The Modernization of Puerto Rico: A Political Study of Changing Values and Institutions [2nd printing 1971. Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674864108, 9780674864115

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THE MODERNIZATION OF PUERTO RICO

THE MODERNIZATION OF PUERTO RICO A Political Study of Changing Values and Institutions

HENRY WELLS

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

© Copyright 1969 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Second Printing, 1971 Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-75435 SBN 674-58075-3 Printed in the United States of America

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

My interest in the modernization of Puerto Rico began in 1949, when I was a visiting professor in the summer school of the University of Puerto Rico. At that time the Popular Democratic Party had been in full control of the government less than five years, and Luis Mufioz Marin had been governor barely six months. Even though the "Mufioz Era" was still young, signs of rapid change and growth were everywhere visible. The first "Operation Bootstrap" factories were beginning production, new schools were being built, vast housing projects were under way, and the streets and highways were already crowded with automobiles, trucks, "guaguas," and "publicos." Almost equally palpable signs of change were the ability and dedication of the public officials I encountered, the intellectual ferment I observed at the University, and the optimism I sensed in the people as a whole. Intrigued by what was going on, I began to seek reasons for it. Every subsequent visit, by providing fresh evidence of the island's continuing transformation, renewed my desire to understand and explain how the modernization process worked. It was during that first visit in 1949 that I became acquainted with Jaime Benitez, then chancellor of the University, and with Pedro Munoz Amato, then dean of its College of Social Sciences. Without the support and encouragement they gave me in later years, this book could never have been written. At their invitation I spent the academic years 1951-52 and 1953-56 at the University of Puerto Rico, teaching part-time and engaging in a wide variety of research projects on the government and politics of the island. Especially valuable, in retrospect, were the tasks I undertook in

viii

Preface

1951-52 as a member of the research group that Dean Munoz Amato had organized to assist Puerto Rico's constituent assembly in the drafting of the Commonwealth constitution. That experience gave me firsthand acquaintance with the realities of Puerto Rican politics and brought me into close contact with most of the leaders of Puerto Rican public life. Several of those leaders have remained my good friends, invaluable informants, and unsparing critics from that time to the present. I record my gratitude to three of them, now deceased, for their unfailing helpfulness and friendship during the years that I taught at the University: Victor Gutierrez Franqui, at first attorney general and later majority leader of the Senate; Ernesto Ramos Antonini, speaker of the House of Representatives; and A. Cecil Snyder, then an associate justice of the Supreme Court, later chief justice. To Carlos V. Davila, then director of the Office of Legislative Services, Marco A. Rigau, then executive assistant to the governor, Nestor Rigual, then secretary of the House of Representatives, and Raul Serrano Geyls, then a professor of public administration with whom I shared an office, I owe a special debt for their many kindnesses, which I acknowledge with thanks and affection. I am grateful for the assistance I received from three institutions in the course of writing this book: the Social Science Research Council, for a Faculty Research Fellowship which enabled me to design the study in 1960 and return to Puerto Rico for further research; the University of Puerto Rico, whose Institute of Caribbean Studies facilitated my scholarly labors in the island during October and November 1964; and the University of Pennsylvania, for fall-semester leaves of absence in 1960 and 1964, for a reduced teaching load in 1966-67, and for a research grant from the Edwin and Agnes Lore Fund in 1968. I express profound appreciation to the following for reading all or parts of earlier versions of the manuscript and for making helpful suggestions: Henry J. Abraham, Robert W. Anderson, James C. Charlesworth, Carl J. Friedrich, Philip E. Jacob, Harold D. Lasswell, Thomas G. Mathews, Arturo Morales Carri0n, Harriet de Onis, Janet Scheff Reiner, Raul

Preface

ix

Serrano Geyls, Herbert J. Spiro, Ben S. Stephansky, Jose J. Villamil, Karl von Vorys, and Patricia P. B. Wells. The publishers of The American Political Science Review, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Caribbean Studies, and The Western Political Quarterly have kindly given me permission to use selections from my writings in those journals. HENRY WELLS

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Columbus Day, 1968

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Part I:

The Sociocultural

Background

1. The Traditional Value System 2. Nineteenth-Century Society and Politics

21 37

Part 11: Cultures in Conflict 3. The American Challenge 4. Puerto Rican Responses 5. The Desperate Thirties Part III:

63 94 114

Economic and Social Change

6. Breakthrough toward Modernity 7. Modernizing the Economy 8. Social Modernization Part IV:

Political Change

9. Governmental Reforms 10. Achievement of Commonwealth Status 11. Political-Status Controversies after 1952 Part V:

135 147 164

193 220 242

Political Stability

12. Politics, the People, and the PPD 13. The Leadership of Luis Munoz Marin 14. After Munoz?

267 293 317

Notes

339

Index

419

TABLES

1. Net income originating in various sectors of the Puerto Rican economy, fiscal years 1940,1952,1964 (in millions of dollars)

155

2. Employment in various sectors of the Puerto Rican economy, selected fiscal years (in thousands of employees)

159

3. Disbursement of Puerto Rican government operating funds by function, selected fiscal years (in millions of dollars)

168

4. Distribution of family incomes in Puerto Rico, selected years (families in thousands)

183

5. Occupational distribution of employed Puerto Ricans, by per cent of total employed, 1950 and 1960

183

6. Years of school completed by Puerto Ricans 25 years old and over, 1950 and 1960 (distribution in per cent)

184

7. Rates, of birth, death, and natural increase per 1,000 population in Puerto Rico, 1940-1964 (selected years)

185

8. Election results by party, shown as percentages of straight-ticket votes, 1940-1964

277

9. Reactions of adult Puerto Ricans (classified by educational attainment) and of public-school teachers to selected "authoritarian" statements

287

THE MODERNIZATION OF PUERTO RICO

Puerto Rico Municipio Boundaries

INTRODUCTION

This study of modernization in Puerto Rico is part of a growing literature on the process of change in societies that are neither predominantly traditional nor predominantly modern. Less than a decade ago it was fashionable among social scientists to call them "transitional" societies, on the usually tacit assumption that they were undergoing an inevitable albeit unevenly paced evolution from traditionalism to modernity. Today, observers of "inbetween" societies are much less inclined to posit an ineluctable and unidirectional course of change. It is far less obvious than it once seemed to be that the future which fate has in store for all "backward" or, more felicitously, "developing" areas is their progressive attainment to something closely resembling the western model of modern industrial society. Recent evidence from one underdeveloped society after another indicates that the machinery of supposedly cumulative modernization is not working well and in some instances has broken down. The capacity of certain nations to fulfill the hopes of their wouldbe modernizers now seems questionable, and the prospect of their distintegration and collapse looms larger than the possibility of their progress toward modernity.1 Even in less extreme cases, it is not necessarily true that the modernization of particular sectors of a system leads to the progressive modernization of related sectors, much less to the ultimate modernization of the system as a whole.2 To carry the argument a step further, it now seems abundantly clear that the interrelationships among economic, social, cultural, and political variables in all societies are still very imperfectly understood. The prevailing uncertainty concerning their inter-

2

Introduction

connections is well illustrated by the numerous attempts that have been made to isolate a single factor as the key stimulus to economic growth or to the modernization process in general. One study tries to identify the trigger variable as a particular kind of change in the pattern of capital formation, another as a certain development in the communication system. Still other studies seek to identify it as a change in personality formation, in the recruitment of leaders, in the advance of knowledge, or in some other factor.3 The very diversity of these notions and the lack of consensus concerning their explanatory power suggest that social change is far too complex a phenomenon to be explained by singlefactor analysis. This is not to say, however, that all factors need to be regarded as equally powerful determinants of change. Some are likely to be more influential than others, and an attempted identification of the most significant factor or cluster of factors can serve a useful function, so long as it is put forward as a partial rather than as a complete explanation of a phenomenon that is conceded to be a complicated set of interacting cause-and-effect relationships. Moreover, the current well-founded skepticism about the inevitability of change from traditionalism to modernity need not lead to the conclusion that the process never occurs, or that no differences are discernible in the capacity of in-between societies to modernize themselves. On the contrary, recognition of the fact that underdeveloped societies do not always or even usually follow a "transitional" course leaves open the possibility that some societies may in fact do so: they may be transitional in precisely the sense of becoming predominantly modern. If such societies can be identified, it becomes highly important to study them with a view to determining how it has happened that in their cases substantial changes in the direction of modernity have indeed taken place. And if a modernizing society can be located within the sphere of Latin American cultural influence, the case deserves special consideration: for as a culture area Latin America has long been notably resistant to over-all development toward economic and social modernity.4

Introduction

3

Puerto Rico affords an example of a society of Hispanic cultural origins that is undergoing rapid modernization in many of its aspects. As recently as 1940 it was a stagnant, poverty-stricken, disease-ridden agricultural society, preponderantly traditional in culture. Since 1941, and more particularly since the end of World War II, the island has become involved in a process of dynamic change and growth. Industry is already nearly four times as productive as agriculture in terms of income generated annually for the insular economy. Per capita net income measured in constant dollars has more than tripled; in current dollars it rose from $121 in 1940 to $1,047 in 1967 and is today higher than in most industrialized countries. Nearly 90 per cent of Puerto Rican children six to eighteen years of age are attending school, a rate of enrollment exceeded in only the most advanced countries. Improvements in medical care and public-health services have reduced Puerto Rican mortality rates below those of all other countries, and life expectancy in the island (70 years) is approximately the same as in the United States. Such indices of material well-being as the number of automobiles, refrigerators, telephones, radios, and television sets per 1,000 population show Puerto Rico to be approaching levels reached in the most modern societies. Ever more encompassing mass media of communication, an ever increasing proliferation of voluntary associations, and an ever burgeoning professional bureaucracy also testify to the progressive modernization of the island.® It is too early to assert with confidence that Puerto Rico is destined to become predominantly modern, in either the near or the distant future. Structural weaknesses could lead to a reversal of recent trends in the insular economy, especially in the event of a serious decline in economic activity in the United States. Those and other modernizing trends could also be reversed by a reassertion of traditional beliefs, values, and patterns of individual and group behavior which are now receding in importance but still persist in the Puerto Rican culture. Such a reassertion might, for example, accompany a marked change in the political situation that has prevailed in the island since 1941. Although it seems most

4

Introduction

unlikely that a drastic alteration of the existing system will occur in the near future, it would be unwise to overlook the possibility that for one reason or another the course of economic and social development which Puerto Rico has been following for more than a quarter of a century may be terminated before the process is complete. Despite that possibility, it is a matter of some significance that the modernizing trends have been continuing in Puerto Rico as long and as dynamically as they have. It is sufficiently unusual a phenomenon to warrant study and explanation. The purpose of this book is to trace out these developments toward modernity in Puerto Rican affairs and to explain how and why they have occurred.

POLITICS AND V A L U E S

Broadly speaking, the focus of this inquiry is on the politics of modernization in Puerto Rico. As will be seen later in more detail, the contemporary drive toward modernity had its origins in the political sector of Puerto Rican society. It was initiated primarily by political leaders who were elected to public office in 1940 on what was essentially a modernization platform. After the modernizing process had been set in motion, they and their administrator colleagues constantly encouraged and promoted its further development. The plans they elaborated, the decisions they made, and the policies they implemented were of decisive importance in keeping the process going and in broadening and deepening its impact on Puerto Rican society. But it is not enough to describe the leaders' activities and thus illustrate the primacy of politics in Puerto Rican development. It is necessary also to try to explain why the political and administrative elite acted as they did, and why they were as successful as they became in attaining their objectives. In order to explain these matters, the role of the Puerto Rican people must also be taken into account. It is necessary to explain why a substantial majority of the people consistently gave the leaders the support

Introduction

5

they needed if they were to stay in power and thus continue to pursue their modernization goals. To arrive at such explanations, a narrower focus than "politics" is required. One that I find useful and employ throughout this study is "values," in particular the values that have a bearing on political behavior. Close attention to values, it seems to me, is indispensable if one is to understand and explain the politics of any society. "The main point of reference for analyzing the structure of any social system," says Talcott Parsons, "is its value pattern. This defines the basic orientation of the system . . . to the situation in which it operates; hence it guides the activities of the participant individuals."6 Making the value pattern "the main point of reference" is all the more essential when analyzing the politics of an in-between society like Puerto Rico. For in the culture of such societies, traditional and modern values tend to coexist in unintegrated and unstable mixtures that provide changing, uncertain, and inconsistent guides to action. Moreover, every stratum and sector of an in-between society tends to have its own value pattern, each differing from the others in its particular "mix" of traditional and modern value components. Finally, the value patterns of the individuals who make up these subsidiary sectors and groupings tend to consist of both traditional and modern values in varying combinations and proportions. 7 The in-between society, in short, typically exhibits a marked heterogeneity of value orientations. In order to subject such a society to meaningful political analysis, one must recognize that heterogeneity and deal with it by attempting to sort out the different mixtures of traditional and modern values characteristic of the individuals, groups, and classes relevant to the analysis. One must also keep in mind the dynamic quality of value formation in the in-between society and the differing rates at which value priorities change within its various sectors. The political analyst of any society would normally give special attention to its political elite. If he were to aspire to a truly illuminating account of how the elite function within the system, he would have to inform himself concerning the values that influence their behavior. The need for inquiry into the values of the elite in

6

Introduction

the study of Latin American politics has been well expressed by Kaiman Η. Silvert: "We cannot fully understand the role of leadership in Latin America until we know for what ends power has been used. For this, we must consider the value orientations which influence leadership groups."8 Awareness of the elite's value orientations is even more important in the study of modernization in a society like Puerto Rico, where a dominant group within the political elite have been the leading innovators. Being modernizers, they would be expected to share a number of modern value orientations and to promote their diffusion throughout the society; but being products of a society neither traditional nor modern, they would also be expected to be partly influenced by traditional values. The ways in which their actions are affected by each of these value influences are of crucial importance in explaining their political behavior. It is essential, furthermore, to identify the value priorities associated with the non-elite who are involved in the political process, such as farm laborers, industrial workers, school teachers, landowners, and businessmen. Knowing their value orientations helps to explain their reactions to the goals and programs of the modernizing elite and their response to the elite's style of leadership.

A SCHEMA FOR VALUE ANALYSIS

The recent upsurge of interest in values on the part of political scientists, sparked by the political-culture studies of Gabriel A. Almond and his associates,9 has tended to reflect the profound influence that Talcott Parsons has had on the objects and terminology of contemporary political analysis. As already noted, Parsons assigns a central place to values as key determinants of action in any social system, a point that he has emphasized in various writings.10 Moreover, his "pattern variables" of action orientation (especially ascription-achievement, diffuseness-specificity, and particularism-universalism) have been widely used by social scientists as organizing or classifying concepts in value analysis.11 Although the pattern-variable approach is illuminating, I prefer

Introduction

7

a rather different conceptual scheme for analyzing and comparing value orientations in the political culture of Puerto Rico. The set of definitions and classifications that I find more useful derives mainly from two sources: the writings of the late Clyde Kluckhohn and those of Harold D. Lasswell.12 The terms and definitions put forward by Kluckhohn facilitate value analysis because they correspond to common understandings of what is meant by values and hence are readily intelligible to the lay reader. The value categories developed by Lasswell and his collaborator Abraham Kaplan lend themselves peculiarly well to the task of classifying and ordering the specific values that are relevant to Puerto Rican politics. They also permit the drawing of clear distinctions between the dominant value orientations of the traditional Puerto Rican and the modern American cultures, which figure prominently in my analysis. Moreover, Lasswell's emphasis on the linkage between values and institutions and on the interplay between the two in the modernization process13 provides concepts that facilitate an understanding of the developments in twentieth-century Puerto Rico with which this study is concerned. 14 Definitions. For the purposes of this study, values are conceptions of desirable (or undesirable) ends, means, and styles of action. This definition, let it be noted, does not equate values with interests, needs, preferences, or desires. It follows Kluckhohn and other students of values in distinguishing between the desired and the desirable. 15 Although the two may, and sometimes do, coincide, they may also differ. The propensity to leave undone those things which one ought to do, and to do those things which one ought not to do, is an all too familiar aspect of the human condition. Assigning the term values indiscriminately to all desired events or preferred outcomes16 hides the essence of values. The term, as ordinarily understood, implies standards, norms, obligations, "oughts," and "ought nots." It is useful precisely because it does not mean simply likes or preferences, needs or interests. Values may mean these things, but they also mean something more. "In the broadest sense," says Kluckhohn, "behavioral scientists may usefully think of values as abstract and perduring standards which are held by the individual and or a specified group to transcend the impulses

δ

Introduction

of the moment and ephemeral situations. From the psychological point of view, a value may be defined as that aspect of motivation which is referable to standards, personal or cultural, that do not arise solely out of an immediate situation and the satisfaction of needs and primary drives . . . Behavior oriented by a value or values does indeed constitute one class of preferential behavior. But such behavior belongs to the category regarded as 'desirable' or 'undesirable' by the group with which the individual identifies— not to that of acts which the individual simply desires or does not desire."17 A value system is the set of interconnected values held by an individual or a group, plus the value premises or cognitive judgments that provide the belief structure within which specific value orientations are entertained. Value premises are philosophical commitments or unprovable beliefs concerning such ultimates as the nature of the universe, the nature of man, and the nature of society (the relation of the self to others). They include both existential and normative statements—beliefs about facts and beliefs about values. The value premises of the American middle class, for example, have been described by Cora Du Bois as the following: "(1) the universe is mechanistically conceived, (2) man is its master, (3) men are equal, and (4) men are perfectible."18

CLASSIFICATION OF VALUES

As implied in our definition, values may be classified into three groups in accordance with the functions they perform as guides to action. They may serve as conceptions of desirable ends of action, means of action, or styles of action. Conceptions of the desirable as regards each of these tend to vary from culture to culture; hence, the identification of cross-cultural differences with respect to the three action orientations is often undertaken, implicitly or explicitly, in studies of so-called national character. Similarly, different conceptions of desirable ends, means, and styles of action within a nation are indicators of its various subcultures. On the individual and group level these conceptions may, within limits, vary from

Introduction

9

person to person, from group to group, and from one time to another. At all levels, their ranking in an order of importance or priority may also vary over time. Since specific values, whether conceived of as ends, means, or styles of action, are extremely numerous in any culture and may be expressed by an almost infinite variety of terms, it is convenient to use an additional classification scheme in order to reduce their number to manageable proportions. Classifying the multifarious specific value concepts relevant to political analysis by the use of a short list of value categories not only facilitates the comparison of values in time and space but also simplifies the task of ranking values in terms of priorities. Value Categories. The list of categories that I use for classifying values, in particular those signifying desirable ends and means of action, is the one that Lasswell and Kaplan have put forward as a tool of "functional" rather than "conventional" value analysis. 10 Their list contains eight categories, four of which they call "welfare values" and the other four "deference values." Their welfare-value categories are well-being, wealth, skill, and enlightenment; the deference-value categories are power, respect, affection, and rectitude. Although the list may not be exhaustive enough to accommodate every conceivable human value (those associated with aesthetic experience and with personal religious faith, for example, would not seem to fit neatly into any of the eight categories), it is sufficiently comprehensive to permit the classification of all the values that are ordinarily relevant to politics. 20 Welfare Values. The category of well-being includes such specific values as safety, health, comfort, enjoyment, emotional security, psychic satisfaction. The familiar phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" of the Declaration of Independence, and the corresponding formula "life, liberty and security of person" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fall principally within this category. Social-welfare programs designed to supply low-cost housing, school lunches, mental-health clinics, birth-control services, playgrounds in densely populated areas, and the like, may be said to have the purpose of enabling persons deprived of such things to enjoy a fuller realization of well-being values. 2 1

10

Introduction

The wealth category embraces such values as money, property, possessions, income, goods, and services, as well as claims on such material benefits. To the extent that socialist parties advocate a more equitable distribution of wealth, they seek an end that falls within this category.22 The category of skill includes proficiency in the practice of any activity, whether work or play, art or science, trade or profession. The enlightenment category refers to such values as knowledge, learning, understanding, insight. The widespread demand for education in developing societies is an expression of either skill or enlightenment values, depending on the level and nature of the education sought. Deference Values. Although values in all the welfare categories often figure in politics, those within the deference-value classes are perhaps more common as desirable ends and means of political action. The most important of these are usually the values having to do with effective decision-making, which belong to the power category. It includes values signifying the ability to make binding decisions, that is, to produce intended effects on others, through the use of sanctions if necessary. The demand for independence on the part of colonial peoples would in some circumstances be classified as the assertion of a power value. The desirable end here would be running one's own affairs, making and executing one's own decisions. The value of liberty or freedom also belongs in this category, for it may connote both the absence of power in the sense of restraint and the presence of power in the sense of capacity to do as one pleases. The respect category encompasses values like honor, prestige, dignity, reputation, recognition, and respect itself. They all signify the attribution of worth to oneself or one's group by others as well as by the self. A politician, for example, is sometimes less interested in power or wealth than in homage, that is, in being well and favorably known to large numbers of people. Equality is another example of a respect value, for it involves a recognition of worth or prestige in terms of one's status as compared with that of others. A colonial people's demand for independence may be even more

Introduction

11

a demand for respect than for power. The emergence of new states in Africa has been to some extent the result of an awakening on the part of Africans to the invidiousness of "white supremacy" and the color bar, to the value of equality of treatment, to the importance of being considered as an end rather than as a means. The political emancipation of dependent peoples in recent years may indeed be regarded as a world-wide revolution in patterns of respect. Affection is the category that includes love, friendship, popularity, congeniality, amicable relations. A familiar example of an affection value is the third term of the historic French slogan: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The Roosevelt "Good Neighbor" policy may serve as an example on the level of international politics in the sense that it specifically posited mutual regard and good will in relations with Latin American countries as a desirable end of American foreign policy. On the domestic level, one need only remind oneself of the occasional public figure who gets elected primarily because of the warm feeling his constituents have for him, quite apart from what he may do or fail to do in return for their affection. It is probable that both Roosevelt and Eisenhower benefited from the support of those whose votes were an endorsement of affection as a desirable end of political action. The deference-value category called rectitude refers to conceptions of good and bad conduct, norms of right and wrong, standards of personal or group morality. A political party, for example, may be said to be seeking the realization of rectitude values if its program promises the enforcement of church doctrines concerning birth control, divorce, and the teaching of religion in public schools. Reformers who attack graft and demand honesty in the public service are seeking the realization of a rectitude value.

