Jones Act - 1917
On 02 March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act, more commonly known as the Jones Act, which made residents of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking U.S. possession, American citizens. It replaced the Foraker Act of 1900, which established a civilian government on the island. The Jones–Shafroth Act (39 Stat. 951-968) guaranteed full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. The act also extended the term of Resident Commissioners from two to four years. This law was later superseded by the Commonwealth Act of 1952.
Woodrow Wilson’s ascent to the presidency had increased the likelihood that the Foraker Act would be amended. In 1912 Wilson campaigned on a promise to ensure U.S. citizenship and home rule for Puerto Ricans. William A. Jones sponsored an act that outlined independence for the Philippine Islands. A 14-term U.S. Representative, Jones attended the Virginia Military Institute as an adolescent and helped to defend Richmond, Virginia, from the Union Army during the Civil War. From 1912 to 1914, Insular Affairs Committee chairman William A. Jones of Virginia, who had previously opposed the Foraker Act, introduced bills on six occasions calling for a new constitutional government for Puerto Rico and U.S. citizenship for its residents. None of them gained any traction, but two events in 1914 added to the island’s importance in the eyes of U.S. officials: the completion of the Panama Canal and the start of the Great War. The canal’s role as a vital connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans highlighted Puerto Rico’s strategic value as a stopover for maritime commercial traffic. This was especially the case for ships coming from Europe, but the start of Great War strengthened fears that the Caribbean would be dragged into the conflict.
Though the Wilson administration was preoccupied with events in Europe, the Bureau of Insular Affairs (BIA) argued that cementing the political bonds between Puerto Rico and the mainland would pay significant dividends. “The word loyalty will have a greater meaning [for Puerto Ricans] if we admit them to the conglomerate of our citizenship,” read a 1912 internal BIA memo. “Otherwise, there will always be discontent[ed] elements that will agitate for breaking the bond.” Also, U.S. military planners were eager to assemble a volunteer Puerto Rican home guard and a Puerto Rican regiment to protect the island and defend the Canal Zone, respectively.
Puerto Ricans’ newly acquired U.S. citizenship made recruitment easier. On an island with roughly one million inhabitants, hundreds of thousands of men registered for the draft; more than 17,000 were selected. The island also exceeded its fundraising quota for Liberty Loan bond drives. “We have been at your side in the hour of crisis and the people who are good to share the responsibilities, hardships, and sacrifices at any great emergency and who are quick to respond to the call of public duty, should also be good to share the prerogatives and advantages of your institutions and of American citizenship in normal times,” said Resident Commissioner Félix Córdova Dávila.
Introduced by House Insular Affairs Chairman Jones — and following on the heels of the First Jones Act (39 Stat. 545-556), which in August 1916 had increased Filipino autonomy and pledged independence as soon as practicable — the Second Jones Act (39 Stat. 951-968), which pertained to Puerto Rico, was less sweeping than the Foraker Act and retained much of the colonial structure. While the new legislation increased membership in the territorial house from 35 representatives to 39 and created for the first time a popularly elected senate with 19 members, it reserved Congress’s right to annul or amend bills passed by the insular legislature and it required that directors of four of the six major government departments—agriculture and labor, health, interior, and treasury—be appointed by the U.S. President with the advice and consent of the territorial senate. The two remaining department heads, the attorney general and the commissioner of education, would be named solely by the President. As a scholar of Puerto Rican politics notes, the Jones Act “barely nodded in the direction of [the] American principle of government by consent of the governed,” and though it provided some “coveted gains,” it hardly fulfilled most Puerto Ricans’ aspirations. Most significant, rather than deferring to Puerto Ricans on the issue of citizenship, the final version of the Jones Act conveyed new constitutional obligations.
