Puerto Rico and the Promise of United States Citizenship: Struggles around Status in a New Empire, 1898-1917 – Parte I de II – By Samuel C. Erman

03/30/2015 | Filed under: Seminarios | Posted by: Francisco

Este escrito de Samuel C. Erman, “legal historian” posiblemente representa la investigación más completa sobre el tema de La Ciudadanía Americana para los Puertorriqueños.

Visito todas las bibliotecas y archivos que tienen información sobre el tema, incluyendo los años de Santiago Iglesias Pantin en Cuba.

Entre otros cubre el legado de Santiago Iglesias Pantin, Samuel Gompers y la American Federation of Labor.

Pag. 274 “As Iglesias had written Gompers in 1914, proponents of independence described U.S. Citizenship as “a chain which will tie [Puerto Rico] forever to the United States, precisely the

result that Iglesias sought.”

Describe el reclamo del “Derecho al Voto de Iglesias” en el 1916, cuando Iglesias rechaza el Bill de Ciudadanía si no le daban el derecho al voto a los trabajadores analfabetos y sin propiedad.

Ambas cámaras aceptaron la propuesta de Iglesias eliminando “a property or an education qualification”. El 2 de marzo de 1917, el Presidente Wilson firmo la Ley.

Iglesias fue invitado a la Ceremonia de la firma, pero los itinerarios de los barcos no le permitían llegar. Samuel Gompers lo represento y recibió uno de los tres bolígrafos.

Inmediatamente le envio un cable a Iglesias, dándole las noticias.

Samuel C. Erman tiene pendiente publicar el libro de esta disertación, la cual aparece an Amazon “currently unavailable”. Actualmente es Profesor Asistente en la Escuela de Leyes de USC.

Adjunto el enlace de la Universidad de Michigan de la disertación. Todo lo encuentran en la maravilla de “Google”.

Amigos, hoy más que nunca, es importante “Rescatar nuestra Historia”, espero disfruten esta.

El Dr. Julio Henna, Dr. Roberto H/ Todd y Sotero Figueroa convencieron a Teddy Roossevelt el liberar a Puerto Rico y los USA fueron recibidos con flores, música y akegría.

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/

handle/2027.42/75920/samerman_1.pdf?sequence=1

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Lea También: Citizenship In The American Empire

Puerto Rico and the Promise of United States Citizenship: Struggles around Status in a New Empire, 1898-1917 – By Samuel C. Erman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

(American Culture)

in the University of Michigan

2010

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Rebecca J. Scott, Co-Chair

Associate Professor Jesse H. Garskof, Co-Chair

Professor Richard A. Primus

Associate Professor Martha S. Jones

Associate Professor Susanna Blumenthal, University of Minnesota

DEDICATION

For my parents.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rebecca Scott deserves foremost credit for whatever merit I have achieved as a historian. She has inspired, mentored, encouraged, corrected, and guided me for nearly a decade. It has been my honor and privilege to be among her students.

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s sage and careful hand is evident on every page of this project. He has shaped me as a scholar, taught me to find new strands in familiar material, pointed me toward new avenues of research, and put wind in my sails.

I began graduate school in Susanna Blumenthal’s criminal-law course—my most challenging academic experience up to that date. Since then, through lessons and example, she showed me what a legal historian should aspire to be and helped me try to become one.

I am blessed to count Martha Jones, Richard Primus, and Daniel Ernst among my advisers. Martha Jones and Richard Primus have offered advice, reassurance, and criticism; brought fresh eyes to my work; and showed me new ways to undertake, organize, and direct my research. While Daniel Ernst never officially joined my committee, he has been a generous, skilled, and constant teacher, reader, editor, coach, and booster.

I have also been fortunate to work with two wonderful editorial staffs in publishing an article and a book review related to this dissertation. I had the opportunity to thank some of the people who have helped with this project at that time, and I wish to incorporate those acknowledgements here.*

I owe a great debt to the University of Michigan. At the law school, I thank Deans Evan Caminker, Jeffrey Lehman, David Baum, Virginia Gordan, Katherine Gottschalk, and Sarah Zearfoss; Professors Rebecca Eisenberg, Phoebe Ellsworth, Richard Friedman, Bruce Frier, Tom Green, Samuel Gross, Daniel Halberstam, Don Herzog, Doug Kahn, Yale Kamisar, Ellen Katz, Joan Larsen, Bill Novak, J.J. Prescott, Nancy Vettorello, and Christina Whitman; and Margaret Leary. In the Program in American Culture, I thank Marlene Moore and Professors Phil Deloria, Vicente Diaz, Gregory Dowd, Mary Kelley, Maria Montoya, Tiya Miles, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Penny Von Eschen, and Michael Witgen. In the Department of History, I thank Paulina Alberto, Sueann Caulfield, Jean Hébrard, Matt Lassiter, Jeremy Mumford, J. Mills Thornton, and Richard Turits. I have benefited enormously from my graduate- and law-student peers, including Héctor Bladuell, Marisa Bono, Sherri Charleston, Alyssa Chen, Tyler Cornelius, Marie Cruz, Peter DiCola, Caroline Fayard, Lorgia García, Lily Geismer, Megan Guilford, Ona Hahs, Clay Howard, Monica Kim, Brian Koch, Sharon Lee, Aaron Lewis, Andrew Lin, Millington Bergeson-Lockwood, John Low, Will Mackintosh, Bayrex Marti, Graham Nessler, Afia Ofori-Mensa, Angela Parker, Isabella Quintana, Marco Rigau Jr., Dean Saranillio, Kelly Sisson, Kithika St. John, Daniel Tenny, and Joanne Werdel. While in Michigan I have also benefited from participating in the Student Research Roundtable at

the law school, the Mellon Seminar in the Humanities, the Graduate Student Workshop

* Sam Erman, “An ‘Unintended Consequence’: Dred Scott Reinterpreted,” review of Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857, by Austin Allen, Michigan Law Review 106 (2008): 1157-1165; Sam Erman, “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1895 to 1905,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27 (summer 2008): 5-33.

on U.S. history, and the Graduate Student Roundtable at the conference “Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World” that the University of Michigan and the University of Windsor co-sponsored. As a member of the Michigan Law Review, I was fortunate to work with and learn from the editors for volumes 102-104.

Georgetown Law School, the Institute for Constitutional Studies, the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Asociación Pop Wuj, and the Middlebury Spanish Language School all provided classroom opportunities during my graduate studies. I owe particular thanks to Professors Charles Abernathy, Bryan Pearce-Gonzales, Maeva Marcus, and Mark Tushnet; my instructors and host family in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala; and Peter Barrett and Charles Zook.

Historical research is only possible because of the invaluable work of archivists, librarians, directors, and staff at repositories and other historically minded institutions. I am grateful to all those who have built and maintained those that I have visited and for all those there who have applied their knowledge and insight on my behalf. In Puerto Rico, these institutions included the Archivo General de Puerto Rico; the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, the Colección Puertorriqueña, and the Biblioteca de Derecho of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras; the Centro de Documentación Obrera Santiago Iglesias Pantín of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Humacao; the Archivo de la Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín; the Ateneo Puertorriqueño; and the Archivo Histórico Municipal del Municipio Autónomo de Ponce, Puerto Rico. José M. Encarnación, Sra. Merche Hicón, Jose H. Morales Cardona, and Evelyn Sola provided special assistance as did everyone at the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas.

On the mainland United States, I worked at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños of Hunter College; the Maryland, District of Columbia, and New York branches of the National Archives; the Library of Congress; the New York City Municipal Archives; the Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Schomburg Center

for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I owe special thanks to Robert Ellis, Pedro Juan Hernandez, Karen Jania, and Gregory Plunges.

In Cuba, I visited the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana

Juan Marinello, the Centro de Estudios Martianos, the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí,

and the Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba. There, elsewhere on the island, and in my travel preparations, I benefited from the assistance of Gregorio Delgado García, Mitzi Espinosa Luis, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Ricardo Galbis, Josman García Lauda, Enrique López Mesa, Esther Pérez Pérez, Fernando Martínez Heredia, Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, Elena Socarrás de la Fuente, Ariadna de la Torre, and Sandra del Valle.

While conducting my research in Puerto Rico, I found mentorship, community, and inspiration within and beyond the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. I am particularly grateful to Professors Juan Baldrich, Gonzalo Córdova, Astrid Cubano, Jorge Duany, Fernando Picó, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Mario Roche Velázquez, and Lanny Thompson; the honorable Juan Torruella; and Isabel Córdova, her son Diego, Juan Dinzey, Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Esperanza Flores, Tomás Pérez Varela, Marco Rigau Sr., and Carmen Suárez.

While researching, writing, and presenting on the U.S. mainland, numerous other people and organizations have provided me assistance and opportunities. I am thankful

for the mentorship, feedback, and consideration of Professors Christina Burnett, Eileen Findlay, Ariela Gross, Tanya Hernandez, Linda Kerber, John Nieto Phillips, and Lucy Salyer. The DC Area Legal History Roundtable, Latin American Studies Association, and Organization of American Historians have all provided me opportunities to share my

work and benefit from feedback. Suejean Cho, Dinah Choi, Cassie Dick, Jamie Jones, Nancy Kong, Jeff Meiser, Patrick Mueller, Oanh Nguyen, Gautham Rao, Veta Schlimgen, David Teller-Goldman, and Joe Wicentowski have been invaluable interlocutors, editors, hosts, collaborators, cheerleaders, role models, and sources.

I owe a special debt to William Jentes, whose named scholarship and warm support allowed me to pursue numerous scholarly opportunities that financial considerations would otherwise have foreclosed. I am also thankful to the following funders, whose generosity has faciliated and made possible myriad aspects of this project: the University of Michigan Program in American Culture, the University of Michigan Law School, the Rackham Graduate School of the Univeristy of Michigan, the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Clara Belfield and Henry Bates, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Michigan International Institute, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Family and friends have sustained me throughout this process. I am thankful to Rebecca Batiste, David Corcoran, Emma Corcoran, James Corcoran, Lynn Ermann, Kay Lee, Jonathan Ragle, and Elaine Tung, as well as the far-too-many people there are to name individually. I am thankful to my inlaws, Kevin and Sue Lee, for their support and encouragement. In addition to being my oldest and dearest friend, Greg Walton has been an incisive, insightful, and indefatigable critic and supporter. Rabia Belt and Ethan Ard have awed me with their humor, loyalty, warmth, and brilliance for over a decade. Rabia has been with me almost every step of the way in graduate school, for which I am more thankful than I know how to express. No small part of that gratitude is a result of her having brought Ethan to Ann Arbor.

Though I once prided myself on helping my younger brother Dan Erman find his way, our relationship has long since shifted. He is now among my role models and confidants, and I valued his support throughout this project. I am proud and grateful to have his wife, Katie Toews, as a sister and friend.

I have dedicated this dissertation to my parents, Mary Corcoran and Howard Erman. Nothing in my life, much less this project, would have been possible without them. I am forever grateful.

Listing Julia Lee’s many contributions to this dissertation would be both a fool’s errand and beside the point. She is my great and perpetual benediction. Her love, companionship, cheer, humor, warmth, loyalty, wisdom, faith, and generosity fill my life with meaning, joy, excitement, and passion. As this chapter in my professional career draws to a close, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to acknowledge my astounding luck at having a lifetime to spend together with her. Thank you.

Many have had a hand in the improvement and completion of this dissertation. Whatever errors remain are entirely my own.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS x CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION 1
STATUS IN THE SHADOW OF WAR, 1898-1900 24

MAKING ALLIES, MAKING CLAIMS: ISLAND LEADERS ON THE MAINLAND,

1900-1902

“AMERICAN ALIEN”: ISABEL GONZALEZ AND THE SUPREME COURT, 1902-

1905

141

“THE FORGOTTEN ISLAND,” 1905-1909 196

A “PECULIARLY GOVERNED” ISLAND: THE TWILIGHT OF U.S.

CITIZENSHIP IN PUERTO RICO, 1909-1917

230

7. EPILOGUE	278
APPENDIX	290
BIBLIOGRAPHY	293

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

MD NARA, 350/_/_/_ Maryland National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 350, Series, Box, File

DC NARA District of Columbia National Archives and Records

Administration

46/_/_/_ Record Group 46, Box, Label, Folder

233/_/_ Record Group 233, Box, Folder

85/_/_~_/_/_ Record Group 85, Entry, Volume number out of total number of volumes, page, no.

AG . . . /_/_ Archivo General de Puerto Rico . . . , Caja, Expediente

OG Oficina del Gobernador

DE Fondo del Departamento de Estado

SPR Sección del Secretario de Puerto Rico

COS Serie del Correspondencia Oficina del Secretaria

CG Correspondiente General

RC Sub-serie del Registro de Correspondencia

T Tarea

CIHCAM _/_/_ Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Colección Angel M.

Mergal, caja, cartapacio, documento

L Libro

LOC Library of Congress

CDOSIP/MC/_ El Centro de Documentación Obrera Santiago Iglesias Pantín,

Microfilm Collection, Roll. BCSPCEPHC/_/_/_ Blase Camacho Souza Papers, Centro de Estudios

Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, Series, Box, Folder

SGL _/_ Library of Congress, Samuel Gompers Letterbooks, 1883-

1924, volume, page

EIA Ellis Island Archive, available at http://www.ellisisland.org/

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

When Frederic Coudert opted to tell the legal history of early-20th-century relationships between U.S. empire and U.S. law, few were better positioned. Following U.S. invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the 1898-99 war with Spain, and U.S. annexations of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, Coudert had acted as counsel in innumerable claims concerning the status of the newly acquired lands and peoples. Appearing alongside and on behalf of Puerto Rican political leaders, a migrant from the island seeking work on the mainland, and merchants involved in U.S.-Puerto Rican trade, he had presented arguments to U.S. agencies, courts, and legislators. By

1926, his activities—especially his arguments before the Supreme Court in the disputes on the topic that came to be known as the Insular Cases—had won him wealth, prominence, and influence. Reflecting on these events in the pages of the Columbia Law Review, he described the Insular Cases as presenting the Supreme Court a choice between its “reverence for the Constitution” and allowing “the United States properly to govern a people so alien.” “These two conflicting desires,” Coudert explained, “were reconciled by [an] ingenious and original doctrine” that “failed anywhere to specify what particular portions of the Constitution were applicable to the newly acquired possessions.” “The very vagueness of the doctrine,” Coudert concluded, “was valuable.” The genesis, persistence, and significance of that doctrine, which he called “Territorial Incorporation,” lies at the core of this study.1

This study proposes a new scholarly perspective on the Insular Cases, especially

Gonzales v. Williams (1904). Like Coudert, I argue that doctrine emerged from the balance and interplay between legal and administrative concerns. But these two strands within the U.S. state are not the whole story. This thesis also traces how a group of Puerto Ricans articulated legal claims about their citizenship in response to the evolution of this legal doctrine, sometimes challenging it, sometimes working within in, and sometimes acting to shape it.

As Coudert indicated, struggles over law and empire in the United States involved institutional actors both within and beyond courts. U.S. expansion in 1898 created opportunities for federal administrators—especially those in the Department of War—to emerge alongside courts and political parties as lead actors in the federal government. As they cooperated and competed to secure autonomous control over and policies for Puerto Rico and other newly U.S. lands, such officials deployed and deferred to legal claims. Members of U.S. political branches also drew upon legal language and norms, responded

to judicial decisions, and acted in accordance with their declarations that they were bound

1 Frederic R. Coudert, “The Evolution of the Doctrine of Territorial Incorporation,” Columbia Law Review

26 (1926): 850 (quotes 1, 3-7), 828 (quote 2); see also, e.g., Gallardo v. Noble, 236 U.S. 135 (1915). Recent scholars join Coudert in examining post-annexation cases concerning the status of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans as of a piece. For works defining the Insular Cases to include such cases, see, e.g., Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006); Christina Duffy Burnett, “A Note on the Insular Cases,” Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, ed. Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 389; see also Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Washington D.C., American Psychological Association, 2001).

by law.2

Coudert observed that courts navigated similarly competing pulls between governance and law. Judges knew that their decisions variously influenced, empowered, and hindered administrative and political officials. They expressed and displayed fidelity to law, but sought to avoid creating a conflict between what they perceived to be needs of governance and the constraints they saw as essential for avoiding tyranny. Some contemporaries described judges’ law as the mere, nearly automatic deduction of results from preexisting and apolitical axioms. Others perceived a law predicated upon evolving social conditions and morals. And some considered judges to be instrumental and idiosyncratic arbiters. But judges belonged to and were influenced by a broader community of legal academics and commentators, private lawyers, and government attorneys. To varying degrees, these heterogeneous legal actors shared norms about the substance, nature, and practices of law that judges felt at least partly bound to honor or address.3

2 For work describing and theorizing the slow emergence of powerful, autonomous agencies from a U.S. state largely constituted by political parties and courts, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982); see also Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter H. Argersinger, “The Transformation of American Politics: Political Institutions and Public Policy, 1865-

1910,” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000, eds. Byrn E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).

3 On classical legal thought and its detractors, see, e.g., Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Thomas C. Grey, “Langdell’s Orthodoxy,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 45 (1983): 1-53; Duncan Kennedy, “Toward an Historical Understanding of Legal Consciousness: The Case of Classical Legal Thought in America, 1850-1940,” Research in Law and Sociology 3 (1980): 3-24; Christopher Tomlins,

“Framing the Field of Law’s Disciplinary Encounters: A Historical Narrative,” Law & Society Review 34

(2000): 933; Robert W. Gordon, “The Elusive Transformation,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 6 (1994): 137-162 (reviewing Horwitz, Transformation of American Law). Stephen A. Siegel has examined historical views of law as systematic and yet also predicated on the morals and conditions of particular groups in specific times and places. See, e.g., “Francis Wharton’s Orthodoxy: God, Historical Jurisprudence, and Classical Legal Thought,” American Journal of Legal History 46 (2004): 422-446. On

elite lawyers, law schools, legal academics, and the broader legal community, see Robert W. Gordon, “‘The

Ideal and the Actual in Law’: Fantasies and Practices of New York City Lawyers, 1870-1910,” in The New

People not employed by the U.S. state also participated in these negotiations. Because U.S. officials throughout the state sought myriad, often-conflicting ends, the concrete disputes and problems that they faced influenced the priorities that they emphasized and pursued and thus the relationships that they formed, the compromises that they reached, and the conflicts that they perpetuated. Those seeking to harness or stave off state action found opportunities in the resultant indeterminacy and plasticity of official policy and decision making. Many, including the five Puerto Ricans whose

claims making in 1898-1917 is the focus of this project, sought to exploit this dynamic by becoming students of the state. They learned the competing commitments and aims of U.S. judges, administrators, and elected officials and used that knowledge to pursue their ends by turning some arms of the state against others or positioning one to influence another’s decisions.4

To perceive processes and changes like those Coudert described requires

identifying and exploring dynamics that encompassed courts, other arms of the state, and claimants largely devoid of political, economic, or social power. Hoping to harness judicial power, individuals crafted claims, presented them to authorities, and thereby framed the arguments and conflicts that courts faced when they rendered decisions. Often, moreover, those conflicts were predecessors of and heirs to similar disputes that had arisen before courts, agencies, and political officials.

This study builds on conceptions of legal history that look beyond judicial

High Priests: Lawyers in Post-Civil War America, ed. Gerard Gawalt (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,

1984), 51; Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960; Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

4 On the complexities of the incentives, circumstances, and senses of self of U.S. officials that shaped their actions, see, e.g., Daniel Ernst, “Morgan and the New Dealers,” Journal of Policy History 20 (2008): 447-

481; Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1896-1928 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

proceedings to encompass the various struggles over concepts that unfolded between people outside the state and officials from all across it. The core case at the center of this project, Gonzales v. Williams (1904), thus only emerges at the midpoint of my seven chapters. The balance of the study attends to other aspects of the struggles around, law, empire, and status of which Gonzales was but a part.

The 1898 U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico interrupted and redirected years of struggle by Spanish Antilleans with Spain for greater freedoms. It occasioned a realignment of island politics that intertwined with debates in Puerto Rico and among

U.S. officials over the rights and status of post-annexation Puerto Ricans. U.S. lawmakers initially saw Puerto Rico primarily in terms of the Philippines, the annexation of which worried most mainlanders more than did that of Puerto Rico. By providing Puerto Ricans little self-government and no recognition as U.S. citizens in the 1900 Foraker Act establishing civil government in Puerto Rico, Congress hoped to create a model for U.S. rule in the Philippines that could be challenged in court without risking an adverse ruling directly applicable to the Philippines. But the first round of Insular Cases (1901) did not settle the status of Puerto Ricans or Filipinos. Seeking to clarify matters, the elected

Puerto Rican representative in Washington, Federico Degetau y González, launched numerous claims to U.S. citizenship on behalf of Puerto Ricans. His opportunity came in

1901, after immigration officials excluded the Puerto Rican Isabel Gonzalez as an undesirable alien and she and her uncle, Domingo Collazo, launched a lawsuit claiming U.S. citizenship.5

When the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case, it established that Puerto

5 I follow the usage of Isabel Gonzalez and her brother Luis Gonzalez in signing their names and omit the accent marks. Isabel Gonzalez to Federico Degetau, 10 Apr. 1904, CIHCAM 5/I/5; Luis Gonzalez to Federico Degetau, 5 Feb. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/35.

Ricans, and thus likely Filipinos, were not aliens. Many also understood Gonzales to signal the Court’s unwillingness to decide whether Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.

