Por y Para Mi Gente: Puerto Rico-US Relations (Meditation 5)

Note

This is my fifth meditation on the documents of barbarism that solidified Puerto Rico’s standing as a US colony from 1898 to present (As Jóse Trías Monge writes, Puerto is the “oldest colony” in the world). You may find the first meditation here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here.

Puerto Rican Citizenship: A Changing Wind with Woodrow Wilson?

From 1897-1913, three white-supremacy-championing Republican expansionists served as U.S. residents: William McKinley (18971-1901), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), and William Howard Taft (1909-1913). The next President, Woodrow Wilson, was an important departure from this season of racist Republican domination.

Woodrow Wilson was a Southern Democrat who opposed conquest, expansionism, and imperialism. His 1912 platform denounced imperialism as “an inexcusable blunder, which has involved us in enormous expense, brought us weakness instead of strength, and laid our nation open to the charge of abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of self-government.” Wilson’s appointment of anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan to Secretary of State reflected this platform.

None of this, of course, entails that Wilson wasn’t a white supremacist. He was. He just didn’t endorse white supremacy and U.S. imperial expansion.

But we should say more. Wilson told Congress that the U.S.’s colonies were “no longer to be selfishly exploited” and that “the familiar rights and privileges” of citizens should be extended to their inhabitants. For mi gente, all this appeared to be—and entail—good news.

A Looming War and Military Need: Puerto Rican Citizenship and The Jones Act of 1917

As President Wilson’s first term ended, Puerto Rico-U.S. relations hardly budged. Four years had come and gone, but Puerto Rico remained an exploited U.S. colony whose non-White inhabitants daily experienced the burden of racist laws and practices that maintained the White Empire’s color-line.

At the start of his second term, however, President Wilson and Congress realized that the pressures of World War I required they alter these racist laws and practices. As the U.S. prepared to enter the war, the federal government considered how it could increase its military force. Having expanded the military and the President’s command of it through the National Defense Act of 1916, the government became increasingly interested in filling the military with Puerto Ricans. But this would require extending Puerto Ricans citizenship and adjusting military conscription policies. Both changes came in 1917. 

Congress enacted a bill of rights for Puerto Rico in the Jones Act of 1917. One of these new rights was citizenship. Section 5 of the Jones Acts reads, “All citizens of Porto Rico, as defined by [the Foraker Act]…are hereby declared, and shall be deemed and held to be, citizens of the United States.” Two months later, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917. This new law based military conscription “upon liability to military service of all male citizens.” Together, the National Defense Act, the Jones Act, and the Selective Service propelled the conscription of thousands of Puerto Ricans into the U.S. military right as the U.S. joined World War I. Approximately 18,000 Puerto Ricans served within the military by the War’s end.

But What did “Citizenship” Mean?

Though the Jones Act granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship, it didn’t grant them full citizenship. That wasn’t Congress’s intention.

Consider remarks Senator Joseph B. Foraker (Rep.), after whom the Foraker Act (1900) is named, made. Senator Foraker declared that the Jones Act merely served to “recognize that Puerto Rico belongs to the United States of America.” Foraker clarified thus:

We considered very carefully what status in a political sense we would give to the people of [Puerto Rico], and we reported that provision not thoughtlessly….We concluded…that the inhabitants of that island must be either citizens or subjects or aliens. We did not want to treat our own as aliens, and we do not propose to have any subjects. Therefore, we adopted the term “citizens.” In adopting the term “citizens” we did not understand, however, that we were giving to those people any rights that the American people do not want them to have. “Citizens” is a word that indicates, according to Story’s work on the Constitution of the United States, allegiance on the one hand and protection on the other.

Senator Foraker’s linguistic maneuvers are arresting. The concept “citizen” has undergone a white supremacist bludgeoning to maintain the desires of the White Empire’s true citizens. Puerto Ricans are “citizens” without the right to vote for their President or Vice-President or for representation in Congress. The White Empire’s governing officials didn’t extend Puerto Ricans these rights, for that wasn’t the will of the Empire’s White majority. Once again, White interest trumps, and requires linguistic sophistry. Puerto Ricans citizenship reflects being foreign—but in a domestic sense.

