El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  A couple of years later, in 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois would see U.S. imperialism somewhat differently, asking in one essay, “What is to be our attitude towards these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them?” referring to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines. He called for black Americans to “guard and guide them with our vote,” reminding his readers that “we must remember that the twentieth century will find nearly twenty million of brown and black people under the protection of the American flag, a third of the nation.”63

  Throughout talks on the treaty and its subsequent ratification, the anti-imperialist movement became more outspoken, arguing that the United States should not take any territories in the aftermath of the war.64 The gradual nature of U.S. territorial expansion—even though that, too, had involved a war in 1846—was perceived to be different from taking overseas colonies, separate from the North American landmass.65 Although many were pleased to see Spain driven out of the hemisphere, in its place the United States had picked up another eleven million people scattered across the globe.66 This was disquieting to many, with some concerned about these new subjects’ not being “white.” Soon organizations like the Anti-Imperialist League began to hold meetings and criticize the direction of the United States. Heated debates also followed in Congress.

  One of the most prominent anti-imperialists to emerge was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic candidate for president, whose firm stance on this issue became a key component of his presidential bid in 1900. His platform decried the unfairness of Puerto Ricans’ receiving “a government without their consent,” while also demanding that the promise of Cuban freedom be delivered.67 Popular as these sentiments might have been, Bryan’s stance on another issue of the day—“free silver,” an economy policy that would have allowed for the unlimited coinage of silver—overshadowed his campaign and ultimately may have cost him a victory.68

  While the United States was having an internal debate about its place in the world, Cubans were forced to accept the immediate reality of a U.S. military occupation. “[This] cannot be our ultimate fate,” declared General Máximo Gómez in 1899, “after years of struggle.”69 The talk in Washington turned to “stability,” as well as the “pacification” included in one of the clauses of the earlier joint resolution, which stipulated that the United States would not “exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof.” It was an ambiguous—and to Cubans, menacing—phrase, one indicating that intervention would be the result if Cuba did not act in favor of U.S. interests.70

  Underneath this talk was a subtext of race: that the island’s large Afro-Cuban population had been mentioned more than once in the same breath as Haiti indicated some of the accepted ideas about the ability of Cubans to self-govern, with one U.S. official quipping that universal suffrage on the island would be counterproductive and that “we might just as well retire and let it drift to Hayti No. 2.”71 The occupying government attempted to institute what were more or less Jim Crow policies, with literacy and property requirements that excluded two-thirds of Cuban men, many of them black, from voting—a move that met with angry reaction and protests.72

  In the end, Cuba would have its independence in 1902, though not without the United States erecting a few more barriers along the way, the largest of which took the form of the 1901 Platt Amendment. This legislation reflected the ongoing U.S. distrust of Cubans and set out a number of new demands as part of a larger bill to end the military occupation of the island. It was crafted to leave U.S. interests protected and U.S. influence undiminished. One key stipulation obliged Cuba to lease land to the United States for a naval station; today Guantánamo Bay remains a base for the U.S. Navy. The amendment also allowed the United States to exercise its “right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence,” which was vague enough for a wide degree of interpretation.73 The reaction in Cuba was immediate, and anti-U.S. demonstrations erupted across the island. Cuban leaders were forced to accept the amendment in the end, believing that otherwise the United States would never leave.

  The long dream of owning or annexing Cuba outright may have come to an end, but the United States had no intention of leaving the island in peace.74 It was back only a few years later, putting its right of intervention to use in 1906, after the collapse of the presidency of Tomás Estrada Palma. The United States sent the secretary of war and future president William Howard Taft for a few weeks before he was replaced as provisional governor by Charles Mangoon, who stayed until 1909.

  In addition to political uncertainties, the island’s economy suffered tremendous swings in its fortunes. In 1903 the United States and Cuba also agreed to a trade reciprocity deal that gave a 20 percent reduction in tariffs on Cuban goods and a similar concession on certain goods that the United States sent to the island. While it was useful in bringing a wider range of imports to Cuba—everything from steel products to cotton goods and luxuries like perfume—the treaty also increased Cuba’s reliance on its much larger trading partner and encouraged sugar production at the expense of the island’s agricultural and economic diversification.75

  To offset the financial pain that some landowners were experiencing, U.S. officials at first implemented a number of measures, such as delayed debt collection, abolition of certain duties and taxes, and a moratorium on plantation foreclosure.76 These provided some relief, but at the same time it was clear there were bargains to be had.77 By 1905, around $50 million in land purchases had been made, with some thirteen thousand U.S. investors owning titles.78 Between 1903 and 1919, some forty-four thousand people from the United States emigrated to Cuba, by then an island of 1.5 million people.79 By 1920, North American sugar interests were producing 63 percent of the total crop.80