After Gonzales, federal administrators and the U.S. political branches became increasingly amenable to a U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans that courts seemed unlikely to construe as constraining U.S. rule in the Philippines. In Puerto Rico, the decision also preceded a political realignment that swept Degetau’s party from power and firmly installed a coalition, led by Luis Muñoz Rivera, that took a more confrontational attitude toward perceived injustices of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico. Muñoz and his co-partisans became more incrementalist, however, after 1909, when Congress reduced Puerto Rican self-government in response to protests by elected islanders for greater democracy. During the years that followed, organized labor in Puerto Rico became increasingly powerful and assertive as one of its leaders, Santiago Iglesias, helped expand its reach from the cities into the fields by co-leading large agricultural strikes that began in 1915. Drawing on a decade-long alliance with the American Federation of Labor, a powerful mainland labor organization, and on years of experience claiming for Puerto Ricans

rights that mainland workers sought or held, Iglesias also aligned Puerto Rican and U.S. organized labor firmly behind U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. Those latter efforts culminated with congressional extension of U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in the 1917

Jones Act, an event that altered but did not resolve struggles around the status of Puerto Rico and of Puerto Ricans.

Through this reframed legal history of the first two decades of U.S. imperial rule in Puerto Rico, several revisions to standard accounts of the Insular Cases become apparent. The relative importance and coherence of the longest and most-cited of those

cases—Downes v. Bidwell (1901)—has tended to overshadow the significance of Gonzales to the history of U.S. citizenship and empire. In explicating Insular Cases, some scholars have argued that the Court used them to try to reconcile fidelity to constitutional norms with exigencies of empire by explicitly altering the constitutional order. Other scholars have disagreed, stressing that the Court had long accorded U.S. political branches wide discretion in territorial governance and that the Court ultimately explicitly denied U.S. colonized peoples few rights. This investigation finds much truth in both positions. The Insular Cases, which attempted to reconcile Constitution and empire, involved few explicit alterations to constitutional rights. To do so, justices met

claims seeking clarification of the status of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by announcing narrow holdings in opinions that maintained a studied and productive ambiguity.6

But evasive decisions were decisions nonetheless. Slowly, a new legal landscape emerged. Between 1898 and 1917, a conventional wisdom formed among many U.S. officials and Puerto Rican political and organized-labor leaders that judicial actions

seeking U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans were likely to remain unavailing and that

6 In advocating a link between potential U.S. de-annexation of Puerto Rico and the Insular Cases, Christina Duffy Burnett stresses longstanding congressional power over U.S. territories and the relatively few constitutional rights that the Supreme Court has explicitly denied residents of Puerto Rico. “Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation,” University of Chicago Law Review 72 (summer 2005):

797-879. Additionally, she collects and distinguishes herself from scholarship depicting the Insular Cases as having distinguished unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico—where residents only received fundamental constitutional rights—from incorporated territories where the U.S. Constitution applied in full. Ibid. 808-809 & nn.39-41. For more on U.S. discretion in territories, see Sarah H. Cleveland, “Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, and the Nineteenth Century Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign Affairs,” Texas Law Review 81 (Nov. 2002): 1-284. On Gonzales v. Williams (1904), see Sam Erman, “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme

Court, 1895 to 1905,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27 (summer 2008): 5-33; Christina Duffy Burnett, “Empire and the Transformation of Citizenship,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, eds. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 332-341; Christina Duffy Burnett, “‘They say I am not an American . . .’: The Noncitizen National and the Law of American Empire,” Virginia Journal of International Law 48 (2008):

659-718. For an overview of research using social and legal histories to trace potentially legal problems,

see Rebecca Sandefur, “Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality,” Annual Review of

Sociology 34 (2008): 16.3-16.5; see also Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review

1985: 899-935.

consequently Congress was the only source from which such recognition could reasonably be sought. In 1898, many U.S. commentators and officials along with some leading Puerto Rican political men insisted that Puerto Ricans would secure U.S. citizenship, eventual statehood, and full constitutional protections all in a bundle or not at all. By 1917, piecemeal official decision making had convinced most observers of the contrary. The growing consensus that securing U.S. citizenship would win Puerto Ricans few new rights and provide them little help winning U.S. statehood for their island increasingly weakened arguments that depended on more robust visions of U.S. citizenship. These same shifts, men elected to office in Puerto Rico discovered, left open

ever fewer promising or even plausible paths to home rule.7

Yet doctrine deferred was not doctrine denied. During the first two decades of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico, the Court decided very little about the status of U.S. colonies and their peoples. Most notably, the justices held, the colonies were neither part of the “United States” for purposes of a single clause in one section of an article of the Constitution nor a “foreign country” for purposes of pre-1900 U.S. tariff laws. Similarly,

the Court later decided that Puerto Ricans were not alien to the United States for purposes of federal immigration law, but did not thereby clarify their U.S. citizenship status. Even territorial non-incorporation—the doctrine for which the Insular Cases are best known

and which remains binding constitutional law today—did not receive unambiguous

support from the Court for more than two decades. And though the Court held that Puerto

7 For work examining the invention of citizenship as a legal category in the French context, see Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); cf. Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) (observing that because freedom, like slavery, unfolded differently across locales, citizenship is an institution to be described locally). For an example of a concept—in this case capacity—that shifted shape as judges applied it in different doctrinal areas, see Susanna L. Blumenthal, “The Default Legal Person,” UCLA Law Review 54 (2007): 1135-1265.

Ricans and others who shared their status lacked constitutional rights to certain criminal procedures—most notably jury trials—what further constitutional rights they lacked remained largely undetermined. By 1917, then, the justices had interposed relatively little in the way of holdings with which their successors would have to reckon in further clarifying the constitutional relationships between law, empire, status, and rights.8

Though they often argued and addressed disputes around law, empire, and status

as matters of legal reasoning, effective administration, and political priorities, petitioners and federal officials also frequently referred to the popular and academic ideas about race and empire that they understood these disputes to involve. Among the most powerful

such socio-cultural concepts were those identifying and justifying global racial hierarchies. Such theories spoke of eugenics, degeneration, environmental factors, the

line between civilization and savagery, and relationships of states, nations, and their laws to peoples and races. To many in the United States, these theories were grounds for treating certain racial groups as inferior. American Indians, Filipinos, and other tropical or indigenous peoples, some thus claimed, were savages. Others—and often the same

people—deprecated the level of civilization of Asian peoples, especially the Chinese. Yet another group—again frequently overlapping in membership—portrayed people of

southern and eastern European descent, including residents of lands formerly within the

8 For an overview of the Insular Cases, see Sparrow, The Insular Cases (emphasizing the extent to which

the doctrine of territorial non-incorporation gained ground after 1903, delineating and seeking to rationalize instances where the Supreme Court did and did not deny constitutional protections to residents of unincorporated territories, and reviewing much prior research analyzing the Insular Cases); José Trías Monge, Historia constitucional de Puerto Rico, vol. 1 (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1980), 244-267, passim; see also José Trías Monge, Historia constitucional de Puerto Rico, vol. 2 (Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Universitaria, 1981); Note, “Status of Filipinos for Purposes of Immigration and Naturalization,” Harvard Law Review 42 (1928-1929): 810 & nn.10-11 (failing to identify a Supreme Court holding to support the claim that peoples annexed to the United States in 1898 were not all then U.S. citizens);. As Gary Lawson and Robert D. Sloane have recently explained, the “category of fundamental rights is as arbitrary and ill-defined as the concept of incorporation,” from which it derives. “The Constitutionality of Decolonization by Associated Statehood: Puerto Rico’s Legal Status Reconsidered,” Boston College Law Review 50 (2009): 24.

Spanish Empire, as incompetent at and inexperienced with law, liberty, and self- government. At the same time, some in Puerto Rico and the mainland deployed these theories to distinguish different levels of degradation among non-Anglo-Saxon peoples and thus establish their own relative superiority vis-à-vis others.9

Annexation also brought Puerto Ricans into a U.S. empire-state still grappling

with the aftermath of its Civil War. That conflict had long stood, especially in the memories of many northerners and of many southerners of color, for union and for emancipation, racial justice, and national inclusiveness. In the 1890s, however, mainstream white U.S. opinion had increasingly come to vilify a key legacy of that conflict: Reconstruction. This renunciation drew inspiration from the academic writings of William Dunning, a professional historian at Columbia University who portrayed Reconstruction as a northern imposition on the U.S. South. It had resulted, he claimed, in misrule by a combination of southern blacks unprepared for office or the franchise, “carpet-bagging” northern whites, and southern white “scalawags” who sought to

9 On the concept of the “Anglo-Saxon” and its relationship to scientific racism and U.S. white mainstream thought on American Indians and Filipinos, see, e.g., Mark S. Weiner, “Teutonic Constitutionalism: The Role of Ethno-Juridical Discourse in the Spanish-American War,” in Burnett and Marshall, Foreign in a Domestic Sense. Alexandra Stern presents a helpful overview of recent work on U.S. eugenics in her introduction to: Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1-26. On perceived racial differences among those of European descent, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). On notions of savagery and civilization, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). A popular mode of thought that Stephen A. Siegel terms “historicism” sorted nations and races in part based upon their laws. “Historism in Late Nineteenth-Century Constitutional Thought,” Wisconsin Law Review (1990): 1431-

1547. On U. perceptions of Filipinos, see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The classic overview of U.S.-American Indian relations remains Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, vols. 1-2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1984]). In “‘Chinese Demons’: The Violent Articulation of Chinese Otherness and Interracial Sexuality in The U.S. Midwest, 1885-1889,” Victor Jew recounts anti-Chinese violence in Milwaukee and reviews scholarship on the Chinese-American experience in the United States. Journal of Social History 37 (winter

2003): 389-410. For an early work discussing one manner in which Gilded Age intellectuals synthesized many of these ideas, see David N. Livingstone, “Science and Society: Nathaniel S. Shaler and Racial Ideology,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers [n.s.] 9 (1984): 181-210.

advance themselves at the expense of the “mass of” southern whites over whom they exercised authority. In its uglier forms—which included and drew upon longstanding portrayals of blacks as potential rapists of white women—this theory contributed to the epidemic of lynchings in the United States. As intended, such attacks on Reconstruction also figured prominently in its rollback, including black disfranchisement and imposition of Jim Crow. These ideas became U.S. cultural touchstones as well, winning expression in popular media such as Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1907) and D. W.

Griffith’s adaptation of it to film, Birth of a Nation (1915).10

Ideas like those Dunning espoused also became commonplaces of U.S. politics, administration, and law. White-supremacist U.S. Democrats’ embrace of them was unsurprising. But following U.S. Republicans’ failure in 1890-91 to pass the Lodge Bill with its federal-elections protections for U.S. blacks and the perceived wartime need for national unity in 1898, substantial numbers of members of Abraham Lincoln’s party also came to accept and espouse such ideas. U.S. administrators and judges also operated within this ideological frame. Grasping the power of these concepts, men heading what came to be the dominant Puerto Rican political coalition took them up, asserting that the injustices they perceived in U.S. governance of Puerto Rico reenacted Reconstruction-era

10 William Archibald Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904 [1898]); Charles E. Merriam, “William Archibald Dunning,” American Political Science Review 16 (Nov. 1922): 692-694; Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1907); The Birth of a Nation, Dir. D. W. Griffith (Epoch Producing Corp., 1915); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American

Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108-122, 335-366; Mark Elliott, Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237-243; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, commemorative ed. (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1955]), 85-96; Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2005), 159-166.

abuses.11

U.S. jurisprudence reflected both the emancipatory legacy of the Civil War and the narrowing of that legacy in subsequent decades. Postbellum Supreme Court treatment of U.S. citizenship illustrates the dynamic. In the Dred Scott case, Scott v. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Taney had held free U.S. blacks not to be U.S. citizens. Claiming that states had traditionally denied civil and political rights associated with citizenship to free blacks, he had reasoned that the Founders could not have intended the Constitution

to cloak free blacks with U.S. citizenship. The 14th Amendment repudiated that holding,

guaranteeing that “All persons born or naturalized in the Untied States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of the United States.” Prior to 1898, U.S. postbellum jurisprudence construed this language to classify peoples subject to U.S. jurisdiction and born in lands under U.S. sovereignty as U.S. citizens. Afterward, and in light of U.S. annexations of territories in which millions of non-whites resided, federal judges indicated a willingness to revisit the matter. The Fourteenth Amendment also prohibited state abridgement of “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” In their opinions, Supreme Court justices addressed this clause ambivalently too, variously celebrating the significance and substance of U.S. citizenship and construing the status to provide few judiciable rights.12

While Reconstruction and the Civil War figured prominently in the U.S. past, it was Spanish rule that dominated pre-annexation events on the island. Afterward, many in Puerto Rico and on the mainland analyzed U.S.-island relations through this lens. U.S.

11 On the relationship between the 1898 war between Spain and the United States and renunciation of the heritage of Reconstruction by many Republicans, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 335-366. See also Elliott, Color-Blind Justice, 243-249; Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 85-96; Scott, Degrees of Freedom,

159-166.

12 Am. 14, sec. 1, U.S. Const. (quotes); see also note 337 below and accompanying text; .

officials and commentators often cast Spain as a tyrant who had denied Puerto Ricans self-government, individual rights, and rule of law. For advocates and opponents of U.S. imperial policies, such portrayals proved double-edged: In light of them, U.S. rule appeared to be an improvement. But they also potentially undermined the legitimacy of U.S. policies in cases where those policies could be portrayed as less liberal than Spanish

ones.13

Puerto Rican men at the forefront of island politics generally held a more complex view of the legacy of Spanish rule. For decades, most prominent island-born politicians had been what came to be known as Autonomistas, or autonomists. Federico Degetau y González and Luis Muñoz Rivera, both Puerto Ricans at the center of this study, emerged as leaders of this movement in the late nineteenth century. Unlike participants in the Cuban Revolutionary Party such as Santiago Iglesias and Domingo Collazo—urban artisans whose activities also animate this project—Autonomistas did not seek to end Spanish rule in Puerto Rico or in neighboring Cuba. Instead, they worked within the Spanish system and disavowed Puerto Rican independence, seeking to end preferences

for those born in continental Spain, to secure full Spanish citizenship and political participation for island-born Puerto Ricans, and to win islanders control over island

affairs. They had made progress on all fronts by mid-1898. In the years following the

13 On the relationship between U.S. perceptions of Spanish tyranny and U.S. understandings of the consequences of U.S. military actions in 1898, see Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Incurring a Debt of Gratitude: 1898 and the Moral Sources of United States Hegemony in Cuba,” American Historical Review 104 (Apr. 1999):

356-398. For interrelationships between U.S. domestic issues and U.S. imperialism, see, e.g., Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” American Quarterly 57 (Mar. 2005): 17-57; Lanny Thompson, “The Imperial Republic: A Comparison of the Insular

Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898,” Pacific Historical Review 71 (Nov. 2002): 535-574. On gains by Autonomistas, see, e.g., Astrid Cubano-Iguina, “Political Culture and Male Mass-Party Formation in Late-Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (Nov. 1998): 631-662;

notes 17-25 below and accompanying text; see also Astrid Cubano Iguina, El hilo en el laberinto: claves de

la lucha política en Puerto Rico (siglo XIX) (Río Piedras, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán, 1990) 77-144.

U.S. invasion, they drew on those experiences to evaluate U.S. policies, chart strategy, justify their actions, and craft arguments to present U.S. officials. In particular, they deployed this history in service of self-portrayals contesting U.S. images of them as passive, politically inexperienced, and unsuited for full citizenship.

While the focus of this history is U.S. law, empire, and status as they involved Puerto Rico in 1898-1917, the questions it raises about the relationship of modestly situated claimants to legal and political change over time have relevance to broader concerns in history and throughout the humanities. Recent work on race, class, gender, discourse, and culture has made less plausible an earlier ambition of some humanities scholars: grand, accurate narratives describing the human condition and its change over time. Observing that centers of power like the state were never the whole story, humanistic scholars increasingly ask how variously situated people experienced and contested everyday power. This scholarship avoids overly neat causal stories but risks sacrificing causal explanations altogether. One way to escape this Hobson’s choice—and it is the path chosen in this study—is to explore citizenship as a venue both for large-

forces narratives and the complexities of individual agency. Because claims of citizenship rested at the nexus of individuals and the state, they provided a tool that individuals used to harness state power and that the state deployed to justify coercive actions against them. This is not a story in which causation worked neatly—people struggled over meanings of citizenship with unpredictable results—but it is one that illustrates mechanisms by which

the complex processes that formed our past evolved into those that form our present.14

14 On concern over a loss of unifying narratives following the cultural turn in legal history, see, e.g., Ariela Gross, “Beyond Black and White: Cultural Approaches to Race and Slavery,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 640-689. On the loss of traditional grand narratives in legal history, see Robert W. Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984): 57-126. For works focusing on citizenship as a

This study attends especially to the ways that the circulation of people and ideas could offer resources to those whose positions were otherwise weak. What Rebecca Scott terms “concepts” of citizenship provide one example. As people articulated concepts of citizenship in one part of the Atlantic World, those concepts could accompany travelers and writings along paths of trade, governance, and conquest. This circulation created an Atlantic intellectual space in which numerous concepts of citizenship co-existed. When residents drew upon this suite of ideas to make claims, they engaged the concepts creatively, recombining, inventing, inflecting, and creating alternatives to them. These

new concepts also entered circulation, becoming bases for new claims.15

To explore more specifically how powerful institutions affected and were affected by those of more modest means, I draw on scholarship examining what is broadly characterized as “claims making.” Such work does not aim to answer classic

dichotomous framings of questions of rights and repression, an end its methods could not achieve. Instead, it looks for mechanisms of negotiation between powerful institutions

and individuals. Such claims and counter-claims are not mere snapshots of the past; they

legal category, see, e.g., James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship: 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by The University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Hilda Sabato insists on the importance of citizenship as a word in “On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” American History Review 106 (2001): 1290-1315. Different characterizations of citizenship can produce seemingly inconsistent results. In Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997) Caryn Cossé Bell finds free, antebellum New Orleanians of color placing U.S. citizenship at the core of their claims and senses of self. William J. Novak, by contrast, argues that U.S. citizenship was merely one status among many in the United States during these years. “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, eds. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

15 Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights and Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary,” 48 Current Anthropology (Apr. 2007): 238 (quote). On reconstructing circulation and development of ideas in the Atlantic World by those in modest positions, see Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31

(Feb. 2006): 1-14; Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,”

Journal of Social History 39 (spring 2006): 615-630.

offer opportunities to study the dynamics through which negotiations between unequal agents produced historical change.16

This study examines such dynamics of historical change by focusing on five Puerto Ricans’ struggles with each other and the state over citizenship and other status relationships. They are Federico Degetau y González, Luis Muñoz Rivera, Domingo Collazo, Isabel Gonzalez, and Santiago Iglesias.

Twenty-five-year-old Federico Degetau was a rising member of the liberal, cosmopolitan, Puerto Rican elite in 1887. His grandparents hailed from Puerto Rico, Britain, and Germany, and his extended family included abolitionists. Though Degetau’s parents hosted meetings of leading liberals in their home, his father owned property in people until the end of his life in 1863, at which point the twenty-eight-year-old enslaved man Chalí appeared among the effects in his will. In the 1870s, Degetau began an education in Europe that culminated in an 1888 law degree in Spain. While there, he cultivated liberal causes and associations. He joined the freemasons, discussed abolition of the death penalty with Victor Hugo, published commentary on pedagogy and fiction, participated in the Société Française pour L’Arbitrage entre Nations, met the Puerto Rican nationalist leader Ramón Betances, and became both a protégé of a leading Puerto Rican pro-autonomy politician. In 1887, that politician, Ramón Baldorioty, founded and Degetau then joined the Partido Autonomista, which became the primary party for Puerto

Rican-born politicians. Baldorioty soon faced repression and imprisonment. Still in

16 A list of claims-making scholarship is necessarily illustrative rather than comprehensive: Rebecca J. Scott, “Reclaiming Gregoria’s Mule: The Meanings of Freedom in the Arimao and Caunao Valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1880-1899,” Past & Present 170 (2001): 181-216; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). On making claims as a learned skill and its relationship to power inequalities, see Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 1-10.