ENDS, M E A N S , AND STYLES OF ACTION

Just as diverse ends are recognized in any culture as desirable or undesirable, so also are various means regarded as desirable or undesirable. This is not to say that there is a sharp distinction be-

12

Introduction

tween ends and means. What are means in one context may be ends in another. Thus wealth may be an end in itself, or it may be a means to another end—as in the case of its use in the form of tuition payments by a person who seeks enlightenment in the form of a college education. Enlightenment so conceived may, however, be valued as a means to wealth in the form of doctor's fees, or to respect in a community that accords high prestige to college graduates. By multiplying such examples one could easily show that values in any of the eight Lasswell categories may in appropriate contexts be viewed as desirable or undesirable means toward the realization of values in any of the other seven categories—or in the eighth itself. Power values usually are the object of political analysis in their dimension as means to other ends rather than as ends in themselves. In many political controversies the question at issue is not the desirability or undesirability of the purposes sought by the use of power but rather the propriety of alternative uses or expressions of power as means. In other words, conflicts over the procedure of making binding decisions are often the stuff of politics. The value system of a democratic society, for example, prescribes a broad distribution or sharing of power, a wide participation in the decision-making process. It sets standards of procedure for the discussion of public issues (for example, "freedom of speech"), for the selection of public officials ("honest elections"), for the passage of legislation ("majority rule"), for the exercise of executive authority ("the rule of law"), and for the adjudication of disputes ("stare decisis"). Practices thought to violate such procedures, or repudiations of the procedures themselves, often give rise to criticism and conflict. The value system of an authoritarian society, to take another example, also prescribes desirable methods and procedures of political participation, recruitment, deliberation, resolution, and implementation. It upholds the desirability of restricting participation in the decision-making process to one man or, more usually, to a particular elite. It usually enjoins obedience and submission on the non-elite. It defines acceptable patterns of leadership selection and of power-sharing as between the ruler and his subordi-

Introduction

13

nates. When powerholders or aspirants to power depart from these and other procedural values, that is, from what are regarded as desirable manifestations of power as means, political controversy and conflict are likely to break out. A number of in-between societies in the contemporary world, including Puerto Rico, profess democratic ideologies and model their political institutions on those of western democratic states. On at least the formal or ideological level they therefore value democratic procedures, democratic patterns of sharing and shaping power. But neither the elite nor the non-elite of such societies have usually internalized democratic power values very thoroughly. Hence they tend to act at least part of the time, or in certain types of situations, in terms of values associated with an earlier period, often one of colonialism, in which the dominant power values were authoritarian. On the operational level, therefore, their political behavior is influenced by both democratic and authoritarian power values and often appears to be inconsistent and even erratic. "Styles of action" signifies manners or modes of action. Abraham Kaplan calls them qualities. "Qualities express," he says, "not the achievement of some single value, but the resultant, in immediate experience, of the achievement pattern . . . What the society does we may describe in terms of values [as classified in the eight categories] and their achievement; but how it does it is a matter of the qualities—not the Tiow' in the sense of the means employed, but in the sense of the style of living." 23 Conceptions of what are desirable styles of living or action vary among and within societies and therefore properly fall within the scope of value analysis. If they are part of a relatively coherent system of values, as in the case of a predominantly traditional or predominantly modern society, they tend to be congruent with the value premises of the system and with those conceptions of desirable ends and means of action which have priority within the system. If they are part of a poorly integrated value system, such as that of the in-between society, which is by definition an agglomeration of unsynthesized traditional and modern value components, they tend to be mixed in orientation and inconsistent with one another. Given the value premises of the American middle class24 and the

14

Introduction

great importance which it attaches to values associated with wealth and well-being, it is not surprising that optimism and activism are often cited as styles of action which that class regards as especially desirable. Other societies or subcultural groups holding different premises and having a different set of priorities concerning desirable ends and means will naturally value quite different styles of action. Florence Kluckhohn tells us, for example, that the largely tradition-bound Spanish Americans of New Mexico value a passive and fatalistic approach to life.25 Until recent years, deferential and dependent styles of political action on the part of the lower middle class and lower class were considered desirable in Britain, even by most members of those classes, because such styles were congruent with the strongly traditional emphases of their value systems.26 The British upper-middle-class commitment to "reserve" as a desirable style of interpersonal action is quite different from the emotionally expressive style that southern Italians and other Mediterranean peoples favor, each of these styles reflecting value premises and ends-means orientations of a distinctly different kind.27 Since conceptions of desirability and undesirability with respect to styles of action are usually dependent on or linked with conceptions of desirable ends and means, it is not necessary to construct a separate set of categories for classifying them, numerous and varied though they may be. By way of a partial classification, however, styles of action may be thought of in terms of sets of polarities, such as personal or impersonal styles, pragmatic or doctrinaire, masculine or feminine, individualistic or cooperative, violent or nonviolent, active or passive, and so on. In a given culture or subculture, one component of such pairs would normally be regarded as more desirable than the other.

V A L U E S A N D PUERTO R I C A N POLITICS

As already noted, the processes of change that have been rapidly modernizing Puerto Rico during the last quarter of a century were for the most part set in motion and have been directed and pushed

Introduction

15

forward by actions taken in the political sector of Puerto Rican society. In this study, as I have indicated, I describe those actions and their results, but my main purpose is to explain how they have occurred and why they have produced the many changes that have taken place. I find that the values of the actors in the situation yield significant clues. Especially important, it seems to me, are the values of the political leaders who sparked the modernization process, fanned it into flame, and have kept the fire burning ever since. But the values of other sectors of the society must also be taken into account; for unless the leaders had understood those values or shared them to some degree, they could not have acted enough in harmony with them to lead the rest of the society toward the modern goals they sought. Members of those other sectors, then, have also been actors in the situation, and their values have to some extent determined the course of change. What are the actors' values? How have those of the leaders resembled and differed from those of the other actors? How does it happen that their respective value systems have been in some respects similar and in others different, and what have been the effects of those similarities and differences? How has the process of change been affected by the ways in which members of the political elite have differed among themselves with respect to their value orientations? Finally, what can be said about the values of Luis Munoz Marin, the dominant figure within the elite, that would help explain the leading role he has played in the modernization process? In order to answer these questions I first try to seek out and compare the origins, or what seem to have been the origins, of the several sets of values relevant to our inquiry. I start by examining Puerto Rico's traditional value system, as well as some of that system's subcultural variations. The dominant values of the traditional culture, largely Hispanic in character, prevailed in Puerto Rico throughout the nineteenth century. For the most part, they were not seriously challenged until after 1898, when sovereignty over the island was transferred from Spain to the United States;

16

Introduction

and many of them, as we shall see, have continued to be determinants of behavior down to the present day. After identifying the dominant values in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican culture, I then examine some of the institutions, or patterns of practice, that were influential in the shaping and sharing of those values. I focus particular attention on the institutions that functioned as agencies of political socialization. I try to show how they influenced political attitudes and behavior among the various sectors of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican society. Although the political-socialization process did not affect all classes and subcultures in the same way, its impact on each was in general compatible with the values characteristic of traditional Hispanic culture. In Part II I try to take account of the changes that began to occur in Puerto Rican values and institutions after the change of sovereignty, which brought Puerto Rico into direct contact with the dynamic, proselytizing modern culture of the United States. I begin by identifying the main characteristics of that culture at the turn of the century and describing the attitudes of some of the Americans who first encountered the culture of the new United States colony and tried to change it. Although the American impact during the early decades of the twentieth century was generally disruptive and disintegrating, its effects were not uniform upon the different sectors of Puerto Rican society. I pay particular attention to the different ways it affected (a) the political elite, (b) the generation of present-day leaders coming to adulthood during that period, ( c ) the rural mass, and (d) their respective value patterns. The examination of these culture conflicts concludes with an account of the 1930's in Puerto Rico, a period of mounting tensions, frustrations, and resentments, but also a period in which value changes among the economically and socially deprived sectors of the population began to manifest themselves in such a way as to enable a small, pro-modernization segment of the political elite to come to power in the general election of 1940. Parts III and IV deal with the modernizing role of that segment, which from the beginning has consisted mainly of Luis Mufioz Marin and his entourage. Those closest to Munoz at the outset were

Introduction

17

fellow politicians who had helped him found the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrätico, PPD). Later his inner circle of modernizers came to include younger party leaders and the top administrators of the PPD reform program. I attempt to show what this leadership group accomplished (and failed to accomplish) in the way of economic, social, and other reforms between 1941 and 1964, a period that I call the "Munoz Era." In 1941 Munoz became president of the Senate of Puerto Rico and leader of the PPD legislative majority. On January 2, 1965 he retired from the governorship after sixteen years' service in that office. Those twenty-four years of modernizing leadership embraced a wide variety of innovations. In Part III I describe the economic and social reforms of the Munoz Era and try to explain how Mufioz and his colleagues were instrumental in bringing them about. In Part IV I discuss first their efforts to modernize Puerto Rico's administrative and governmental structures and offer "value" reasons to explain why some of their efforts in that area were less successful than their ventures in economic and social reform. I then analyze Munoz Marin's attempts to liquidate a long-standing barrier to full modernization: the continuing preoccupation of certain elements of the political elite with the issue of Puerto Rico's political status vis-ä-vis the United States. Here I carry the account through the political-status plebiscite of July 23, 1967, and, as in my discussion of the other reforms, employ value analysis to illuminate the issues involved. In Part V I undertake to explore the connection between the political leadership of the Munoz Era and the political stability of that period—an important consideration, for the stability of the PPD regime and of the political process contributed enormously to the success of the regimes modernizing efforts. After noting the absence of factors that have elsewhere caused value dissensus and political instability, I fix attention on the congruence between, on the one hand, the means and styles of political action employed by the PPD leaders and, on the other, the means and styles regarded as desirable by the Puerto Rican people. For the most part, both the leaders and the people remained wedded to traditional Hispanic deference values in their political life, and to styles of action

18

Introduction

consistent with them. Although this may have been less true of Mufioz than of other leaders, the effectiveness of his political leadership was to a great extent due to his capacity and willingness to play the role of the traditional caudillo. My main thesis with respect to Mufioz Marin is that the over-all effectiveness of his leadership, which has been crucially important to the modernization process, can be understood chiefly in terms of a commitment on his part to both modern ends and traditional means of action. I conclude the study with a review of trends that have emerged in Puerto Rican affairs since Mufioz's retirement from the governorship and with some comments on what they seem to indicate concerning present value configurations in Puerto Rican politics and the future of the modernization process.

PART I THE SOCIOCULTURAL BACKGROUND

CHAPTER 1 THE TRADITIONAL VALUE SYSTEM

The breakthrough toward economic and social modernization in Puerto Rico took place in the early 1940's. In order to understand how it occurred and what happened later, it is helpful to take account of the values of those Puerto Ricans, both leaders and led, who were involved in the process from the start. Most of them had been born between 1880 and 1920. This means that they had been reared in families whose adult members had themselves been born before the turn of the century. The earliest value influences to which the Puerto Ricans of the 1940's had been exposed were therefore those they had received at the hands of parents and other persons whose own value orientations had been largely shaped by the culture of nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, in which traditional Hispanic values were dominant. It is safe to assume that many of the value orientations the younger Puerto Ricans had learned within the family, the Church, and other tradition-bound institutions during their formative years stayed with them and remained significant determinants of their behavior as adults. The following account of what those values were depends mainly on two types of evidence. One is the impressive body of data accumulated in recent years concerning the value components of contemporary Puerto Rican culture. The survey research of sociologists and the participant-observer research of anthropologists, conducted on various levels of Puerto Rican society but espe-

22

The Sociocultural Background

daily within the poorer and less educated sectors, have identified a number of currently held values and value premises as carry-overs from a traditional past. The other source is the extensive literature on the traditional value system of Spain and Hispanic America. Its relevance to the Puerto Rican case derives from the hegemony that Spain exercised over the island for nearly four hundred years. Although, as Richard M. Morse has said, "some of the most notable characteristics of Spanish life—a dominant and ceremonial urban culture, elaborate [civil and ecclesiastical] bureaucracies, and a pervading sense of hierarchy in both the urban and rural domains —were given a weak institutional base in Puerto Rico," the island was populated mainly by Spanish immigrants who did carry with them and transmit to their descendants what Morse calls the "texture" of Hispanic culture. 1 The value premises and values identified in these pages are put forward neither as exclusively Hispanic in character nor as common to all traditional cultures. Those who are familiar with the value systems of traditional societies outside the sphere of traditional Puerto Rican or, more broadly, Hispanic cultural influence may well find certain similarities and even correspondencies between the value components here described and the components with which they are acquainted in other cultural contexts; but it is not the purpose of this analysis to make cross-cultural comparisons of that kind. Its aim is simply to delineate those components of the traditional Puerto Rican value system which seem relevant to politics and to document their expression in the insular culture by the use of data drawn from the sociological and anthropological studies mentioned above.

VALUE PREMISES OF THE TRADITIONAL CULTURE

Among the several value premises, or beliefs about ultimates, that have long manifested themselves in Spain and Spanish America, four are of special interest for an understanding of Puerto Rican culture and politics in the nineteenth century. Two involve conceptions of mans place in the universe (mans relationship to nature and the supernatural) and of the structure of society (man's

The Traditional Value System.

23

relationship to other men). The other two state beliefs concerning the nature of man, or, as Florence Kluckhohn puts it, "the character of innate human nature."2 Fatalism. The first of these widely shared, typically Hispanic beliefs is best designated as the fatalism premise. It is the belief that life is shaped by forces beyond human control. Nature, fate, luck, the will of God are the determining influences of human existence. As expressed in the teachings of the Church, the misfortunes and disasters inevitably encountered in this vale of tears are to be borne patiently, for they are the wise if mysterious workings of God's will. The prevalence of this fatalistic attitude in Argentina, for example, is well expressed in T. R. Fillol's observation that the Argentines are a people who "wait, and hope, and expect the attainment of the promised future not by their own effort but by 'magic' or divine grace . . . The forces behind events appear to Argentines not only unmanageable, but also unpredictable. Thus Argentines are very fond of gambling."3 Puerto Ricans have traditionally shared the same value premise. According to the Puerto Rican sociologist Elena Padilla, "Man's life is believed to be subject to fate, and luck plays an important part in the events that are to lead him to the fulfillment of his destiny."4 Ascription. Closely related to the fatalism premise is the belief that society, like the Church, is naturally hierarchical and that one's place in the social pyramid depends mainly on the stratum to which birth consigns one. Every person in the traditional culture tends to accept his station in life. Inherited or ascribed social superiority and inferiority are among the unalterable facts of human existence. As John P. Gillin points out, unquestioning acceptance of social inequality is still widespread in Latin America. "Latin American societies," he writes, "are stratified societies, and there is no question about this among most members of the populace, whether urban or rural. . . With the advent of European and North American ideas of democracy and of Marxian notions of the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat, this fact is now resented in some quarters, but, culturally speaking, it is, I think, still almost universally accepted as a fact."6 The nineteenth-century Puerto Rican

24

The Sociocultural Background

attitude has been expressed in similar terms: "If one was born poor and friendless, the chances were overwhelmingly in favor of his dying that way. It was God's will. One could, however, acquire merit in the eyes of God or one's master by leading a pious and good life, which among other things called for an acceptance of the social status quo."® Personalism. A third value premise is the conviction that the person, the human being as such, has intrinsic worth or integrity. In this view of man, which is not inconsistent with the ascription premise,7 it is the uniqueness of each human being that counts. One's own innate individuality entitles one to the respect of others, and, by the same logic, one accords respect to every other person in recognition, not of his common humanity, but of his equally worthy but inevitably different individuality. This conception is not to be confused with Anglo-American notions of individualism. Whereas the American view stresses individual rights, personal initiative, private enterprise, equality of opportunity, and the like, the Hispanic attitude is indifferent to all such considerations. Its focus is on the distinctive inner quality of the individual personality. Rene de V. Williamson has described the Spaniard's approach in these terms: "It isn't how a living may be earned that he thinks important, but who earns it. It isn't what legal rights you happen to have that he wants to know about but who you are. It isn't what a human being has that can be duplicated in every other human being which deeply concerns him but rather what any one human being has that is unique and distinctive. In short, the central and supreme national value of Spain is a person and not an individual."8 Gillin uses similar language in contrasting the Latin American and the North American view of the individual: "In the United States the average individual is seen in terms of his equality with others—equality, either of right or opportunity. In Latin American culture, however, the individual is valued precisely because he is not exactly Tike' anyone else. He is special and unique."9 Male Superiority. The fourth value premise in the traditional culture is the belief that men are inherently superior to women. Like the personalism premise, the belief in male superiority is

The Traditional Value System

25

common to all Spanish American countries and to Spain itself, not to mention the Near East 10 and other culture areas outside the Hispano-Catholic sphere of influence. According to J. Mayone Stycos' study of rural and urban families of the Puerto Rican lower class, many islanders still believe that men think better than women do, have seven senses instead of women's five, and can withstand moral temptations more steadfastly than women can. 11 The belief that females are the weaker sex, morally as well as physically, helps explain the cult of virginity which has traditionally imposed a strictly chaperoned and otherwise sheltered life on unmarried girls of all social classes in Hispano-Catholic countries, including Puerto Rico. It also helps account for the circumscribed role traditionally assigned to married women, whose place is in the home. The males of the family are honor-bound to protect the purity of their mother, wives, daughters, and sisters; but, as Julian Pitt-Rivers has pointed out, the difficulties that the traditional culture expects men to encounter in discharging this duty are indicated by the "ancient but still popular" Andalusian saying, "La mujer honrada, la pierna quebrada y en casa (the honorable woman: locked in the house with a broken leg)." 12 Patterns of value and behavior significant for political analysis derive from the male-superiority premise. Explored more fully later, they include the high valuation that Puerto Ricans, like other Latin Americans, have traditionally placed on authoritarian husbands, on patriarchal fathers, on paternalistic landowners, and on all males (machos) who manifest virile or he-man styles of action. The Hispanic cult of masculinity (machismo) is of special interest because of its bearing on the style of action traditionally regarded as desirable in a political leader.