  For Puerto Rico, the outlook was bleaker than Cuba’s, despite former U.S. consul Hanna’s cheerful assertion that Puerto Ricans should be congratulated “at their good fortune in becoming a part of the territory of the great United States.”81 Puerto Rico faced a fate much different from its island neighbor’s. To begin with, the timing was unfortunate: it was ceded to the United States only a short while after it had finally managed a deal with Spain in 1897 that granted it more powers of self-government, including setting its own tariffs, creating a currency, and establishing a legislature. The prominent journalist and politician Luis Muñoz Rivera had been elected head of the new body that spring, only months before U.S. troops came ashore. In addition, a year after the war ended, the island was slammed by one of the worst hurricanes in its history, San Ciriaco, which made landfall in the south of the island on August 8, 1899.82

  When the United States took charge, all the reforms that had been enacted before the invasion were wiped away and replaced with the Foraker Act of 1900, also known as the Organic Act. It established a government for the island with a governor and a council appointed by the U.S. president, although Puerto Ricans could vote for the members of the legislative chamber and a resident commissioner who was a nonvoting representative to Washington.83 Added soon after this was the 1902 Official Languages Act, which made English an equal official language to Spanish, to be used in government and in the schools, despite the fact that most people, including civil servants and teachers, did not speak it. Language issues and the lack of cultural understanding angered and frustrated Puerto Ricans both at home and abroad. An article in the Puerto Rico Herald —edited at the time by Luis Muñoz Rivera—thundered from its offices in New York that “it is absolutely necessary that the Governor of Puerto Rico should be thoroughly acquainted with the language spoken in the island.”84 Indeed, the U.S. paperwork from the Foraker Act onward misspelled the name of the island “Porto Rico,” an error that would require thirty-two years of campaigning to correct.85

  The United States sent a succession of unpopular governors to Puerto Rico, starting with Charles Herbert Allen. During the one year he was in office he managed to earn the suspicion and hostility of people
on the island by buying up land that would later be the basis for a powerful sugar syndicate. Allen would go on in 1913 to be president of the American Sugar Refining Company, a firm better known as Domino Sugar.

  In 1902, Allen contributed a chapter to a book, Opportunities in the Colonies and Cuba, about what awaited potential investors in Puerto Rico. He praised the soil for still being fertile even though “portions of it were under tillage long before the Pilgrims waded ashore at Plymouth.” Yet much was being used for pastures, which Allen thought “under proper conditions could be devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane”—a topic about which he had learned a great deal.86

  In the book, he divided the 950,000 Puerto Ricans on the island into “whites,” “negroes,” and “mestizos,” and claimed that Puerto Rico had “a larger percentage of white inhabitants than is found in any other island in the West Indies.”87 He found the people to have a “distinct individuality,” though predicted that with the “thrift and industry which follows the Anglo-Saxon, in time this very individuality will disappear.”88 Allen also envisioned an island that could support industry or be ideal for a second home, as it had “little to be vainly looked for by the continental resident seeking a winter residence.”89

  Despite its many natural resources, the island economy lagged, as a 1903 headline in the New York Times made clear: “Porto Rico Not Prospering Under United States Rules.” The unsigned piece pointed a finger at the United States for not doing more to buy Puerto Rican coffee and other products, yet it made the improbable claim that “thus far Porto Rico has been blessed with honest American officials.”90 Blaming the “shiftless native labor,” the article boasted that “an American can do ten times as much work as a Porto Rican, and do it better at that.” The myth of the lazy Hispanic continued to stalk the former Spanish territory.

  Puerto Ricans were working hard, on and off the island. Many landless or peasant agricultural workers—known on the island as jíbaros—had left to labor in the fields of a fellow territory, Hawaii. Small farmers devastated by the 1899 hurricane felt they had few other options, not least because a coffee crop takes about five years to yield a harvest. By 1901, more than fifty-two hundred Puerto Ricans had arrived in Hawaii, desperate enough to take their chances to work in fields thousands of miles away.91 In the meantime, U.S. interests continued to pour money into Puerto Rican sugar operations, taking control of or buying out other growers, until five major corporations dominated sugar on the island.92

  The Mexicans in Texas or New Mexico had citizenship, or at least the right to obtain it, conferred on them. By contrast, the situation in Puerto Rico was unclear. In the 1901 Downes v. Bidwell case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not have the same application on the island as it did on the mainland. As a result, Justice Edward White introduced the doctrine of territorial nonincorporation; in domestic terms, Puerto Ricans were foreign; in international terms they belonged to United States.93

  This principle was difficult to translate into practice, and a high-profile case the following year tested the limits of nonincorporation for Puerto Ricans. The legal battle began when a young Puerto Rican woman named Isabel González tried to enter the mainland United States in 1902. She was a single mother traveling without her child but also pregnant. Her intention was to follow her fiancé to Staten Island, where he was working, and marry him. Her brother lived there along with other relatives. Put into the same category of “alien” as other foreigners, Puerto Ricans in 1902 had to enter via Ellis Island, which at that time was under the commissionership of William Williams. He was an advocate of strict enforcement, and the rate of people turned away had doubled in his first year.94 Of special interest to him were the people thought likely to need recourse to public funds, or, as it was put in the case of González, “likely to become a public charge.”95 Under this regime, unmarried mothers or women who were pregnant were taken for further questioning, while single women had to be collected by a family member. Once González’s pregnancy was revealed, she was pulled aside, although family members were present to meet her. Officials asked whether her relatives were “able, willing and legally bound” to give her support.96