Spain, Degetau launched a newspaper to protest. Some months later, Baldorioty was freed.17

Like Degetau, Luis Muñoz Rivera joined the Autonomist movement of the aging Baldorioty. When Baldorioty died in 1889, the thirty-year-old autodidact Muñoz founded La Democracia, an Autonomista newspaper. There Muñoz, the son of a slave-owning merchant, continued to advocate on behalf of the party, which sought local power in local matters, greater civil and political rights, and enjoyment of constitutional rights for those

born in Puerto Rico on equal terms with continental Spaniards.18

The years 1894-95 found thirteen-year-old Isabel Gonzalez growing up in a Puerto Rican home alongside her brother Luis and her four-year-old sister Eloisa. Her mother, Antonia Dávila González, was again pregnant. Though the family lacked financial security, they had the resources to secure an education for Isabel Gonzalez. But between the looming need for Luis Gonzalez to produce income for the family and the concomitant lack of secure resources, the family’s ability to provide educational

17 Ángel M. Mergal, Federico Degetau: un orientador de su pueblo (New York: Hispanic Institute, 1944),

30-34, 39-46; Untitled document, 27 May 1864, CIHCAM 6/VII/14; Copy, Certificate of Federico Degetau upon receiving his law license, 29 Oct. 1888, in A. M. Melgar, Documentación relacionada con la vida y la obra de D. Federico Degetau, 1941, 29, CIHCAM 20/L2; Copy, Inventario, in Melgar, Documentación, 20; Certification of membership in El Porvenir, 20 Jan. 1882, CIHCAM 6/VII/16; “Delegate from Porto Rico,” The Times, Worthington, Ind., [Dec. 1900?], available at CIHCAM 22/L1; José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 11-12; Gonzalo F. Córdova, Resident Commissioner, Santiago Iglesias and His Times (Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993), 25; Fernando Bayron Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos de Puerto Rico (1809-1976) (Mayagüez, P.R.: Editorial Isla, Inc., 1977), 92; see also David Ortiz Jr., Paper Liberals: Press and Politics in Restoration Spain (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 4-6, 9, 105, 108, passim; Dominique Soucy, Masonería y nación: redes masónicas y políticas en la construcción identitaria cubana (1811-1902) (Spain: Ediciones Idea, 2006); Sandi E. Cooper, “Pacifism in France, 1889-1914: International Peace as a Human Right,” French Historical Studies 17 (autumn 1991): 359-386; Felíx Ojeda Reyes and Paul Estrade eds., Ramón Emetrio Betances: obras completas, 16 vols. (San Juan, P.R.: Ediciones Puerto, vols. 1-3 published in 2008-2009, vols, 4-16 are forthcoming); Pilar Barbosa de Rosario, De Baldorioty a Barbosa: historia del autonomismo puertorriqueño, 1887-1896 (San Juan, P.R.: Imprenta Venezuela, 1957).

18 Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 24, 26-28, 31; Ortiz, Paper Liberals, 21-22; Trías Monge, Trials, 11.

opportunities for the other children was not assured.19

Though the date of Domingo Collazo’s marriage to Isabel Gonzalez’s aunt is unclear, Isabel Gonzalez eventually came to call that Puerto Rican typographer uncle. Collazo had arrived in New York from the island in the late 1880s or early 1890s. Once there, he rejected Autonomistas’ attempts to merely alter the terms of Spanish rule in Puerto Rico and instead became an advocate of Antillean independence. Though he would be counted as white in later censuses, for the moment he closely followed the trajectory of Sotero Figueroa, perhaps the most prominent Puerto Rican activist of color to promote an Antillean revolution against Spanish colonial rule. Around 1895, Collazo

became Secretary of a political club that Figueroa had founded and led three years earlier. The club aimed to unite Puerto Ricans in New York behind revolution. Collazo also

joined Figueroa in a second revolutionary club, this one comprised largely of Puerto Ricans of color. There, Collazo attended meetings alongside revolutionary activists like Arturo Schomburg and Rosendo Rodríguez.20

A native of continental Spain, Santiago Iglesias had trained as a carpenter,

participated in republican protests, gained exposure to labor and political thought, and

19 Gonzalez to Degetau, 5 Feb. 1903; Gonzalez to Degetau, 10 Apr. 1904; Manifest for the S.S. Ponce, 12

May 1903, 78, EIA; Transcript of Record, No. 225, Gonzales v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (1904).

20 U.S. Manuscript Census of 1910 for Ward 12, Manhattan, New York, Supervisor’s District No. 1, Enumerator’s District No. 619, Sheet No. 13 A, Line 43, n.d., available at HeritageQuestOnline database,

Series T624, Roll 1024, Page 13; U.S. Manuscript Census of 1920 for New York County, New York, Supervisor’s District No. I, Enumerator’s District No. 974, Sheet No. 7 B, Line 76, 5 Jan. 1920, available at HeritageQuestOnline database, Series T625, Roll 1209, Page 151; Juan Carlos Mirabal, “Momentos del

club Borinquen en el Partido Revolucionario Cubano (1892-1895),” Anuario del Centro de Estudios

Martianos 7 (1984): 140-141 (quoting Sotero Figueroa, Modesto Tirado, Francisco Gonzalo Marín, and Antonio Vélez Alvarado, El Porvenir, 24 Feb. 1892, 1); Bernardo Vega, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, ed. César Andreu Iglesias, trans. Juan Flores (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984 [1977]), 76-77; “Club ‘Borinquen,’”La Patria, 23

Jan. 1897, 3; Las Dos Antillas Political Clubs Minutes, 1892-1908, Schomburg Collection, NYPL; Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, “The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto Rican in New York, 1891-1938,” Journal of American Ethnic History 21 (fall 2001): 3-49. I thank Jesse

Hoffnung-Garskof for guidance with research and analysis on Antilleans in New York and for sharing work and ideas in progress.

written for the labor press before relocating to Cuba in 1887. There, he was a lector in a tobacco factory, charged with reading aloud from novels and newspapers to workers as they performed their work. He also organized workers, published a labor newspaper, and assisted strikes. Like Collazo, though at greater personal risk, Iglesias eschewed Autonomism for revolutionary politics, winning a commission from the head of the Cuban revolutionary movement to write a manifesto on behalf of pro-independence Cuban workers and securing the rank of Lieutenant from insurgent leader General

Máximo Gómez.21

In 1895, partisans of Cuban independence took up arms against the Spanish colonial state. Within months, José Martí—an advocate of separation from Spain who would soon be remembered as a major intellectual and political leader of the Cuban revolutionary movement—joined the troops already in the field in Cuba. Martí depicted Cuban independence as one goal in a larger social revolution that would create an egalitarian Cuba free from race and class divisions. When he died in battle later that year, partisans of such an Antillean revolution lost their most articulate and influential advocate. Some responded by seeking to shore up support for Martí’s vision. Thus, in

1896 Collazo helped found and briefly became the administrator of a new revolutionary newspaper, La Doctrina de Martí. Headed by Rafael Serra, a leading Cuban revolutionary thinker and journalist of color, and frequently featuring Sotero Figueroa’s writings, La Doctrina located itself on “the extreme left of the Separatist Party.” It

rejected calls for U.S. annexation of the Spanish Antilles and advocated a “free and

21 Santiago Iglesias Pantín, Luchas emancipadoras (crónicas de Puerto Rico) vol. 1, 2d ed. (San Juan, P.R.: [Imprenta Venezuela] 1958 [1929]), 15-19, 31-32, 43-44, 88; Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 12-13, 46-

47, 50-52; see also, e.g., Jean Stubbs, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History,

1860-1958 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba Between Empires

1878-1902 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 14.

sovereign” Cuba and Puerto Rico where its envisioned revolution would improve the status of workers, women, and people of color. In his two articles, Collazo stressed Puerto Rican independence, asserting that the revolution “is not only a Cuban question, but an Antillean question, in which Puerto Rico and Cuba share equally.”22

Santiago Iglesias initially remained at his desk as a lector in a Cuban cigar factory

as battles raged elsewhere on the island. Then, in 1896 Cuban authorities searched his home, seized his papers, and issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of sedition and collaboration with the revolution. Iglesias fled to Puerto Rico. While workers’ guilds (gremios), mutual-benefit societies, and strikes were visible there, organized labor in Puerto Rico remained weak and overall working conditions were poor. The young, rural, and island-born Puerto Ricans who made up the bulk of the work force generally lived in the countryside, faced rising mortality rates, and were poor and illiterate. Few owned real estate. Many worked in the coffee, sugar, and tobacco industries that dominated the island. Iglesias treated the dearth of unions as an opportunity. Focusing on urban artisans like himself, he began organizing workers and in May 1897 launched a labor newspaper. He benefited from his status as a continental-born Spaniard, he later recalled. “I was

frank and spoke in the colony without any kind of reservation,” for “the fact of having

22 “Nuestra labor,” La Doctrina de Martí, 25 Jul. 1896, 1 (quote 1); “Ni española ni ‘Yankee,’” La Doctrina de Martí, 30 Jan. 1898, 1 (quote 2 (“libre y soberana”)); D. Collazo, “Deber cumplido,” La Doctrina de Martí, 25 Jul. 1896, 2 (quote 3 (“no hay solamente una cuestión cubana, sino una cuestión antillana, de la cual la de Puerto Rico forma parte lo mismo que la de Cuba”)); Title unknown, El Porvenir,

13 Jul. 1896, 1; Banner, La Doctrina de Martí, 25 Jul. 1896; Banner, La Doctrina de Martí, 10 Nov. 1896,

1; Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, Rafael Serra y Montalvo obrero incansable de nuestra independencia (La Habana, Cuba: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1975); D. Collazo, “¡No más corderillos!” La Doctrina de Martí, 6 Aug. 1896, 3; see also, e.g., S. Figueroa, “Cuba, para los cubanos,” La Doctrina de Martí, 24 Oct. 1896, 1; “A nuestras damas,” La Doctrina de Martí, 10 Oct. 1896, 3; “Patria Libre,” La Doctrina de Martí, 2 Oct. 1896, 1; “Un periódico y un libro,” La Patria, 1 Jul. 1896, 3; “Rasgos de José Martí,” La Doctrina de Martí, 6 Aug. 1896, 2; Pérez, Cuba between Reform and Revolution, 108-110; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 112-138; Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, 14-17, 40-43, 46, 90, 99-100. In becoming administrator, Collazo took on the post that Figueroa had recently filled at La Patria, the oficial newspaper of the Cuban revolutionary Party. “Administración de ‘Patria,’” La Patria, 20 Aug. 1895.

been born in [continental] Spain was, in a way, a form of security for me then.”23

As fighting in Cuba continued, Puerto Ricans observed and maneuvered. Some were optimistic. Spain, they knew, was on the defensive, caught between a resilient insurgency and U.S. pressure to engineer a prompt peace. During prior anti-Spanish foment and uprisings within and beyond the Antilles, Puerto Rico had secured at least temporary gains. In 1812, a short-lived Constitution had treated colonies such as Puerto Rico as Spanish provinces with full representation in the Spanish Cortes, or legislature, and had extended full Spanish citizenship to white islanders. Under attack during a prior Cuban insurgency in the 1870s, Spain had restored some Puerto Rican representation in the Cortes, abolished slavery in Puerto Rico, and promulgated an 1876 Constitution that it had partly extended to Puerto Rico. Luis Muñoz Rivera now sought to repeat this history by remaining loyal to Spain and treating the crisis that the Cuban insurgency had produced as an opportunity to seek autonomy. He traveled to Madrid to form a commission of Puerto Rican Autonomistas that also included Federico Degetau. Once there, and notwithstanding Degetau’s dissent, Muñoz negotiated a deal on behalf of a majority of the commission with the liberal-monarchical party of Práxedes Mateo

Sagasta. That party—along with the Conservative Party currently in power under Antonio

Cánovas del Castillo’s leadership—dominated Spanish politics. Under the agreement,

23 Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, 38-39 (quotes (“era franco y hablaba en la colonia sin reserva de ninguna clase”; “el hecho de haber nacido en España constituía en cierto modo una garantía para mi en aquel momento”)), 31-32, 43-44, 88; Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 12-13, 46-47, 50-52; Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 14; Juan Carreras, Santiago Iglesias Pantin: su vida, su obra, su pensamiento (datos biográficos) (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial Club de la Prensa, 1965), 9; Trías Monge, Trials, 15-17; Fernando Picó, La guerra después de la guerra (San Juan, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán, 1987), 23-29, 33, 35; Henry K. Carroll, Report on the Industrial and Commercial Condition of Porto Rico, 2d ed. (San Juan, P.R.: Ediciones Puerto, 2005 [1899]), 40-52; Gervasio L. García and A.G. Quintero Rivera, Desafío y solidaridad: breve historia del movimiento obrero puertorriqueño (San Juan, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán,

1986), 18-28; Juan Ángel Silén, Apuntes para la historia del movimiento obrero puertorriqueño (San Juan, P.R.: Publicaciones Gaviota, Inc., 1978), 22.

Autonomistas were to fuse with Sagasta’s party, instrumentally retreating from their republicanism to make island autonomy more likely. Though Autonomistas as a whole approved the measure, a substantial minority that included Degetau dissented and withdrew from the party. The schism produced two new parties: Muñoz’s Liberales, and the Ortodoxos to which Degetau belonged. In 1897 Sagasta’s party came to power. Still facing U.S. pressure to end the fighting in Cuba, it extended relatively liberal charters of autonomy to both Cuba and Puerto Rico, albeit ones that also left metropolitan authorities

substantial power over the islands. Island-wide elections were scheduled for early 1898.24

U.S. leaders monitored events in Cuba with growing concern. As 1897 drew to a close, they increasingly realized that Spain would not be able to halt the revolution in Cuba. They thus faced a choice: wait for Cuban rebels to win independence for their island or intervene. Here, competing U.S. aspirations for Cuba muddied matters. For decades U.S. officials had coveted the island, vaguely imagining that Spanish rule would some day end and that Cuba would migrate to U.S. sovereignty. Cuban independence threatened this vision. At the same time, however, much of the U.S. public had come to sympathize with the Cuban independence movement. While this sentiment would prove fleeting, it now led to an unusual situation. U.S. President William McKinley tried to negotiate for purchase of Cuba and then declared the United States on the path to war shortly before the U.S. Congress passed a resolution disclaiming any “intention to exercise sovereignty” over Cuba “except for the pacification thereof.” As active fighting between Spain and the United States loomed, U.S. goals seemed to be defined in contradictory ways. But however unclear the goals of intervention, Congress authorized

24 Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 21, 33-37, 53-55; Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 54, 142-144; Mergal,

Federico Degetau, 50; Bayron Toro, Elecciones, 107-108; Trías Monge, Trials, 11-15.

war on April 20, 1898. The decisive step toward overseas empire had been taken, despite an apparent renunciation of the intent to rule.25

The events that followed sparked a constitutional crisis over the relationships of U.S. imperial governance to U.S. law and democratic norms. That crisis unfolded across the U.S. state. During it, judges, lawmakers, and administrators struggled to variously channel, implement, and contest legal underpinnings of U.S. colonial rule. Those outside the employ of the state, including the Puerto Rican leaders and litigants upon whom this study focuses, also participated. Wielding concepts of citizenship, they made claims that drew official responses and thereby altered mainland-Puerto Rican status relationships. During these debates, actors on all sides drew on, responded to, and transformed powerful, competing metaphors and terminologies involving race and empire. The Insular Cases, as well as the extension of U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917 via the congressional Jones Act, followed. Those legal landmarks largely reflected—even as they shaped—the broader and surrounding set of conversations about race, citizenship, empire, and the Constitution, which, crucially, included a handful of remarkable Puerto

Ricans.

25 Pérez, Cuba between Empires, xviii-xix, 58-227; Joint Resolution for the Recognition of the

Independence of the People of Cuba, Statutes at Large 30 (1898): 738-739.

CHAPTER 2

STATUS IN THE SHADOW OF WAR, 1898-1900

U.S. invasion hit Puerto Rico like a hurricane, destroying or transforming many aspects of life while leaving others intact. People residing on the island found that the war left their allegiances in question and in flux. Drawing on their backgrounds as native-born Puerto Ricans, as islanders born in continental Spain, or as foreigners, residents navigated their competing potential obligations and sought to define their status vis-à-vis Spain, the United States, and other nations. With U.S. occupation also auguring a potential transformation of Puerto Rican tariff policy, businesses and their lawyers contemplated means with which to shape and profit from the upcoming settlement. Partisan differences between island political leaders Federico Degetau and Luis Muñoz Rivera survived the U.S. takeover relatively unscathed. As they considered which political advantages to try

to retain from the times of Spanish rule and to seek from the United States, they also considered their differing roles in the Puerto Rican state. In promoting themselves and their policies to potential island voters and to U.S. officials in control of island governance, the men deployed both the language and the ideal of the United States as a guardian of democracy and individual rights. For Santiago Iglesias, a labor leader on the island, U.S. rule altered the conditions but the nature of his struggle for prominence and

worker welfare. A new metropole did not alter workers’ poverty or powerlessness. It did reshape opportunities for and threats to labor organizing and activism by bringing new investors and employers, a new history of metropolitan labor activism and governmental responses, and new potential allies. The U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico also struck many mainlanders as likely to transform the United States. Some opponents of annexation worried either that it would extend U.S. citizenship, full constitutional protections, and eventual statehood to racial inferiors and thus erode the U.S. nation from within. Others feared that the United States would violate its constitution to exclude such people from the polity. The challenge for those promoting annexation, then, was to reconcile U.S. empire with fidelity to constitutional norms.

The War Department Shapes the Debate

The U.S. War Department lay at the center of debates around the legal implications of U.S. expansion. As the agency responsible for governing territories that the United States occupied, it was among the first parts of the U.S. state to confront potential constitutional and other legal limits that arose through implementing U.S. imperial policies. In Puerto Rico, debates centered on two events: the U.S. invasion and then annexation of the island.

Puerto Rican revolutionary Domingo Collazo was implicated in the invasion that came as part of the broader military conflict between Spain and the United States. That military conflict began with the U.S. routing of a Spanish squadron in the Philippines on May 1, 1898. As U.S. military officials prepared to invade both Cuba and Puerto Rico as well, they met with numerous Puerto Rican members of the Cuban Revolutionary Party,

including Dr. Julio Henna, R. H. Todd, and Antonio Lluveras. Though all three men were members of the same club within that Party, Lluveras proceeded independently from Henna and Todd. He helped the commander of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, General Nelson Miles, plan an invasion that was predicated on Lluveras’s promise that 2,000

Puerto Ricans in the town of Yauco stood ready to receive U.S. arms and rise up in support of U.S. troops. Having already transported Cubans to Cuba to join those already fighting against Spanish forces, U.S. officials selected what came to be known as the Puerto Rican Commission. The seven commissioners, who included Collazo and Lluveras, were to act as guides, aides, and interpreters for the invading army. On July 25, General Miles landed troops and arms near Yauco. Soon Collazo and the other

commissioners were ashore.26

Speaking in Ponce shortly after his arrival, Miles requested Puerto Ricans’ “cheerful acceptance of the Government of the United States” and promised Puerto Ricans “the liberal institutions of our Government” and “the largest measure of liberty consistent with this military occupation.” Hopeful that U.S. rule would in fact bring liberal rule and liberty, many local island leaders welcomed U.S. troops by displaying U.S. flags. At least some commissioners and their allies led campaigns by Puerto Ricans on behalf of U.S. forces, including attacks by armed squads seeking quick, orderly

26 “Porto Ricans Will Go,” The Washington, 22 Jul. 1898, 7; [Roberto H. Todd], Memoria de los trabajos realizados por la sección Puerto Rico del Partido Revolucionario Cubano. 1895 á 1898, reprint (San Juan, P.R.: La Obra de José Celso Barbosa y Calcalá, Inc., 1993 [1898]); Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba between Empires, 1878-1902 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 11-42, 96-112, 196; “Van

Guard of Cuba Invaders,” Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1898, 3; Edgardo Meléndez, Movimiento anexionista en Puerto Rico (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial UPR, 1993), 24; Bernardo Vega, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, ed. César Andreu Iglesias, trans. Juan Flores (New York: Monthly Review Press: 1984 [1977]), 76-77; Enrique López Mesa, La comunidad cubana de New York: siglo XIX (Habana, Cuba: Centro de Estudios Martianos, 2002). For scholarship

using multiple archives to trace family members as they traveled throughout the Atlantic World, see, e.g., Jean Hebrard and Rebecca J. Scott, “Rosalie of the Poulard Nation” (paper presented at the University of

Minnesota Legal History Seminar/Workshop, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 Nov. 2008).

capitulations of lightly defended island towns. By mid-August, fighting had ended and Spain had promised to transfer sovereignty over Puerto Rico to the United States at a future date.27

Formal U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico did not come until April 11, 1899, when

Spain and the United States exchanged the ratifications of the Treaty of Paris ending the war. They had finalized the text four months earlier. The delay in ratification resulted partly from internal opposition. In the United States, a powerful anti-imperialist movement arose to fight annexation of the Philippines. Characterizing Filipinos as a barbaric threat, Anti-Imperialists in the Senate spoke against the treaty. They and allies argued that U.S. colonialism would rend the U.S. constitutional system or, conversely, that the U.S. Constitution would require a disastrous incorporation of Filipinos into the U.S. polity. When the Senate advised ratification on February 6, 1899, it declared that it did “not intend[] to incorporate the inhabitants of the Philippines into citizenship of the United States.” Humiliated by its recent military defeat and reluctant to dismantle the bulk of its remaining empire, Spain delayed ratification somewhat longer, until March

19.28

27 Nelson A. Miles to the Inhabitants of Porto Rico, Headquarters of the Army, Ponce, Puerto Rico, 28 Jul.

1898, in Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1898: Report of the Secretary of War. Miscellaneous Reports (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), 41 (quotes); Mariano Negrón Portillo, Cuadrillas anexionistas y revueltas campesinas en Puerto Rico, 1898-

1899 (Río Piedras: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, 1987), 27-28; A.D. Hall, Porto Rico: Its History, Products and Possibilities (New York: Street & Smith, 1898), 98-100. I have not found evidence that Collazo led such campaigns or had military training.

28 “McEnery Resolution Adopted,” Los Angeles Times, 15 Feb. 1899, 2 (quote); Treaty of Paris, Statutes at

Large 30 (1899): 1754-1762 (official presidential ratification on February 6); Robert L. Beisner, “1898 and

1968: The Anti-Imperialists and the Doves,” Political Science Quarterly 85 (Jun. 1970): 188, 201-202, passim; Paolo E. Coletta, “McKinley, the Peace Negotiations, and the Acquisition of the Philippines,” Pacific Historical Review 30 (Nov. 1961): 341-350; “Philippine Race Problem,” New York Times, 14 Jan.