TRADITIONAL V A L U E S :

E N D S AND M E A N S OF A C T I O N

Associated with the foregoing beliefs are certain values that lend themselves fairly readily to a ranking in terms of their relative importance in the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican culture. Among

26

The Sociocultural Background

desirable ends and means of action, the deference values clearly outweigh the welfare values. And among desirable styles of action, the most significant seem to be those modes of behavior appropriate to the members of a society preoccupied with considerations of personal status and prestige. Respect. Among the deference values, and within the traditional value system as a whole, the dominant value is respect (respeto). The most desirable end of action—the thing that everyone would like most to have or achieve—is the self-respect that comes of enjoying the respect of others.13 In view of the personalism premise, that quintessentially Hispanic belief in the dignity of the person, it is not surprising that traditional Puerto Rican society should have sustained the view that achieving the respect of others is not only desirable but possible. For it simply means that others can and must recognize one's own innate worth. Even in present-day Puerto Rico, as the anthropologist Anthony Lauria, Jr., points out, "one must treat all men with respeto. To be sure, the concrete deferential acts of respeto communicate many kinds of regard in which a person may be held—awe, trust, esteem for technical capacity, recognition of superior rank, and affection. But the element of respeto which must be communicated in the most minimal message of this ceremonial idiom concerns the person's basic right to a self. This element of respeto obtains between those who are, otherwise, social equals, superiors, and subordinates. One's very social existence is predicated upon the bonds of respeto."1* Every individual, no matter how poor and humble, is entitled to exact, at the minimum, the respect due him as a person, and to take offense at words or actions that betoken falta de respeto (lack of respect). According to the historian Americo Castro, " Ί am the master of my hunger' was the reply of one very poor Spaniard to men who wanted to buy his vote for a deputy he didn't like."15 But those of higher social and economic status are entitled to more respect than are those of lower status, and older people to more than younger ones. "The way the system works," says Elena Padilla, "an adult still owes respect to those in a higher social position or with greater social power than he and to those who are older than he, but if he is poor, younger folk who are more affluent will also expect deference from him."16

The Traditional Value System

27

In short, the traditional culture establishes a hierarchy of respect, based mainly on ascription rather than achievement. In accordance with this hierarchy it is deemed desirable that every person receive the deference due him and show deference to others in the measure that they are entitled to it. Enjoying self-respect and the respect of others is thus an eminently desirable end of action; according respect to others, especially to socially recognized superiors, is one means by which that end may be attained.17 The Hispanic peoples' traditional concern for dignidad is a manifestation of their preoccupation with respect as the highest value. The rather ambiguous word "dignity" does not convey the true meaning of dignidad. It is better translated as "self-respect"—in the sense of respect for the integrity of the self, one's own or someone else's. By Anglo-American standards the individual Spaniard or Latin American sometimes seems excessively self-oriented, innerdirected, inward-looking; unnecessarily self-protective, defensive; unduly sensitive to real or imagined slights. But if he is extremely solicitous of his own amour propre, he is no less mindful of that of others. When, for example, he writes a letter, he addresses the recipient (unless a member of his immediate family or an intimate friend) in terms of elaborate politeness and closes with assurances of "the highest and most distinguished consideration," or some other standard phrase denoting profound respect. Both the high valuation of respect and the corresponding commitment to dignidad in interpersonal relations are basic components of traditional Puerto Rican culture. Both indeed have strongly persisted to the present day. Melvin M. Tumin, director of an empirical study of Puerto Ricans' attitudes toward social class in the 1950s, speaks of dignidad as one "aspect of the traditional way of life to which even the most committed modernist pledges allegiance." He defines it as "a term which expresses the belief that all men are ultimately equal and equally worthy of respect, regardless of temporary or even enduring differences in their material standard of living, in the formal power they exercise, or in the prestige which their occupations and educations evoke."18 Power. Traditional Puerto Rican attitudes toward power are both different from and similar to those attributed to Spaniards. Since at least the late nineteenth century, Puerto Ricans have been

28

The Sociocultural Background

described as docile and submissive in the face of governmental authority,19 whereas the Spanish people have long been known for their resentment of formal power, no matter how legitimate. Spaniards have a reputation for being almost anarchic in their determination to pursue their private or personal goals without regard to any public purposes or civic obligations that may stand in their way. And yet they are also well known for their addiction to strong leaders and their acceptance of authoritarian rule.20 It is in these latter respects that the traditional Puerto Rican and the traditional Spanish attitudes toward power are very similar. If the Spanish attitude appears somewhat paradoxical, it is readily explainable in terms of the personalism premise and the respect value discussed above. For it is personal power that Spaniards, as well as Puerto Ricans and most other Latin Americans, have traditionally regarded as desirable. Power embodied in an institution, or power exercised by a faceless, nameless bureaucrat, Spaniards (unlike Puerto Ricans) regard as an aifront to personal dignity, as a menace to individual freedom of action. But when power is personified, personalized, when it is incarnated in a caudillo, they (like Puerto Ricans) tend to value it highly; for in that guise it becomes a desirable means of action—specifically, a means of achieving respect. Respect may be attained through power either by exercising power personally or by identifying oneself with a strong and dynamic leader. Self-respect and the respect of others are direct outcomes of the first alternative. To exercise power oneself means to make decisions which others accept as binding; their acceptance is testimony of their respect for the decision-maker. The second alternative engenders an indirect but no less genuine bolstering of self-respect on the part of the person who identifies himself with a power-wielder; for the identification provides a vicarious but satisfying realization of the potentialities of the person's own inner being. "The Spaniard," says Americo Castro, "feels himself united to other people only when in his view they amount to a magnification of his own person . . . This explains the social groupings whose unifying center is a caudtllo."21 This conception of power as a desirable means of actio..· is of

The Traditional Value System

29

course far removed from the modern democratic conception. Hispanic peoples have never found democracy particularly attractive precisely because they attach little value to widely shared power. Whereas from the democratic standpoint the desirable method of making binding decisions is to involve as many people as possible in one or another aspect of the decision-making process, the preferred Hispanic method is to leave decision-making to a single person in whom one has confidence—oneself or a redoubtable power figure. A measure of the difference between traditional Puerto Rican and modern Anglo-American conceptions of power is the role of presiding officer in the two cultures. Essentially foreign to Puerto Rico's traditional culture is the Anglo-American notion of the chairman as a person chosen by a group to ensure an orderly discussion on the part of its members so that all points of view can be expressed and a majority decision or consensus arrived at. The traditional Puerto Rican understanding of the role of presiding officer is that the presidente22 defines the purposes of the group, makes its decisions for it, and sees to it that they are carried out, meanwhile maintaining the group's cohesion and unanimity under his leadership. If a minority should disagree with his decisions, it is not expected that they will abide by them anyway. On the contrary, it is assumed that they will withdraw from the group.23 Affection. As an end in itself, affection could hardly be said to rank so high as respect in the traditional value system, but it is an important value all the same. It differs from respect in that it is a desirable outcome of only a small number of interpersonal relationships. Respect is claimed from everyone, whereas affection, in the sense of friendship and understanding, is expected only of those few with whom one is in a position to establish close personal relations. One has few intimates, but one prizes those few. It is a matter of psychological security. As Gillin explains it, the Latin American can feel secure only with those who "can be expected to have with him a reciprocal appreciation of his soul." These normally include three categories of persons: members of one's family, those to whom one is bound by ties of ceremonial co-parenthood (compadrazgo),

30

The Sociocultural Background

and that always limited number of others with whom one has developed a relationship of mera pura amistad (pure and simple friendship). 24 The circle of intimates around a political leader is a familiar pattern of Puerto Rican politics. Drawn largely from the above categories, they serve him as aides and advisors as well as trusted friends with whom he can share his successes and disappointments. A fourth category of affection relationships that figures prominently in the traditional culture is the regard, ranging from simple liking to rapturous enthusiasm, which is often felt by inferiors for superiors when the latter perform their roles in a socially approved fashion. Agregados (tenant farmers), for example, may develop a quasi-familial attachment to their hacendado (landowner) if he is a "good" landowner, that is, if he treats them fairly ("respects" them) and yet firmly maintains his patriarchal authority.25 Similarly the followers of a political leader may come to cherish him, almost worship him, if he is a sufficiently strong and vibrant personality. The process by which affection for such a leader can emerge is well illustrated in the following passage from one of Carlos Wyld Ospina's stories of Guatemalan life: "His former experience as a highwayman had equipped him marvelously to manage the people of the coast, who were as quarrelsome and perverse as they come. The foreman's sternness first provoked them to rebellion; then they began to realize the stature of Juan Vargas, or, as he signed himself, Bragas . . . On the heels of fear came the devotion of the whole gang to the man as a man, capable of making even the toughest of them knuckle under. Their devotion to him was mingled with that naive and primitive affection which the countryman is so prone to feel toward the man in command—the raw material from which caudillos are made."26 Hence it would seem that in the traditional Hispanic culture the value attached to this kind of affection as a desirable end of action is more important to the followers of a leader than to the leader himself. From his standpoint, the respect of others is an end more desirable to attain than popularity; if he should perchance gain the affection of others, it would come as a kind of by-product of his having won their respect. From his followers' standpoint, however, the more desirable end of action on their part is to show their

The Traditional Value System

31

affection for him, once he has gained their respect. As will be seen later in this study, the propensity of tradition-bound Puerto Ricans to display affection for a powerful leader has persisted well into the second half of the twentieth century, clearly manifesting itself in the deep personal attachment that many of the countryfolk have felt for Luis Munoz Marin ever since his first emergence as a strong authority figure. Rectitude. In the traditional culture, as would be expected, the most highly valued norms of personal conduct are those that facilitate the showing and receiving of respect. As Lauria has indicated, even contemporary Puerto Rican society is characterized by a set of respect-oriented norms that the members of all classes regard not only as desirable but also as indispensable rules of conduct. The widespread acceptance of those norms is revealed in the general use of what Lauria calls "a ceremonial or ritual idiom," or set of clich£s, which emphasizes respect as the key to proper demeanor. "No Puerto Rican," he says, "is considered properly socialized unless he can comport himself with respeto . . . There is a universal ceremonial idiom, in which all adult Puerto Ricans can communicate; there are other idioms which are more specific to certain segments of Puerto Rican society. In either case, respeto is the basic prop of the deference game."27 The stress put upon respect-oriented norms within the nineteenth-century family, where their inculcation was a major goal of child training, will be seen in our later analysis of political socialization in Puerto Rico during that century—most of the evidence for which, it may be noted, comes from more recent and even present-day patterns of family life, especially in the rural areas. The later discussion also points up the prevalence of such norms on the hacienda (plantation), where they were supposed to govern landowner-worker relations. In the twentieth century they still, ideally, play that role in the now limited areas where the hacienda system continues to exist. Welfare Values. For nearly everyone in traditional Hispanic society, respect and the other deference values are not only desirable but also, to a significant degree, attainable ends or available means of action. Not so the welfare values: those falling within the categories of wealth, well-being, skill, and enlightenment. In one

32

The Sociocultural Background

sense, of course, wealth has always been the dominant goal of the great mass of people in most Latin American countries, for their principal concern is survival. 28 But since they tend to lack the means of accumulating wealth beyond the requirements of bare subsistence, they cannot aspire to accumulating or even sharing the other welfare values. Material abundance, good health, education, and other attributes of a high standard of living are too remote to justify efforts to attain them. Such ends are meaningful only to the elite, whose disproportionate capacity for welfare-value accumulation supplements and reinforces ascription as the basis of elite status. When, in exceptional cases, a member of the non-elite manages to reach and enjoy an elite style of life, it is thought to be luck, not achievement, that enables him to do so. Welfare ends and means may in fact be disvalued. Within at least the upper-class subculture of traditional Hispanic society, a characteristic value orientation is that of disdain for physical labor, money-making, technological skills, and nonhumanistic learning. Schooling of any sort for the non-elite was disvalued during most of the nineteenth century in Puerto Rico. Municipal primary schools established in Aibonito and Patillas during the early 1830's soon had to close for lack of pupils. Backed by public opinion, most local authorities ignored a colonial decree of 1865 which required all municipalities to establish public schools and admit children of the poor without payment of fees. 29 A traditional disvaluation of money persisted well into the present century in certain parts of rural Puerto Rico as a counter-strain within what had become a predominantly materialistic culture. According to the anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz, who studied a plantation workers' village ("Poyal") on Puerto Rico's south coast in the late forties, "Cash is the basis of life in Poyal, yet too much concern about it is despicable in terms of the local value system."30

TRADITIONAL VALUES: STYLES OF ACTION

Four desirable styles of action deserve mention as components of the traditional Puerto Rican value system which are relevant to

The Traditional Value System

33

politics. Being elements of a coherent system of values, they bear a complementary relation to the value premises and the ends and means of action already discussed. Their implications for politics thus reinforce themes already dealt with. Personal Contact. One highly valued style of action is that of conducting affairs on a person-to-person basis. "The importance of personal contacts," says Salvador de Madariaga, "is well known wherever people of the Spanish race are concerned. Whether the question in debate is a trivial affair or the most important business, a relation from man to man is indispensable if results are to be obtained."31 Like Spaniards, Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans have traditionally attached far greater value to personal contacts than to impersonal or institutional relationships. The sine qua non of a good relationship is an intermeshing of personalities. It need not be a harmonious encounter: the air may shimmer with the heat of argument; but face-to-face contact is unquestionably the preferred mode of behavior. Similarly in the traditional culture the relationship between leaders and followers is essentially personal. People follow a man not only because they see in him the kind of person they would like to be or think they really are, but also because they can make contact with him as a man. Belief in his principles or loyalty to his party has little to do with it. "In Spain," says Madariaga of an earlier time, "the characters on the political stage owe their prestige to their own personality, and their own personality it is which gives strength and driving power to the principle or cause which they happen to have espoused."32 It is for this reason that the traditional leader can normally count on retaining the loyalty of his followers no matter how often or how bewilderingly he may change his doctrine or his program, if indeed he is equipped with either. Masculinity. Whatever a man's status in the traditional society or whatever his particular role, he should act like a man. Sexual potency and aggressiveness are at the root of the traditional Hispanic ideal of masculinity (machismo), but the concept has wider implications. It connotes forcefulness of personality, strength of will, courage, daring, self-assertiveness, self-confidence, and similar qualities. Such modes of action constitute the traditional norm not

34

The Sociocultural Background

only for the natural-born, red-blooded he-man (macho) but also for men of all types and of all stations and pursuits. As for the political leader, a pre-eminently masculine style of action is so desirable as to be almost indispensable. As William L. Schurz puts it, "to have meaning to the average Latin American, the state should be embodied in the person of a man who is resolute and self-confident, virile and intelligent—one who is may hombre [a real man]."33 Gillin states the principle more succinctly: "Not all machos are caudillos (leaders), but all caudillos must be machos."3* It follows that a leader like Mufioz Marin, who has pursued power boldly and wielded it with assurance, is the kind of person most likely to gain the respect of others and to earn for himself the loyalty and affection of a large personal following. Individuality. Third among desirable styles is that of acting in such a manner as to preserve one's uniqueness or individuality. Although the traditional Spaniard or Spanish American may enter wholeheartedly into personal relations with another individual, he fights shy of involvement with organized groups. He resists merging his own personality with that of others in any joint or cooperative endeavor, whether of a business, social, or civic nature. He is not a "joiner," nor is he organization-minded. Fear of loss of personal identity makes it difficult for him to form strong institutional attachments outside the family, which indeed is regarded not as an institution but as a projection of the self.35 The disvaluation of collective action and of anything smacking of teamwork or group discipline helps explain the perennial weakness of labor unions and all other interest groups in Puerto Rico, as in other countries of Spanish background, not only during the nineteenth century but even today. It helps account for the nonexistence of civic associations and organized charities in traditionbound centers. According to Ren£ Williamson, the Spanish peoples' preference for an individualist style of action also explains their affinity for guerrilla warfare as against conventional military action.36 Humanism. Traditional Hispanic culture is humanistic in orientation rather than scientific, esthetic rather than materialistic, idealistic instead of practical. Desirable styles of action therefore

The Traditional Value System

35

include those which display what are regarded as man's distinctively human qualities—his capacity for idealism or high moral purpose, for abstract speculation, for artistic creativity, and for deep feeling or emotion. Such styles as the empirical, experimental, and pragmatic are contemptuously disvalued—no more worthy of esteem than an hidalgo (gentleman) who soils his hands in physical labor. The traditional culture encourages emotional expression, in dramatic words and gestures, passionate enthusiasms, and the like. "Serious matters," Gillin tells us, "must customarily be expressed emotionally if they are to receive a positive response and interest. In politics the appeal to the emotions is, of course, ever present and frequently obscures other interests."37 Similarly, the traditional culture puts a high value on literary and oratorical modes of expression. Being known as a writer, and especially as a poet, is a decided advantage for anyone aspiring to election or appointment to public office. As Gillin says, "It must be kept in mind that in the field of practical politics and international relations prominent holders of political office, civil servants, and diplomatic representatives are often writers, philosophers, or poets of international renown. They receive such posts not only because of their prestige but also because of a genuine belief that their success in aesthetic pursuits fits them for posts of national responsibility and leadership. It is obvious that for such men and women, and for the middle groups they usually represent, a purely pragmatic approach to problems does not necessarily constitute the most effective appeal."38 Even in the middle of the twentieth century, recent and contemporary examples of Latin American literary figures in high public office come readily to mind. Among famous writers elected to the presidency have been the novelist R0mulo Gallegos in Venezuela and the short-story writer Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, each of whom, however, was overthrown after less than ten months in office (1948 and 1963, respectively). It is to be noted that when the 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Guatemalan poet and novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, he was then serving as his country's ambassador to Paris. Puerto Rico also provides illustrations of this principle in its two greatest political

36

The Sociocultural Background

figures, Luis Mufioz Marin and his father, Luis Mufioz Rivera. Both were journalists, essayists, and poets whose literary reputations enhanced their political appeal. In the case of the younger Mufioz, the few poems that he published in his twenties were in the eyes of his followers justification enough to call him el Vate (the Bard) when he entered politics—an honorific epithet that has clung to him, to his political advantage, throughout his subsequent career. The traditional Hispanic regard for aesthetically appealing expression, plus an addiction to abstract ideas and lofty idealism on the part of the intelligentsia, means that the traditional style of political discourse tends to be florid, doctrinaire, and highly polemical. A talent for long-winded oratory, embellished by fanciful figures of speech, laden with emotional appeals, and declaimed in rolling periods, is thought to be almost indispensable for any political leader who aspires to win and retain a large popular following. The upper class of traditional Puerto Rico value all such humanistic styles of action. "If we analyze the nature of the island's contributions to the culture of the nineteenth century," says Ramon Mellado, "we find that those of the literary type predominate. The islanders preferred literature to the experimental sciences, and in literature they preferred the poem to the essay . . . Political orators dazzled their audiences with speeches about patriotism and the beauty of Puerto Rican women, while analyses of economic and social problems were conspicuous by their absence."39

CHAPTER 2 NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIETY AND POLITICS

It was in 1508 that conquistadores under Juan Ponce de Leon founded the first Spanish settlement in Puerto Rico. For most of the next three hundred years, the island was more important to Spain as a bastion of imperial defense than as a source of wealth. Lying athwart the sea lanes plied by the Spanish galleons, Puerto Rico guarded the approaches to the far richer colonies of New Spain to the west and Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru to the south. From the beginning, the imperial policy of mercantilism inhibited economic development. It limited trade with the island to licensed traffic between Spain and the single port of San Juan; all other seaborne trade with the capital or along the coasts was prohibited. After the middle of the seventeenth century seaboard settlers, petty traders in the coastal towns, and even royal officials in San Juan engaged in smuggling and other forms of illicit commerce;1 but their activities were on too small a scale to counteract the repressive effects of the mercantilist restrictions, which prevented the development of commercial agriculture and hence discouraged immigration. As late as 1765 the inhabitants of the island numbered less than 45,000. About one tenth of these lived in San Juan; the other nine tenths included barely 8,000 free men (whites, mulattoes, and Negroes) over fifteen years of age, the rest being free women and

38

The Sociocultural Background

children and some 4,000 slaves. Most of the rural families lived on their own land; being thinly scattered over the island, they tended to be isolated from their neighbors.2 Throughout the eighteenth century, says the Puerto Rican historian Arturo Morales Carriön, "San Juan continued to be a tightly huddled community, surrounded by its rings of walls and imposing fortresses, expressing in their planning and architecture royal defiance of aggressors from afar. The rest of the island was left pretty much to itself, with little encouragement given to its productive occupations and living theoretically within the narrow system prescribed by royal exclusivism."3 During the last third of the century, however, the population increased substantially, having risen to 155,000 by 1800.4 Most of the immigrants were from Spain and the Canary Islands, but some came from Haiti and other French colonies in the Caribbean. The French colonists entered under a royal decree of 1778 which permitted the settlement of Roman Catholics who would take an oath of allegiance to the King of Spain. Conservative in temper, none of the newcomers caused much change in the traditional culture of the island. Nor did Puerto Rico's growing contacts with North Americans have much effect. For the most part those contacts were limited to the clandestine trade that developed between the island and some of the thirteen colonies prior to the American Revolution and that continued, partly legalized, for a time thereafter.6 Profound changes began to occur in the economy and population of the island after 1815, when the Spanish Crown issued a decree known in Puerto Rico as the Cedula de Gratias. In effect the decree repealed the long-standing mercantilist rules and instituted a policy of promoting economic growth and colonization. As Sidney Mintz has pointed out, its promulgation "stimulated an influx of Catholic entrepreneurs by offering to them grants of land from the royal domain in proportion to the number of slaves they owned. Catholic foreigners came from the French and British islands, from Louisiana, Venezuela, Mexico, and Santo Domingo . . . The CSdula provided for the free importation of machinery, removed taxes on slaves and agricultural implements, established free commerce with Spain, and allowed direct commercial relations with foreign na-