  Her family explained to officials that she was a widow about to remarry.97 However, her fiancé was not there in person because he was at work, and this aroused further suspicion. The final blow came when her brother, Luis, assured the officials that her family would make sure Isabel and her fiancé married, leaving the impression that the fiancé was being forced to wed Isabel.98 After that, she was denied entry. She turned to the well-known Puerto Rican lawyer Domingo Collazo to take up the case. This soon turned into a larger battle that was about more than just her right to entry—it was about the status of all Puerto Ricans. In fact, while she was awaiting the trial on bond she married her fiancé, and that would have changed her eligibility, but she hid this fact because she knew what was at stake.99

  The case reached the Supreme Court by 1903, and after two months of hearings and deliberations it issued a unanimous ruling that the word “alien” could not be used in relation to Puerto Ricans. It did not make them full citizens, but it meant they could have more freedom to travel and live on the mainland.100 Isabel González, for her part, was not pleased, and criticized the decision for not addressing the real issue of true citizenship. It did, however, open the way for more people to head north. After the 1904 ruling in Gonzales v. Williams—the court misspelled her name—more Puerto Ricans began to pack their bags for El Norte.101

  On the island, divisions persisted about the direction of its future. Some wanted independence, but others, like Luis Muñoz Rivera, who was resident commissioner from 1911 to 1916, advocated a sort of self-governing in-between status. This was, in part because although he and his party, the Unión de Puerto Rico (Unionist Party), preferred statehood, they believed the U.S. Congress would not pursue it. At the same time, Muñoz Rivera considered full independence by this point a “purely abstract ideal.”102 Instead, Puerto Rico came a step closer to this desired autonomy in March 1917 with the Jones-Shafroth Act, though Muñoz Rivera died in late 1916, before its passage. This legislation created an elected bicameral legislature for the island, giving Puerto Ricans a greater degree of local democracy. It also made them U.S. citizens, partially incorporating them into the wider nation while also reminding them of the limits of self-rule on the island.103

  A crucial element of Jones-Shafroth was the opening of the U.S. military to Puerto Ricans. As the First World War began in Europe, the United States realized it needed to shore up its influence in its own backyard. Rumors that Germany had an increasing interest in the Caribbean unnerved Washington; and not coincidentally, in 1917 the United States also purchased the Danish West Indian islands of St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas, today’s U.S. Virgin Islands.

  On May 18, 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which meant all men between ages eighteen and thirty-two had to register for military service. At the request of the Puerto Rican legislature, Congress extended the draft to include Puerto Rico.104 On the first day, 104,550 Puerto Rican men signed up; the number later reached 236,853, with 17,885 called into service.105 A Puerto Rican regiment was sent to Panama, while other soldiers joined black regiments.106

  A few years after the First World War ended, E. Montgomery Reily arrived as governor of Puerto Rico, in 1921. He had no previous experience in governance and diplomacy, and his background was as an assistant postmaster and businessman in Kansas City. He had become involved in local and then national Republican politics, helping to build support for the successful presidential bid by Warren Harding, who in turn appointed Reily to the governorship.

  Among all the unpopular governors sent to the island, he may well have been the most despised. He was so ill-prepared for his post that President Harding had to edit Reily’s inaugural address. It was delivered on July 10, 1921, and, despite the blue pencil marks of the president, Reily managed to offend his audience, saying that “ther
e is no sympathy or possible hope in the United States for independence” for the island.107 His overall plan was to “Americanize” it. He later complained to Harding in a letter that “after my inaugural address was made, I received a number of letters threatening my life.”108 During his two years in office, sugar prices collapsed. Puerto Ricans in New York also joined in the chorus against him.109 With the situation deteriorating, Reily wrote to the president in March 1922, telling him that everything was “tranquil and peaceful” except for the fact that his enemies on the island had “appointed a Grand Jury about three weeks ago to investigate everything my administration accomplished. It is nothing but a political Grand Jury.”110 Reily tendered his resignation in February 1923.

  The combination of ongoing economic struggles and the stream of incompetent governors continued to cause problems in Puerto Rico throughout the 1920s and 1930s. While this turned some people into more ardent supporters of independence, thousands more decided to leave Puerto Rico and take their chances on the mainland.111

  After the end of the Spanish-American-Cuban War, the United States reached even farther south, to the Isthmus of Panama, which was then part of Colombia. The dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, like that of finding the fabled Northwest Passage, had persisted for centuries, but now engineering could make the connection a cartographic reality. The former French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who been the force behind the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, set up a private company to do the same in the Americas, paying Colombia for a concession to the land. Construction began in 1880 through the dense jungle that blankets the isthmus. Thousands of workers died from malaria and other tropical diseases, and Lesseps ran out of money before quitting in 1889.