1899, 4; Fred H. Harrington, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898-1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22 (Sep. 1934): 222, passim; William George Whittaker, “Samuel Gompers: Anti-Imperialist,” Pacific Historical Review 38 (Nov. 1969): 431, 439, passim; see also Allen H. Merriam, “Racism in the Expansionist Controversy of 1898-1900,” Phylon 39 (4th qtr. 1978): 369-380;

Once in place, Article IX of the treaty shaped struggles over allegiance, status, and governance. The article settled one set of lingering questions: whether and which Puerto Ricans owed allegiance to the United States. It demanded U.S. allegiance from all Spaniards born outside the Spanish peninsula then resident in Puerto Rico and gave Spanish “natives of the [Iberian] peninsula” who resided in Puerto Rico a choice: remain Spanish or renounce that citizenship and adopt “the nationality of the territory in which they may reside.” Additionally, Article IX extended congressional discretion over Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans close to its outer constitutional limits, asserting that the “civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by Congress.” The impact of the provision was less broad than its language, for treaties did not nullify constitutional restraints on Congress.

A debate among legal academics soon began over what courts should and would do in the face of such a political assertion of power. Initial commentators split into two broad camps. One set claimed that U.S. annexation would automatically extend peoples in the acquired territories U.S. citizenship, full constitutional protections, and eventual

statehood for their lands. The other asserted that the United States could deny the peoples it acquired this entire bundle of status and rights.29

At the War Department, occupation of Cuba and formal annexation of Puerto

Rico and the Philippines lent growing urgency to questions around the legal ramifications of empire. Recognizing the shift in emphasis from conquest to law, President McKinley

“To Delay the Treaty,” The Washington, 16 Jan. 1899, 3; “Democratic Row Delays Treaty,” Chicago Daily

Tribune, 21 Jan. 1899, 1; “M’Kinley Issues Edict of Peace,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 Apr. 1899, 1.

29 Treaty of Paris 30 (1899): 1754, 1759 (art. 9); Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 42-51; Elmer B. Adams, “Causes and Results of Our War with Spain from a Legal Standpoint,” Yale Law Journal 8 (Dec. 1898):

119-133; Selden Bacon, “Territory and the Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 10 (Jan. 1901): 99-117; James

W. Stillman, “Citizenship in Ceded Territory,” Green Bag 11 (May 1899): 203-208.

on August 1, 1899, appointed as Secretary of War Elihu Root, one of the most respected, capable corporate lawyers of his day. Now an adviser to the U.S. political branches, a peer of other secretaries, and the head of the agency chiefly responsible for governing new possessions, Root became a central architect of U.S imperial policy. Joining his subordinates in deprecating Filipinos, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans as racial inferiors, he

sought ways to ensure ongoing U.S. influence in governance of all three communities.30

Root variously described Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Filipinos as being “as incapable of self-government as children” and thus as sharing the attitude “which causes the continual revolutions in . . . other West Indian islands and the Central American states.” Attributing this degraded state to accrued, persistent, and intergenerational— though not biologically determined—racial differences, he did not “doubt their capacity to learn to govern themselves,” but argued that self-government would “be slowly learned, because it is a matter . . . of character and of acquired habits of thoughts and feeling.” His immediate subordinates agreed. According to the public report of Puerto Rican military governor George Davis, Puerto Ricans resembled “negro illiterates” in the U.S. South, “reservation Indians,” and “Chinese”; lacked “true manhood”; were but “a few steps removed from a primitive state of nature”; and threatened to become another “Santo Domingo, Martinique, or Guadeloupe.” Cuban governor-general Leonard Wood told the New York Times that Cuban self-government could mean “establishment of another Haitian Republic.” Root’s men in the Philippines saw their charges as “large children” and “Indian[s]” who would need one or two generations of U.S. tutelage to avoid reprising “all the oppression and all the evils which were known in Spanish

30 Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938), 215, 222; John Griggs to

Elihu Root, 10 Aug. 1899, MD NARA 350/8/12/C-182-70.

times.”31

Though Root’s Republican Party formally opposed southern disfranchisement of former slaves and their descendants, Root personally and publicly deemed Reconstruction a failed experiment in extending men of color citizenship, suffrage, and equal rights. Joining southern white-supremacist disfranchisers to portray voting as a privilege that could undermine good government if dispensed too liberally, Root and his agents advocated suffrage restrictions. In the Philippines and Puerto Rico, U.S. officials limited voting to combinations of property holding, tax paying, office holding, and

literate men. Root sought a similar result in Cuba, later describing to Governor Wood the importance of “exclud[ing a] great a proportion of the elements which have brought ruin to Haiti and San Domingo.” But having failed to disarm fully the thousands who held no property but enjoyed prestige and had proven their willingness to fight for their vision of Cuban independence, Root and Wood had little choice but to let veterans vote. Though that expansion of the franchise may have helped preserve an uneasy peace in Cuba, it likely contributed to the election of constitutional-convention delegates who disappointed U.S. officials by constitutionally guaranteeing nearly universal male suffrage. Following the reestablishment of civil government in Puerto Rico, lawmakers there too moved to

liberalize suffrage laws until in 1904 nearly universal male suffrage had been restored.32

31 Jessup, Elihu Root, 332 (quote 1), 288; Elihu Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States: Addresses and Reports (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916), 164-165 (quotes 2-4); Geo. W. Davis, Report of the Military Governor of Porto Rico on Civil Affairs, in Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900, vol 1, pt. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902), 117 (quotes 5-6, 8-10), 115 (quote 7); Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 308 (quote

11); Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 378-380 (quotes 12-13); Report of the United States Philippines Commission to the Secretary of War for the Period from December 1, 1900, to October 15, 1901, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 21 (quote 14).

32 Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 311-312 (quoting Elihu Root to Leonard Wood, 14 Apr. 1900), 260, 307-

310, 313-327; Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge,

Root and his subordinates also sought to write U.S. control into the civil governments of the territories that they administered. With the U.S. Congress having rejected annexation of Cuba, Root moved to circumscribe eventual Cuban sovereignty in ways that would nonetheless guarantee a continuing U.S. role in Cuban governance. Synthesizing the ideas of many high U.S. officials with select British imperial practices, Root suggested to Secretary of State John Hay that future U.S.-Cuban relations include a U.S. right to intervene to protect independence, stability, and rights in Cuba; a limited U.S. veto over Cuban treaties; and a U.S. naval station in Cuba. Aware that Cubans would not accept such infringements on their sovereignty once granted independence, Root and the U.S. Congress made these concessions, in a slightly modified form known as the Platt Amendment, the price of sovereignty. They represented, Root told Cuban representatives, the “[e]xtreme limit of this country’s indulgence in the matter of the

independence of Cuba.” Given little other choice, Cubans enshrined the Platt Amendment in their constitution and then in a treaty with the United States.33

With no congressional promise of independence impeding U.S. rule in Puerto Rico or the Philippines, Root promoted explicit U.S. controls. Contending that Jeffersonian government “does not depend upon consent,” Root characterized independence as “the most fatal possible gift” to peoples in need of political

guardianship. “[J]ustice and humanity require,” he added, “that . . . the weak shall be

Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005), 186-187, 202-206; Report of the United States Philippines

Commission . . . 1901, 20; General Orders, No. 160, Headquarters Department of Porto Rico, San Juan, 12

Oct. 1899, MD NARA 350/5A/311/1286:2; Constitución del a República de Cuba (Habana, Cuba: Imprenta de Rambla y Bouza, 1901), 11; Elihu Root, Address of the Honorable Elihu Root, Secretary of War, Delivered at a Meeting of the Union League Club, Held on the 6th Day of February, 1903, To Honor Its Fortieth Anniversary ([1903?]), 7-10; Pedro A. Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898-1932 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 180-182.

33 Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 322 (quoting Washington Evening Star, 1 Jun. 1900, 1), 317-321, 323-

327; Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 206.

protected, that cruelty and lust shall be restrained, whether there be consent or not.” Root initially looked to British colonial models for inspiration, but soon concluded that non- democratic versions of U.S. state governments were a better fit. He and his subordinates thus argued that both archipelagos should enjoy U.S. governmental institutions—e.g., a governor, executive agencies, and a legislative chamber—but little electoral influence. At most, they wrote, elected islanders should form a lower legislative chamber that lacked

the power to “chok[e] the government” by preventing passage of the annual budget.34

Anticipating that his policies and proposals would occasion status-based challenges and congressional questions, Root produced legal arguments denying that the Constitution imposed substantial restraints on U.S. rule in Puerto Rico, and arguing that Puerto Ricans were not U.S. citizens. In an internal Department memo and his annual report, he argued that the dominant understanding of the source of U.S. power to acquire territory was not a constitutional provision but the powers of sovereignty of all nations under international law. That authority, he went on, included a plenary federal power to govern acquisitions limited only by express constitutional provisions and natural law. Because the Constitution primarily limited federal reach by reserving powers to individual, interested states, he added, it had little effect where Congress administered territory for all states. Root cast U.S. rule there as “an inheritance case” where the “[e]xecutor may yield to individuals where their particular shares are at stake, but will guard the general fund for all.” Similarly, Root wrote, the Constitution primarily protected individual rights from federal but not state interference and so ensured a

34 Jessup, Elihu Root, 332 (quotes 1, 3-4); 370 (quote 2) (quoting Elihu Root to Mrs. Lowell, 11 Feb. 1904),

288-379; Report of the United States Philippines Commission . . . 1901, 22 (quote 5); Sparrow, The Insular Cases, 34-35, 40-55; José A. Cabranes, “Citizenship and American Empire: Notes on the Legislative History of the United States Citizenship of Puerto Ricans,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 127 (Dec. 1978): 412-435.

federal-state balance, but did not confer individual rights to those residing beyond state borders. This all made sense, he wrote, because the U.S. Constitution was designed solely for U.S. benefit, which Root defined as encompassing the pre-existing U.S. populations and not annexed peoples. Only a “very few” “general limitations” “protected equally by the Constitution[,] Magna Charta,” and natural law, he concluded, restrained

congressional action in the territory. Even this limit on U.S. rule, he elaborated, was enacted for U.S. and not Puerto Rican benefit. It thus only encompasses strictures that were “a part of the nature of our Government.” The Uniformity Clause—with its prescription that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”—would not qualify. Due Process and Contracts clauses would 35

Root found support in precedents inscribing U.S. expansion and ascription into

law. Assessing judicial review of U.S. actions during the periods of non-state status of Louisiana, Florida, Alaska, the Guano Islands, and Montana, Root found consistent recognition of congressional discretion. Cases involving Mormons, slaves, antebellum free people of color, and American Indians had reached similar conclusions. Thus, Root found, the legal legacy of U.S. expansion and subordination provided doctrinal underpinnings for U.S. colonialism.36

For the proposition that Puerto Ricans were not U.S. citizens, Root and a law officer in his Department, Charles Magoon, drew on U.S. political practice, international law, and the Constitution. In his Department memorandum, Root discussed the judicially

35 Memorandum, n.d., MD NARA 350/5A/197/1444:9, 2-36, 61 (quotes 1-4); Art. 1, sec. 8, U.S. Const. (quote 5); Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1899. Report of the Secretary of War. Miscellaneous Reports, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,

1899), 3 (quote 6); Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States, 161-168. War department officials wrote that the above memorandum was “probably by Sec’y of War Root,” which its topic, orientation toward legal materials, and conclusions indicate. War officials who rediscovered it apparently also gave it a 1904 stamp. Memorandum, n.d.

36 Memorandum, n.d., 38-56.

validated U.S. practice of extending U.S. citizenship to non-tribal residents of annexed areas. Here he stressed that these settlements of questions involving citizenship, governance, status, and rights in acquired land came through treaties and similar documents. They thus reflected, he argued, not fidelity to constitutional mandates but the necessity of political action to accomplish ends that the Constitution did not require. Such discretion over the citizenship status of acquired peoples, he indicated, paralleled international precedents. Britain did not extend its Magna Charta to all people over whom it was sovereign, he wrote. Similarly, international law recognized conquered peoples as nationals of the conquering nation but had no effect on what status the conquering nation

accorded such peoples for its domestic purposes.37

In a February 12, 1900 memorandum later published by Congress, Magoon turned to constitutional issues. The “correlative of allegiance is protection,” not citizenship, he argued, because citizenship was more substantive. It encompassed “great powers, rights, privileges, and immunities,” he continued, noting that were Puerto Ricans to be U.S. citizens, ethnic-Malaysian and -Chinese islanders would have a right to enter the

mainland under U.S. immigration laws. Not only were foreign-national soldiers, aliens, Indians, Chinese, and convicts “persons within the jurisdiction of the United States from whom allegiance in some form is due who are not citizens of the United States,” he expanded, but “in another and limited sense,” so were U.S. “minors and women,” who held only limited political rights. As a result, that Puerto Ricans owed allegiance to the

United States under the Treaty of Paris did not make them U.S. citizens despite the 14th

37 Charles E. Magoon, Report on the Legal Status of the Territory and Inhabitants Acquired by the United States during the War with Spain, Considered with Reference to the Territorial Boundaries, the Constitution, and Laws of the United States, Sen. doc. no. 234, 56th Cong., 1st sess., (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900).

Amendment injunction that “All persons born . . . in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Summarizing the amendment as making U.S. citizens of those who could establish “[b]irth within the territory and allegiance of the United States,” he turned to Elk v. Wilkins, an 1884 Supreme Court case holding that an American Indian who had been born into a tribe and had thus been

outside “allegiance of the United States” at that time did not come within the amendment upon abandoning his tribe and joining non-tribal U.S. society. The decision drew on several arguments, the most prominent of which compared Indians to immigrants to

argue that the quasi-national nature of tribal governments made individual Indians’ decisions to join non-tribal U.S. society akin to expatriations, hence matters of naturalization and not birthright citizenship. In his memorandum, Magoon focused on a less prominent part of the opinion: “Persons not . . . subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at the time of birth cannot become so afterwards” for purposes of claiming

U.S. citizenship under the 14th Amendment. As a result, he concluded, individual

naturalizations were Puerto Ricans’ sole path to U.S. citizenship. 38

In early 1900, U.S. political branches turned their attention to an organic act addressing the status and governance of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. Drawing on Root’s proposals and legal analyses, among other sources, politicians and commentators mixed legal and political questions involving tariffs, the status of people and places, and constitutional injunctions. Frequently they did not detail what links joined their themes. They also cited prior U.S. activities in former territorial acquisitions, though frequently

38 Am. 14, sec. 1, U.S. Const. (quote 6); Magoon, Report on the Legal Status, 71-72 (other quotes); United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898); Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884); above note 29; Memorandum, n.d., 65-75; Chinese Exclusion Act, Statutes at Large 22 (1882): 58; Statutes at Large 23

without specifying whether the analogies were political or legal authorities. Authors and speakers tied governance to race, characterizing Puerto Ricans as superior to ostensibly “savage” Filipinos. But because the Philippines were larger than Puerto Rico and, racially, seen to pose a greater threat, U.S. Congressmen were quick to sacrifice Puerto Rican interests for what they perceived to be a favorable settlement of the Philippines

question. Aware that the Supreme Court would likely use its review of any organic act for Puerto Rico as an opportunity to clarify the constitutional status of Puerto Rico and other new U.S. acquisitions, Congressmen treated the act as a chance to test of the legality of a possible legislative scheme for the Philippines without risking an adverse ruling directly applicable to that archipelago. Imposing a modest tariff on U.S.-Puerto Rican trade, Congressmen observed, would facilitate the envisioned test, because such non-uniform tariffs were constitutionally barred for trade within the “United States.” On April 12

Congress did just that, setting customs and monetary policy for Puerto Rico and delineating a new government to replace War Department rule. By not specifying whether and what constitutional protections, U.S. citizenship status, and eventual statehood status Puerto Ricans would receive, the bill, known as the Foraker Act, indicated that the myriad legal issues raised by annexation could and perhaps should be

addressed separately.39

The bill created a civil government for Puerto Rico with some but not much democracy, thereby closely tracking the proposals that Root had made in his 1899 annual

39 F. Degetau y Gonzales, “Antecedentes del debate: I. Económicos,” El País, 4 Mar. 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L2; “La constitución Americana: conferencia de Degetau,” El País, 17 Apr. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; F. Degetau y Gonzalez, “Educacion civica,” Parts I-VI, newspaper unknown, [Aug.

1900?], available at CIHCAM 12/L2; articles collected in CIHCAM 18/L1, 26-53; Foraker Act, Statutes at Large 31 (1900): 77-86; “Judge Magoon’s Memorandum,” Washington Post, 12 Apr. 1900, 4; see also Cabranes, “Citizenship and the American Empire.”

report. Under it, the President would appoint the Governor, top judges, and Executive Council for the island, with the last forming both a gubernatorial cabinet and an upper legislative chamber. Puerto Ricans would elect the House of Delegates, a lower legislative chamber unable to legislate without Executive Council consent, and the Resident Commissioner, a nonvoting representative in Washington. As Root had earlier observed, this thin democracy had precedents in prior U.S. territorial laws, though,

importantly, inexact ones. Previously, Congress had reserved such strong federal controls for territories with relatively few non-tribal residents, anticipating that greater democracy would follow migrations by U.S. citizens into those lands. Puerto Rico, by contrast, was already densely populated. Additionally, in prior organic acts, Congress had tended to create nonvoting “Delegates” to Congress to represent territorial residents’ interests in Washington. The new nomenclature of Resident Commissioner suggested uncertainty over the status of the island. So too did both the instruction that the commissioner file his certificate of election with the Secretary of State, like a foreign dignitary, and the lack of mention of the commissioner enjoying a voice in the House of Representatives as

delegates generally did.40

Responding to financial and constitutional concerns, the Foraker Act also reshaped Puerto Rican commerce and labor. It set the official exchange rate at $0.60 for each peso and imposed a temporary tariff on goods transported between Puerto Rico and

40 Foraker Act, 31 (1900): 81-84, 86 (secs. 18-28, 31, 33-34, 39); Root, The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States, 167; “Porto Rico Delegate’s Status,” New York Evening Post, 7 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Las gestiones de Degetau en defensa de los emigrantes á las islas Hawaii,” La Correspondencia, 25 Sep. 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Floor Privileges to Degatau,” Washington Post, 22 Apr. 1902, 4; cf. “El Juez Rodey,” El Aguíla, 9 Feb. 1909, available at CHICAM 8/L1; Act of September 9, 1850, Statutes at Large 9 (1850): 451-452 (New Mexico); Act of March 23, 1870, Statutes at Large 16 (1870): 76-77 (Arizona); Jack Ericson Eblen, The First and Second United States Empires: Governors and Territorial Governments, 1784-1912 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968); Northwest Ordinance, Statutes at Large 1 (1789): 51-52.

other U.S. ports that was 15% of the rate charged on foreign goods imported into the United States. While powerful corporate and state sugar interests weighed in on the tariff, their impact was blunted by the conflicting interests of sugar growers and processors, the opportunities mainlanders with capital saw in Puerto Rican sugar, and the emergence of antitrust sentiment and tariff policies as partisan U.S. political issues. Consistent with what Degetau had read during the debates, congressmen also saw a tariff as a way to secure Supreme Court clarification of the status of Puerto Rico. Because it would potentially violate the constitutional injunction that “Duties . . . be uniform throughout

the United States,” a tariff was likely to give the Court an occasion to decide whether Puerto Rico was part of the United States, at least for those purposes. U.S. political branches embraced this opportunity to create a doctrinal hook for judicial review while declining to impose a tariff sufficiently high to slow growth substantially in the Puerto Rican sugar industry.41

Concerning the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans, the Foraker Act obscured as

much as it clarified. Republican Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio, who had authored the law in close collaboration with the White House, had originally included a provision recognizing Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens. In response to colleagues’ objections, he had on March 2 explained that the provision was not “giving to those people any rights that the American people do not want them to have.” This had not satisfied colleagues who worried that the provision might prejudice the issue that they anticipated the Supreme

41 Art. 1, sec. 8, U.S. Const. (quote); Foraker Act, 31 (1900): 77-78 (sec. 3), 80 (sec. 11); César J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898-1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 48-73, 108-109; Frank R. Rutter, “The Sugar Question in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 17 (Nov. 1902): 65-71, passim; “Democratic Platform for

1900,” The Second Battle or The New Declaration of Independence 1776-1900 (Chicago: W. B. Conkey

Co., 1900), 42; note 68 above.

Court would soon decide—whether Puerto Rico was part of the United States—in ways that would tie their hands when legislating for the Philippines. To quell dissent, Foraker backed down, substituting a vague provision describing Puerto Ricans as “citizens of Porto Rico.” It would be for later actors to determine whether this was a national status like French citizenship, a regional status like state citizenship, or something new.42

Taken together, the provisions of the Foraker Act reflected only a modest

clarification of the constitutional and status issues surrounding U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico. The law made no mention of whether Puerto Rico would one day become a U.S. state, instead extending the island a measure of democracy that was small for such a densely populated territory, but similar to that which had existed in other territories that were now U.S. states. Similarly, Congress was reticent about the application of the U.S. Constitution to Puerto Rico; it used a modest tariff to create grounds for a test case that would determine whether the Uniformity Clause applied to the island, but otherwise remained silent. As to citizenship, Congress elected ambiguity. Even as these issues remained unresolved, however, legal analyses like those that the War Department produced shaped the terms of debate, providing argumentative tools to allies and constituting targets for opponents’ rebuttals. By treating each of these issues separately, the Foraker Act made it easier to see constitutional protections, eventual statehood, and U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans as independent issues that could be addressed separately through subsequent claims and future legislation.43

42 Cabranes, “Citizenship and the American Empire,” 428 (quote 1) (quoting Cong. Rec., 56th Cong., 1st sess., 1900, 33, pt. 3:2473), 413; Foraker Act, 31 (1900): 79 (sec.7) (quote 2); A Civil Government for Puerto Rico: Hearings before the Committee on Insular Affairs House of Representatives Sixty-Third Congress Second Session on H. R. 1318 A Bill to Provide a Civil Government for Porto Rico, and for Other Purposes, 26 Feb. 1914, 32 (statement of Lindley Garrison) (citing concern that U.S. laws might automatically apply in Puerto Rico).