Nineteenth-Century Society

39

tions. The effect of this Cedula on Puerto Rican agriculture was revolutionary."® So also was its effect on population growth. The number of inhabitants rose from 221,000 in 1815 to 330,000 by 1832; it had passed the half-million mark by 1860 and reached 953,000 by 1899.7 On the economic side, sugar and coffee plantations (haciendas) grew rapidly in size and number. Methods of production, however, remained inefficient because of the limited use of technology. Although the sugar and coffee sectors of the economy were the first to shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture, both relied almost exclusively on manual labor. Little capital was invested in machinery beyond a small steam or ox-driven muscovado mill on each sugar hacienda and a hand-operated hulling machine on some of the larger coffee farms. Almost the only tools used were the machete, the hoe, the axe, and a wooden plow with an iron point. The lack of investment in new methods and equipment contributed to thefinancialdifficulties in which many sugar and coffee farmers found themselves by 1875; during the last quarter of the century many of the less efficient producers lost their lands.8

STRUCTURE OF THE N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y

SOCIETY

The population of Puerto Rico remained predominantly rural. The first reliable census, that taken in 1899 during the period of American military government, classified less than 15 per cent of the 953,000 inhabitants as urban, that is, as residents of towns of over 1,000 population. Only 8.7 per cent lived in towns of more than 8,000 population. Nearly two thirds of the labor force (62.8 per cent) were engaged in agriculture, which had been the chief source of wealth for at least three centuries.9 Social Stratification. In general, the class structure of nineteenthcentury Puerto Rico conformed to a simple two-class pattern. This was especially true of the areas devoted to sugar production—the coastal plains and the larger inland valleys. In both types of region the family-owned hacienda became the dominant form of economic organization during the period 1815 to 1875. There the main classes

40

The Sociocultural Background

were the landowners and the plantation workers. Between them, but much closer in status to the workers than to the owners, were the artisans—a small group of plantation blacksmiths, carpenters, and the like—and the overseers or mayordomos. The owner (hacendado) either lived on his plantation or, as was frequently the case, maintained a residence in the nearest large town and left active management of the hacienda to someone of his own class, often a member of his extended family, who served as resident administrator. Some of his workers were Negro slaves (until the abolition of slavery in 1873), but the majority were free laborers, many of them white. Called agregados, the free workers lived as squatters on the land of the hacendado and worked for him, sometimes as sharecroppers, in lieu of paying rent. During the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, strict laws against "vagrancy" reduced the agregado system to a form of forced labor. Landless workers were compelled to work for the owner of the land on which they lived, had to carry a workbook as proof of their employment, and could not leave the plantation unless free of debt. The emancipation decree of 1873 therefore did not substantially improve the lot of slaves when it in effect converted them into agregados, especially since the two groups had long been accustomed to working side by side in the fields and sugar mills.10 In the coffee country of the mountainous interior a wide diffusion of land ownership produced a somewhat more complex pattern of social stratification, but even so there was a basic cleavage between the large landowners on the one hand and the small holders and the landless on the other. Until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a rough equality of poverty had prevailed among the widely scattered highland families. Possessing their own farmsteads, acquired by squatters' rights or by land grant from the government, they lived mainly by subsistence agriculture. The introduction of hulling machinery changed this pattern, for it then became profitable to grow coffee as a cash crop. Those able to invest in the new machines were mainly newcomers from Spain, Mallorca, and Corsica, many of whom acquired haciendas of a hundred acres or more. As the century advanced, the hacienda system absorbed more and more of the small farms, whose former

Nineteenth-Century

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41

owners had no recourse but to work as agregados on the coffee plantations. Even those farmers who managed to retain their small holdings (thirty acres or less) came to depend on the neighboring hacendado for occasional employment, the wages thus earned being used not for capital accumulation but to make ends meet. By the last quarter of the century, therefore, highland society had evolved an essentially two-class structure, the hacendados constituting the upper stratum and the dependent peasants and landless workers the lower.11 Social stratification in the cities and towns was also dual: "On the top there was an upper class. At the bottom were 'the people.' " 1 2 The urban elite were almost entirely Spanish-born: merchants, higher clergy, and civil and military officers of the colonial government. For the most part, the merchants had come to the island in their youth to enrich themselves, married within the resident Spanish community, and accumulated wealth by any means open to them, including sharp practices and the use of force. Enjoying a de facto monopoly of trade and commerce, the Spanish merchants turned the perennial shortage of capital to their own advantage by extending credit to Puerto Rican farmers at high, often usurious, rates of interest, and by paying them considerably less than the market price for their mortgaged crops.13 This group within the closed hierarchy of the Spanish elite was especially unpopular with the native-born Puerto Ricans, who contemptuously called them juntperos (junipers, or upstarts). The native population was nevertheless economically dependent on them. The merchants not only gave the farmers credit and bought their crops, but also provided employment to urban workers and offered for sale the only manufactured goods available in the community. Socially dominant and politically influential, they ran the towns.14 Communications. Physical mobility was severely restricted by a lack of roads. After four hundred years of Spanish control, the only surfaced highway of any length was the 78-mile military road between San Juan on the north coast and Ponce on the south, a winding route that crossed two mountain ranges. In 1899 it cost $30 to travel by coach from one terminus to the other. Most of the other coastal cities were connected with one another by dirt roads which

42

The Sociocultural Background

became impassable after heavy rains. Rough trails were the main links between the towns of the interior and those of the coast. When Commissioner Henry K. Carroll was gathering material in 1899 for his famous report to President McKinley, he was warned not to undertake the journey from Utuado to Lares, adjacent municipalities in the west-central mountains, without first making his will. He found that it cost as much to transport coffee from Utuado to the nearest port as to ship it from the port to Liverpool.15 The paucity of internal communications inhibited physical mobility both directly and indirectly. The very difficulty of getting about kept people at home, isolated from nearby communities and even from their neighbors. But it also had the indirect effect of promoting poverty and illiteracy, which were in themselves a bar to travel. Per capita income remained low partly because the inadequate system of roads limited the volume of agricultural products that could be hauled to market. Illiteracy rates remained high, especially in the rural areas, partly because the few schools available were often hard to get to. In 1880 Governor-General Eulogio Despujol attempted to justify the total lack of public education for girls in the rural districts by pointing to the dangers involved in a daily transit of young maidens to some distant school and home again via trails along which they might lose their way or their virtue.16

POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION

Within this historical setting and structural framework, such social institutions as the family, the hacienda, the schools, and the Church performed the function of transmitting the traditional culture from one generation to the next in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Among these, the family and the hacienda were clearly the most influential in the inculcation of traditional values bearing on politics and in the formation of more or less corresponding patterns of political behavior. The Family. The basic unit of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican society was the nuclear family, consisting of husband, wife, and

Nineteenth-Century

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43

unmarried children. Although they had their own house (a oneor two-room shack in the case of the poorer classes), they kept in constant touch with their close relatives and usually lived near them. Together with parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, cousins and in-laws, they constituted an extended family—one united by ties of loyalty and mutual obligation. Although the task of child rearing was often shared among the members of the extended family, all its adults recognizing an obligation to help with the care, training, and discipline of the young, primary responsibility was vested in the parents of the nuclear family. The dominant role the father was supposed to play within it and the subordinate role expected of his wife reinforced the deferential patterns of right conduct which they taught their children. Hence the total configuration of desirable husband-wife and parent-child relationships amounted to an authoritarian ideal of family life. Although less prevalent today than it used to be, that ideal is still accepted among many rural families, especially in the highland areas.17 In the traditional family, whether of the nineteenth century or of the present day, the father is ideally the lord and master. In keeping with his superior status, it is incumbent upon him to control the family as its decision-maker, lawgiver, and disciplinarian, as well as to serve as its breadwinner and its only contact with the outside world. His wife is meant to be a submissive helpmate, more a servant than a partner, who would never venture forth from home unless accompanied by her husband or otherwise suitably chaperoned. In a tradition-bound family the premise of male superiority underlies relations between husband and wife from the moment of the couple's engagement, at which point also respect, power, and masculinity values come strongly into play. "The role of the masterful husband is required of the engaged man," says the sociologist Reuben Hill, "not only by the girl's father and his male friends, but by his fiancee. It tells her she has betrothed a strong forceful man who will exert substantial leadership in their future family affairs."18 The chief object of child training in the traditional family is to inculcate patterns of attitude and behavior consistent with the

44

The Sociocultural Background

most important of all values, respect. "The concept of respect," says Elena Padilla, "claims of a child that he not transgress the bounds of whatever adults expect of him, that he obey without question and accept with docility the decision of authorities, namely his parents and elders."19 Unlike the modern American family, whose members tend to participate equally and even competitively in a wide variety of activities, the traditional Puerto Rican family has always sought to maintain a clear distinction between the status and role of children on the one hand and of parents on the other. "The child has no voice in family matters, not even in matters which pertain to him directly and exclusively. He has to be unfailingly obedient, for obedience is the hallmark of respect."20 Despite the heavy emphasis on obedience and the high valuation of respect, children in the traditional Puerto Rican family somehow learn attitudinal and behavioral patterns that promote family solidarity. The warmth of traditional family life suggests the importance of the mother as an inculcator of affection values; for in the traditional culture she is expected to be not only executrix of the father's commands but also a kind and loving protector of the children.21 Such values would also seem to underlie the bonds of mutual loyalty and obligation that reach beyond the immediate family to embrace members of the extended family and even those outsiders co-opted into the narrower family circle by the compadrazgo relationship. That relationship of ritual co-parenthood, so familiar in the traditional Hispano-Catholic culture of Latin America, obtains between parents and their children's godparents. In the traditional setting, parents and compadres (co-parents) are supposed to owe one another unfailing regard, trust, and consideration, and are expected to turn to one another for help in minor troubles as well as in major crises. Adults of all classes and subcultures in nineteeth-century Puerto Rico readily entered into the compadrazgo relationship, and they continue to do so, though their motives vary somewhat from one subculture to another.22 Finally, traditional Puerto Rican child-rearing practices include constant stress on masculinity as the style of action to which boys in the family should aspire. "Beginning about the time when they start to toddle," Mintz reports, "boys are taught that aggressiveness

Nineteenth-Century

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45

is male and that they should be aggressive. This emphasis on maleness is strongly marked . . . From infancy onward, the boy learns that he must be muy macho."23 Nevertheless, traditional parents do not ordinarily allow a boy to engage in acts of physical aggression, especially against anyone outside the family. Boys tend to be treated more indulgently than girls, but neither sons nor daughters are allowed to develop feelings of independence. According to David Landy, who studied a rural lower-class village ("Villa Cafia") in east-central Puerto Rico during the mid-fifties, these and other ambivalences in the upbringing of boys cause them to become dependent and insecure adults. The Villa Cana male, he says, "has learned in his growing up that to achieve full Villacafiese status he must first of all embellish his machismo with acts of maleness. Many of his actions can be understood within the framework of his struggle against the external cultural compulsives to increase the trappings of machismo and appear strong, virile, and selfsufficient, even as he is pushed from within to gratify his cravings for a strong figure with which to identify and to whom he may attach his dependency needs."24 The Hacienda. Since most nineteeth-century Puerto Ricans lived in rural areas, the hacienda was second in importance only to the family as an agency of political socialization. Like the family, it inculcated rectitude values that emphasized respect, and power values that focused on submission to personal authority. Hence the two social institutions reinforced each other in perpetuating traditional patterns of attitude and behavior. "The hacienda," says Mintz, "was the seat of continuous, face-toface, reciprocal deference-respect relations between the owner or manager and his family on the one hand, and the hacienda agregados on the other."25 These relations were guided by norms that had attained wide currency in rural Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century and that are recognized as ideals today on the larger coffee and tobacco plantations of the mountainous interior. The traditional culture defined the "good landowner" and the "good worker" in terms of the conduct appropriate to each. Common to both roles was the accordance of respect. The good landowner was one who "respected" his workers and their families

46

The Sociocultural Background

by taking thought for their welfare and by treating them courteously, without condescension. The good agregado respected the owner by being a competent and reliable worker and by accepting without question the owner's superior status. As Eric Wolf puts it, "the best thing that a landowner can say of one of his workers is that he 'respects a lot' (respeta mucho)."2e The traditional code of hacienda behavior consisted of a set of reciprocal rights and duties. Among other things, it required of the landowner certain actions and attitudes that benefited his workers, and it expected of the worker those actions and attitudes that benefited the owner. In specific terms, the good hacendado or patron was expected to be a paternalistic employer: one who gave steady employment to his agregados and provided them a minimum of economic perquisites, such as a house for each family, and perhaps a plot of land on which to raise vegetables and a few chickens and pigs. He was also expected to extend them credit at the hacienda store, to make them occasional gifts of milk, meat, and other 'luxury" foods, to see that they received medical attention when sick or injured, to intercede with the police or the politicians when they got into trouble, and in general to act as their protector and benefactor. On the other hand, the good landowner was expected to exert firm control over hacienda affairs, to exact the respect due his superior position, and to protect his own interests. The following statement of policy by a twentieth-century hacendado, as quoted by Wolf, is quite consistent with the firm line the traditional code of conduct required the good landowner to follow: "'The landowner has to take continual care that the workers will plant only annuals in their plots. If the landowner does not check carefully, they will often plant avocados and nino bananas. And the quarrel is on . . . Then I take my horse and ride through the plot. I destroy the plantings at once. The people cry after that, but one must take a strong stand with these people for their own good [hay de ser fuerte con esta gente para el bien de ellos].' "2T As for the worker and his family, the code required that they serve the landowner loyally and well. The agregado was obliged not to work for anyone else or for himself if the patron could use

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47

his services. His wife and daughters were expected to be on call for help in the owner's household, and his sons to be available for taking care of the owner's animals, running errands, and performing other services as required. The good worker "must not ask for overly large amounts of credit. Yet he must present the owner with an occasional demand for credit, to re-emphasize his dependence on the man who owns the land and employs him."28 Landowner and agregado, in the traditional nineteenth-century relationship, were expected to be on close personal terms, though the difference in status between them was never in doubt. Each, moreover, was supposed to have personal knowledge of and interest in the family of the other. The ties that bound them together were thus, in theory at least, more personal than economic. On the traditional hacienda, the unquestioned authority of the landowner was supposed to rest on the respect and affection due him as a paternalistic employer rather than on the economic power at his command. Agregados and small holders were expected to look to him not only for employment but also for direction of their daily lives and for help in time of sickness or other trouble. According to a recent description, the hacendado was often "a patriarchal figure who acted at times as father, counselor, physician, and judge of his people. The terms padre de agrego (father by aggregation) is still used by some of the older residents of our rural communities when referring to the owner of the land where they live."29 Formal Education. Spanish officialdom in the capital, the merchant and government elite in the urban centers, and the hacendados in the rural areas long remained indifferent, even hostile, to public education. Private tutors, private schoolmasters, and the Church saw to the elementary and secondary schooling of upper-class children, whose parents could pay the fees; but virtually nothing was done to educate the rest of the school-age population until the second half of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1882, the Puerto Rican historian and publicist Salvador Brau pointed out that governors-general had issued detailed instructions on the care and feeding of gamecocks as early as 1825 but had not seen fit to do anything about the instruction of the children of the rural poor, who formed the great mass of the island's population,

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The Sociocultural Background

until forty years later.30 From 1865 onward the colonial governors issued a number of directives concerning the establishment of public schools in the countryside as well as in the towns, but local authorities were uncooperative and progress was slow. By 1899 only 159,000 (16.6 per cent of the population) were reported able to read, and of these only "5,045 persons of both sexes and all ages [were] reported to have received an education of a grade above that obtained in the primary schools."31 For most of the population, therefore, the schools were not an agency of political or any other kind of socialization. Only a small minority, drawn mainly from the elite, ever had an opportunity to receive any formal education. Those who did attend school, whether public, private, or parochial, received a severely limited education. Teachers were ill-prepared and poorly paid, textbooks were few, and supplies and equipment were scanty. GovernorGeneral Despujol described the condition of the public schools as follows in a report that he sent to the Crown in 1880: "Eight months after my arrival [in 1878] and while the ayuntamientos [municipal councils] were still appointed directly by the government, the equipment of the schools of the whole island could hardly have been worse. There were boys' schools in the principal towns which did not have a single writing book; some had but three copies of the grammar: notwithstanding the fact that the teacher had asked for these books repeatedly and petitions for them had been presented to the ayuntamientos by the local juntas [school boards]. In one of the girls' schools the teacher was compelled to teach grammar orally from the only manuscript text that she possessed. But even now, with ayuntamientos elected by popular vote, of the 1,618 boys attending schools of one of the most important towns of the island, only 637 have seating accommodations. If this is the case after the government has just distributed school desks for 1,120 children of the superior schools of the island, what must have been the condition before . . . If this is the condition in the principal towns, what must be the condition of schools in the villages?"32 The typical private elementary school, as well as the public school in the smaller towns and villages, consisted of a single class-

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49

room, often located in the teacher's house. The curriculum of all schools placed heavy emphasis on "sacred history," religion, and morals, and all textbooks were written in catechistic form. "The child learned the answer to the questions, and the recitation consisted of repeating the answer when the question was asked by the teacher or his assistant . . . Great emphasis was also placed on church attendance. Teachers were urged to attend church with their pupils and see that they performed the rites of the church."33 Strict discipline was maintained in the classroom, often by the use of corporal punishment.34 Clearly, these methods of instruction reinforced several of the patterns of political socialization already identified as resultants of child training in the traditional family. They contributed to the internalization by the young of such attitudes as acceptance of hierarchy and respect for higher authority, and to the instilling of behavior patterns of obedience, dependence, and docility. Despite limited enrollments, the nineteenth-century schools had an impact on value formation that was far from insignificant, for the children they influenced in each generation tended to include the future leaders of the island. The Church. In general, the people of Puerto Rico were never strongly attached to the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. From earliest Spanish times there was an insufficiency of priests to minister adequately to the population. In the nineteenth century churchgoing was mainly an activity of the townspeople, particularly of the upper-class women. The country people seldom saw a priest, attended mass, or made confession from one year to the next. Most of them married consensually—without benefit of clergy or civil ceremony—and baptized their infants themselves. Although this service (bautismo de agua), sometimes performed by the midwife, was supposed to be followed by a church baptism (bautismo de pila), often it was not. And yet the people clung to folk expressions of Catholicism—festivals on saints' days, rites of thanksgiving (rosarios) to saints for answered prayers, wakes for the deac (velorios), and other forms of quasi-religious ceremony conducted at home in the company of family and friends. It was in following such practices and in their faith (not unmixed with superstition)

50

The Sociocultural

Background

rather than in church attendance and knowledge of church doctrine, that almost all Puerto Ricans were Catholics.36 It seems likely that folk Catholicism helped universalize the fatalism premise among the lower classes of rural Puerto Rico. It may well have strengthened their belief that changes in their own lives were unlikely to occur except through divine intervention, luck, or some other agency beyond their control. Similarly, such knowledge as they did have concerning the Church doubtless reinforced their attitudes of deference toward authority. Sketchy though their acquaintance with the priesthood may have been, they probably had some understanding of the superior role of the priest vis-a-vis his parishioners in the hierarchical Catholic system. Where contact with priests and the practice of churchgoing were more common, as in the larger towns, such attitudes of deference and dependence were intensified by the Hispanic pattern of churchstate relations. In nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, as had been the case since the earliest days of Spanish settlement, the Church was an arm of the state. Priests were appointed by the governor-general on the advice of the bishop and in the name of the Crown. The higher clergy were all Spanish-born, as were most of the parish priests and members of the religious orders. They were normally in league not only with the colonial officials, both civil and military, but also with the Spanish merchants of the towns.36 "As there was more or less friction between Puerto Ricans and Spaniards, and the priests were paid by the government and were understood to be in entire sympathy with it," Commissioner Carroll reported, "they really did not come in close touch with many of the natives in their parishes."37 The development of anti-Spanish sentiment during the nineteenth century led some Puerto Ricans of upper-class background or education to adopt anticlerical and even skeptical views.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL LIFE

During most of the four centuries of Spanish colonial rule, Puerto Rico had no political life worthy of the name. Only members of the

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51

small class of educated Puerto Ricans, for the most part members of the landowning elite, took an active role in public affairs, and this only during those brief periods of the nineteenth century when liberal regimes in Spain granted them a few political rights. The vastly larger peasant class remained deferential and strictly nonparticipant until 1898, the last year of the Spanish epoch. Royal authority was centralized in San Juan, the capital. Elsewhere, Spanish officialdom made its presence felt chiefly in the cities where military units were stationed and in the towns administered by military officers. Except for occasional intervention in support of the landowning elite, as in the case of police enforcement of the mid-century workbook decrees and other laws affecting landless laborers (repealed in 1876), the central authority and its agents tended to leave the rural areas to their own devices. Informal Power: The Hacendado. Most country people knew at first hand only the authority of the landed gentry, who were the unofficial but almost omnipotent arbiters of rural life. Although relations between the landowner and his agregados were often marked by mutual respect and by mutual recognition of reciprocal obligations, the laborers had no recourse if the owner chose to act arbitrarily. After 1876 they were legally free to leave the hacienda if dissatisfied with the conditions under which they lived and worked. In practice, however, they were so lacking in resources that they could not break away. Since their relations with the hacendado were regulated at best by an oral contract and usually by only a tacit agreement, much depended on his honesty and good faith. In any case, they could not appeal to outside authority to protect theirrights.As Miguel Mel£ndez Mufioz, the dean of Puerto Rican social historians, has put it, "The plantation was a world apart, autonomous, ruled by the all-embracing will of its owner. Neither the laws nor those charged with enforcing them, not even the supreme authority of the metropolitan power or its representative in the colony, ever crossed its boundaries. Complacent and tolerant, they stopped short at its borders."38 Within their own areas of influence, therefore, the hacendados held sway as the undisputed ruling class. Once outside them, however, they found themselves subject to higher authority.