Citizenship was a controversial subject on an island whose political leaders struggled to define its relationship with the United States. For example, Luis Muñoz Rivera initially argued against granting Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship in the debate over the Jones Act, following the lead of his Union Party, which eliminated statehood from its platform in 1912. However, he personally embraced the prospect of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. After eventually endorsing the Jones Act on the House Floor, Muñoz Rivera proceeded to explain why many Puerto Ricans rejected it. “My countrymen, who, precisely the same as yours, have their dignity and self respect to maintain, refuse to accept a citizenship of an inferior order, a citizenship of the second class, which does not permit them to dispose of their own resources nor to live their own lives nor to send to this Capitol their proportional representation,” he said. Muñoz Rivera never saw the Jones Act implemented; he died before President Wilson signed it into law on March 2, 1917.
Intended to pacify Puerto Rico’s concerns and strengthen America’s grip on the Caribbean Basin during wartime, the Jones Act only made Puerto Rico’s political situation more complex. “Rather than solving the status question, the Jones Act intensified the status struggle,” placing Resident Commissioners at the center of the debate observes historian Luis Martínez-Fernández.”
What the Foraker Act, the Insular Cases, and the Jones Act failed to finally determine was Puerto Rico’s political status as a nonincorporated American territory. According to Martínez-Fernández, the early decades of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico were driven by a policy of “bifurcation and fragmentation” as U.S. authorities played favorites with factions of the island’s political elite in an attempt “to retain the island as a territorial conquest of ambiguous political status.”54 Puerto Rican politicians were also split on the question of status. The popularity of three broad options—statehood, complete independence, and some measure of autonomy within the colonial structure—waxed and waned among Puerto Rico’s political elites.
By virtue of their participation in the American federal government most Resident Commissioners either advocated a form of colonial autonomy or pursued statehood. At the heart of the matter was the constant struggle to achieve a balance between federal and local control of Puerto Rico’s internal affairs. One scholar describes Luis Muñoz Rivera as a “master trapeze artist in Puerto Rico’s ideological wars” because at one point in his career he embraced all three status options. But this balancing act was difficult for Muñoz Rivera, who was caught between his deep emotional and cultural attachment to his Hispanic heritage and Puerto Rican independence and his pragmatic impulse to accept U.S. citizenship. Here was the essential autonomist dilemma: Whereas statehood threatened to subsume local Puerto Rican issues, complete independence might limit the island’s economic opportunities. The divisiveness of this issue both on and off the island led a Washington Post reporter to observe in 1924, “What the ultimate status of Porto Rico will be is a matter still lying in the capacious lap of the gods.”
Extending New Deal benefits to Puerto Rico tested the Resident Commissioners’ ability to balance desires for local control with the distribution of federal aid on the island. Early in the economic crisis, Félix Córdova Dávila and José Pesquera attempted to stem losses by appealing to President Herbert Hoover to extend to Puerto Rico the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a program that funneled federal tax revenue to local banks. When Franklin D. Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1933, he urged a series of emergency economic policies and social welfare programs known collectively as the New Deal, and sought to include Puerto Rico in much of this legislation.
A major change in the U.S. government’s oversight over Puerto Rico involved transferring the island’s jurisdiction from the War Department to the Interior Department, establishing the Division of Territories and Island Possessions (DTIP) on May 29, 1934. The move placed the management of all U.S. territories in a single office and, more significant, moved Puerto Rico out of the military’s jurisdiction.
The economic upheaval of the Great Depression initiated a wave of anti-Americanism in Puerto Rico that crested in the mid-1930s. Formed in 1922 when the dominant Partido de Unión (Union Party) dropped independence from its platform, the Partido Nacionalista (Nationalist Party), who called for complete Puerto Rican independence, were never a significant force in their own right, but an electoral alliance with the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) in the 1932 election as well as an increase in deadly protests catapulted them into the public eye. On February 23, 1936, members of the Nationalist Youth Movement, Hiram Rosado and Elías Beauchamp, assassinated insular police commissioner Francis Riggs. The two young men were arrested at the scene and taken to a police station. Claiming the youths had attempted to steal their weapons, the arresting officers shot both assassins dead while they were in custody. Puerto Ricans of all political stripes condemned the outburst of violence.
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.
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