43 For an example of an attempt to undercut Root’s influence by undermining his arguments, see “Majority

Crafting Claims against the U.S. State

While the War Department sought to establish what they could do in Puerto Rico, individuals resident there and businesses with interest in island trade struggled to

discover and influence what was done to them. Differently situated people in Puerto Rico pursued a variety of strategies vis-à-vis the U.S. state, dependent in part upon the status that they had held under Spanish rule, the relationships to Spain that they now desired, and the shifting relationship of Puerto Rico to Spain and to the United States. Mainland businesses that feared competition from Puerto Rican products lobbied Congress to tax them. Those that traded in those goods sought to defeat such duties, at times in court. Both groups directed their claims to U.S. officials who generally responded to such concerns by altering policies in ways that avoided rather than answered questions of status.

As the war persisted into August 1898, inhabitants owing Spain their permanent allegiance found themselves caught between regimes. As citizens of a Spanish empire- state at war with the United States, they faced charges of treason for cooperating with U.S. troops. Thus, after retaking towns that Puerto Ricans had helped capture, Spanish troops arrested or killed more than a dozen of the Puerto Ricans they found there. Yet, as U.S. troops overran broad swathes of the island and appeared certain to win the war,

Puerto Ricans’ incentives to cooperate with and pledge allegiance to U.S. forces grew.44

Cognizant of these competing pressures, Commanding General Miles issued an order three days after landing in Puerto Rico that clarified the U.S. position on mutual

Kept in Line,” Washington Post, 12 Apr. 1900, 1.

44 Negrón Portillo, Cuadrillas anexionistas, 19-26.

obligations of allegiance and protection. U.S. forces, he wrote, primarily sought “to destroy or capture all who are in armed resistance.” While Spain might not agree that refraining from “armed resistance” was sufficient to prove allegiance to Spain, Miles’s order created a safe haven of sorts for Puerto Ricans, letting them meet their obligations to the U.S. state through inaction. If they could reconcile passivity with their obligations to Spain, they could avoid a choice between treasonous betrayal of a former or future

master.45

Yet within days, Miles’s subordinates raised the price of liberty and access to governmental institutions. For U.S. forces administering conquered territory, military and political prisoners were a distraction, while the expertise, experience, and effort of Puerto Ricans were key resources. Consequently, U.S. forces paroled prisoners and hired Puerto Ricans willing to give their “word of honor” that they did not “sympathize with Spain”

“in the current war” and “will not give aid nor assistance . . . to the enemies of the United

States.”46

The oaths ostensibly only solicited Puerto Rican passivity—an absence of aid and assistance—but many oath-takers saw little middle ground as to national sympathies during wartime. Before taking the oath, islanders provided their birthplace—generally Puerto Rico or Spain. For those who desired to remain Spaniards after the war, the dilemma could be particular acute. So it appeared to be for Pedro San Clemente who,

45 Miles to Inhabitants of Porto Rico, 28 Jul. 1898, 41; cf. General Order No. 101, War Department, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, D.C., MD NARA 350/5A/21/168 (McKinley’s prior order concerning Cuba).

46 E.g., Parole of M. Gonzalez, 10 Aug. 1898, AG/OG/CG/179/Justicia, Ciudadanía, 19 octubre 1898-1899, C.F. 140, D.P. 1898 (“palabra de honor”; “simpatiza U. con España”; “en la guerra actual”; “no dar ayuda

ni asistencia . . . á los enemigos de los Estados Unidos”); Parole of Rafael Cintron, 9 Aug. 1898, AG/OG/CG/179/Justicia, Ciudadanía, 19 octubre 1898-1899, C.F. 135, D.P. 1898. On Cintron’s form, the

word “Parole” is circled and a hand-written note reading “Custom House employee” appears, suggesting

that he signed the oath as a condition of employment rather than release. Ibid.

after indicating that he was a Spaniard, sought to satisfy the oath while affirming his allegiance to Spain by focusing on his opposition to war: “I say as a Spaniard, that my natural sentiments and sympathies are with my nation; saying at the same time, that I don’t sympathize with any type of war.” For others, oaths confirmed a prior decision to oppose Spain. Island-born Manuel E. Vidal y Vidal, who had already decided to work for the United States, “salute[d] the great power, initiator of the liberty of the American world, and [was] at its service.” Some Puerto Ricans used the oaths to align publicly with the U.S. cause. Native-Puerto Rican Pedro M. Fort y Ramírez declared, “To be a slave or to be a citizen of a free and powerful nation is a great difference, and all my soul and

sympathies are with the United States.”47

After U.S. and Spanish representatives signed a protocol suspending active hostilities on August 12, 1898, U.S. officials again tightened the oaths that they regularly administered as prerequisites to official employment. For the next eight months U.S. military officials would build and administer a Puerto Rican state to govern a population that technically continued to owe Spain its permanent allegiance. While doing so, they used promises of U.S. citizenship and the related issue of allegiance to promote U.S. rule and encourage Puerto Ricans into more robust relationships with the U.S. state. On October 18, 1898, General Guy Henry, a future military governor of Puerto Rico, announced, “The forty five States . . . unite in vouchsafing to you prosperity and

47 In AG/OG/CG/179/Justicia, Ciudadanía, 19 octubre 1898-1899, see Parole of Pedro Sam [sic] Clemente,

10 Aug. 1898, C.F. 135, D.P. 1898 (quote 1 (“Digo como Español, que mis sentimientos y simpatías naturales son á mi nación; diciendo [así] mismo, que no simpatizo con ninguna clase de guerras”)); Parole of Manuel E. Vidal, 10 Aug. 1898, C.F. 143, D.P. 1898 (quote 2 (“Saludo á la gran potencia iniciadora de la libertad del mundo Americano y estoy á las ordenes”)); Parole of P. M. Fort., 10 Aug. 1898, C.F. 139, D.P. 1898 (quote 3 (“De ser esclavo, á ser ciudadano de una Nación libre y poderosa hay una gran diferencia, por eso toda mi alma y simpatias [sic] estan [sic] por los Estados Unidos” )); cf. Hall, Porto

Rico, 109-110 (noting a more substantial oath forces briefly required of judges); Conditions of Parole, Aug.

protection as citizens of the American union.” In the months following, subordinates had islanders swear to undertake such traditional duties of citizenship as allegiance, service, and defense. Under one oath, islanders gave their word to “bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America, . . . serve them . . . against all their enemies,” and act “in accordance with the orders of the President.” The other went farther, requiring that they “swear that it is my loyal and true intention to become a United States citizen” while making them “renounce forever every . . . state or sovereignty[,] . . particularly the King

of Spain.”48

Some Puerto Ricans found these oaths coercive. With no treaty specifying their future relationship to Spain, taking the oath raised troubling questions about their Spanish pensions, their Spanish status, and their prior services to the crown. One native Puerto Rican who had served in the Spanish militia told U.S. officials that losing his Spanish citizenship would contradict his military oath and make him a perjurer. For those born in continental Spain who desired to retain their prior allegiance, the oaths constituted a reversal of sorts, for it was the overwhelmingly island-born Puerto Ricans who embraced U.S rule who were best positioned to comply with oaths of office. Thus, one man wrote the government as “a Spaniard and Notary Public” to see if he could decline the oath, while Antonio Álvarez Nava later sacrificed his notarial post to preserve his claim to “Spanish nationality.”49

48 Hall, Porto Rico, 167-170 (quoting a Boston Herald article) (quote 1); Oath of Allegiance, 1898-1899, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, 19 octubre 1898-1899 (quotes 2-3); Oath of Allegiance of José Siaca ,

1898-1899, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, 19 octubre 1898-1899 (quotes 4-5 (“juro solemnemente que es mi propósito leal y verdadero hacerme ciudadano de los Estados Unidos”; “renuncio para siempre todo . . . estado ó soberano[,] . . . en particular al Reino de España”)). For examples of the many jobs for which such oaths were prerequisites, see AG/DE/SPR/COS/RC/1, C.F. [multiple numbers], D.P. 1898 (multiple dates).

49 Document, 19 Oct. 1898, AG/DE/SPR/COS/RC/1, C.F.81, D.P.1898 (quote 1); Certificate Issued by

On April 11, 1898, Spain and the United States promulgated the Treaty of Paris. In it, the nations addressed ambiguity around Puerto Ricans’ allegiance by transferring the allegiance of the island born to the United States and by giving those born in continental Spain one year to choose between that outcome and continuing their loyalty to Spain. But by failing to clarify the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans now under U.S. sovereignty, Spain and the United States gave Puerto Ricans incentives to claim that status. For instance, the continental-born Dr. Valeriano Asenjo did not merely accept transference of his allegiance from Spain to the United States, but instead took affirmative steps to be recognized as a U.S. citizen. His doing so raised the possibility that continental Spaniards would not only have greater opportunities under the Treaty of Paris to determine their new allegiance, but also might have greater access to U.S. citizenship. Those Puerto Ricans born in continental Spain who remained alien to the United States under the Treaty of Paris could potentially have access to U.S

naturalization procedures on the same terms as other foreigners, an opportunity it was not yet clear that Puerto Ricans who owed their allegiance to the United States would have. Thus in June 1899, Asenjo submitted what he called an “application for naturalization papers” to military-governor George Davis. With no established naturalization procedure in place, Asenjo supplemented his request with biographical details relevant to a variety of conceptions of U.S. citizenship: desire to become a citizen, residence, capacity, achievement, loyalty, language, military service, community, and character. He thus

stressed his seventeen-year residence in Puerto Rico, his four years of medical education

AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, mayo 1901, 1787 (quote 2); U.S. Census of 1910, Series T624, Roll

1778, Page 103, accessed via HeritageQuest Online; Correspondence surrounding Juan Rocafort y Ramos,

17 Mar. to 17 Apr. 1900 in AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, julio 1899-1900. On uncertainty faced by

Puerto Ricans, see, e.g., Document, 25 Oct. 1898, AG/DE/SPR/COS/RC/1, C.F.344, D.P.1898; Document,

7 Nov. 1898, AG/DE/SPR/COS/RC/1, C.F.525, D.P.1898.

in New York, his professional status as a doctor, his “desire to become an American citizen,” that his “sympathies are entirely American,” and his fluency and literacy in English. Additionally, he attached a reference from a member of the U.S. armed forces attesting that Asenjo was “well known and respected in this community—[] intelligent, conscientious and of high moral character.” An aide-de-camp to Davis deflected this

claim by explaining that no court in Puerto Rico was yet authorized to naturalize.50

Asenjo gained a second opportunity to claim U.S. citizenship on October 12 when Governor Davis promulgated new election laws. In crafting his order Davis faced a populace that included island-born Puerto Ricans who now owed the United States their permanent allegiance; frequently long-term-resident foreigners who under international law owed the United States only the temporary allegiance of sojourners; and Puerto Ricans born in continental Spain who had eight more months to choose which status to occupy. Davis decided to give “foreigners of long residence in Puerto Rico [including Puerto Ricans born in continental Spain] an opportunity to vote in the election.” He thus

ordered that qualified “[c]itizens or subjects of foreign countries . . . be permitted to vote .

. . provided . . . that they shall have made renunciation under oath of their foreign nationality.” More than 1,000 men, including Asenjo, responded by “solemnly declar[ing] and swear[ing] that it is my bona fide intention to become a citizen of the United States of America. I renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to the [state to which allegiance was currently owed].” Though Davis later insisted that his order “in no

50 Valeriano Asenjo to George Davis, 7 Jun. 1899, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, junio 1899, 3728; Aide-de-Camp to Valeriano Asenjo, 15 Jun. 1899, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, junio 1899, 3728. Within weeks, a U.S. Provisional Court did begin issuing declarations of intention to become U.S. citizens, including some which eventually ended up in the naturalization files of the U.S. District Court for the District of Porto Rico. E.g., Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America of Alberto Bravo, 25 Jul.

1899, NY NARA RG 21, Early Naturalization Records for U.S. District Court in Puerto Rico, Box 1, Declarations of Intention.

way related to naturalization,” the French Chargé d’Affaires, on December 26, 1898, asked the U.S. Secretary of State if the order extended U.S. naturalization laws to the island. If so, both men knew, it could mean U.S. citizenship for and French expatriation of oath-takers. Though of little concern to French officials, Davis’s order also again raised the possibility that the United States would reenact Spanish favoritism toward Puerto Ricans born in continental Spain by giving them and not native-born Puerto

Ricans access to naturalization.51

An official in the State Department then wrote the War Department for clarification, launching correspondence that revealed agreement that the order had been a mistake but disagreements—rooted in officials’ differing roles—over responses. The State Department argued that the second part of the oaths raised troubling questions. While the declaration of intention to become a U.S. citizen merely tracked “the first act necessary to naturalization” under U.S. law, the renunciation of foreign nationality “superadd[ed] thereto the performance of an act which under the naturalization laws of the United States is an essential feature of the final act of admission to citizenship.” For the State Department, which had to explain U.S. policy to foreign officials, Davis’s order could “create for a foreigner accepting its provision an anomalous situation, inasmuch as by renouncing his foreign allegiance he would cease to be a citizen of the country of

51 Wrapped document, Secretary of State to Secretary of War, 18 Jan. 1900, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, marzo 1900, 7171 (quote 1); General Orders, No. 160, 12 Oct. 1899, 3-4 (quote 2); Gobierno

Militar, Secretaria Civil, Bureau de Estado, Legajo numero

formado con las declaraciones y

juramentos de fidelidad prestado al Gobierno de los E.E. U.U. de America por los extranjeros que fueron

súbditos del de

, AG/DE/T76-16/1, 3 (quote 3); Assistant Secretary of War to Secretary of State, 20 Jan.

1899, MD NARA 350/5A/311/1286 (quoting correspondence from Davis) (quote 4); Translation, Thiebaut to John Hay, 26 Dec. 1899, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, marzo 1900, 7171; Fernando Cortes, Summary of Oaths of Allegiance, 11 Mar. 1901, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, 1900-1901, tarjetas

11125, 1399, 1593; Valeriano Asenjo y [Pascual], 31 Oct. 1899, Juramento de fidelidad á los Estados Unidos de América, in Legajo num. 6 formado con las declaraciones de juramento de fidelidad prestado al Gobierno de los EE.UU. de América por los extranjeros que fueron súbditos del de [sic] España, no. 128, AG/DE/T76-16/3; Robert Phillimore, Commentaries upon International Law (Philadelphia Pa.: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1854), 278.

origin without thereby acquiring any new allegiance.” Agreeing that a foreigner in Puerto Rico might, under Davis’s orders, renounce one allegiance while “having acquired no right to any other citizenship,” Root wrote not of fear of foreign states but of individual claimants. A “French subject” in such a position, he predicted, “would very naturally complain of having been misled.” Thus, he concluded, the provision should be stricken. Describing his “embarrassment” that his policy had placed hundreds “in the anomalous condition of ‘a man without a country,’” Davis asked to retire rather than rescind his order. Less concerned with international reaction or future claims, he worried that revocation would invalidate recent local elections, creating local “turmoil and excitement.” Instead, he proposed, only address the issue if forced. Root and his staff concurred, at least temporarily leaving open the issues raised by the French Chargé d’Affaires. If Dr. Asenjo pushed the matter further, I have yet to find evidence of the

effort.52

As other Puerto Ricans continued to claim U.S. citizenship, U.S. officials established a regular response: avoidance. In one example a former Puerto Rican resident who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the United States and served under U.S. forces in the Insular Police, Rafael Molinari, wrote the Puerto Rican government from Mexico. He sought certification of his prior service, which, he presumed, would prove his U.S. nationality. U.S. officials demurred. Avoiding the substantive issues of whether residence in lands under U.S. sovereignty made him a U.S. national and whether his oath and quasi- martial service entitled him to U.S. protection, the Secretary of Puerto Rico wrote that the

52 In AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, marzo 1900, 7171, see John Hay to Secretary of War, 27 Jan.

1900 (quotes 1-3); Elihu Root to George Davis, 6 Feb. 1900, (quotes 4-6); [George Davis] to Secretary of War, 12 Feb. 1900 (quotes 7-9); Clarence Edwards to Geo. Davis, 7 Mar. 1900. See also Memorandum Card, 27 Feb. 1900, MD NARA 350/5A/311/1286:4; John Hay to Secretary of War, 10 Apr. 1900, MD NARA 350/5A/180G/1286-5; Assistant Secretary of War to Secretary of State, 20 Jan. 1899.

oath and service had not naturalized Molinari and that Molinari was not listed as a U.S. citizen in existing documents. In November 1900, Carlos Rampola launched a claim with similar results. He told U.S. officials that he and his siblings, children of U.S. citizens who had resided in Puerto Rico for eighteen years, sought recognition as U.S. citizens. The Acting Attorney General of Puerto Rico, in a letter to the Governor, advised otherwise. Despite agreeing that the siblings were U.S. citizens, he saw no need for official confirmation. Rather, “[i]f the persons . . . are citizens of the United States, and

any right belonging to them based thereon shall be hereafter denied them, ample remedies for enforcement of such rights exist in Porto Rico.” In other words, Rampola needed a better test case.53

While Puerto Ricans were failing to clarify their status, a second and related line

of claims involving challenges to federal customs policy made headway. By October

1899 the Coudert Brothers international-law firm had begun to lay groundwork for such challenges. Writing former colleague Secretary of War Elihu Root, they expressed professional interest in the “many questions arising in Cuba,” which the United States also still occupied, and requested legal opinions and circulars from Root’s Department. Such documents would help them dispense advice to and mount legal challenges to U.S. policies adversely affecting their clients. By late 1899, the New York Times reported, “[n]umerous protests” were “pending before the board [of general appraisers] regarding duties levied on merchandise from Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” Initially some failed

for a variety of technical reasons: shipment predated annexation; U.S. sovereignty did not

53 Correspondence Wrapper, dating from 20 Nov. 1900, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía, 1900-1901, tarjetes 11125, 1399, 1593; Summary, Rafael Molinari to [Governor?], 14 Jul. 1900, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia/ciudadanía julio 1900 10906; Summary, W. Hunt to [Rafael Molinari], 19 Dec.