52

The Sociocultural

Background

Formal Power: The Governor-General. Throughout the four centuries of Spanish control, both formal and effective power resided in the governor-general. Appointed by the Crown and responsible to the peninsular government, he was the embodiment of Spanish sovereignty in the island. Having broad discretion, he also enjoyed virtual supremacy in administering the affairs of the colony. As viceregal patron of the Church, he had wide jurisdiction over ecclesiastical matters. As captain-general he commanded the armed forces. (During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly every governor-general was a high-ranking officer in the Spanish army.) As head of the civil government he directed the administration of municipal as well as insular affairs. Most of the insular officials under his control were Spaniards, some of whom remained in Puerto Rico only long enough to meet the low requirements for retirement in Spain as civil pensioners. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the municipalities (except for San Juan and four other cities) were governed by military officers appointed by the governor-general and directly responsible to him. In the 1870's military rule gave way to civil authority, but not to true local self-government. Every municipio had an elected council (ayuntamiento) and a mayor chosen by it, but the governor-general still dominated local affairs. He could appoint the mayor if dissatisfied with the council's choice, he appointed all other local officials, he issued directives which the mayor was bound to carry out, and his approval was required before most ayuntamiento decisions could take effect.39 Other instruments of gubernatorial control were the army and the insular police. Several battalions of Spanish army regulars and local militiamen were distributed among the seven military districts into which the island was divided. The police consisted of two insular forces, the Vigilantes and, after 1869, the notorious Guardia Civil (Civil Guard), plus a local constabulary under the control of the mayor in each municipio. Since the police were often used for political purposes—to manhandle or imprison critics of the regime, intimidate voters, and rig elections—their ubiquity and strength retarded the growth of political awareness and participation.40

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53

Anticipations of Political Modernity. But official hostility and repression did not prevent the rise of political consciousness, at least among the educated classes. From time to time liberal regimes came to power in Spain, as in the years 1808-1814, 1820-1823, and 1868-1874. During these brief interludes the peninsular government suspended gubernatorial despotism and permitted Puerto Ricans to enjoy a few civil liberties. Members of the small planter aristocracy and professional middle class were allowed to address petitions to the Crown, publish newspapers, and even nominate deputies to the Spanish Cortes. Improved economic conditions after 1815 enabled some of the wealthier hacendados to send their sons to Europe for their education. A few youths of humble origin, such as Roman Baldorioty de Castro and Jose Julian Acosta, also studied abroad by virtue of financial support provided by private benefactors who were impressed by their brilliant performance in Puerto Rican schools.41 By the middle of the century a considerable number of these young men had returned to the island from university studies in Spain and France. Although trained as doctors, lawyers, teachers, and scientists, many of them soon came to public notice as orators, poets, essayists, and journalists. Imbued with liberal and nationalist ideals, they seized every opportunity to advocate political and social reforms, such as the introduction of representative institutions and the abolition of slavery. They also urged that the economy be freed from the stranglehold of the Spanish merchants, for they shared their fathers' resentment against the juniperos. A few of them, such as the leaders of the abortive Lares Uprising (1868), went so far as to demand independence from Spain. But most of the native-born intelligentsia were content to work for reforms within the Spanish political system, the presence of formidable military and police forces making any other course quixotic, even suicidal. Their first chance to participate in elections and, more generally, their first taste of modern politics, came during the chaotic period in Spanish history that began with the Revolution of 1868 and ended with the fall of the Republic early in 1874. During those years the peninsular government authorized the election of fifteen

54

The Sociocultural Background

deputies to represent Puerto Rico in the Cortes. It also authorized the election of municipal ayuntamientos and of the Provincial Deputation, an administrative council first established in 1813 but long in abeyance until reconstituted in 1870. Freedom of the press and freedom of petition and assembly were restored, and voluntary groups were permitted to organize. These developments led to the formation of political parties. First to organize were the native-born reformers, who founded the Liberal Reformist Party in November 1870. A few months later the mainly Spanish-born officeholders, merchants, and other defenders of the status quo established the Conservative Party, also known as the Unconditionally Spanish Party. (Its members were usually called Unconditionals.) The two parties competed for the votes of an electorate of some 20,000, which consisted of all adult males able to read and write.42 In the first election of deputies to the Cortes, held in June 1871, the Liberals carried all but one of the fifteen electoral districts. Although the Unconditionals won the corrupt April 1872 election eleven to four, the Liberals regained their fourteen seats in a third contest held four months later, after a change of regime in Spain. During 1873 Liberal candidates captured all fifteen seats and swept the municipal and Provincial Deputation elections. These victories attest to the popularity of the Liberal cause among the educated classes of the Puerto Rican community in the period when they were free to express their political preferences. Eclipse of Liberalism. Upon the overthrow of the short-lived Spanish Republic, despotism again descended on the island. Returning to the old pattern of arbitrary central authority, GovernorGeneral Jos6 Laureano Sanz abrogated many of the reforms of the previous five years and visited reprisals upon the liberal elements. But accepting political parties as a permanent feature of Puerto Rican life, Sanz and his successors worked hand in glove with the Unconditionals. Under the leadership of Jose Fernandez, Marquis of Esperanza, and Pablo Ubarri, Count of Santurce, the pro-Spanish party gave uncritical support to the colonial government in return for legal and extralegal measures that assured them of many patronage appointments and a virtual monopoly of elective offices from 1874 until 1897.

Nineteenth-Century

Society

55

The restrictive suffrage acts and decrees in force during that period are a case in point. The law of 1878, for example, limited the vote to males over 25 years of age who paid at least 125 pesetas a year in taxes or came within certain specified groups, such as priests, retired officers of the armed forces, holders of academic or professional diplomas, teachers, and "all public employees earning an annual salary of at least 2,000 pesetas."43 These categories enfranchised all the Spaniards in the island, whereas the tax requirement disfranchised practically the entire indigenous population. In 1880, under the operation of this law, only 2,004 out of an adult male population of 374,640 were eligible to vote—0.53 per cent of the total.44 Persecuted and discriminated against, the Liberals seldom participated in elections after 1874. Sometimes they were unable to rally their forces sufficiently to nominate candidates; at other times they refused to enter electoral contests in protest against the suffrage laws. They also weakened their position by incessant squabbling among themselves. Emergence of the Political-Status Issue. A main preoccupation of the Puerto Rican intelligentsia before 1870 had been their second-class citizenship, resulting from the absence of representative institutions and other means of political self-expression. Although the idea of local self-rule or autonomy for Puerto Rico had been broached at least as early as 1823,45 it was not until after 1870 that educated Puerto Ricans became concerned with the second-class political status of the colony itself: its inequality visä-vis the peninsular provinces and its total lack of autonomy as regards the management of insular affairs. Soon two schools of thought developed among the members of the Liberal Reformist Party concerning the future political status of the island. One, the assimilationist school, wanted Puerto Rico to have a status equal to that of the peninsular provinces and to live under all the laws that applied to them, rather than under the special and more restrictive laws that had long applied to Puerto Rico and Cuba. The other, the autonomist school, held that the island should enjoy a considerable measure of self-government or home rule within the Spanish empire. At first the assimilationists were the dominant faction, but after

56

The Sociocultural

Background

1874 their influence steadily declined as younger people pressed for recognition in party councils. A debilitating struggle for control of party affairs finally ended in 1884 with the resignation of the assimilationist president of the party, Jose de C£lis Aguilera. The autonomists, under the leadership of Romdn Baldorioty de Castro, then assumed direction of the party and in 1887 reorganized it under the name Puerto Rican Autonomist Party. No sooner had the autonomists won control than they split into two new factions. One group, strongly republican in tendency, sought to gain home rule for the island by aligning the Autonomist Party with the small but vocal Republican Party of Spain. The other group, less critical of the monarchical system, thought it more practical for the insular Autonomists to enter into an electoral alliance or pact with the peninsular Liberals, a powerful monarchical party whose leader, Praxedes Sagasta, had frequently served as prime minister of the Spanish government. In 1897 Luis Munoz Rivera, leader of the pro-Liberal faction, succeeded in negotiating such a pact with. Sagasta, but the republican faction, under the leadership of Dr. Jos6 C. Barbosa, refused to accept its terms. The party then split in two, the Munoz wing reorganizing itself as the Liberal Fusionist Party, the Barbosa wing as the Historic (Orthodox) Autonomist Party.46 Autonomic Reforms of 1897. In November 1897 the Spanish Crown issued three decrees liberalizing the governments of Puerto Rico and Cuba. Whether their issuance was in any respect a consequence of the Mufioz-Sagasta pact is perhaps open to question,47 but the fact remains that the decrees did apply to Puerto Rico and generally satisfied the Puerto Ricans' demands for political autonomy. The most famous of the three decrees, the Autonomic Charter of the Antilles, provided for the establishment of a parliamentary system of government. The second decree granted the suffrage to all adult males, and the third brought Cubans and Puerto Ricans under the protection of the bill-of-rights provisions (Title I) of the Spanish Constitution of 1876.48 The Autonomic Charter of 1897 vested the power to legislate on internal affairs in a Parliament consisting of two houses, a partially

Nineteenth-Century Society

57

elected Council of Administration and an elected Chamber of Representatives. They could "pass upon all matters not specially and expressly reserved to the Cortes of the Kingdom or to the central Government" (article 32). Parliament was specifically authorized to frame tariffs and fix customs duties on imports and exports. The executive power was divided between a governorgeneral and a cabinet (Secretarios del Despacho). In his capacity as representative of the Spanish nation and its government, the governor-general exercised broad powers in matters relating to die Church, the armed forces, the maintenance of law and order, and the enforcement of national laws, decrees, treaties, and other acts or measures of the home government that were applicable to Puerto Rico; for example, he could unilaterally suspend the right of free speech and other guarantees in the bill of rights after hearing the counsel of his cabinet. In his capacity as "representative and chief of the colony," however, he exercised executive authority on behalf of the cabinet, which was responsible not to him but to the insular Parliament. He could not issue an executive order unless a cabinet minister countersigned it and thereby took responsibility for it. Under the charter Puerto Rico retained voting representation in the Cortes and participated in the framing of commercial treaties that affected the island. The charter itself could not be amended except on petition of Parliament. These reforms gave the Puerto Ricans their first genuine opportunity to learn the arts of self-government in nearly four hundred years of Spanish rule. They came too late, however, for those arts to be learned under the Spanish flag. On February 11, 1898 (four days before the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor), a transitional cabinet took office to govern the island until a majority government could be formed after the holding of parliamentary elections in March. Headed by Luis Mufioz Rivera, the interim cabinet at first consisted of three Liberal Fusionists and three Orthodox Autonomists; but the heat of campaign politics soon caused the Autonomists to resign their posts. Wholly inexperienced in free elections, the two parties carried their rivalry to such extremes that disorder and even bloodshed accompanied the balloting. A month after the elections, in which the Liberals won twenty-

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The Sociocultural Background

five of the thirty-two seats in the Chamber of Representatives, war broke out between Spain and the United States. The crucial victory of that war, the surrender of Santiago de Cuba to the American forces, occurred on July 17, 1898—the very day that Puerto Rico's first Parliament held its inaugural session. Eight days later American troops landed on the south coast of the island. On July 28 the Parliament disbanded, never to reconvene.49 The modernization of Puerto Rico's political system under Spanish auspices thus ended before it really began. Traditional Values and "Status" Politics. The concern over Puerto Rico's relations with Spain which preoccupied the insular leaders after 1870 was basically an expression of their discontent with the indignities of colonialism. In terms of our value categories, what was mainly at issue in the Puerto Rican protests and demands was the failure of Spain to accord due respect to her Puerto Rican subjects. As we have seen, their quest for respect did not lead the political elite to seek independence from Spain. Unlike their Cuban cousins of that period, most Puerto Rican leaders took the continuation of Spanish sovereignty for granted, as if it were in the nature of things. What they wanted was Spanish recognition of Puerto Rico's dignity and worth; but, as indicated above, they differed among themselves as to the form of that recognition. The manner in which they disagreed reflected their commitment to other traditional values. The controversies between assimilationists and autonomists from 1870 to 1884 and between monarchist and republican autonomists from 1884 to 1897 were hotly debated, but they were only partly ideological. They were also highly personal. The leaders of the competing factions, such as C£lis Aguilera and Baldorioty in the first period and Mufioz Rivera and Barbosa in the second, were rivals for power within the party structure, as well as rival ideamongers. Similarly, many of their followers supported them as much because of the magnetic attraction of their personalities as because of agreement with their views. The behavior of both leaders and followers revealed their commitment to the whole complex of traditional values associated with the personalism premise—the

Nineteenth-Century

Society

59

concentration of power in one man, his embodiment of a forceful, virile style of action, and his maintenance of intimate personal ties with his supporters. "Puerto Rico's political leadership," says Morales Carrion, "was heavily dominated by personalismo. The quest for autonomy was led by proud, sensitive men, who resented Spanish condescension if not authority, but were also prone to quarrel among themselves."50 As time went on, the rivalry between Mufioz Rivera and Barbosa became more personal than ideological, to the point where their followers were known as Munocistas and Barbocistas rather than as partisans of one or the other political creed. This tendency began to show itself in the parliamentary election of 1898, the first ever held in Puerto Rico on the basis of universal manhood suffrage and hence the first occasion on which appeals could be made to anything approaching a mass electorate. Whole families and even villages became fanatical adherents of one leader or the other, with the result that increasingly bitter exchanges marked the campaign. These culminated in the acts of violence mentioned above. For more than a quarter of a century thereafter, despite Mufioz Rivera's death in 1916 and Barbosa's in 1921, rivalry between the Munocistas and the Barbocistas often superseded ideological issues as a cause of division and conflict in insular politics. "As a matter of historical fact," says a leading chronicler of Puerto Rican political parties, "Puerto Rican political movements have tended by and large to follow great leaders, regardless of their policy orientations, rather than pursue rigid and dogmatic creeds."61

PART II CULTURES IN CONFLICT

CHAPTER 3 THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE

The American conquest of Puerto Rico by force of arms was mercifully brief. Begun on July 25, 1898 the military campaign had been under way less than three weeks when word came from Washington that the war was over. Hostilities on the island stopped at once. Since the peace protocol called for the cession of Puerto Rico to the United States, the Spanish authorities made haste to evacuate their troops. American military government formally took control of the colony on October 18, 1898. Then began another type of conquest: an attempt to reorganize Puerto Rican life in accordance with American values and patterns of behavior. Americanization of the island has been going on ever since. In part it has been the result of policies undertaken by military and, after 1900, civil authorities with that end specifically in view. In part it has been the product of equally deliberate attempts by mainland economic interests to introduce American techniques of production, marketing, and business management. In part, also, it has been an unplanned, spontaneous process whereby individual Puerto Ricans have consciously or unconsciously accepted the American style or adapted themselves to it. The rate of change has not been constant over the years, nor have all Puerto Ricans been equally receptive to American influences, but the general direction of change has been toward the American model. Lest there be any misunderstanding, it must be pointed out that

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the island is not yet fully Americanized, nor is it ever likely to be. In many respects it remains more Spanish than North American and will doubtless continue to be so. The shape or texture or flavor of its emerging modernity is not likely to cease being recognizably Puerto Rican. The fact remains, however, that the course of Puerto Rican development cannot be understood except in terms of the impact of the predominantly modern American culture upon the traditional Hispanic culture of the island. Through two generations—until about 1940—that impact was uneven but mainly disruptive, especially in the realm of values. A painful conflict of cultures throughout the period debilitated insular politics and retarded the discovery of solutions to the island's accumulating problems. But before examining that situation we need to understand how different from the traditional Puerto Rican society and culture the early twentieth-century American society and culture were.

MODERNITY, AMERICAN STYLE (1898-1930) By the beginning of the twentieth century the United States had come to manifest many modern attributes. In the South, to be sure, a traditional culture still remained dominant, and in other parts of the country, especially in remote rural areas, the modernization process was not very far advanced. But taken as a whole the United States at the turn of the century was predominantly modern.

AMERICAN

SOCIETY

By 1900 advanced technology and entrepreneurial skills were being employed in almost all sectors of the American economy. Although 60 per cent of the population still lived on farms and in small towns, evidences of mechanization were everywhere to be seen, even in agriculture. "Life in the States," wrote a visiting Englishman in 1901, "is one perpetual whirl of telephones, tele-

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grams, phonographs, electric bells, motors, lifts, and automatic instruments."1 During the next three decades, remarkable advances in science and technology brought forth a myriad of new ways of doing things. By the 1920's productivity in industry and agriculture had increased so much that a comfortable standard of living came within the reach of millions of American families. "Automobiles, single-family houses, roads, household durables, mass markets in higher-grade goods—these," says W. W. Rostow, "tell a good deal of the story of the transformation of American society in the 1920's, a transformation which altered the whole style of a continent's life, down to its courting habits."2 Although the Depression of the early thirties sharply restricted effective demand for the new consumer goods and services, they came to be regarded as almost indispensable ingredients of the good life, worth nearly any sacrifice to acquire and enjoy. In the meantime other attributes of modernity appeared in American life. The social tensions to which rapid industrialization and mass immigration had given rise during the later decades of the nineteenth century gradually subsided after 1900. A steadily rising standard of living facilitated the acculturation of the foreignborn and permitted more and more native Americans to attain, or at least aspire to, middle-class status. Especially significant was the broadening of educational opportunities early in the new century. As Eric Goldman has described it, "Public education, that traditional avenue of opportunity, was going through a phenomenal expansion that made any previous stage of development seem slow. By 1910 the coveted high-school diploma was accessible to all except the poorest or those living in the least-settled areas. West of the Appalachians, the land-grant colleges were making even a college degree nothing spectacular for the child of a moderately successful farmer."3 By 1900 the patriarchal extended family, never so common in the United States as in Europe, was rapidly disappearing. Wives had come to share family authority almost equally with their husbands, and even children had become participants in the process of family decision-making. Interests and loyalties formerly focused on the family unit were spreading to such secondary

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Cultures in Conflict

groups as clubs and lodges, civic and charitable organizations, cooperatives, and professional associations. Although the United States had long since become known as a nation of joiners, after the turn of the century the number and size of voluntary associations strikingly increased. One example was the growth of labor unions. "By 1911," says Richard Hofstadter, "the membership of all American trade unions was five times what it had been in 1897; that of the A.F. of L. was almost seven times as large. Total union membership had grown from 447,000 to 2,382,000."4 A similar burgeoning occurred among employer associations, uplift and reform societies, and countless other interest groups. By the 1920's, American society had become unmistakably pluralistic.

