoming the first director of the combined Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. For his contributions to cancer research, Rhoads was featured on the cover of the June 27, 1949 issue of Time magazine \under the title "Cancer Fighter."
However, while in Puerto Rico, years before Dr. Joseph Mengele performed sadistic experiments on Jews in Nazi concentration camps, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads staged a few of his own inhumane experiments on the people of Puerto Rico; a people he considered “the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere.” Despite admitting his contempt for Puerto Ricans, and his intention to do them harm, he went unpunished and ultimately benefitted from a whitewashing campaign in the U.S.
After the Spanish-American War in 1898, spurred on by William Randolph Hearst’s yellow journalism, the United States acquired several territories, including the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. In 1899, Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory, which it remains today.
In the 1930s, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads went to Puerto Rico “working in public health to alleviate disease,” Daniel Immerwahr, author of How To Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), told Dave Davies in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. Rhoads, who was working for the Rockefeller Institute went to study anemia. But after he arrived, he apparently had a lot more on his mind than alleviating disease.
“He immediately started running all kinds of experiments that it's almost impossible to imagine him doing on the mainland - certainly not on white patients,” Immerwahr said. “So he refused to treat some of his patients just to see what would happen with them. In other patients, he actually tried to induce disease in them. He described them to his colleagues as experimental animals.”
Rhoads wrote a letter to a colleague in Boston saying that while the place is “beautiful,” Puerto Ricans “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.”
The letter went on: “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.”
Although un-mailed, when the letter was discovered by a colleague, it became an explosive issue in Puerto Rican politics and added fuel the nationalist movement led by Pedro Albizu Campos, who had earlier been betrayed by promises by the U.S. government, Immerwahr pointed out.
Immerwahr noted that the Supreme Court dealt with the question of who is fully American “with a set of cases that are called the Insular Cases, where it concludes that some of the overseas territories, despite the fact that they are part of the United States, technically - they're U.S. territory - they're not part of the United States in the constitutional sense. Namely, they're not covered by the Constitution.
“And if you are born in a U.S. territory that's not covered by the Constitution in this way, you don't have constitutional protections. You don't have the right to vote for president. You might not even have trial by jury. And in fact, this is still good law today. So if you live in the mainland United States and you travel to Puerto Rico, by virtue of having made that trip, you lose the constitutional right to trial by jury.”
Not long after the letter was discovered, Rhoads left Puerto Rico and returned to the U.S. where he maintained that he was joking. According to a 2003 article in Science by Douglas Starr, titled "Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize," Rhoads called 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." He explained that nothing "was ever intended to mean other than the opposite of what was stated."
At the time, Rhoads faced no repercussions for his words. In fact, after another damning letter was discovered, the U.S. government destroyed it. Rhoads became the vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine, joined the Army during World War II, where he became a colonel, and the chief medical officer in the Chemical Warfare Service. (Ultimately, after a new investigation in the early 2000s, because of his racism, Rhoads’ name was stripped from an award named in his honor, which had been established in 1979 by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).
According to Immerwahr, during his stint in the military, Rhoads was at the center of the United States “trying out all kinds of poison gases and other chemical weapons.” It did so “by doing human subjects testing on uniformed men - it turns out 60,000 in all.” These men, many of who are Puerto Ricans, “have mustard agents applied to their skin. They're put in gas chambers with gas masks just to see what happens. And the United States also has an island near Panama that it claims and that it uses to run all kinds of chemical weapons tests,” Immerwahr pointed out.
As Immerwahr told Davies, of all people, Rhoads is “the one who ultimately has to sign off on the ethics and the medical advisability of these tests. And I've gone through the records of the Chemical Warfare Service and haven't found a single test that he objected to. Just the opposite - he goes through, and he comments on the tests. Does white skin blister differently than black skin? Let's find out. … So he has this really incredible history, after having already left the island, of still experimenting on more Puerto Ricans.”
Although remembered in Puerto Rico as a scoundrel, as Immerwahr says, Rhoads ends his career “with a number of other doctors, [as] the head of the Sloan Kettering Institute. And he … becomes one of the forefathers of chemotherapy. He's on the cover of Time magazine. He's celebrated for decades as one of the pioneering doctors in the United States.”
In How to Hide an Empire, Immerwahr writes: “At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.”
In 1979, the American Association for Cancer Research established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award. AACR eventually stripped the honor from Rhoads because of his racism.