1900, AG/OG/CG/179/justicia—ciudadanía diciembre 1900.

cover Cuba; and filing in customs court created a presumption that goods were imported. But beginning in July 1900 federal circuit courts began issuing rulings on whether Puerto Rico was part of the United States for purposes of tariff laws and constitutional provisions. The Coudert Brothers law firm brought two particularly well-framed challenges. On March 12, 1900, it sued George Bidwell, the collector of customs at the port of New York, in state court on behalf of D. A. de Lima and Company. In the suit, quickly removed to a U.S. circuit court, De Lima protested tariffs that Bidwell had levied in late 1899, before enactment of the Foraker Act. In a perfunctory October 17, 1900, opinion, the court rejected De Lima’s complaint. De Lima appealed. Then, on November

23, 1900, Coudert Brothers brought a new suit against Bidwell on behalf of Samuel

Downes and in the circuit court. Downes contested tariffs that Bidwell had levied in late

1900 after enactment of and pursuant to the Foraker Act. The court rejected this complaint perfunctorily on November 30, 1900. Downes too appealed. By year end, appeals of both cases pended before the U.S. Supreme Court.54

Autonomists Reconstituted: Luis Muñoz Rivera and Federico Degetau Face U.S. Rule

Proceeding under the Charter of Autonomy that Spain had extended Puerto Rico

the year before, Luis Muñoz Rivera moved in early 1898 to establish himself as the head

54 Coudert Brothers to Elihu Root, 19 Oct. 1899, MD NARA 350/5A/169/1116; “Cuba a Foreign Land in Law,” New York Times, 9 Nov. 1899, 7; Virginia Kays Veenswijk, Coudert Brothers: A Legacy in Law: The History of America’s First International Law Firm 1853-1993 (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1994), 135; Sparrow, The Insular Cases, 55; see also, e.g., “The Porto Rican Decision,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 19 Jun. 1900, 6; Goetze v. United States, 182 U.S. 221 (1901); Transcript of Record, no. 456, DeLima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 1 (1901); Motion to Advance, DeLima; Transcript of Record, no. 507, Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901); but cf. “Outside of Tariff Laws,” Washington Post, 15 Feb. 1900, 4 (reporting that “the board of classification of the United States general appraisers” had denied a claim that Puerto Rico was part of the United States for purposes of “goods imported”).

of a new, autonomous Puerto Rican civil government. On March 27, 1898, in what the Charter had decreed would be the first island-wide election with near-universal male suffrage, 121,573 Puerto Rican men cast ballots. Securing more than two-thirds of the vote, Muñoz’s Liberales looked forward to controlling the upcoming island legislature. Degetau’s party, the Ortodoxos, received less than 20% of that total, though Degetau himself won and quickly occupied a post as a deputy in the lower chamber of the Spanish Cortes in Madrid. Within weeks, Spain and the United States were at war and then on

July 17, eight days before U.S. troops came ashore in Puerto Rico, the island legislature opened with Muñoz at the head of the cabinet-like Council of Secretaries.55

Across the Atlantic, Federico Degetau faced the war as a deputy in the Cortes. Like most elected Puerto Rican officials, he did not support a Cuban-style revolution in Puerto Rico and instead advocated Puerto Rican autonomy from, allegiance to, and participation in the metropolitan state. But such loyalty, he and his compatriots in Spain discovered, did not insulate their policies, posts, or constituents from danger. After word of the U.S. landing in Puerto Rico reached Spain, Juan Ramos y Velex, a fellow attorney, wrote Degetau that he expected a Spanish colonial policy of “the offering of Isaac sacrificed by his father Abraham.” A recent copy of the Madrid El Heraldo, he then related with disgust, asserted that national interests meant that Spain “‘cannot arm the inhabitants because it would be to expose itself to what occurred in the Philippines.’” Now, he feared, Spain might send under-armed islanders into the “slaughterhouse.” “Is it

that the national honor commands it?” he wrote. “My God: no more of national honor; it

55 Division of Customs and Insular Affairs, War Department trans., Adaptation of the Electoral Law of June

26, 1890, to the Islands of Cuba and Porto Rico (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 3,

5; Fernando Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos de Puerto Rico (Mayagüez, P.R.: Editorial Isla, Inc., 1977), 107-108 and n.153. On Ortodoxos, see Introduction above note 24 and accompanying text.

has already been satisfied.”56

Several days later, with U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico likely, Rafael María de Labra, a Puerto Rican politician and advocate of autonomy, described to Degetau another betrayal of the mutual obligations of allegiance and protection that allegedly bound the Spanish citizenry of Puerto Rico to their metropole. Spain, he wrote, accused Puerto Rico of “disloyalty” while itself preparing to concede rather than meet its duty to protect the island. Spanish cession of Puerto Rico, he noted, meant Spain “forgetting about the agreements that were contracted with us, respecting the government”; hard-won Puerto Rican autonomy might not survive annexation. Then, on August 7-8, liberal Madrid newspapers El Heraldo and El Globo addressed the anomalous position of Puerto Rican deputies, who represented soon-to-be annexed constituencies. Though the papers agreed that deputies could finish their terms, they encouraged them to and assured readers that they would resign their posts once their districts disappeared.57

Federico Degetau thus occupied an uncomfortable position by the time Spain and the United States declared an end to active fighting in an August 12 protocol promising Spanish cession of Puerto Rico to the United States. An official state of war existed between the government of which he remained a deputy and the troops currently

56 Juan Ramos y Velex to Federico Degetau, 27 Jul. 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/69 (“[ofrecer?] de Ysaac sacrificado por su padre Abraham”; “no puede armarse á los habitantes porque sería exponerse á que ocurriera lo de Filipinas”; “matadera”; “Es que el honor nacional lo impone?”; Por Dios: basta ya de honor nacional que á la fecha esta ya satisfecho”) (I follow Ramos’s usage in not placing an accent on Velex).

57 Rafael M. Labra to F. Degetau, 7 Aug. 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/71 (“Por ofriciar de Ysaac sacriado por su padre Abraham”; “que no puede armarse á los habitantes porque sería exponerse á que ocurriera lo de

Filipinas”; “matadero”; “¿ . . . . Es que el honor nacional lo impone?”; “¡Por Dios! basta ya de honor

nacional, que á la fecha esta ya satisfecha”); “Sin representación,” Heraldo de Madrid, 7 Aug. 1898, available at CIHCAM 22/L1; “Los representantes antillanos,” El Globo, 8 Aug. 1898, available at CIHCAM 22/L1; John L. Offner, The Diplomacy of the United States & Spain over Cuba, 1895-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 78; David Ortiz Jr., Paper Liberals: Press and Politics in Restoration Spain (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 99; Fernando Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos de Puerto Rico (1809-1976) (Mayagüez, P.R.: Editorial Isla, Inc., 1977),

108.

governing the homeland that he represented. He responded by temporarily relocating to his property in France and seeking to convince Spain and the United States to mitigate the conflicting loyalties that the looming U.S. annexation would impose on Puerto Ricans. There, in mid-October, he wrote both to Praxedes Sagasta, the Spanish Prime Minister, and to U.S. President McKinley. Drawing on his commitments to international law and mandatory arbitration as an alternative to war, he advocated making mandatory, permanent arbitration part of the final treaty of peace. Otherwise, he argued, Puerto Ricans’ “regional history, culture, and . . . language,” which constituted a “moral” and

“indestructible link of origin,” would coexist with the “narrow, juridical link” they would soon owe the United States; renewed U.S.-Spanish hostilities would be for them “in part

a civil war.”58

When U.S. and Spanish treaty negotiators arrived in Paris soon thereafter,

Degetau secured meetings with them. Having drawn on his existing relationships in Spain and begun building enduring relationships with high U.S. officials, he shared his views with both. Although the parties rejected his arbitration suggestion, they accepted his proposal to promote Puerto Rican culture and education by allowing Spanish-language “scientific, literary and artistic works” to be admitted duty-free to the island for ten years following ratification of the treaty. Degetau then left for Puerto Rico, arriving in late November to restart his political life.59

58 Federico Degetau to Praxedes Sagasta, 15 Oct. 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/80 (quotes 2, 5 (“moral”; “en parte una guerra civil”)); Draft, Federico Degetau to Mac Kinley, 18 Oct. 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/81 (quotes 1, 3-4 (historia y cultura regional y de nuestro idioma”; “indestructible vinculo de origen”; “estrecho vinculo jurídico”)); Certification of Permission to Embark for Puerto Rico, 23 Sep. 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/77. On Degetau’s pre-1898 interests and commitments, see Introduction above, note 17 and accompanying text.

59 Treaty of Paris, 30 (1899): 1754, 1761 (art. 13) (quote); P. Sagasta to Federico Degetau, n.d., CIHCAM

2/III/83; John Hay to F. Degetau, 10 Nov. 1898, CIHCAM 2/III/88; [Illegible] to Federico Degetau, 26 Oct.

1898, CIHCAM 2/III/86; John MacArthur to F. Degatau, 31 May 1899, CIHCAM 2/IV/6; [Federico

Degetau], “A el ‘Diario,’” El País, 15 Sep. 1900, available at CIHCAM 22/L1; Title unknown, La Nueva

Muñoz spent the early months of U.S. rule trying to prolong his pre-war political power. As head of the first autonomous, democratically elected, insular parliament on the island at the time of U.S. invasion, he had nowhere to go but down. If the United States reduced Puerto Rican autonomy, the portion of the state that Muñoz controlled would shrink. Any position in Puerto Rican civil government except the top one would also be a demotion. As a result, progress for Muñoz lay in opposing and impeding U.S. innovations.

Indeed, Muñoz’s position had promptly come to seem less powerful and less permanent under U.S. rule. Despite reconstituting Puerto Rico’s elected Council of Secretaries as a U.S. institution and confirming Muñoz as both its interim President and its interim Secretary of State, U.S. military authorities made themselves the locus of state power. In December, newly appointed military governor Guy Henry foreshadowed imposition of a literacy requirement for suffrage by voicing his support for the measure.

He then told a critical prominent island politician that “he [the governor] was the supreme authority of the Island.” Both the decision and the response to criticism boded poorly for Muñoz, whose power depended upon robust civilian rule and winning elections. His Liberales had just won a commanding majority in elections featuring nearly universal manhood suffrage, but had not been tested before an electorate from which, as Henry intimated, the more than three quarters of islanders who were illiterate had been

expunged.60

Era, 22 Nov. 1898, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Title and newspaper unknown, 22 Nov. 1898, available at

CIHCAM 12/L2.

60 Santiago Iglesias Pantín, Luchas emancipadoras (crónicas de Puerto Rico) vol. 1, 2d ed. (San Juan, P.R.: [Imprenta Venezuela] 1958 [1929]), 101 (quote (“él era la suprema autoridad de la Isla”)); Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People, 64 (citing the 1899 census); Document, 22 Oct. 1898, AG/DE/SPR/COS,

C.F. 74, D.P., 1898; see also “La alocución del General Henry,” El Liberal, 10 Dec. 1898, 1. On Muñoz’s

power in late 1899, see note 61 below and accompanying text. On Muñoz’s pre-invasion position, see

On February 5, island military governor Henry reorganized the elected Council of Secretaries into four departments whose heads reported directly to him. Muñoz and his colleagues resigned in protest and appealed to Washington. Military governor Guy Henry met the resignations with an attack on Muñoz, telling Puerto Ricans that the Council

“was of Spanish origin[,] gave to one man the opportunity to dominate all the departments and to enhance his political power[, and was] contrary to that which should exist under the present form of government.” Under the new system, he wrote, Liberales and Ortodoxos were both represented, “so that all the people may feel they have representation.” Explaining that Muñoz wanted more—suffrage and a legislature—he

wrote that “[t]hese come with Congressional legislation and are not possible now.”61

In attempting to divide U.S. officials in Puerto Rico from those in Washington, Muñoz misjudged the federal state and isolated himself from it. On February 15, the military governor wrote Washington that Muñoz was “a disgruntled politician [who] lost his power through his own fault” and that Puerto Ricans were “incapable of governing themselves and will be for some time to come. Like children, they have to be governed

by fear.” Washington officials, who worked through and tended to trust their subordinates

in Puerto Rico, appeared to concur, letting the change in island governance and the

Gonzalo F. Córdova, Resident Commissioner, Santiago Iglesias and His Times (Río Piedras, P.R. : Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993), 60; José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 13-14.

61 Headquarters, Department of Porto Rico, General Order No. 17, 10 Feb, 1899, in, Annual Reports of the

War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1899 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,

1900), 576 (quotes); Headquarters, Department of Porto Rico, General Order No. 12, 6 Feb. 1899, in vol. 4,

Laws, Ordinances, Decrees, and Military Orders Having the Force of Law, Effective in Porto Rico, May 1,

1900: Letter from the Secretary of War Transmitting, in Response to the Inquiry of the House of Representatives, Laws and Ordinances of and Military Orders and Decrees Affecting Porto Rico, House of Representatives, 60th Cong., 2d sess., doc. no. 1484 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,

1909) 2191-2192. In this period Ortodoxos were known as Radicales. I retain the old term until they reconstitute as Republicanos circa mid-1899. For an excerpt from a letter Muñoz wrote after arriving on the mainland to lobby officials in Washington, see “Muñoz Rivera en los Estados Unidos,” La Democracia, 3

May 1899, 2.

resignations stand.62

Muñoz’s setbacks facilitated Degetau’s gains. In February, Degetau secured the vacancy that Muñoz’s orchestrated resignations had left at the head of the island’s Department of the Interior, becoming one of four top civilian officers on the island and responsible for education, public works, and charities. Shortly after Spain and the United States formalized U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico via the Treaty of Paris, island political leaders reconstituted themselves into new political parties. On July 4, 1899, revolutionaries who had assisted the U.S. invasion joined former Ortodoxos like Degetau to launch a new party they called Republicano. Soon thereafter Muñoz and his allies, in a substantially weaker position than they had been a year earlier, reconstituted themselves into the Partido Federal.63

Both coalitions retained the Autonomist ideals of liberal republicanism and Puerto

Rican self-government that had dominated Puerto Rican politics since late in Spanish rule. Portraying themselves as the best men to lead Puerto Rico as it forged a relationship to a new sovereign, leaders in each party trumpeted their Puerto Rican patriotism and cast their political aspirations for Puerto Rico in terms of U.S. practices and constitutional traditions. Their rivals, they argued, failed on one or the other criteria.

To position themselves as vigorous and pragmatic advocates of Puerto Rican self- government, Muñoz and other Federales described the United States as a nation that valued regional autonomy and people willing to struggle for it. Celebrating U.S.

annexation as a step toward autonomy, their platform contended that no other nation had

62 G. Henry to Adjutant General, 15 Feb. 1899, MD NARA 350/5A/21/168:3 (quotes); Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People, 167.

63 To the People / Al país, ([P.R.], Imp. El País, [1899?]), available at CIHCAM 22/L1; Headquarters, Department of Porto Rico, General Order No. 15, 9 Feb. 1899, in Laws, Ordinances, Decrees, and Military

Orders.

“a system of autonomy so broad and indestructible.” It was thus, they claimed, that the United States was not “called a nation[;] they . . . do not say: <Oh Lord, bless our nation,> but they say: <Oh Lord, bless these United States.>” Yet in joining the Union,

Muñoz’s paper El Liberal argued, “the race that inhabits Puerto Rico” also faced a threat of domination by and absorption into the United States. Acknowledging that Puerto Ricans could only hold their own by achieving an unlikely national greatness like that of French Revolutionary troops and Frederick the Great’s armies, the paper told readers that the thirteen original U.S. colonies had once spoken “loudly because they didn’t know

how to speak like slaves”; they did not seek “liberty as a privilege, but as a right.” Puerto Ricans, too, it wrote had won “liberty” and “autonomy” from Spain, and now should again “claim with . . . energy the respect that ought to come to our personality as a

pueblo.” Previously, another Federal paper claimed in an English-language article, Puerto Ricans who had less than full freedoms under Spain had abstained from May 2 festivities that celebrated how “Spain combated with heroic impetus for its independence.” Now, it related, some Puerto Ricans who supported “the liberal principles upheld by Washington” would avoid Washington Day celebrations because they were “subjected to a degrading, depreciating inferiority, . . . are denied citizenship, [and] are not protected by a

constitution.”64

By depicting a United States that would extend ample autonomy to those who

64 Program del Partido Federal ([1899?]), 9-15, available at CIHCAM 6/L3 (quotes 1-2); Puerto-Rico en la union Americana,” El Liberal, 27 Jan. 1899, 1 (quotes 3-4 (“¿De qué modo, evitando la absorción, puede sostener competencia con la americana la raza que habita Puerto Rico?”); “Entre claro y oscuro,” El Liberal, 10 Jan. 1899, 1 (quotes 5-6 (“habló alto, porque no supo emplear el lenguaje de los esclavos”; “no pidió la libertad como una merced: la reclamó como un derecho” )); “La personalidad de Puerto Rico,” El Liberal, 7 Jan. 1899, 1 (quotes 7-9 ( “libertad”; “autonomía”; “reclamamos con . . . engergía el respeto que se debe á nuestra personalidad como pueblo”)); “Spain Preferred to Our Neglect,” Diario de Puerto Rico,

24 Feb. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quotes 10-13); Art. 2, sec. 1, U.S. Const.; “Lecciones al pueblo,” El Liberal, 17 Jan. 1899, 1.

fought for it, Muñoz could position his clashes with U.S. officials as evidence of his fitness for Puerto Rican leadership rather than as examples of bootless anti-U.S. intransigence. Explaining his earlier resignation from the body that had been the Council of Secretaries in an open letter, Muñoz portrayed himself as a martyr to honor and country whose actions would hurry U.S. extension of autonomy to Puerto Rico. In reducing the responsibilities of Muñoz and the other highest-ranking elected officials on the island, Muñoz wrote, Governor-General Henry had “completely annulled” “the personality of our country,” “snatch[ed]” away “the autonomy we were enjoying when the occupation began,” and made it impossible for Muñoz to “continue with dignity” in his post. Drawing on a metaphor of polity as family, Muñoz advocated a Puerto Rican “emancipation,” that “Porto Rico be a brother in the [U.S.] family and not a slave.” With Henry’s contrary change in place, he did not think that new “[m]en of honor and character” should decline official posts. Change, he argued, would now come not from local protests but through appeals to federal authorities who, he predicted, “will not consent to the enslavement of the whites after spilling so much blood to prevent the

enslavement of the blacks.”65

Muñoz’s claim that struggle represented the surest path to Puerto Rican autonomy also facilitated his critique of Degetau and other Republicanos who had benefited from

his and his colleagues’ travails. Republicanos, Muñoz and his allies claimed, resembled the Puerto Rican Unconditional Party from Spanish rule. Incondicionales—who had tended to be Iberian-born and used patronage networks to accrue electoral power—had

supported centralized Spanish rule in Puerto Rico rather than autonomy. In opposition,

65 Luis Muñoz Rivera to friends on the island, n.d., in “Luis Munoz Rivera,” San Juan News, 14 Feb. 1899,

1, available at MD NARA 350/5A/21/168:7.

Autonomistas had aligned emerging Puerto Rican patriotism with advocacy of autonomy, making Incondicionales national enemies in popular island memory. Although Republicanos joined Federales as successors to political movements that had long opposed Incondicionales, Federales now argued that Republicanos mirrored their prior common enemy in extending unpatriotic, disproportionate loyalty to the new metropole.

They were, Federales argued, “unconditionally American.”66

By the time the United States formally annexed Puerto Rico, Republicanos like Degetau had, unlike Muñoz and his Federales, aligned themselves with a new metropole that many islanders perceived to be a modern, affluent model of democracy. Degetau

built on this prestigious association with U.S. rule by developing and displaying expertise in U.S. law and politics and by taking positions of leadership that publicly highlighted his commitments to promoting Puerto Ricans’ welfare through a mix of paternalistic and modern-liberal reforms. He thus entered the Puerto Rican Supreme Court bar, chaired the island Board of Charities, served on the Board of Trustees for the free library of San

Juan, became President of the San Juan school board, and joined the Executive Committee of the Partido Republicano. Twining charitable service with paternalism toward purported social inferiors, Degetau offered lectures in San Juan for the betterment

of unmarried women and working-class men. He also presented himself as a man of

66 Asamblea republicana. Celebrada en San Juan, Puerto Rico. Los días primera y dos de julio de 1899 ([San Juan,] P.R.: Imprento de “El País,” 1899), 29, available at CIHCAM 6/L2 (quote (“incondicionalmente americano[]”) (quoting Federales)); F. Degetau y Gonzalez, To the People (P.R.: El País, [1900?]); Astrid Cubano-Iguina, “Political Culture and Male Mass-Party Formation in Late- Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (Nov. 1998): 642-643, passim; Eileen J. Findlay, “Decency and Democracy: The Politics of Prostitution in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1890-

1900,” Feminist Studies 23 (autumn 1997): 471-499; Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 20-59; Mariano Negrón-Portillo, Las turbas republicanas, 1900-1904 (Río Piedras, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán, 1990), 21-22. On Federales’ ongoing charges of unconditionalism, see, Title unknown, El Territorio, 5 Jul. 1899, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Title unknown, La Democracia, [Jul. 1899?], available at CIHCAM 12/L2;

E. Astol, “Two Kinds of Unconditionalism. A Parallel,” Puerto Rico Herald, 22 Feb. 1902, 5. On

Autonomistas, see Introduction, notes 17-18, 24 and accompanying text.

principle, risking controversy to reject a suggestion by a Muñoz newspaper that in Puerto Rican girls “the general instinct awakes very early” making “immediate vigilance, not of a teacher but of a mother,” necessary. Rather, he argued, the paper needlessly cast doubt on the virtue of Puerto Rican daughters and on the morality of Puerto Rican wives and mothers, for science, experience, and modern pedagogy all supported co-education. Then as Chair of the Board of Charities, Degetau investigated and confirmed charges that the superintendent of an orphan asylum had physically abused children in his care. The

Board closed the matter after accepting the resignation of that superintendent but not punishing him further. Writing Governor-General George Davis that “neither you nor any other officer . . . could so punish soldiers—already robust men—with such impunity,” Degetau resigned.67

At the same time he devoted himself to mastering English while supplementing

his firsthand knowledge of U.S. practices and norms by consuming scholarly and political writings and commentary. These, he would later indicate to readers of island newspapers, included books like James Bryce’s 1888 treatment of U.S. people and institutions, The American Commonwealth and articles by professors and politicians in leading mainland

67 “Protesta,” El País, 7 Jul. 1899, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quoting El Territorio, 1 Jul. 1899) (quotes

1-2 (“el instinto general despierta desde muy temprano”; “la vigilancia inmediata, no del maestro sino de la madre”)) (emphases omitted); Draft, F. Degetau to G. Davis, 30 Mar. 1900, CIHCAM 2/IV/18 (quote 3) (I have utilized what appears to be Degetau’s translation into English); Major Egan and F. Degetau, Investigation of the charges of Excessive punishment brought against Mr. Benjamin Delvalle, Acting Superintendent of the Boy’s Charity School, 29 Mar. 1900, CIHCAM 10/II/35 et seq.; Certification of Eugenio de Jesús López [Gartamlide?], 8 Jan. 1900, CIHCAM 6/I/17; Charles Allen to Frederico Degetau,

25 Nov. 1900, CIHCAM 2/V/6; “Los examenes generales,” La Correspondencia, 19 Jun. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; [Illegible] to Federico Degetau, 9 Jun. 1900, CIHCAM 2/IV/21; Headquarters, Department of Porto Rico, General Order No. 37, [3?]1 Mar. 1899, available at CIHCAM 2/IV/5; F. Degetau to Manuel Rossy, 31 Aug. 1900, in “Un acuerdo,” El País, 20 Sep. 1900, available at CIHCAM

12/L2; José Barbosa et al. to Federico Degetau, Sep. 1900, CIHCAM 2/IV/29; “Conferencia importante,”

newspaper unknown, 9 Sep. 1899, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Ateneo,” La Correspondencia, 5 May

1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; title unknown, La Correspondencia, 6 May 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Asamblea republicana, 21-23; “Lo de beneficiencia,” El País, 1 Apr. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Lo del asilo de huérfanos,” La Correspondencia, 3 Apr. 1900, available at CIHCAM

12/L2; “Lo de beneficiencia,” El País, 4 Apr. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2.

periodicals.68

As a result of these efforts and his preexisting reputation, Degetau quickly emerged as a leading Republicano spokesman. In promoting his party and later his own candidacy to represent Puerto Rico as its first nonvoting Resident Commissioner in Washington, Degetau portrayed Federales as patriotic fools. Their sound and fury on behalf of the island, he claimed, signified nothing in comparison to Degetau’s informed and effective, albeit more subtle, efforts to secure Puerto Rico a favorable status within the United States. Degetau attacked Federales’ constitutionally doubtful demand that the

United States immediately extend Puerto Rico a territorial government “with all the rights of a State, except the right of sending Senators and [voting] Representatives to

Congress.” Doing so would, for instance, contravene the Article Two reservation in the U.S. Constitution of electoral votes for President to the states. In making such a demand, Degetau charged, Federales displayed “total ignorance concerning the roles of States and Territories in the Union.” Stressing the role of the U.S. Congress in shaping Puerto Rican status, Republicanos used their platform to counsel and even celebrate patient attention to meeting the expectations of an admittedly superior United States. It is, they wrote, “our duty to await” congressional action. In the meantime, they proposed, Puerto Ricans

should “advance civilization” on the island, “lend every effort to . . . teach [islanders]

loyalty” to the United States, and “strive to become worthy” of a United States that could help them achieve “the highest culture in human destinies.”69

68 Federico Degetau to Adolfo Marin, [Mar. or Apr. 1899?], CIHCAM 2/IV/13; Degetau, “Antecedentes del debate”; “La constitución Americana”; Degetau, “Educacion civica”; articles collected in CIHCAM

18/L1, 26-53.