T H E VALUE SYSTEM

These developments indicated that Americans in general, and middle-class Americans in particular, had already embraced the value premises of the modern American value system and were behaving in accordance with its conceptions of desirable ends, means, and styles of action. Value Premises. The basic value premise of modern American culture, already firmly held by the turn of the century, was the belief that nature was intelligible and manageable. It seems to have derived in part from the days when there was a frontier to be pushed back and a wilderness to be tamed. In the experiences of those early times, says Henry Bamford Parkes, "the American came to believe that nothing was beyond his power to accomplish, provided that he could muster the necessary moral and material resources, and that any obstacle could be mastered by means of the appropriate methods and technology."5 By contrast with the traditional Latin American fatalism and helplessness in the face of natural forces, this deep-rooted North American belief held that man could understand the physical world and change or control it to suit his own purposes. Equally characteristic of the belief-pattern of early twentiethcentury America was the value premise that "progress" was

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possible. Having mastery over nature, man was in a position to improve his natural environment, to change it for the better. According to this still widely prevalent American view, man himself was perfectible. Latent qualities of mind, personality, and physique could be brought to full development by deliberate cultivation. Similarly, everyone was believed capable of improving his position in life. The existence of different social and economic statuses did not mean that anyone was ordained by fate or nature to remain in the status into which he was born. He could rise if he chose to. Closely related was the third value premise, the belief that in the last analysis the individual was master of his own destiny. Although challenged today by the view that society or the environment or even one's sex experiences in infancy largely determine one's behavior, the individualism premise has long been one of the central dogmas of American life.® It was practically undisputed in the early twentieth century when the American cultural invasion of Puerto Rico got under way. One generation after another had been brought up to believe that the individual was free to choose his courses of action and responsible for what came of the choices he made. The final American value premise relevant to our purposes was a belief in equality. Although not presumed to be equal in natural endowments, all men (and women) were held to be equal in some ultimate respect, described variously as equal in the sight of God, in intrinsic worth, or in essential humanity. Like the foregoing beliefs, this article of faith had deep roots in the American past and was generally accepted in the early decades of this century. It has since continued to serve as one of the underpinnings of the contemporary American value system. Primacy of the Welfare Values. Among desirable ends and means of action, it is the welfare values (rather than the deference values) that have long been dominant in American culture. Among these, wealth has been singularly important. Most immigrants have come to the "land of opportunity" in search of a level of economic security and independence that they had little hope of achieving in the closed hierarchical societies of their homelands.7 For all subsequent generations, the acquisition of money and other material

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Cultures in Conflict

possessions has continued to be a supremely desirable end and means of action, desirable as an end in itself and as a means to well-being: to safety, health, comfort, adornment, ease, entertainment, and the other benefits of a high standard of living. Although it has been suggested that the American people are now placing a lower value on the acquisition of material possessions than they used to,8 mass consumption still continues. In any event, no such partial disvaluation of wealth and well-being had set in during the period of the American impact on Puerto Rican culture with which we are now concerned. Ever greater improvement in the material conditions of life remained the primary objective of most Americans. Means to that end have ordinarily involved the other two categories of welfare values, skill and enlightenment. Although concerned with nonmaterial aspects of life, their highly valued status has been due in part to their usefulness in the achievement of wealth and well-being. In American culture, learning has tended to be valued less for its own sake than for its applicability. Knowhow has been, on the whole, more highly thought of than knowledge. Moreover, skilled performance in the arts, in sports, and in many other fields is often admired as much for its earning power as for its virtuosity. The great popular demand for schooling and the enormous public and private investment in education are to be explained partly in terms of the fact that the academic diploma has long been cherished as a passport to material success. Hence also the constant proliferation, even on the university level, of "practical," vocational, and technological studies. Thus materialism has helped set the tone of even intellectual and cultural life. Deference Values. But man does not live by wealth alone, even in modern societies. By the early twentieth century a firm commitment to liberal and humane ideals had long tempered the crassness of American materialism. It was mainly through deference values that those ideals were expressed; but it must be noted that, by contrast with the welfare values, certain deference ideals were sometimes ambiguous as guides to action. In practice, moreover, they were frequently, sometimes flagrantly, violated. As a consequence their introduction to Puerto Rico, where traditional

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Hispanic deference values were dominant and unequivocal, was in some instances an unsettling experience. Equality, for example, was a respect value that lent itself to conflicting interpretations and contravening practices. The meaning and implications of the concept had never been agreed upon in American culture, despite its general acceptance as an ideal. In the early decades of this century (as well as later) it was never clear whether equality of opportunity or equality of treatment was the end in view. Equality of opportunity seemed to imply recognition of dissimilar capacities and acceptance of unequal statuses and rewards, whereas equality of treatment seemed to imply the minimization of individual differences and a leveling of statuses and rewards.9 Moreover, there were marked discrepancies between ideals and practices in this area. "Equality before the law" and "one man, one vote" were familiar expressions of the equality-oftreatment principle in American politics; but just as familiar were denials of equal treatment to Negroes, Jews, Catholics, and other ethnic and religious minorities in employment, housing, education, and other aspects of American life—including politics. In the same vein, many Americans displayed a supercilious or at best a paternalistic attitude toward Puerto Ricans. They regarded the islanders as inferior because they were generally poorer and less well educated than Americans and, above all, culturally different from them. Certain ambivalences likewise attached to values in the power category. In general, Americans disvalued power, regarding it as something evil. As Hofstadter puts it, "Authority that can be clearly located in persons, or in small bodies of persons, is characteristically suspect in America"10—a striking contrast to the traditional Hispanic predilection for personal authority. And yet Americans always admired their presidents who exercised strong leadership, especially those who guided the country through times of crisis.11 Disliking "politics," the American people were generally suspicious of politicians, but they nevertheless believed that the people should rule through elected officials. Although they had long shunned "foreign entanglements" and opposed European colonialism, toward the end of the nineteenth century many

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Cultures in Conflict

Americans were extolling the might of the United States and advocating that it fulfill its "manifest destiny" through territorial expansion overseas. Underlying these and other surface contradictions, however, there was a consistent value pattern. What the American value system had long held to be most desirable in politics was widely shared and clearly limited power. For at least a century the American ideal had been constitutional democracy. Popular control should be exercised through institutions which, checking and balancing one another, would prevent the abuse of power. Public policy-making should be a process of discussion and compromise in which, at one stage or another, all interested groups and individuals would have a chance to participate. Such participation, if it was to be meaningful, presupposed an atmosphere of freedom: one in which government not only did not interfere with but actually protected individual and collective rights of expression, assembly, organization, and the like. In these and all other activities, the government and private groups were expected to operate under the rule of law. Such were the value tenets relating to power that the Americans carried with them to Puerto Rico at the turn of the century. Although not always willing to apply them fully, either at home or in the Puerto Rican situation, they and their successors expressed no doubts about the ultimate validity of these principles and were in fact never reluctant to extol them. Ambiguities associated with values in the affection and rectitüde categories from time to time beclouded the implementation of those values in American life. Although it had long been widely felt that popularity was a desirable end of action and a valuable means to other ends, and that love, affection, and consideration for others should characterize not only family life but interpersonal relations in general, the American culture contained an equally deep-rooted contrary emphasis. It urged the desirability of selfregard: attention to one's own self-interest and a high-minded disregard for the interests and opinions of others. The familiarity of the maxim "God helps those that help themselves" attested to the prevalence of this value orientation.

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At the time of the American occupation of Puerto Rico and for more than thirty years thereafter, a widely held belief in the desirability of such ends as self-regard and ego-satisfaction, along with private property as a means and "rugged individualism" as a style of action, contributed to popular acceptance of laissez-faire as the cornerstone of public policy in economic matters. That paradoxical nineteenth-century doctrine forbade the government to intervene in economic life for the purpose of protecting workers and consumers against exploitation or of raising the living standards of the poor. On the other hand, the doctrine approved of almost any governmental action designed to increase the profits of private business or to make private property more secure. Application of the doctrine to Puerto Rico between 1898 and the 1930's meant that the federal government imposed almost no conditions on the investment of private capital in the island but undertook to create a climate favorable to such investment; for example, Puerto Rico was incorporated within the economic and military-security sys* tems of the United States. Contradictions arising out of the selfregarding and other-regarding emphases of the American value system were thus imported into the island along with the other aspects of American culture. As for the rectitude values that cluster around "honesty," the American position was much more consistent. On the normative level, the old maxim "honesty is the best policy" stated the prevailing view. Truthfulness, trustworthiness, and other manifestations of personal integrity were unquestionably desirable means and even ends of action. In the early twentieth century no less than in later times, the American code of desirable conduct applied such norms to groups as well as to individuals, and to public affairs as well as to private life. "Public office is a public trust" expresses a persisting ideal in American culture. Neither at the turn of the century nor at any time before or since has the American moral code failed to condemn such practices as bribery, embezzlement, and extortion, no matter how widely or openly they may have manifested themselves. "Honest graft" has remained a contradiction in terms. Rigged elections, nepotism, draft dodging, and influence peddling are other forms of political dishonesty which the

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Cultures in Conflict

American value system has consistently decried. Whatever the practice of particular Americans may have been, the unambiguity of the "honesty" norms of the United States political system could not have given rise to doubts in the minds of Puerto Ricans as to what American values in this area really were. Styles of Action. Traditional Puerto Rican and modern American conceptions of desirable styles of action had little in common. Whereas preferred Puerto Rican styles in the early twentieth century reflected the ascriptive or "deference" orientation of traditional Hispanic culture, the preferred American styles were consistent with the achievement or "welfare" orientation of the predominantly modern culture of the United States. The Americans with whom Puerto Ricans came increasingly in contact did not insist on meaningful personal relationships as a prerequisite to satisfactory business or other dealings. Nor did they regard a masculine or forceful approach as peculiarly meritorious. A style of action which Americans had long found desirable was activism, behavior that gave the impression of vigor, dynamism, movement. Work was valued for its own sake because it meant activity, keeping busy, getting something done. Also characteristically American was (and remains) the related style or quality of optimism. It was deemed desirable to look on the bright side of things and to pursue all goals in a spirit of cheerful self-confidence that made light of difficulties and assumed the ultimate accomplishment of the ends sought. "The optimistic quality that pervades the American mood," says Cora Du Bois, "is clearly conveyed by the "bigger ergo better' mentality; the 'never say die'; the 'up and at 'em.' " 12 It is probable that many Puerto Ricans, like other Latin Americans, regarded North American optimism as a naive and superficial approach to life, one that ignored the reality of pain, evil, sorrow, and death. Some of them may well have taken American self-confidence to be insensitivity and even arrogance. Another style consistently preferred by Americans was the practical, efficient, utilitarian approach. This empirical, pragmatic emphasis was markedly different from the traditional Hispanic outlook, which attached far greater importance to speculation

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about ultimates and to ethical and esthetic considerations. It has indeed remained one of the main sources of misunderstanding between the two cultures. "Our efficiency and purposefulness," says Frank Tannenbaum, "our 'go-getterness,' and our enthusiasm for material success prove most irritating and incomprehensible to the Latin American."13 One final contrast: As against the traditional Hispanic preference for modes of action consistent with the actor's sense of individuality or uniqueness, a desirable American style of action was one in which the individual acted through an organized group. 'Teamwork," "cooperation," "organization" were highly valued terms in the lexicon of early twentieth-century America. Already famous for being joiners, Americans usually looked with favor on group action to attain individual and collective ends.

THE AMERICAN IMPACT ON PUERTO RICO (1898-1930) The first statement of American intentions with respect to Puerto Rico appeared on July 28, 1898, three days after the United States invasion troops had landed at Guanica. It took the form of a proclamation issued by Major General Nelson A. Miles, commanding general of the United States Army, and addressed to the inhabitants of the island. It assured them that the military forces had come to Puerto Rico "bearing the banner of freedom. They bring you the fostering arm of a nation of free people, whose greatest power is in justice and humanity to all living within its fold . . . We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for centuries has been oppressed, but, on the contrary, to bring you protection, not only to yourselves but to your property, to promote your prosperity, and to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our Government."14 Understandably, many members of the Puerto Rican political elite interpreted this message to be a pledge that the United States would give generous treatment to the island. In particular, they

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read into it a promise of full self-government on the American model, under a political system different from the one they had so recently received from Spain but a system no less autonomous in authority. They therefore welcomed the American troops and applauded the transfer of sovereignty. When it later became apparent that the policy-makers in Washington had no intention of granting them local autonomy, the Puerto Ricans who had entertained such expectations felt defrauded. Most of the Americans involved in the adoption of federal legislation concerning Puerto Rico at the turn of the century were not conscious of any inconsistency between the policies they agreed upon and the ideals expressed in General Miles's proclamation. If they had been challenged on the point, they doubtless would have replied that their decisions were fully in accord with the spirit of the General's message; for in their view they were behaving as generously toward Puerto Rico as conditions within the island itself would then allow. To have done more at that stage, they were convinced, would have been to render Puerto Rico a disservice. At issue here were two quite different assessments of the Puerto Rican situation. These conflicting appraisals derived from the dissimilar cultural backgrounds of the two sets of actors in the situation, and in particular from the different value lenses through which they viewed the island. The Puerto Rican elite, intelligent and public-spirited though many of them were, judged their society and its problems mainly in terms of traditional Hispanic values. This orientation illuminated certain admirable features of Puerto Rican life, but it also hid from consciousness other aspects which, from a modern American value standpoint, could only be regarded as deplorable. It was these latter aspects which caught the attention of the American military and political leaders, who, parochial in their own way and often unjustifiably smug, were nevertheless reacting as products of their predominantly modern culture. Since by virtue of their conquest and their political and economic power they were in a position to determine events, the Americans proceeded to conduct Puerto Rican affairs in accordance with their own value preconceptions.

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(1898-1900)

On October 18, 1898, the Spanish colors were hauled down and the Stars and Stripes raised to replace them above the battlements of El Morro. The ceremony marked not only the change of sovereignty but also the beginning of a brief but epoch-making interlude in Puerto Rican history, the period of military government. During the next eighteen months United States military authorities initiated one reform after another, all of them designed to Americanize the social and political system of the island. The changes in structure and policy which they introduced long outlasted their brief tenure of office. Congress incorporated many of them into the first Organic Act for Puerto Rico, 16 adopted in 1900; subsequent civil authorities built upon others in their administration of the island. A partial listing of the innovations is enough to indicate their far-reaching scope. The cabinet, which had been the keystone of a parliamentary form of government under the Autonomic Charter of 1897, was replaced by an executive branch in the American separation-of-powers tradition. The judiciary, which had been an arm of the Spanish central administration, was reorganized and given independent status. The old practice of holding the accused incomunicado for an indefinite period of time was outlawed, and the writ of habeas corpus and other Anglo-American procedural safeguards were introduced. Finding that a main source of insulargovernment revenues under Spanish rule had been customs duties on imported foodstuffs (including rice, beans, and codfish, the staple diet of the poor) and that the municipal governments subjected these same articles to consume or sales taxes, the militarygovernment authorities abolished both levies. A beginning was made toward the establishment of a tax system based on ability to pay. 18 Support for the Catholic clergy from public funds was terminated, and other measures were taken to separate church and state. The public-school system was completely reorganized along American lines, and regulations concerning public sanitation were put into effect.17 Surprisingly enough, the military government introduced all

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these changes into Puerto Rican life without any instructions from Washington. No directives whatever were forthcoming from the President or the Secretary of War. 18 Why, then, did the military authorities dare take such sweeping action? How can such unmilitary behavior on their part be explained? I submit that they proceeded so freely on their own initiative because they were confident that they were taking the actions that their superiors would have taken, or would have wanted them to take, in the circumstances. They seem to have assumed that the values held by higher authority at home, and by the American people in general, were the same as theirs, and that anyone sharing those values would have made the same judgments concerning what was wrong in the Puerto Rican situation and what needed to be done about it. American Reactions to the Traditional Culture. The validity of this hypothesis may be tested by examining the many expressions of opinion that appear in a 340-page document submitted to the War Department on October 13, 1899 by Brigadier General George W. Davis of the United States Volunteers, then Military Governor of Puerto Rico.19 The first 80 pages contain his own report on conditions in the island and on the activities of the military government during the first year of the occupation. The remainder consists of the reports which he had solicited from other members of the administration and from the commanders of fourteen military posts located throughout the island. Although a professional soldier, General Davis was not a graduate of West Point. His military career had begun in 1861 when, at the age of 23, he had enlisted as a private in the Union Army. Mustered out in 1866, he had joined the regular army the following year and had slowly ascended the ladder of promotion.20 Most of his subordinates in the military government of Puerto Rico were West Pointers or career officers like himself. Others were civilians, and still others were civilians in uniform who had recently joined their state's National Guard in order to have a part in the war. Since National Guard officers were appointed by the President on the recommendation of the governors of the states, many commissions had been awarded on the basis of political patronage.21 It would seem, therefore, that the civil and military

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officers of the military government, whose values stand so clearly revealed in their reports, must have constituted a fairly representative cross section of the American middle class at the turn of the century. Despite differences in tone and content, the several reports are strikingly similar in their appraisals of Puerto Rican life and in their remedies for its shortcomings (as the authors perceived them). As an understanding of the American value system would lead one to expect, the aspects of Puerto Rican society most frequently remarked upon were the poverty and illiteracy of the people. "The salient characteristics of the general population of Puerto Rico," wrote Captain Schuyler in a typical comment, "are ignorance, poverty, and helplessness." Reporting from Arecibo, Captain Macomb declared that "this island . . . has a large population (of which a large percentage is illegitimate) continually bordering on famine, miserably fed and miserably educated." "Contrary to American ideas," reported Lieutenant Chiles from Aguadilla, "instead of doing everything possible to encourage universal education, everything possible was done by those in power to discourage it. The result is that . . . only about 15 per cent are able to read and write."22 Whereas the American officials reproached the former Spanish authorities for the Puerto Ricans' lack of roads, sanitation, and schooling, they tended to blame the people themselves for their poverty. Mistaking traditional Hispanic fatalism for indolence, the Americans attributed the wretched living conditions of most Puerto Ricans to their unwillingness to bestir themselves. "They are without ambition," said General Davis, "and see no incentive to labor beyond the least that will provide the barest sustenance. All over the island they can be seen to-day [shortly after the devastating San Ciriaco hurricane of August 8, 1899], sitting beside their ruined huts, taking no thought of to-morrow." The chief signal officer, Major Glassford, had the same impression: "The campesino, like the Indian, is not given to labor; in his resistance to civilization he confines his efforts to the strictest necessities." Captain Swift, post commander in Humacao, was more specific: "I have had some chance to observe the laboring class, having employed large num-

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bers on the roads. My judgment is that not one per cent can read and write. They are far inferior to the cotton-field hands of the United States. They are weaker physically, less ambitious, more shiftless, and idle."23 Critical of "the broad gulf between the rich and the poor and between the educated and the uneducated," the newcomers from the mainland tended to share Major Mansfield's belief that "the absence of a middle class is the great drawback to reform and change." They had scarcely more respect for the educated elite than for the benighted mass. "The landlords have but little sympathy for their peons, are not inclined to aid them in their need, and give but little in charity," wrote Captain Watts. "They talk fluently of the suffering of the poor, but will make no sacrifice to feed the hungry or relieve the sick."24 Even more roundly criticized was another subclass of the insular elite, the politicians. According to General Davis, "The people of this island . . . have seen [it] governed and exploited in the interest and for the benefit of a few. The Spanish governing element has disappeared, but their example remains. There is no lack of natives of learning and ability ready to take the place of their former masters, step into their vacant shoes, and take up the government laid down. And, having power, would they not use it as their predecessors did? . . . There are here a few really publicspirited men who appear to have ideas of government other than self-seeking, but the number is very small."25 Other officers alluded to a long and continuing history of corruption in municipal administration26 and in the judiciary.27 As for contemporary politics, one of the Americans noted a "thraldom" of the rank and file to party leaders, an attachment based on personalities rather than on issues since the two parties' programs seemed to be almost identical.28 Like other observers, General Davis disparaged the "unseemly partisan strife" which often caused members of one party to regard members of the other "as criminals or blackguards or as in some way disreputable." "The island," he wrote, "is wracked and torn by political animosities."29 The greatest need, as most of the Americans saw it, was to rid the island of illiteracy, for until that problem was overcome effec-

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tive self-government would be impossible. Lieutenant Chiles expressed the prevailing view: The Puerto Rican people "are not capable of self-government, and in my opinion it is a question of many years before they will be. Only by the most liberal system of education applied to the coming generation, with a thorough introduction of American ideas, can we hope for any beneficial results." "What this island needs," wrote Captain Macomb, "is education and then more education." "Such people," wrote Major Mansfield, "require a strong or at least a firm government, and before they are able to honestly govern themselves in every way they must be educated. I have the greatest sympathy in the world for these people, and if after a very intimate acquaintance with them for over a year I could say that they were in all particulars fit to govern themselves, I would gladly do so; but I can not at present."80 The significance of all the foregoing comments and criticisms is that the Americans involved in the military government of Puerto Rico found themselves (doubtless most of them for the first time in their lives) in a society that seemed to abound in precisely those things which their own culture had taught them to disvalue most highly; poverty, illiteracy, and disease; squalor, discomfort, and inconvenience; stark inequality in the social order; dishonesty in government; and both massive nonparticipation and passionate antagonism in politics. Unable to see redeeming features in the traditional society, they did not hesitate to remodel it wherever they could. Americanizing the school system was an obvious first step. But they recognized that thoroughgoing reforms in education and other fields would take years of dedicated effort, and they were therefore unanimous in favoring the continuance of American tutelage and control for many years to come. Recommendations on Civil Government. Required by the Secretary of War to give his views on the form of civil government most suitable for the island, General Davis made the following preliminary statement: "Were the mass of the inhabitants educated and possessed of some conception of the duties of citizenship and experience in civil government, their immediate endowment with rights and privileges equal to those enjoyed by our own citizens

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would be gladly recommended. But in view of the profound illiteracy of 85 per cent of the people, of their total unfitness to exercise the electoral franchise, of the corruption and maladministration that now characterize the affairs of many municipalities, and of the misuse that would almost certainly be made of political power by those who would inevitably secure it, I can not find warrant or justification for a recommendation to now vest Puerto Rico with the faculties and power of self-government—an investiture that I think should be withheld until there shall have been a plain demonstration of their competence to exercise it."31 The Military Governor's proposed "scheme for a temporary government" was thoroughly consistent with these sentiments. It recommended that Puerto Rico be styled a "dependency," not a territory. The island would be under the executive control of the President of the United States, who would appoint a governor, the heads of seven executive departments, the justices of the insular supreme court, and the judges of a United States district court for Puerto Rico. Legislative powers would be exercised "later on" by a legislative assembly, to be elected by "popular suffrage" but with the franchise limited to males over 21 years of age who could read and write or were taxpayers. These qualifications would have restricted the suffrage to approximately 5 per cent of the population, according to General Davis' own estimate.32 The governor would be advised by an executive council consisting of the seven department heads, plus four others appointed by him from among the members of the legislature when that body had been established. "For the present the governor and executive council should control legislation. When experience shall have shown that the people comprehend the gravity of the duties and obligations of self-government will be soon enough to establish the lower house." Even then, however, the powers of the legislature (and those of the governor and council, for that matter) would not be absolute: "It would be within the power and authority of the President of the United States to disallow, repeal, alter, or annul any order of the governor in council, and any law or ordinance passed by the assembly."33

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Such were the recommendations of the Brigadier General into whose hands had fallen the responsibility for governing Puerto Rico during the transition to civil control. His views carried weight in Washington, partly because he was highly respected in his own right, partly because he spoke with the authority born of experiences absolutely foreign to most other Americans, and partly because his reactions to those experiences rang true. They reflected values that were widely shared in America at the turn of the century.