The Racist Congressional Quagmire

Many members of Congress resisted passing the Jones Act. For these representatives of white power, the Puerto Ricans racial status as non-White undesirables, those unfit for fuller entrance into the “American family” (Justice White, Downes v Bidwell). This racist resistance had a grotesque four-year Congressional precedent.

In 1912, Representative Joseph Cannon (Rep.) shared his White fears about Puerto Rican citizenship. “I do not know, but as I am informed by people who are familiar, 75 or 80 percent of those people are mixed blood in part and are not the equal to the full-blood Spaniard and not equal, in my judgment, to the unmixed African, and yet they are to be made citizens of the United States.” Backing his colleague, Representative James Slayden (Dem.) offered his thoughts.

In all these Central and South American States there is a large population of mixed bloods. The progeny of the union of the Spaniard and native Indian is not without ability. Many of them have been men of high order and ability. They have produced great statesmen like Juarez and Diaz in Mexico, great orators, painters and writers, but it can not be denied that they seem to lack the calm judgment so essential in the conduct of the affairs of state….

Mr. Cannon might have said, and would certainly have been more accurate if he had said—that as a whole they have a different color. That would better have explained what he conceives to be their incapacity for “government of the people by the people.” Color in this matter is more important than language.

Though Cannon and Slayden represented different regions of the U.S.—Illinois and Texas, respectively—and belonged to different parties, they found common cause and ground in resisting Puerto Rican citizenship for the sake of their White Empire.

Of course, not all Representatives opposed Puerto Rican “citizenship.” Representative Elmer Morse (Rep.) argued that because Puerto Ricans had “consented to became a part of this country,” it seemed fitting that they should be “entitled not only to the protection but to all the rights of American citizens….[even if] the quality of citizenship is not as high as it ought to be, yet they should be given the privilege of American citizenship at this time.” Four years later, Representative Henry Cooper (Rep.) offered a searing defense of Puerto Rican citizenship, arguing that Puerto Ricans were:

civilized, so civilized…[that] in the island of Porto Rico years ago, when they bought and sold slaves, they voluntarily taxed themselves, raised money to the aggregate of $16,000,000, paid for all of the slaves and made them free. That is better, far better than we did in the United States, for we killed hundreds of thousands of our own people before we could free the slaves.

Cooper’s flipping of the racist civilization-script is damning. Yes, it maintains a white gaze. But it captures the folly in the racist argumentation of folks like Cannon and Slayden who worried about Puerto Ricans lacking “the calm judgment so essential in the conduct of the affairs of state.”

Sadly, even Cooper’s argument provided incapable of keeping Cannon-and-Slayden-like arguments out of Congress. Indeed, Cannon recapitulated his racist arguments against Puerto Rican citizenship.

Now, when you talk about a people competent for self-government, certain things are to be taken into consideration. One is the racial question. Another is the climatic conditions…

The people of Porto Rico have not the slightest conception of self-government…

I have never been in favor of United States citizenship so far as Porto Rico is concerned…

Porto Rico is populated by a mixed race. About 30 percent are pure African. I was informed by Army officers when I was down there that when the census was taken every man that was a pure African was listed and counted as such, but that there was really 75 to 80 per cent of the population that was or had an African strain in their blood.

Lest some find Cooper’s argument persuasive, Cannon weaponized Negrophobia and the one-drop rule to stress that Puerto Ricans were not White nor merely mixed. They were Black.

Rubin Weston—Again.  

Growing up in New Jersey, I wondered: Why don’t Puerto Rican’s on the island have full citizenship rights. When I asked, family members gave evasive answers, sometimes settling for the slogan “it is what it is.”

Given the racism I experienced on the mainland, I eventually suspected that racism was an important part of the answer my family wasn’t giving me. I was right.

Let me once again give Rubin Francis Weston the last word.

Americans in positions to influence or to establish policy were not very generous in giving to the Puerto Ricans rights usually given to Americans. For the first third of the twentieth century they rationalized the inconsistency of their treatment of the Puerto Ricans on the basis of cultural differences. In the final analysis, race emerged as the determining factor in establishing policy. That policy assumed that the Puerto Ricans were radically different from the Anglo-Saxons and were unassimilable into the American body politic.