69 Program del Partido Federal, 9-15 (quote 1); “Gran fiesta republicana en Rio-Piedras,” El País, 4 Sep.

1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quote 2 (“la total ignorancia en que se hallan respecto de lo que son en la Unión los Estados y los Territorios”)); Degetau, To the People (quotes 3-9); Art. 2, sec. 1, U.S. Const.

This full-throated embrace of U.S. rule, Degetau added in a speech at a Republicano convention, was no impugnment of Republicanos’ Puerto Rican patriotism. Only under “monarchical and centralized pueblos” like Spain, he claimed, does “patriotism . . . involve[] a tension between love of region and submission to the family or city that personifies or stands in for the entirety of national life.” Because the U.S. federal government did not dominate its regions, he continued, there “patriotism has a double concept with profound love of native region acting as a basis and foundation for profound love and respect for the general state.” In fact, Degetau asserted, his purported sophistication about the nature of U.S. politics and law would only enhance his vigorous advocacy on Puerto Ricans’ behalf. Thus, shortly after the Foraker Act laid out procedures for electing a nonvoting representative of Puerto Rico in Washington and an island House of Delegates, Degetau asked his “Fellow-citizens” to select a Republicano legislature and to give him the “honor of representing our people [and] going to claim in Washington for us the right to the fullness of the American citizenship” as resident commissioner. He promised islanders that “basic principles of the Constitution of the United States” guaranteed Puerto Ricans “enjoyment of the American citizenship” and Puerto Rico status as an “organized Territory now, in preparation to become an autonomous state of the union.” Honor and manhood, he intoned, demanded that they vindicate these rights. Just as the U.S. Revolution told “the world that mankind has reached its majority,” islanders had reached “the hour . . . of assuming the duties and responsibilities of American citizenship.” Failing to win “immunities and privileges of the citizenship,” would doom U.S. rule in Puerto Rico and ruin “our honor . . . as Porto

Ricans, as Americans, and as men.” Unlike Muñoz and his allies, he insisted, only he had

done the “studies of constitutional materials and decisions involving the American constitutional questions that underlay issues of status” to succeed. He was ready, he elaborated, to “brandish” the “juridical meaning” of the Treaty of Paris “in defense of the rights of our country.”70

Debate in Washington concerning U.S. rule in Puerto Rico, Degetau claimed,

raised two fundamental, interrelated issues: the status of Puerto Rico and of Puerto Ricans. The dilemma, he wrote, was whether “Puerto Rico will be a Republican Territory today and tomorrow a State of the Union, or [if] Puerto Rico will be what the Anglo Saxons call ‘a crown colony.’” That question in turn raised another: if “there are in the United States . . . or can be two classes of citizens, two conditions of rights,” “citizens of

a higher category called to govern other citizens of an inferior condition.” He argued that the answer lay in the highest U.S. authority, a constitution with two facets: the principles, organizations, and functions that it established, which then developed over time; and the

legal document with its fixed, interpretable text.71

70 Asamblea republicana, 29 (quotes 1-3 (“el patriotismo en los pueblos monárquicos y centralizados supone un dilema entre el amor á la región y la sumisión á una familia ó á una ciudad, que encarnan y absorven [sic] la vida nacional toda”; “El patriotismo Americano tiene el doble concepto de amor profundo á la región nativa, como base y fundamento del amor y respeto profundos al Estado General”)); Degetau,

To the People, (quotes 4-5, 9-12); Degetau to correligionarios, 5 Sep. 1900, in “Candidatos o candiditos,” El Diario, 11 Sep. 1900, available at CIHCAM 22/L2 (quotes 6-8, 13 (“principios básicos de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos”; “plenitud de la ciudadanía americana”; “Territorio organizado ahora, que se prepara para ser uno de tantos Estados Autónomos de la Unión”; “estudios sobre materia constitucional y determinadamente sobre las cuestiones constitucionales americanas de que depende el status”)); [Degetau], “A el ‘Diario’” (quotes 14-16 (una significación jurídica de cuya interpretación surgen armas que es preciso esgrimir, y que un día esgrimiré en defensa de los derechos de nuestro país”)); “Gran fiesta”; Degetau to Rossy, 31 Aug. 1900; “Need the Best Candidate,” San Juan News, 1 Oct. 1900,

available at CIHCAM 22/L1, 104; “La convención republicana,” newspaper unknown, [early Oct. 1900?], available at CIHCAM 12/L2.

71 F. Degetau y Gonzalez, “El Dilema,” El País, 20 Mar. 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L2 (quote 1 (“Puerto Rico será un Territorio Republicano hoy y mañana un Estado de la Unión, ó Puerto Rico será lo que entre los anglo-sajones se llama <una Colonia de la Corona.>”)); F. Degetau y Gonzalez, “Puerto-Rico ante el Congreso,” El País, 16 Mar. 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L2 (quotes 2-3 (“hay en los Estados Unidos ó que puede haber dos clases de ciudadanos; dos condiciones de derecho”; “unos ciudadanos de

superior categoría llamados á gobernar y otros ciudadanos de inferior condición que solo sirvan para ser

gobernados”)); “La constitución Americana.”

With him and his audiences presumably aware that the United States treated non- whites as “citizens of an inferior condition” in the popular sense of citizenship as full membership in a civic community, Degetau found reassurance in the history of the U.S. Constitution. He added that under it innumerable groups—all, he implied, inferior to Anglo-Saxons—held extensive, formal rights. Overlooking the failure of such legal forms to protect ostensible beneficiaries from such subordinating state polices as Jim Crow, Degetau instead focused on a whiggish recounting of the history of U.S. rights. After abolishing slavery, and despite worries that southern U.S. society, including its many former slaves, “‘was not prepared’ for the life of law,” he claimed, the United States had “not dared to deprive slaveholders or freedmen of the privileges and immunities of the Constitution.” Today, he wrote, the United States extended “equality before the law and liberty,” albeit a technical one, to a “pueblo composed of representatives of all the European families, and of the families of Cherokee, Chootawaw, Chickawa, Creek, Seminole, among other varieties of red skins, and of Chinese in California and of Blacks

in the South.”72

For those unimpressed by the chance to resemble U.S. blacks, Degetau also portrayed members of the Latin race like Puerto Ricans as coauthors with Anglo-Saxons of democracy, hence equal members in a shared civic tradition. Equating political

72 F. Degetau y Gonzalez, “Por honor y por deber,” El País, 22 Mar. 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L2 (quotes 1-2 (“‘no estaba preparado’ para el derecho”; “no se atrevió á despojar a esclavizadores y esclavizados de las [] garantías y de las inmunidades de la Constitución”); Degetau, “Puerto-Rico ante el Congreso” (quotes 3-4 (“la igualdad ante al derecho y la libertad”; “pueblo compuesto de representantes de todas las familias europeas y de indios Cherokees y Chootaws y Chickasaws y Creeks y Seminoles entre las variedades de pieles rojas, y de chinos en California y de negros en el Sud”)); “La constitución Americana” (quote 5 (“las distintas razas humanas en ella representadas”)); “La constitución de los Estados Unidos,” El País, 23-24 Apr. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; cf. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkely: University of California Press, 1997). For an overview of ascriptive strands in the history of U.S. citizenship, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

organizations and political innovations of nations with the “distinct human races represented in” them, he depicted “Latins” as affirming “the existences of the individual as the center of juridical relations” and unifying diverse peoples within a single state through common laws. Montesquieu, he added, developed the Aristotelian notion of separation of powers that the United States had put into practice.73

Yet despite his assurances that the U.S. government would see Puerto Rican

Latins as Anglo-Saxons’ equals, Degetau also worried about the matter. The challenge,

he wrote, was that because many in Congress both saw the Foraker Act as a precedent for Filipino legislation and did not believe that Filipino history had prepared those islands for U.S. institutions, they might equate Puerto Ricans and Filipinos. In response, he did not explicitly make Cuba his object lesson, though it shared a history of slavery and a populace with African ancestry with Puerto Rico; many mainlanders were racializing Cubans as dark, barbaric, dishonorable, and incapable of self-government; and some Cuban leaders were responding by stressing Cuban civility, culture, peacefulness, and whiteness. He did, however, tell readers, “our duty now is to demonstrate with information the reality that we are a civilized and Christian society and that it cannot be said that ‘we are not prepared’ to live with the principles of the Constitution.”74

Though Degetau also asserted that the legal or textual Constitution as well as U.S. ideals, international standing, and honor would all ensure U.S. citizenship and

73 “La constitución Americana” (“latinos”; “la existencia del individuo como centro de relaciones jurídicas”).

74 Degetau, “Por honor y por deber” ( “nuestro deber de la hora presente es demostrar con los datos de la realidad que somos una sociedad civilizada y cristiana y que no se puede decir de nos otros que ‘no estamos preparados’ para vivir esos principios de la Constitución”); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 170-194; Jessup, Elihu Root, 370; Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 200-260; see also, e.g., “A Sovereign Power,” New York Herald Tribune, 4 Feb. 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L1, 34; “Nation’s New Possessions Not Ready for

Complete Government,” [New York?] Press, byline 18 Feb. [1900?], available at CIHCAM 18/L1, 40;

“Porto Rico Bill before the House,” New York Press, 20 Feb. 1900, available at CIHCAM 18/L1, 41C.

constitutional rights for Puerto Ricans. But by framing his claim as an argument that he could later deploy if necessary, he also he betrayed concern that U.S. officials might disagree. Degetau depicted a U.S. Constitution that constrained U.S action in Puerto Rico. Unlike Root, for whom sovereignty over Puerto Rico brought the United States inherent, unimpeded governing discretion, Degetau claimed both that all federal power over Puerto Rico sprang from the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution and that this power was limited by the numerous constitutional provisions that protected individual rights from federal, though not necessarily state, infringement. As for U.S. citizenship, he wrote that subjecting Puerto Ricans would be both to say “Goodbye Washington, Goodbye Founding Fathers” and indicate, “with the entry of Puerto Rico into the Union as a ‘Dependency,’ that American citizenship had been reduced to the

monopoly of 74 million oligarchs.” If the United States “shamefully” reneged on General Nelson Miles’s presidentially sanctioned promise to Puerto Ricans on behalf of the “honor and . . . dignity of the American pueblo” to bring them the blessings of the U.S. Constitution, it would be a “disrespect of [U.S. people’s] own honor and good name,” recognized as such “even in the eyes of a tribe relegated to the solitude of Indian

Territory.”75

As voters considered Federales’ and Republicanos’ competing arguments, the Executive Council of Puerto Rico proceeded under the Foraker Act to divide the island into seven electoral districts. Aware that the district lines would shape electoral fortunes

75 Degetau, “Puerto-Rico ante el Congreso” (quote 1 (“adios Washington, adios Padres venerables de la Constitución”)); “El dilema” (quotes 2-6 (“con el ingreso de Puerto Rico en la Unión como ‘Dependencia’, la ciudadanía americana se redujo al monopolio de 74 millones de oligarcas”; “humillarse avergonzada por la desestimación de su propia honra”; “honor y . . . dignidad del pueblo americano”; “desestimación de su propia honra y de su buen nombre”; “ante la tribu perdida en las soledades de su Territorio Indio”)); “La libertad en la constitucion de los EE. UU.,” El País, 7, 15, 23 May 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; see also F. Degetau y Gonzalez, “La palabra del Choctaw,” El País, 27 Jul. 1899, available at CIHCAM 12/L2.

for the major Puerto Rican political parties, the Executive Council proposed a procedural solution. After new Governor of Puerto Rico Charles Allen appointed five Puerto Ricans—two Federales, two Republicanos, and one independent—to the Executive Council, the Council instructed those members to propose electoral districts. At a subsequent meeting, the Republicano members accepted a plan proposed by the independent. Despite protests by the Federales, the Council ratified the choice. Hoping to improve their prospects, Federales charged gerrymandering; the two Federales on the Council resigned; and Muñoz cabled Washington in protest. As in 1899, Muñoz’s attempt to divide Washington and island officials failed. On September 7, the State Department cabled the Governor for details, and the Governor “[r]ecommend[ed] resignations be accepted at once” from the “declared obstructionists, openly and actively hostile to America and Americans.” The State Department told the Governor that President

McKinley directed acceptance of the resignations.76

With elections looming, Federales next faced extralegal violence unchecked by island officials. In successive September incidents, a group of mostly working-class residents of San Juan who supported Republicanos gathered outside of Muñoz’s home and fired shots, then destroyed the press with which he published the newspaper El Diario. These public performances of violence against a man of Muñoz’s standing by men he would have perceived to be his social inferiors overturned honor-based norms of deference and provided at least some who had long faced disfranchisement with opportunities to assert their equality or even their superiority. Though both attacks were

76 In AG/OG/CG/179/justicia, ciudadanía octubre 1898, L. M. Rivera, see Governor Allen to Assistant

Secretary Hill, 8 Sep. 1900 (quotes); Hill to Governor Allen, 7 Sep. 1900; John Hay to [Governor Allen], 3

Oct. 1900. See also Foraker Act, 31 1900: 82-83 (secs. 27-30); Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People,

167; “Se consumó la injusticia: nueve contra dos,” La Democracia, 6 Sep. 1900, 2.

brazen and lengthy, city officials did not prevent them. As November elections for the House of Delegates and Resident Commissioner neared, the extra-legal violence intensified, until Federales faced nearly daily attacks in and around San Juan. Finally, in early November, Muñoz and the Federales decided to withdraw from the elections, citing “lack of protection for our right to vote and the manifest partiality of the council in favor of the Republican[o] Party.” Two days later, Republicanos ran unopposed in November 6 elections, sweeping the House of Delegates and electing Degetau Resident

Commissioner. Within days, Degetau had left for Washington to fulfill his campaign promise to win U.S. citizenship for all islanders. Soon thereafter, Muñoz joined him on the mainland in self-imposed exile.77

New Labor: Santiago Iglesias Seeks Mainland Allies and U.S. Protection

Santiago Iglesias embraced U.S. rule from the outset. He perceived its potential to alter political and economic relations between island workers, local elites, metropolitan officials, and U.S. capital. He could observe that under U.S. rule island political leader Luis Muñoz and his partisans lost much of the political power they had been on the verge of locking up in mid-1898. Similarly, U.S. capital followed U.S. troops into the island. Admittedly unfamiliar with many facets of U.S. politics, government, and organized labor, Iglesias took an experimental approach to his new circumstances. He explored mainland alliances, formulated and revised arguments around U.S. rule, and sought

77 Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People, 168 (quoting U.S. Department of State, First Annual Report of the Governor of Porto Rico (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 47); Negrón-Portillo, Las turbas republicanas, 81, 87, 93, 108-109, 127-132, 138-139, 158-199; Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 197, 177-178, 188; Eileen J. Suarez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 93; Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos, 115-116; “Porto Rican Delegate,” Indianapolis Journal, 3 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Topics of the Times,” New York Times,

17 Apr. 1902, 8.

opportunities to take advantage of U.S. protection and promises of freedoms of citizenship.78

Iglesias’s first opportunities came early. Shortly before the U.S. invasion Iglesias had learned of orders to arrest him that he presumed were Muñoz’s doing. Captured

while seeking to flee to the United States, he had been jailed by Spanish colonial officials who viewed him as a danger to a state on the brink of war. His release came five months later, on October 5, 1898, as part of a U.S.-initiated policy toward political prisoners. When a police inspector close to Muñoz immediately sought to re-arrest Iglesias, Iglesias sought protection from U.S. troops. Those troops, he remembered years later, told him, “Now you don’t have anything to fear; the American flag protects you[;] . . . consider yourself a free citizen.” Two weeks later, on October 20, Iglesias founded the Federación Regional de los Trabajadores de Puerto Rico to organize, represent, and advocate for island workers. Three days after that he launched the newspaper Porvenir Social, an

organ of the Federación Regional that published American and European writings on labor organizing, economic battles, and socialism. By October 25, he had organized artisans and workingmen to petition for his appointment as a San Juan councilman. And at the end of the month, a large assembly of labor representatives supplemented their

economic demands by declaring, “we are annexationists”; “the institutions of the

78 Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom; Cesar J. Ayala and Laird W. Bergad, “Rural Puerto Rico in the Early

Twentieth Century Reconsidered: Land and Society, 1899-1915,” Latin American Research Review 37, no.

2 (2002): 221; Laird W. Bergad, “Agrarian History of Puerto Rico, 1870-1930,” Latin American Research Review 13, no. 3 (1978): 73-74; Sidney W. Mintz, “The Culture History of a Puerto Rican Sugar Cane Plantation: 1876-1949,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33 (May 1953): 229; Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Hurricane of San Ciriaco: Disaster, Politics, and Society in Puerto Rico, 1899-1901,” Hispanic American Historical Review 72 (Aug. 1992): 324-325. On social organizing, legal and political change, and experimentation, see Mark Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-

1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Steven Michael Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).

American Republic should be planted in our Island for the good of the pueblo.”79

Having regained a measure of space in which to maneuver, Iglesias turned to forging alliances. One opportunity came from Federico Degetau’s Republicanos, newly ascendant over Iglesias’s former adversary, Muñoz. When Degetau and his co-partisans met with Iglesias and the Federación Regional in mid-1899 to propose an alliance, however, a combination of self-interest and his expressed desire to keep labor independent of partisanship led Iglesias to demur. Other members embraced the chance

to acquire electorally powerful allies. As the white Spaniard Iglesias later acknowledged, “[t]hat Dr. Barbosa [the leader of the Republicanos] was a prominent member of the race of color, and that many workers of all kinds were of the same race that society was prejudiced against, complicated my situation greatly.” When a fractious, chaotic labor meeting followed, Iglesias and his allies abandoned the Federación Regional to Degetau

and his allies, forming the Federación de Trabajadores Libres in its stead.80

Seeing mainland labor organizations as other potential allies, Iglesias and his colleagues resolved to reach out to the U.S. Socialist Labor Party and the American Federation of Labor. Socialist Party leaders saw U.S. annexation of hundreds of thousands of workingmen as an opportunity to grow. Within days of promulgation of the Treaty of Paris, they wrote Iglesias with information, sought links with socialists in Puerto Rico, and solicited an article from Iglesias for their organ, The People. Later that

79 Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, 83 (quote 1 (Ahora no tiene usted nada que temer; el pabellón Americano le ampara[;] . . . puede considerarse un ciudadano libre”)), 96 (quotes 2-3 ( “somos anexionistas”; “las instituciones de la República Americana deben implantarse en nuestra Isla para bien del pueblo”)), 62-72, 77-78, 82, 88, 92-93, 95; Document, 25 Oct. 1898, AG/DE/SPR/COS/RC/1, C.F.276, D.P.1898; Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 59; “The President’s Message,” New York Times, 12 Apr.

1898, 1.

80 Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 59 (“La circunstancia de ser el Dr. Barbosa un miembro prominente de la raza de color, y de ser un gran número de obreros de todos los oficios procedentes de la misma raza

prejuiciada en la sociedad, complicaba mucho más mi situación, haciéndola dudosa y delicada”), 117-122.

year, Iglesias provided the requested article, and the political wing of the Federación Libre formally aligned with mainland socialists. By contrast, the American Federation of Labor vilified U.S. expansion as a threat. In late 1899, protesting “against the forcible annexation to this country of . . . Porto Rico” rather than for better U.S. rule there, the Federation described Puerto Ricans being “deprived of the right of self-government” as putting “our [mainlanders’] political rights . . . in jeopardy.” Earlier, Federation President Samuel Gompers, had linked Puerto Rico to what he perceived to be the racial threat of the Philippines when, in opposing annexation of both, he had asked, “If the Philippines are annexed what is to prevent” “hordes of Chinese and the semi-savage races” of “the negritos and Malays from coming to our country [and] . . . engulfing our people and our

civilization?”81

During a trip to New York hosted by mainland socialists in the first quarter of

1900, Iglesias saw benefits from associating with their party. At numerous socialist events he discovered an inclusive organization of male and female workers of Russian, German, Italian, Polish, French, Austrian, and Spanish descent; he heard speeches in German, Spanish, and English; and he saw an embrace of Puerto Rican unions. He also observed that U.S. socialists held banquets, used large meeting halls, and counted lawyers, doctors, writers, and journalists as members, indicating resources that outstripped those of the Federación Libre.82

While there, he also gained access to mainland audiences. On March 8, for

81 Report of Proceedings of the 19th Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor Held at

Detroit, Michigan, December 11th to 20th Inclusive, 1899 (James H. Stone & Co, 1899), 148-150 (quotes

1-3); “Samuel Gompers Is Hissed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 Oct. 1898, 4 (quotes 4-5); “Chicago Peace

Jubilee,” New York Times, 19 Oct. 1898, 3; Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 94, 113, 126, 162-164.