T H E ORGANIC A C T OF

1900

The extent of General Davis' influence on policy-makers may be seen in one significant example, President McKinley's remarks on Puerto Rico in the annual message which he sent to Congress on December 5, 1899. "For the present purposes," he said, "I recommend that Congress pass a law for the organization of a temporary government, which shall provide for the appointment by the President, subject to confirmation by the Senate, of a governor and such other officers as the general administration of the island may require, and that for legislative purposes upon subjects of a local nature not partaking of a Federal character a legislative council, composed partly of Porto Ricans and partly of citizens of the United States, shall be nominated and appointed by the President, subject to confirmation by the Senate, their acts to be subject to the approval of the Congress or the President prior to going into effect." He proposed that "the principle of local selfgovernment be applied at once" at the municipal level so that the people might thereby gain experience in managing their own affairs. "I have not thought it wise," he continued, "to commit the entire government of the island to officers selected by the people, because I doubt whether in habits, training, and experience they are such as to fit them to exercise at once so large a degree of self-government; but it is my judgment and expectation that they will soon arrive at an attainment of experience and wisdom and

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self-control that will justify conferring upon them a much larger participation in the choice of their insular officers."34 In following so closely the recommendations of the Military Governor, President McKinley implicitly rejected the views of his own Special Commissioner, Henry K. Carroll, whom he had sent to Puerto Rico in October 1898 for the specific purpose of studying local conditions and making recommendations concerning the future government of the island. Having spent only four months in Puerto Rico but having taken voluminous testimony in all parts of the island, Commissioner Carroll had received a more favorable impression of the Puerto Rican people and of insular conditions than that held by General Davis and his subordinates. Implicit throughout the report which he submitted to the President on October 8, 1899 was a stronger commitment to democratic values than theirs; and his appraisal of the capacity of the Puerto Ricans for self-government was correspondingly more optimistic. "The question remains," he wrote, "whether, in view of the high rate of illiteracy which exists among them, and of their lack of training in the responsibilities of citizenship, it would be safe to intrust them with the power of self-government. The commissioner has no hesitation in answering this question in the affirmative . . . The Porto Ricans will make mistakes, but they will not foment revolutions or insurrections. They will learn the art of governing in the only possible way—by having its responsibilities laid upon them."36 Provisions of the Organic Act. The law that Congress adopted in April 190036 was a compromise between the two sets of recommendations to the President. It was based on a bill reported to the Senate by its Committee on Pacific Islands and Puerto Rico, the members of which had studied the Davis and Carroll reports and received oral testimony from both men as well as from a number of other witnesses. In opening debate on the bill, the chairman (Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio) explained to the Senate that the committee had "undertaken . . . not to give those people a complete local self-government, but a government republican in form, and to confer upon them the right to as much participation in that government as we thought, in view of the testimony submitted to us, it was safe to give them."37

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As presented by the committee and adopted by Congress, the bill followed the Davis and McKinley recommendations in providing that the President should appoint the governor, the members of an Executive Council, and the justices of the insular Supreme Court. But it also reflected the more liberal views of Commissioner Carroll in creating a popularly elected legislative body, the House of Delegates, and in authorizing the people to elect a resident commissioner to represent them in Washington. "We found," explained Senator Foraker, "that they have had some experience in the matter of voting, and we thought that we could safely trust to them the exercise of the suffrage to the extent that I have indicated. We felt that it would be a good means of educating them in the matter of government, that it would interest them in the government."38 The Organic Act of 1900, often called the Foraker Act, vested legislative powers equally in the House of Delegates and the Executive Council, which together formed the Legislative Assembly. The council consisted of six department heads and of "five other persons of good repute"; as a further concession to liberal opinion, at least five of its members were required to be Puerto Ricans. The governor was empowered to veto acts of the Legislative Assembly, but it could override a veto by a two-thirds vote in each house. Congress reserved to itself, however, the power to annul any law enacted by the assembly. As for the judiciary, the act continued in existence the structure of courts established by the military government, including its provisional federal court which was converted into the District Court of the United States for Puerto Rico. In addition to making the above arrangements for "civil government," the act established certain economic and political relationships between Puerto Rico and the United States. It provided for free trade between the island and the mainland, a policy strongly recommended by both Davis and Carroll, who had predicted a great improvement in Puerto Rican economic conditions if insular products could enter the American market free of duty.39 In order to help the new government meet its financial obligations, the act provided that United States customs duties on goods imported

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into the island from foreign countries should be paid into the insular treasury, and that federal excise and other taxes collected on Puerto Rican goods sold in the United States should also be turned over to the insular government. The act specifically exempted Puerto Rico from the application of United States internalrevenue laws, but it declared that all other federal laws not locally inapplicable should have "the same force and effect in Puerto Rico as in the United States." Shipping between insular and mainland ports was made subject to the federal laws that regulated shipping between coasting districts of the United States, and the United States monetary system was extended to the island. Those inhabitants who had not chosen to remain Spanish subjects were declared to be "citizens of Puerto Rico, and as such entitled to the protection of the United States." (All the provisions mentioned in this paragraph except the last one have remained in effect to the present day.) As Arturo Morales Carrion has observed, Congress indulged in "juridical temporizing" when it adopted the Organic Act of 1900. It wanted to promote democratic development in Puerto Rico, but at the same time it felt that the Puerto Rican people were not ready for democracy since they had so little familiarity with American institutions, customs, and values. 40 Hence it gave the Puerto Ricans a taste of self-government but left control over insular affairs in the hands of presidentially appointed officials, who could be counted on to take their cues from Washington rather than from the Puerto Rican electorate. Congress carefully avoided designating Puerto Rico a territory, for in the past territorial status had been a prelude to statehood, a destiny that it deemed inappropriate for the island. For the same reason it made the people "citizens of Puerto Rico" instead of granting them the United States citizenship that it had always given the inhabitants of territories. On the other hand, it provided equally unprecedented assistance to the island when it exempted Puerto Rico from federal taxation and diverted certain federal customs and excise revenues into the insular treasury. Neither of these financial benefits could Congress have constitutionally bestowed if it had declared Puerto Rico a territory. 41

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85

1917

Although Congress had adopted the Foraker Act as a temporary measure, it did not seriously reconsider the matter of organic legislation for Puerto Rico until the end of the first Wilson administration, despite incessant appeals from Puerto Rican leaders that the act be liberalized.42 In 1914 the House Committee on Insular Affairs approved a reform bill, but the House itself did not act on it. By 1916 most members of the Democratic majorities in the two chambers were persuaded that the Puerto Ricans should be given more control over their own affairs; but they could not bring themselves to concede that the islanders were ready for full self-government, or even for territorial status with its implication of eventual statehood. Like the Republican sponsors of the first Organic Act, they looked askance at the poverty, illiteracy, and political inexperience of most of the population, and at the Spanish language and culture of the people as a whole. The continued existence of these factors they regarded as evidence enough that Puerto Rico was still in need of supervision, tutelage, and further Americanization.43 The Organic Act which Congress adopted in 1917,44 often called the Jones Act, granted new powers to the Puerto Rican people, but not the degree of self-rule their leaders had been demanding since 1900. Such increased authority as it did bestow, it counterbalanced in part with new controls. And, like the Foraker Act, it carefully avoided any reference to the nature of Puerto Rico's relationship to the United States. The one important change which it made in that relationship was the granting of United States citizenship to the people of the island. Although it was believed in some quarters (particularly among pro-statehood Puerto Ricans) that this action implied the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the Union as a territory, the United States Supreme Court eventually decided that it did not. In Balzac v. Puerto Rico (1922), 4 5 the Court held that Puerto Rico could be deemed an incorporated territory only when specifically declared to be so by Congress. Hence the Jones Act left the political status of Puerto Rico as indefinite as ever.

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Among the reforms that the Puerto Rican leaders had long insisted upon, only two were unequivocally granted: a bill of rights and a popularly elected Senate. Their hopes for an all-Puerto Rican executive branch were only partially rewarded. The governor remained a presidential appointee, but he was authorized to name five of the seven department heads, with the advice and consent of the insular Senate. The President continued to appoint the attorney general and the commissioner of education, who headed departments which Congress felt should remain firmly under American control.46 The Executive Council was stripped of its legislative functions but assigned certain administrative duties. It consisted of the seven department heads, not including the auditor. The latter was given semi-autonomous status as a presidential appointee with authority analogous to that of the comptroller general of the United States. Even though Congress was now prepared to allow the popular election of both houses of the legislature, it was unwilling to grant the Puerto Rican lawmakers immunity from American control. The Jones Act authorized the governor to send to the President any bill that had been passed over his veto by a two-thirds vote in each house. If the President chose to uphold the veto, the bill could not become law. And two limitations on insular legislative authority were carried over from the Organic Act of 1900: the reservation of power by Congress to annul acts of the Puerto Rican legislature (never exercised, however, either before or after 1917), and the declaration that Puerto Rico was subject to all federal laws of general application except the internal-revenue laws. Also kept in force were the economic provisions of the first Organic Act, as amended prior to 1917.

V A L U E T R A N S F E R S UNDER T H E ORGANIC A C T S

The years 1900-1930 were a period of rapid change in three sectors of Puerto Rican society: the government, the educational system, and the economy. In all three the pattern of change was the substitution of modern American for traditional Puerto Rican

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goals, practices, and institutions. In the governmental and educational spheres, the main agents of innovation were Americans in the insular bureaucracy who had been sent to Puerto Rico for the specific purpose of implementing a federal policy of Americanization. In the economic sector, however, the innovators were mainly private citizens who had gone to the island in search of financial gain for themselves or for the mainland companies which they represented. Although the activities of the two sets of Americans reflected somewhat different aspects of the American value system, both groups tended to assume that Puerto Rican institutions and ways of doing things were defective insofar as they were dissimilar to their American counterparts. Government. Intent upon Americanizing the insular government in accordance with the highest canons of public administration as then understood in the United States, Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt appointed able and conscientious Americans to serve as governor and as heads of the six executive departments.47 But none of them knew any Spanish or had any prior understanding of Puerto Rican culture. Few of the subsequent appointees were any better qualified in those respects, and some of them lacked any qualifications at all, save for a record of services previously rendered to the party in power in Washington at the time of their appointment. For the most part, however, the Americans sent to Puerto Rico during the first two decades of this century were reasonably competent. Although there is little direct evidence to go on, it seems likely that they made a profound impact on the political life of the island simply by doing their jobs the way they thought they should be done. For their conception of the role of the public official was different from the traditional Hispanic conception. So was their view of how the decision-making process ought to work, and of how government ought to be run. Fairly typical products of the early modern culture of the United States, they perceived the Puerto Rican situation in the light of the prevailing values of their own culture and acted accordingly. By contrast with the personalismo tradition of Puerto Rico, the American approach focused more respect on the office than on the

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holder of it. Unlike the royal governor and his agents, the American governor and other presidential appointees had little discretionary power. They acted always in the knowledge that the scope of their activities was defined by law and that they were accountable to the courts if they exceeded their authority. In policy-making they took it for granted that conflicting views would be expressed. For the first extended period in Puerto Rican history the press was free to criticize, and the people's rights of free speech, petition, and assembly were fully protected. The American officials proceeded on the assumption that compromises and accommodations should be sought and majority decisions accepted, even when believed by the minority to be palpably wrong. In administration they demanded of their subordinates as much efficiency as they could muster, holding them to strict standards of honesty in their handling of government funds and property and in their dealings with the general public.48 In all these respects, the American pattern of rule was far different from that to which the Puerto Rican people had long been accustomed. There can be little doubt that the norms implicit in the American pattern came gradually to be those by which the Puerto Ricans themselves judged the behavior of their public servants, for they are widely accepted today in Puerto Rican public life. The pattern was also different with respect to the substantive work of government. Just as the above procedures and approaches reflected the deference values of American culture, notably their emphasis on shared power, freedom, and due process of law, so the activities in which the insular government engaged reflected the prevailing welfare values of the culture. On the initiative and under the tutelage of American officials, the legislative and executive branches concentrated on the construction of roads and other public works, sanitation, the prevention of disease, and the promotion of public education. Such matters had received scant attention during the Spanish colonial regime. For the Americans, however, they were desirable ends of governmental action because of the importance that the modern American value system attached to literacy and physical well-being. A good deal was accomplished. Whereas only 1,660 miles of

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roads had been built during the four centuries of Spanish rule, 5,730 miles were constructed between 1898 and 1918. Vigorous attention to public health and sanitation reduced the death rate from an average of 30 per thousand toward the end of the Spanish era to an average of 24 per thousand during the second decade of American control. The number of children in school had increased from 22,000 ( 7 per cent of the school-age population) in 1898-99 to 161,000 ( 37 per cent) in 1918-19, and the number of teachers had gone up from 525 to 2,984. Insular funds expended on public education had risen from $503,000 in 1901-02, 28 per cent of the government's total expenditures, to $2,468,000 in 191819—an astonishing 42 per cent of governmental outlays in that fiscal year. 49 Education. Nowhere was Americanization more consciously promoted than in the public schools. The first commissioner of education, Martin G. Brumbaugh, committed his department unequivocally to that objective. As he expressed it in his first annua.1 report, "The spirit of American institutions and the ideals of the American people, strange as they do seem to some in Porto Rico, must be the only spirit and the only ideals incorporated in the school system of Porto Rico." 50 Among the more outlandish innovations, from the traditional Puerto Rican standpoint, was the ban on religious instruction in the schools. Strange also was the idea of public education for girls, and stranger still (if not immoral) the teaching of boys and girls together in the same classroom. Rote memorization of catechistic questions and answers, so typical of Hispanic pedagogy, gave way to exercises that called for the solving of problems and the performance of simple experiments. The study of American history, myths, and heroes, and of "the American way of life" supplanted instruction in Spanish history and the doctrines and history of the.Church. The introduction of manual training, home economics, and, in the rural schools, instruction in agriculture, ran designedly counter to the traditional prejudice against manual labor. Organized athletics, previously unheard of in Puerto Rican schools, did more than promote physical fitness, itself an untraditional goal. They had the additional purpose of inculcating such

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untraditional styles of action as teamwork, intergroup competition, and observance of rules of the game. Most remarkable of all, the study of English was made compulsory. The aim of American policy was to develop a bilingual population, as much at home in English as in Spanish. The Puerto Ricans' acquisition of the new language was, however, disappointingly slow. Insular salaries were too low to attract American teachers in sufficient numbers, and too few Puerto Rican teachers learned English well enough to teach it properly. Most pupils had no occasion to use it outside the classroom, and in any case nearly 80 per cent of them did not stay in school beyond the third grade. Undaunted by these obstacles (or unwilling to recognize them), commissioners of education between 1904 and 1915 required English to be used as the language of instruction and Spanish to be taught as a special subject. The lamentable results of this program, under which most pupils left school before learning to read either English or Spanish, embroiled the language issue in insular politics. A change of policy in 1915, which restored Spanish to the primary grades as the medium of instruction, was only the first of many unsuccessful attempts to find a compromise formula that would satisfy the conflicting American and Puerto Rican demands.61 The Economy. During the period of the Foraker Act and for another 15 years or so thereafter, American policy toward the Puerto Rican economy was consistent with the curious kind of laissez-faire philosophy, mentioned above, which was predominant in the United States in that era. Legislative and executive leadership in Washington remained largely indifferent to the poverty of the islanders. American officials in the insular government could less easily ignore the problem, but they did little more to solve it than to make occasional appeals for the establishment of new industries. Since Congress had created conditions favorable to investment in the island (notably through those provisions of the Foraker Act which had included Puerto Rico within the United States tariff and monetary systems and exempted the island from federal taxation), it was content to leave private economic interests free to use their capital as they saw fit. The only congressional

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restriction worthy of the name was the so-called 500-Acre Law,52 which limited corporations and partnerships to the ownership or control of not more than 500 acres of Puerto Rican land. But the act contained no enforcement provisions, and no one paid any attention to it. Sugar production attracted by far the largest share of American capital, some $10,000,000 having been invested in cane fields and sugar mills by 1910. Four American corporations acquired large acreages, introduced scientific methods of cultivation, and replaced the inefficient muscovado mills on numerous individual estates with huge central sugar factories (centrales), which could grind all the cane produced for miles around. These developments forced the wealthier Puerto Rican planters (including some Spaniards) to adopt the same techniques. The modernization process, plus the diversion of ever more land to cane growing, yielded enormous increases in the production of sugar. Exports rose from an average of 57,000 tons a year during the last decade of Spanish rule to 69,000 tons in 1901, 284,000 tons in 1910, 489,000 tons in 1917, and 606,000 tons in 1928.53 A similar expansion occurred in the export of leaf tobacco and cigars, again financed mainly by American capital. Free access to the protected American market also stimulated the development of a minor but profitable export trade in citrus fruits, pineapples, and coconuts. American economic interests had a modernizing impact on numerous aspects of Puerto Rican life. Throughout the sugar business they introduced canons of industrial efficiency. Traditional hacienda management—small-scale, personal, and often paternalistic—gave way to modern corporate control: large-scale, impersonal, and oriented exclusively toward maximizing profits. As Sidney Mintz has pointed out, plantations became factories in the field and the work force a kind of rural proletariat, 'landless, wageearning, store-buying, and economically homogeneous."64 Gone forever were the personal relations between landowner and campesinos that had given psychological as well as economic security to all members of the hacienda community. Hacendados sold or leased their land and moved away, whereas the workers, atomized and isolated from one another, had to face the difficult task of

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discovering new means of social integration, which many of them eventually found in political parties, labor unions, and evangelical religious sects. Even more difficult was the plight of the Puerto Ricans employed in sugar centrals, fruit canning factories, and other processing plants, who had to adjust themselves to the wholly unfamiliar routines of mechanized production, as well as to the disciplines of industrial organization. Effective corporate management necessitated modern banking and credit facilities, a need which Puerto Rican bankers learned to supply by competing with the four American and Canadian banks that established branches in the island. The material requirements of the new enterprises and the consumer demands of their American personnel initiated a rapid growth of imports from the United States. The larger Puerto Rican merchants secured distributorships for American machinery, hardware, foodstuffs, and a wide variety of other products, in the marketing of which they learned to use mainland advertising techniques. Many American brand names became household words in the Puerto Rican community. Taken as a whole, the Puerto Rican economy expanded remarkably during the first three decades of American rule.55 But the expansion affected only a few sectors of the economy, notably sugar, and its benefits were unevenly distributed. Corporate profits were large, and most of those accruing to mainland corporations were withdrawn from the island. Agricultural laborers received low wages and had only seasonal employment. In the mid-twenties, a relatively prosperous period, wage rates averaged only 75 or 80 cents a day on sugar plantations and between 50 and 60 cents a day on coffee and tobacco farms. Urban workers were little better off: their wages were somewhat higher, but so were theii living costs. According to a study undertaken for the Brookings Institution in 1928-29, "a daily wage of 70 cents, with employment four days out of seven, represented approximately the earnings of the larger part of the daily laboring population."58 Although comparable data on wage rates and unemployment during Spanish times are not available, it seems likely that the condition of the working classes had not substantially improved

