ELA - Commonwealth Act of 1952
Throughout the early 1940s, congressional conservatism generally blocked any progress toward greater Puerto Rican autonomy. During the Second World War, because of Puerto Rico’s strategic location at the entrance to the Caribbean Sea, Congress chose not to address the issue of the island’s relationship to the United States, whether as a territory, a state, or an independent country.
But after 1945, several developments encouraged officials to reconsider Puerto Rico’s status. The first, and perhaps the most influential, was a response to the political and symbolic leadership of future governor Luis Muñoz Marín and his powerful political party, the PPD, which was formed in 1938. Muñoz Marín and the PPD promoted a moderate position of supporting an autonomous relationship with the United States instead of immediate independence.
The economic success of Muñoz Marín’s mid-1940s industrialization plan, dubbed “Operation Bootstrap,” also fostered a growing belief on the mainland that Puerto Rico had reached a critical level of economic and political maturity. A second, equally powerful justification for revisiting the federal-insular relationship was the “international atmosphere of decolonization” that emerged after World War II. Under pressure from the newly created United Nations, President Truman advocated self-determination and self-government for colonies, including Puerto Rico, as part of the “Four Points” in his 1949 inaugural address.
As early as 1943, the Puerto Rican legislature requested that islanders be permitted to elect their governor as the next step toward self-government. Muñoz Marín and his PPD ally Antonio Fernós-Isern sought this right as a step toward greater autonomy, and the move seemed appropriate after President Truman’s appointment of the first native-born governor, Jesús Piñero, in 1946. The men’s congressional allies—Chairman of the House Insular Affairs Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Possessions Fred Crawford of Michigan and Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska—introduced a bill permitting the island’s voters to elect their own governor in 1947. Reported favorably by committees in both houses, the Crawford–Butler Elected Governor Act (P.L. 80-362) passed with widespread bipartisan support in the final minutes of the first session of the 80th Congress (1947–1949). The measure was the first major change to Puerto Rican governance since the Jones Act in 1917. “Indeed,” wrote a historian, “the climate in Congress for insular autonomy was remarkably favorable.”
Despite the new legislation, the federal-insular relationship remained confusing and outdated. Fernós-Isern outlined his views on this political relationship in an address at Princeton University on May 5, 1948, redefining Puerto Rico not as a state of the union or as an independent republic, but as an intermediate “Autonomous State” or a “Federated Republic.” A fixation on independence or statehood had created “worshippers of different sects,” Fernós-Isern said the following October. He called on Puerto Ricans to unite, not as a colony but as a dominion of the United States, aligned with the mainland with regard to international matters but governed locally under its own constitution.
ntered minimal but vocal opposition on the House Floor. Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York—a frequent advocate for independence who represented a large number of Harlem-based Puerto Ricans—argued vehemently against Fernós-Isern’s 59-line bill (H.R. 7674). Marcantonio characterized the bill as “merely a snare and a delusion and a fraud perpetuated” on Puerto Ricans. “We are giving them nothing,” he declared. “This bill is a scheme to deprive the people of Puerto Rico to pass on their own future status.” The final bill passed on a voice vote in both chambers, becoming Public Law 600 after President Truman signed it on July 3, 1950.161 Fernós-Isern called on Puerto Ricans to unite with mainland Americans in observing “independence day” on the 4th of July.
Congress still maintained ultimate oversight over Puerto Rico’s internal affairs, and with the Jones Act in place, the final law created a “moral” compact between Puerto Rico and the United States rather than fundamentally altering their legal relationship. Moreover, Fernós-Isern’s strategy had achieved a resolution to the status issue, which many Puerto Ricans had sought for half a century. With President Truman’s signature, the ELA took effect July 25, 1952, the anniversary of the American invasion of Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War. Fernós-Isern and Muñoz Marín joined 35,000 people in front of the capitol in San Juan to raise the new flag, which boasted five red and white horizontal stripes with a single white star in a blue triangle, a design that Puerto Rican revolutionaries had hoisted against Spain in 1895.
Support for the ELA was far from universal. Detractors noted that the underlying status structure remained unchanged; Puerto Rico was still a U.S. territory. “The Congress of the United States … agreed to accept the Commonwealth status on the understanding that the phrase ‘in the nature of a compact’ did not mean that Congress was irrevocably giving up its jurisdiction over Puerto Rican matters, internal and external,” historian Surendra Bhana concludes. The ELA faced several court challenges in the late 20th century. The honeymoon period that followed the adoption of the ELA barely lasted into the next decade.
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