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during the first 30 years of American control. It may indeed have worsened, for the rapid growth in population (up from 953,000 in 1899 to 1,544,000 in 1930, a 61 per cent increase) does not seem to have been accompanied by a corresponding rise in real income or employment opportunities. Moreover, the inexorable enlargement of the cane fields deprived many a small farmer and agregado of the plots on which they had raised part of their food supply. In any case, whether or not the multitudinous non-elite of Puerto Rican society were in fact worse off than they had been before, they had increasing reasons for thinking they were and for being dissatisfied with their lot. If it had occurred to them to do so, they could have readily contrasted their own standard of living with the far more comfortable standard maintained by the Americans on the island. Never very numerous but conspicuous out of all proportion to their numbers, Americans were to be found teaching in the schools, serving in the insular government, working for mainland corporations, running their own businesses, and practicing the professions. Whatever they worked at and wherever they lived, they insisted upon pursuing an American rather than a Puerto Rican style of life. The growing availability and popularity of American movies provided further opportunity for the common man of Puerto Rican society to note differences between his own living conditions and those prevalent in more modern societies. The increasing display of American consumers' goods in local shop windows and even in company stores doubtless tended also to awaken even the poorest Puerto Ricans to the possibility that they too could (or should) enjoy some of the fruits of a modern way of life. "In the old days," wrote Luis Munoz Marin in 1929, "most Porto Rican peasants owned a few pigs and chickens, maybe a horse or cow, some goats, and in some way had the use of a patch of soil. Today this modest security has been replaced by a vision of opulence. There are more things that they can't get. The margin between what they have and what they can imagine has widened enormously."67

CHAPTER 4 PUERTO RICAN RESPONSES

In 1898 the Puerto Rican people gave a cordial welcome to the Americans who came to the island as invaders and occupiers. They showed few signs of regret when sovereignty over their homeland passed from Spain to the United States, and they seemed not unduly concerned at the loss of the political autonomy that they had so recently won from Spain. Their complacency in the face of all these profound changes reflected their belief that they would fare no worse under the Americans and would doubtless be better off, politically and economically, then they had been under the Spaniards.1 The political elite were sustained in this belief by their acquaintance with American ideals and accomplishments. They knew of the material progress of the United States, of its long history as a self-governing republic, and of its commitment to liberty and equality. Expecting the benefits of the American liberal tradition to be extended to Puerto Rico, they looked forward to continuing their control over insular affairs through the civil government to be established by Congress. The Puerto Rican leader best prepared to take advantage of the change of regime was Dr. Jose C. Barbosa. Having been educated in the United States, he spoke English well and knew how to get along with the Americans. Moreover, he had developed a strong admiration for American culture and its institutions. In July 1899 he persuaded his party to drop the outmoded Orthodox Autono-

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mist label and call itself the Republican Party, taking the name of the party then in power in Washington. Three months later the Mufioz Rivera Liberals followed suit by adopting another familiar name in American politics, that of the Federal Party. The Puerto Rican Republicans and the Federalists also adopted new platforms, which were almost identical in their pro-American sentiments. Each expressed wholehearted approval of the annexation of the island by the United States and pledged loyalty to American ideals and institutions. Each also called for the inclusion of Puerto Rico within the tariff and monetary systems of the United States, for the immediate granting of territorial status to the island, and for its eventual admission into the Union as a state.2 By this time, however, the Barbosa group had established a close working relationship with the military-government authorities, whereas Luis Mufioz Rivera and his followers had withdrawn to the sidelines. Throughout the last half of 1899 the two parties bitterly contested a series of municipal elections that the military government had arranged, on the basis of a suffrage limited to adult males who were literate or paid taxes. According to one observer, the fury of the San Ciriaco hurricane was no worse than the ferocity with which the two parties attacked each other for the handful of votes at stake. Nor could advance warnings from Washington that Congress was preparing to adopt a restrictive Organic Act bring the two factions together. Mufioz Rivera's suggestion that the parties present a united front before Congress in defense of the island's political and economic interests met with an icy rebuff from the insular Republicans.® The Foraker Act was a disappointment to both parties because of its limited grant of self-government and its failure to clarify Puerto Rico's political status vis-ä-vis the United States. The Republicans, however, decided to make the best of it. They cooperated fully with the governor and other presidential appointees who took office in May 1900 and supported their policies of Americanization. The Federal leaders, on the other hand, soon took their party into opposition. By the following September the two Federalists initially appointed to the Executive Council had resigned their posts, and the Federal Party itself, in protest against

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an alleged gerrymandering of legislative districts, had refused to participate in the November 1900 elections. Abstaining also from the 1902 elections, Mufioz Rivera and other Federal leaders nevertheless kept up a constant barrage of criticism against the American officials and their Republican allies. The Republicans, strongly entrenched in the new government, used their favored position to secure the appointment of Republicans to many posts in the insular bureaucracy. As a result of the 1904 elections, however, control over the House of Delegates passed from the Republicans to the erstwhile Federalists, who had recently changed their party's name to Union de Puerto Rico. Then began a period of Unionist Party dominance that was to last for 25 years.4

TRADITIONAL VALUES IN POLITICS

Although American control had introduced many changes in the political institutions and practices of the island, the character of Puerto Rican politics remained basically traditional. Power was still valued most highly when embodied in the person of a strong and dynamic leader, as witness the continued pre-eminence of Mufioz Rivera and Barbosa, both men of forceful, even magnetic, personality. Further evidence of the persistence of this traditional value orientation was the bitterness of feeling that characterized relations between one leader's followers and the other's.6 For the most part, as mentioned earlier, their mutual hostility could be better accounted for in terms of conflicting personal allegiances than in terms of ideological differences. Those active in politics, whether as a pastime or a profession, continued to be drawn from a small and privileged sector of the population. Mainly educated men, they belonged to the economic and social elite of their local communities. Dr. Barbosa was an exception to this rule in that he was a Negro of humble origins, son of a bricklayer in the town of Bayamon. But as a youth he had attracted the notice of his father's sometime employer, a rich landowner, who had sent him to a preparatory school in up-state

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New York and thence to the University of Michigan. Graduated in 1880 with the degree of Doctor of Medicine, Barbosa had returned to the island and soon made a name for himself not only as a physician but also as one of the leading intellectuals and political liberals of the capital. During his adult life, therefore, he was a member of the small but influential professional middle class of Puerto Rican society.6 Luis Mufioz Rivera was a more typical member of the political elite. Both of his grandfathers had been Spanish army officers who had served in Puerto Rico and remained there as landowners after retirement. His father, also a servant of the Crown, was the leading citizen of Barranquitas, an isolated town in the mountainous center of the island. Sent there in 1855 to serve as alcalde (mayor), he had become one of the well-to-do merchants and traders of the region. Mufioz Rivera, born in 1859, received no formal education beyond that which was then available in Barranquitas, but he developed skills frequently encountered in traditional Hispanic leaders: he became an accomplished poet, orator, and journalist. In manner and appearance he fit the machismo tradition, for he was a man of firm will and commanding presence. In public life his nickname was el Leon (the Lion).7 Although less conservative than his father,8 Mufioz Rivera shared many of the opinions of the hacendado class on social and economic questions. At the turn of the century his views on universal suffrage were indistinguishable from those of General Davis. "It would be extremely dangerous," he told Commissioner Carroll, "to hand over our future to the masses, who are entirely without civic education and who might be wrongly directed by the audacity of agitators who would make them their tools."9 By 1916 he had changed his mind on this issue, as shown by his arguments against the suffrage restrictions originally contained in the Jones Bill, which later (minus those restrictions) became the Organic Act of 1917.10 But the material needs of the masses never seriously engaged his interest or concern. In this respect his attitude was no different from that of most members of the political elite. Economically secure themselves, or intent upon becoming so by obtaining public office, the insular

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politicos were largely indifferent to the distress of their humbler fellow citizens. Such problems as miserably low wages, seasonal unemployment, endemic diseases, mass illiteracy, inadequate housing, and the like, received little more attention than the lip service occasionally paid to them in party platforms. Although protective of their own interests and sometimes concerned about the state of the economy as a whole, the political leaders were in general less interested in welfare than in deference values. Among the most highly regarded deference values were those associated with respect. All sectors of the elite felt it desirable that the Puerto Rican people achieve a position of dignity in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Ideologically, therefore, they tended to concentrate their attention upon the single issue of Puerto Rico's political status vis-ä-vis the United States. The Status Issue. Under Barbosa's inflexibly pro-American leadership, similar in mood to that of the pro-Spanish Unconditionals after 1870, the Republicans held fast to their original commitment to statehood as the goal of Puerto Rico's political evolution. As a first step toward it they urged that Congress grant United States citizenship to all Puerto Ricans and declare the island to be a territory. They also asked for an elected Senate to replace the Executive Council and for the appointment of all department heads by the governor with the consent of the upper house. Once these limited objectives were achieved, they hoped to move steadily forward to the dignity of statehood. Their ultimate aim, in other words, was to achieve for Puerto Rico the respect that would automatically accrue to it from political equality within the Union. The Mufioz Rivera group advocated similar short-run reforms but became increasingly disenchanted with statehood as the final goal. In 1904, as Unionists, they renewed the endorsement of statehood that they had first put forward as Federalists in 1899. But in 1904 they also endorsed autonomy and independence as possible forms of full self-government.11 In declaring their approval of Puerto Rico's becoming "an independent nation under the protection of the United States" they broke new ground. Never before in the history of the island had a major political group

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declared independence to be an acceptable solution to the status problem. After 1904 the independence alternative rapidly gained supporters within the Unionist Party, among whom the brilliant orator Jose de Diego was the most influential. Speaker of the House of Delegates from 1907 until 1915, De Diego used his position in the legislature and his high rank in the party to promote pro-independence and anti-American views. The steady growth of such sentiments among Unionists was reflected in the party's decision in 1913 to eliminate the demand for statehood and for United States citizenship from its platform. But Munoz Rivera never allowed the independentistas to capture the Unionist Party during his lifetime. Resident commissioner in Washington from March 1911 until his death in November 1916, he early came to the conclusion that Congress was not at all likely to grant either independence or statehood to Puerto Rico within the foreseeable future. Too much the practical politician to be satisfied with struggling for unattainable goals, he turned his attention to reforms that would stand some chance of receiving congressional approval and at the same time satisfy Puerto Rican longings for political dignity.12 The status formula that he believed would meet these objectives he called "autonomy" or "home rule," that is, internal self-government within the framework of American sovereignty. This solution was reminiscent of the relationship he had sought with Spain some fifteen years before when he had negotiated his pact with the monarchist Sagasta; it also prefigured the commonwealth formula that his son, Luis Mufioz Marin, was to bring to fruition some forty years later. In 1911 Mufioz Rivera explained the three status alternatives in the following terms to an American audience at Lake Mohonk, New York: Statehood was the preferred solution for Puerto Rico because it would mean full equality within the Union. If that were unattainable, Puerto Rico proposed "home rule," which would not only provide local self-government but also preserve the sentimental bonds and the economic benefits of the existing relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. But if neither of these solutions was possible, there remained the alternative of independence, "which we reserve as the last refuge of our right

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and our honor."13 Amplifying these views in the Unionist newspaper La Democracia, he said that insisting on statehood was like a child asking for the moon, and that independence was an equally unrealistic goal. He made it clear that, regardless of his personal preferences, he was prepared to settle for autonomy, not only because it was attainable but also because it offered certain positive benefits for Puerto Rico. "With autonomy," he wrote, "two things will be saved: Puerto Rico's self-interest and Puerto Rico's dignity."14 Since De Diego and his followers would accept nothing less than independence, Mufioz Rivera was forced to combat their influence within the Unionist Party; for he recognized that they would seriously jeopardize his efforts to gain congressional approval for autonomist reforms if they succeeded in committing his own party exclusively to their views. With the support of his personal following and with the help of such pro-statehood Unionists as Martin Travieso and Juan B. Huyke, he persuaded the Unionist convention of 1914 to declare the party to be in favor of "consecrating all its efforts" to the achievement of autonomy. In their 1915 convention the Unionists not only reaffirmed the "Miramar Rules" of 1914 but also adopted a resolution prohibiting party members from engaging in pro-independence activity at home or abroad until autonomy had been obtained. 15 Upon the adoption of that rule De Diego broke with Mufioz Rivera and temporarily exiled himself to Spain. Antonio R. Barcelo, a staunch Munocista, was chosen to succeed him as president of the Unionist Party. 18 Meanwhile Mufioz Rivera worked incessantly to arouse Congress from the apathy that had overtaken all but a handful of its members with respect to Puerto Rican affairs. Thanks in part to his efforts and to the prodding of President Wilson, a reform bill introduced by William A. Jones, chairman of the House Committee on Insular Affairs, finally passed the House of Representatives in May 1916. Although Mufioz Rivera had opposed certain features of the bill, such as its grant of United States citizenship to the Puerto Rican people, 17 his deathbed testament revealed that he favored its passage as a step forward in Puerto Rico's evolution

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toward political dignity.18 Four months after his death on November 15, 1916 the Jones bill became law as the Organic Act of 1917,19 and Puerto Rico did indeed enter a new stage of political development, both internally and in its relations with the United States.

CHANGING VALUES IN POLITICS AFTER 1 9 1 7

During the years when each of the status alternatives was incarnated in a dynamic and respected leader—statehood in Barbosa, independence in De Diego, autonomy in Mufioz Rivera—followers of the man tended to be supporters of the corresponding status, and vice versa. Personification or personalization of the issues thus gave a certain clarity and simplicity to insular politics. All that changed, however, when the three leaders died, Munoz in 1916, De Diego in 1918, Barbosa in 1921. For the men who inherited their power—Antonio Barcelo in the Unionist Party, Jose Tous Soto in the Republican—were leaders of a different stripe. They lacked the personal magnetism and the strong convictions of their great predecessors. Both men were also linked with American sugar interests, Barcelo as a brother-in-law of the vice president and general manager of the Fajardo Sugar Company and Tous Soto as a corporation lawyer, later attorney for the South Porto Rico Sugar Company.20 Throughout the twenties and thirties deference values remained paramount, but a shift of emphasis became apparent. Power replaced respect as the focal value. Party programs and appeals to the electorate still concentrated on status issues, but the parties were less firmly committed to particular formulas for achieving political dignity than they had been before. The formulas espoused tended to be those that seemed most likely at the moment to further the parties' aspirations for power and the leading politicians' ambitions for public office. After 1917 control of the insular legislature, especially of the Senate, became the most desirable goal of practical politics, and status considerations became largely subordinate and instrumental to that end. This change of attitude

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helps explain the otherwise bewildering succession of party splits, realignments, and name changes that took place between 1922 and 1940. The Socialist Party. Another factor that contributed to the increasing complexity of insular politics was the emergence of the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico. Making its first bid for popular support on an island-wide basis in the general election of 1917, the party won 14 per cent of the popular vote and gained a member-at-large in each house of the legislature. Its influence on the party system was disruptive because its initial thrust was toward the realization of welfare values. As the traditional elite soon discovered to their alarm, the welfare orientation of the new party was decidedly appealing to many voters. Founder of the party and its first senator was Santiago Iglesias, a native of Galicia, who had come to Puerto Rico in 1896 as a 24year-old carpenter turned labor organizer. Repeatedly imprisoned as a radical and a subversive by the Spanish authorities and by the Mufioz Rivera government of 1898, he had persevered to organize Puerto Rico's first labor unions. In 1900 he appealed successfully to the American Federation of Labor for support of his newly organized Free Federation of Workers. In 1901 the insular federation became formally affiliated with the mainland body, and Iglesias was appointed AFL organizer for Puerto Rico. These and other contacts with American trade unionism made him an advocate of Americanization and, later on, of statehood for Puerto Rico. But during the early years his main interest was in raising the campesinos' standard of living.21 What Iglesias and his colleagues in the Puerto Rican labor movement had been demanding prior to 1917 seems in restrospect to have been little more than a moderate program of social and economic reform. They called for such things as higher wages for farm and city workers, an eight-hour day, better working conditions, paid vacations, insurance and pension arrangements, collective bargaining, and recognition of the right to picket and to strike. They inveighed against "monopolies" and against exploitation by the big corporations, and they called for the promotion of cooperatives and the "insularization" of essential public ser-

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vices. There was nothing very radical or doctrinaire in any of this, but all such demands were strenuously resisted by the Unionist and Republican leaders, even by De Diego, who was in other contexts regarded as a liberal, even a radical.22 Conservative to the core on economic questions, the members of the political elite were basically hostile to reform proposals. Moreover, they feared that if they acted on these demands Congress would disapprove of their "socialist" legislation and might retaliate by refusing to grant the status reforms they wanted. Hence the Unionist majorities and Republican minorities in the legislature paid little heed to the increasing strength of the labor movement or to its ever more insistent demands for ameliorative legislation. It was their unsympathetic attitude and their increasingly overt alliance with the big landowners and the representatives of corporate interests that led Iglesias and his associates to enter Socialist candidates in the insular elections of 1917. In the 1920 elections the Socialists more than doubled their 1917 vote, increasing their share of the total to 24 per cent and electing a senator and four representatives. These gains suggest that the party could have attracted the support of a much larger percentage of the electorate over the years to come if it had continued to ignore the status controversy and to concern itself primarily with the basic needs of the average voter. For the status issue was almost meaningless to the great mass of Puerto Ricans. Although they remained strongly committed to deference values on the level of interpersonal relations, as for example in their continuing regard for strong personal leadership and their readiness to accord respect to persons of superior rank, they had never shared the political elite's concern with the dignity of Puerto Rico as a political unit. Being to all intents and purposes nonparticipants in the political life of the island except on election day, they were little interested in public affairs that did not affect them personally. There is no evidence that either in the last three decades of the nineteenth century or in the first three decades of the twentieth the ordinary citizens, the rural and urban poor, regarded themselves as victims of the indignities of colonialism or cared whether Puerto Rico's political status betokened sufficient honor

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and respect. It is safe to say that such issues never disturbed most of them. The changes that had been taking place in the society around them, however, were making them increasingly conscious of their own poverty. Their growing concern, as their response to unionization and to the Socialist Party makes clear, was with welfare values: with their lack of wealth, their low level of wellbeing, their inadequate skills, and their limited or nonexistent education. If the Socialist Party had continued to address itself to such issues as these and if the other parties had remained preoccupied with the status question, the Socialists might well have become the majority party by the time the Depression overtook the island. But in 1924 the Socialist leaders chose to forfeit whatever advantage they may have had as the only party concerned with welfare values. Prior to the elections of that year they formed a coalition with the pro-statehood branch of the Republican Party and thus obscured their identification with the cause of economic reform; for the Republicans were economic conservatives, and the only ideological bond between them and the Socialists was their common belief in permanent association with the United States. What really brought the two groups together seems to have been the prospect of certain defeat if each put up its own slate of candidates in the 1924 elections. By combining forces behind a ticket drawn from both parties, the respective party leaders could hope not only to ward off disaster but even possibly to win. Iglesias and his colleagues had become so completely absorbed in the game of electoral politics that they were prepared to suppress their ideological commitments in order to make a good showing at the polls. Splits and Mergers. The Socialists' and pro-statehood Republicans' individual prospects seemed barren in 1924 because of certain pre-election maneuvers initiated by Antonio Barcelo, the Unionist leader. In 1922 he had induced a special convention of the Unionist Party to drop the pro-independence policy altogether and commit the party only to autonomy, that is, to the creation of a so-called Libre Estado Asociado, or Free Associated State.23 This policy shift antagonized the more zealous independentistas within

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the party, who resented the sudden jettisoning of a plank that had been part of the Unionist platform since 1904. A number of them withdrew in protest and organized the Nationalist Party, whose unequivocal goal was the conversion of Puerto Rico into a "free, sovereign, and independent republic."24 Apprehensive that these defections would weaken the Unionist Party sufficiently to cause its defeat at the hands of Socialists and Republicans, Barcel