82 Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 136-139, 144-149, 165-166; Eddie Gonzalez and Lois Gray, “Puerto

Ricans, Politics, and Labor Activism,” in Puerto Rican Politics in Urban America, ed. James Jennings and

Monte Rivera (Westport, Colo.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 117 (citing Vega, Memoirs).

example, Iglesias tested his arguments before 6,000 workers and reporters at a socialist meeting at the Cooper Union hall that had previously been a forum for Cuban revolutionary activities. Stressing Puerto Rican workers’ need for U.S. protection, he characterized U.S. rule in Puerto Rico as an interrupted journey from slavery to freedom. “[F]or four centuries, the privileged were the owners of lives and haciendas,” he told listeners, and workers were “treated like servants.” Even before “President McKinley . . . told Congress and the world: ‘THAT IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY AND LIBERTY, I INTERVENED IN THE SPANISH COLONIES,’” “they [Puerto Ricans] accept[ed] with jubilation the DEMOCRATIC AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS.” Problems, he

related, arose due to “a privileged class of the republic” and “capitalist designs” aiming to create a “new slavery.” The U.S. people, he contended, should not let the “ignorance,” “humility and submission” of island laborers lead those laborers to “work nearly for free and be political slaves.” Rather they should “loan their cooperation and protection” to Puerto Rico “until it has been elevated to a level of economic and political life like that in modest U.S. states.” When Iglesias finished, the audience adopted a protest resolution

that they telegraphed to President McKinley. Afterward, the socialist paper The Worker quoted Iglesias at length and the New York Tribune described Puerto Rican workers’ claims of mistreatment, over-taxation, and disfranchisement to its broader audience.83

The first major test of whether Iglesias could find space for labor activism under

83 Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 146-149 (quotes (“por espacio de cuatro siglos, fueron todos los privilegiados dueños de vidas y haciendas”; “Presidente McKinley, quien había dicho en el Congreso de Washington y al mundo entero: ‘QUE EN NOMBRE DE LA HUMANIDAD Y LA LIBERTDAD, INTERVENIA [sic] EN LAS COLONIAS ESPAÑOLAS”; “ellos aceptan con júbilo las INSTITUCIONES DEMOCRATICAS AMERICANAS”; “una clase privilegiada de la República”; “designios capitalistas”; “nueva esclavitud”; “ignorancia”; “humildad y sumisión”; “trabajen casi gratis los obreros puertorriqueños

y sean esclavos políticos”; “prestarle su cooperación y protección, hasta elevarlo al nivel de vida económica y política similar a cualquiera de las comunidades más modestas de los Estados de la Unión”)),

144-145, 150, 155; López Mesa, La comunidad cubana, 25, 101-102.

U.S. rule and through recourse to mainland socialist allies came shortly after implementation of the exchange rate in the Foraker Act lowered workers’ real wages. Employers implemented the exchange rate set by the Act by paying workers $0.60 for each peso previously earned. Merchants did not, charging $1.00 for goods that had previously cost one peso. Iglesias had few resources with which to respond. Though island labor leaders claimed to be translating documents from the mainland socialists for publication in the local labor press and anticipating organization of a socialist party

throughout the island, Puerto Rican organized labor remained institutionally weak. As the

San Juan News wrote, “Labor in Puerto Rico is not well enough organized to accomplish[] anything by strikes” because “a strikers’ reserve fund is unknown among the local labor unions, and as the men live practically from hand to mouth, they cannot stay out over a day or so.” Nonetheless, in early July Iglesias and fellow labor leaders planned a general strike centered in San Juan to target initially construction and municipal and insular works. On August 1, after employers denied workers’ written demands, the strike began. As Iglesias recalled, their efforts paralyzed private and government works and municipal and military workshops.84

For several weeks the strike occasioned official repression and party competition. For Degetau’s Republicanos, it was a threat. A successful strike would raise Iglesias’s standing; laborers would join the Federación Libre and might leave the Republicano- aligned Federación Regional; and Republicano vote totals could fall. San Juan officials, led by their Republicano mayor, thus repressed the strike. On August 2, the San Juan News sided with city officials, reporting that “notorious Socialist” Iglesias and some

84 “Labor Leader Was Jailed,” San Juan News, 2 Aug. 1900, 1, available at AG/OG/CG/disturbios, #11709, cuatro copias del periódico San Juan News 1900-1902, caja de procedencia 233 (quotes); Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 167-169, 173-174; Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 79.

colleagues had been arrested, but that it was “not probable that any of the strikes will assume any seriousness” “on account of the number of troops” available. Iglesias protested to the mayor that police had provoked strikers in order to arrest them, then

arrested him for not rising to the bait. Those charged to protect public order and safety, he declared, had committed “acts [that] were truly cowardly and beneath the dignity of civilized men.” Repression continued. Within days, twenty-seven strikers and strike leaders had been arrested. Though eventually released pending a trial scheduled for early September, Iglesias was charged with criminal conspiracy.85

During this period, Muñoz’s Federales and mainland socialists lent Iglesias some

support. Federales shared Iglesias’s antipathy for Republicanos and criticized what they described as repression of strikers by Republicano officials. On August 5, for example, Muñoz’s paper El Diario reported that Degetau had overstepped the bounds of what even his U.S. allies would permit: “At 9:45 a municipal hygiene attendant passed through la Cruz street, exchanged words with a building worker, and in the presence of the mayor and Federico Degetau, set out to arrest him. Some Americans stepped in because they observed that this was unjust.” On August 22, Iglesias wrote to workers and socialist journals in New York about difficulties on the island. He subsequently reported that the association between Puerto Rican workers and such extra-island organizations helped Puerto Rican organized labor survive the oppression of the period. Some San Juan strikers, Iglesias also later reported, won gains.86

85 “Labor Leader Was Jailed.” (quotes 1-2); Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 189 (qutoe 3 (“actos resultan verdaderamente cobardes e indignos de hombres civilizados”)), 187-188, 193.

86 Iglesias, Luchas Emancipadoras, 187 (“A las 10 menos cuarto pasó un celador de higiene municipal por la calle de la Cruz, tuvo algunas palabras con un albañil, y a presencia del Sr. Alcalde y de Don Federico

Degetau, dispuso autoritariamente que se le arrestase. Varios americanos lo impidieron, porque observaron

era una injusticia.”), 167, 191, 197.

During and after these months the Federación Libre faced extralegal violence

from the largely poor San Juan residents who supported Republicanos and the Federación Regional and who engaged in anti-Federal violence too. These assailants fought members of the Federación Libre during the strikes, and, Iglesias reported, attacked him thrice following his release from prison pending trial. Lacking civil rights necessary for labor activism, blacklisted from many workshops, and vulnerable to vigilante violence, Iglesias left San Juan for New York in late September. Finding work and lodging with socialist friends there and uncertain if he would return to Puerto Rico, he joined a local union and began publishing articles in the mainland labor press. His first attempt to use U.S. rule

and a mainland ally to advance his standing and the cause of organized labor in Puerto

Rico had failed.87

The range of potential consequences of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico for U.S. law, Puerto Rican status and self-government, and island leaders narrowed sharply between 1898 and 1900. In 1898, many Puerto Rican leaders, military officials, and mainland commentators predicted wholesale extension of the U.S. constitutional order to Puerto Rico, including self-government, liberal U.S. institutions, U.S. citizenship, full constitutional protections, and eventual statehood. Others on the mainland envisaged a U.S. empire unencumbered by a constitutional requirement to provide Puerto Ricans any of these advantages. By late 1900 War Department policies, unsuccessful claims by Puerto Ricans, actions by U.S. officials in Puerto Rico, and the Foraker Act had dashed

87 Negrón-Portillo, Las turbas republicanas, 81, 87, 93, 108-109, 127-130, 138-139; Iglesias, Luchas

Emancipadoras, 197, 177-178, 188, 198-199; William George Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,

1901-1902: Origins of American Trade Union Involvement in Puerto Rico,” The Americas 24 (Apr. 1968):

378; Córdova, Resident Commissioner, 80; “Bail Sent to Iglesias,” Washington Post,” 11 Nov. 1901, 5.

Puerto Rican hopes for immediate self-government. They had also revealed U.S. officials and lawmakers who repeatedly faced and failed to definitively resolve narrower and narrower questions concerning Puerto Rican status. It thus appeared that the United

States would not make a single choice between Constitution and empire but instead try to navigate their competing demands case by case. Labor leader Santiago Iglesias and political leader Luis Muñoz Rivera were victims of this shift. After enthusiastically claiming rights as “a free citizen” and building an alliance with mainland associates, Iglesias found neither sufficient to win him adequate state protection during strikes. Muñoz, who consistently demanded that the United States immediately fulfill in Puerto Rico its ideals of self-government, found himself progressively driven from power.

For others, the fracturing of broad questions of Constitution and empire created opportunities. Degetau won the highest elected office available in Puerto Rio by joining the War Department and Congress in seeing the U.S. citizenship status of Puerto Ricans as a bellwether for their rights under the Constitution and for the status of their island under that document and in U.S. policy. Muñoz’s vocal failures to win gains from U.S. officials and ongoing transformation of broad status questions into multiple, increasingly technical and legalistic ones played to Degetau’s strengths as a prominent lawyer, intellectual, and student of the United States. Similarly, the Coudert Brothers law firm identified remunerative litigation opportunities in challenging the statutory and constitutional validity of tariffs on island-mainland shipments. Thus, as Puerto Ricans and U.S. officials broke overarching concerns about the meaning of U.S. expansion into specific questions about policy and status and then selected some for special attention,

they reshaped and narrowed debate around discrete matters that claimants could press the

state to clarify and resolve.

CHAPTER 3

MAKING ALLIES, MAKING CLAIMS: ISLAND LEADERS ON THE MAINLAND, 1900-1902

In 1901, Republicanos, the Federación Libre, and Federales each had a top leader newly settled on the mainland. Given the differing circumstances under which Federico Degetau, Santiago Iglesias, and Luis Muñoz Rivera had left Puerto Rico, these men approached mainland interlocutors in different ways and for different ends. Degetau sought U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans, traditional U.S. territorial status for Puerto Rico, and full inclusion of both in the U.S. constitutional order as a proof and consequence of Puerto Ricans’ meriting equal treatment as whites with full membership in the U.S. nation. Having become Resident Commissioner on promises of securing these ends and enjoying good relations with presidential appointees on the island, he aimed to use his position within the U.S. government to win immediate progress on his favored causes from federal agencies, political branches, and courts. By contrast, with

presidential appointees in Puerto Rico, local courts, the Republicano majority, a rival labor organization, the leading island newspaper, and large employers all aligned against him, Santiago Iglesias sought a non-governmental ally on the mainland to offer him and his Federación the protection that U.S. Socialists had failed to provide. The most promising candidate was the large, powerful, and growing American Federation of Labor,

which had learned the benefits of federal lobbying and drawing on strands of U.S. law helpful to the labor cause. Luis Muñoz Rivera used oppositional tactics to highlight injustices and seek eventually to change the orientation of the U.S. political branches and courts toward Puerto Rico. As leader of a minority party that presidential appointees in Puerto Rico disfavored, Muñoz both lacked legitimacy when speaking to mainlanders on behalf of his island and had comparatively little access to island patronage networks. With consequently fewer responsibilities than Degetau or Iglesias to govern Puerto Rico or its leading labor movement, he and his co-partisans focused on courting potential constituents.

These men’s struggles occurred amidst shifting U.S.-Puerto Rican relations involving dynamics in which they sometimes played only a small role. In the 1900 U.S. presidential election, for instance, the question of the U.S. relationship to its new acquisition had been a central issue. Embracing anti-imperialism, William Jennings Bryan had stated in accepting the Democratic nomination for President that the “forcible annexation of territory to be governed by arbitrary power differs as much from the

acquisition of territory to be built up into states as a monarchy differs from a democracy.” After McKinley had decisively won reelection, Anti-Imperialists turned their eyes from the polls to the courts, especially the series of tariff and fee disputes that came to be

known as the Insular Cases. So too did Puerto Ricans.88

88 “Mr. Bryan’s Speech of Acceptance,” New York Times, 9 Aug. 1900, 8; Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 108; José Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire: Notes on the Legislative History of the United States Citizenship of Puerto Ricans (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 1-6, 18-44.

“The very vagueness . . . was valuable”

In early 1901, facing seven Insular Cases concerning the relationship of Puerto Rico to the United States, the Supreme Court appeared poised to reshape the juridical landscape of U.S. empire. Two of these cases, DeLima v. Bidwell (1901) and Downes v. Bidwell (1901), presented the issues of whether Puerto Rico was “foreign,” hence subject to existing tariff laws, or a part of the “United States” within which the Constitution demanded tariff uniformity.89

The driving force behind DeLima and Downes was the Coudert Brothers law firm. The firm had been founded in the 1850s by the three sons of Charles Coudert, a Frenchman who had fled to the United States in the 1820s to escape capital charges for participation in a conspiracy against the French state involving the revolutionary hero the Marquis de Lafayette and Napoleon Bonaparte’s son. As the law firm became a leader in international law in the latter 19th century, one founding brother, Frederic Coudert Sr.,

was twice offered Supreme Court posts. By 1900 his twenty-nine-year-old son Frederic Coudert, a veteran of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, was the lead oral litigator at the firm. On January 8-9 the junior Coudert made front-page news with his arguments before the Supreme Court in Downes and Bidwell.90

In proposing judicial responses to U.S. empire, Coudert and his adversaries, U.S.

89 Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901); DeLima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 1 (1901). Three cases were already pending before the High Court when Degetau reached New York. Motion to Advance, no. 340, Goetze v. United States, 182 U.S. 221 (1901); Motion to Advance, No. 158, Fourteen Diamond Rings v. United States, 183 U.S. 176 (1901); see also Chapter 2, above, note 54 and accompanying text. Four additional Insular Cases joined the docket of the Supreme Court in December. Transcript of Record, no.

509, Armstrong v. United States, 182 U.S. 243 (1901), 8; Transcript of Record, No. 514, Huus v. New York & Porto Rico S.S. Co., 182 U.S. 392 (1901), 2-3; Transcript of Record, No. 501, Dooley v. United States, 183 U.S. 151 (1901), 14-15; Transcript of Record, No. 507, Downes, 182 U.S. 244 (1901).

90 Sparrow, The Insular Cases, 80; DeLima, 182 U.S. 1 (1901); Downes, 182 U.S. 244 (1901); Virginia Kays Veenswijk, Coudert Brothers: A Legacy in Law: The History of America’s First International Law Firm, 1853-1993 (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1994), 4-12, 17-20, 26, 80-81, 90-93, 97-98,

108-109, 111, 116, 123-125, 149-150, 435; see also, e.g., “Locating Porto Rico,” Los Angeles Times, 10

Jan. 1901, 1; “Status of Porto Rico,” New York Times, 9 Jan. 1901, 7.

Attorney General John Griggs and U.S. Solicitor General John Richards, agreed that meanings of terms like “foreign” and “United States” varied by context. Coudert focused on the Uniformity Clause, arguing that “United States” should there be read to make the clause “apply throughout all [U.S.] territory regardless of whether it was a State or whether it was Territory of the United States.” In reply, Griggs contended that Puerto Rico was U.S. territory under international law but remained foreign under the U.S.

Constitution. Richards further deconstructed the term “United States”—giving it different meanings for purposes of sovereignty, the Constitution, legislation, and international matters—and concluding that its constitutional sense did not encompass Puerto Rico. In support of these positions, the government attorneys drew precedents from throughout U.S. history, including many involving prior U.S. expansions and U.S. treatments of slaves and their descendants, Chinese, American Indians, annexed populations, women, and children. Though many of these peoples were U.S. citizens who held limited rights, Griggs rejected equating allegiance with naturalization by depicting U.S. citizenship in robust terms. “Suppose a cession of a small island with a half dozen inhabitants [to be used] solely as a fort,” he stated; “must the United States . . . accept them as citizens?”

Doing so, he implied, would handicap the U.S. right to acquire territory.91

Griggs’s anti-citizenship stand reflected the potential importance of the issue to the cases at hand. “[I]f the inhabitants of these islands are citizens of the United States,” Coudert argued, “it would be admitted that the islands themselves were part of the United States.” To make the implications of his position more palatable, Coudert portrayed U.S.

91 Transcript of Record, no. 456, DeLima, 182 U.S. 1 (1901), 5 (quote 1); Brief for Plaintiff in Error, Downes, 2 (quote 2); Opening Argument of Mr. Coudert for Plaintiff in Error, Downes, 18 (quote 3); Sparrow, The Insular Cases, 46-51, 80-85; Argument of the Attorney General, no. 340, Goetze v. United States, 182 U.S. 221 (1901), 73.

citizenship as broadly distributed and of little consequence. Broad distribution did not threaten the U.S. polity, he argued, for though popular opinion equated citizenship with political rights, U.S. law did not. Ignoring the fact that as elite a lawyer as the Attorney General had just implied otherwise, Coudert asserted that legal U.S. citizenship was “passive” or “naked,” synonymous simply with nationality. It encompassed such people lacking political rights as “women, children[,] and all persons in the Territories,” and those who did not meet state literacy requirements for voting. “[E]very person within a given territory,” he asserted, was generally either a “national[ i.e., a citizen,]” or an “alien[].” So too Puerto Ricans. Those born after annexation enjoyed what he described

as the 14th Amendment extension of U.S. citizenship to all people “born . . . in the United

States and subject to their allegiance.” The international law of cessions made U.S. citizens of Puerto Ricans already on the island in 1898.92

On Coudert’s view, non-U.S.-citizen American Indians and antebellum people of color in the United States proved the rule. Though they occupied intermediate U.S. statuses that made them neither alien to nor citizens of the United States, he contended that the peculiar reasons for their status bolstered his case. Indians, he claimed, were not U.S. citizens because they owed allegiance to tribal political communities rather than to the United States; place of birth was irrelevant, because those born on Indian lands but

not into tribal allegiance were U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment. Here, in fact, was

a potential way to placate those like Democratic Senator Donelson Caffery of Louisiana, who worried that Filipinos “incapable of reaching our standard of government or civilization . . . might inoculate our citizenship with the poison of theirs.” As Coudert

92 Brief for Plaintiffs in Error, Downes, 92 (quote 3), 88 (quote 4), 83 (quotes 6-8), 84 (quote 9), 82, 85-91,

93; Opening Argument of Mr. Coudert for Plaintiff in Error, Downes, 9, (quotes 1-2), 41 (quote 5), 42.

explained, the United States could class “uncivilized” Filipinos with American Indians for constitutional purposes. By treating them as owing an allegiance to their local leaders that would remove them from full U.S. sovereignty, the United States could also remove them from the 14th Amendment stricture that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The choice then, Degetau argued, was not between U.S. citizenship and alienage for Filipinos but between two forms of Filipino non-citizenship: quasi-tribal status or something else.93

In advocating the former, Coudert reminded the Court of the antebellum people of

color who had become noncitizens of the United States via the Dred Scott case. There Chief Justice Roger Taney had stressed their being “capable of being made property.” Even free people of color, Coudert related, had been “under the Constitution, . . . something different and apart from the rest of humanity,” “something . . . in the domain of natural history or zoology, . . . like a horse or a dog,” “half man, half beast.” Like conquered peoples of yore, he explained, they could in some instances be reduced to property under state law and thus subjected without being naturalized. But, he argued, Puerto Ricans should not “occupy that debased position.” In any case, such “views have been repudiated by the American people in the Civil War, by three amendments to the Constitution of the United States, by this court, and by forty years of advancing civilization.”94

93 “Caffery on the Philippines,” New York Times, 7 Feb. 1900, 5 (quote 1); Am. 14, sec. 1, U.S. Const. (quote 2); Opening Argument of Mr. Coudert for Plaintiff in Error, Downes, 42-44; Brief for Plaintiffs in Error, Downes, 78-99.

94 Brief for Plaintiffs, Downes, 95 (quote 2), 84 (quote 4), 99 (quote 6), 78-98; Opening Argument,

Downes, 43 (quotes 1, 3, 5), 42, 44; cf. Argument of the Attorney General, Goetze, 73-77. On re- enslavement in the antebellum U.S. South, see Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: The New Press, 1974), 370-380, passim.

Shortly after disembarking in New York on December 1, 1900, Puerto Rico’s first elected representative in the United States, Federico Degetau, had hurried to Washington to hear arguments in the Insular Cases. Once there, he observed that U.S. political branches were loath to act pending that judicial resolution, and so focused on other levers of power: the administrative state and mainland media. Aware that agencies had great authority in domains like federal employment, international relations, immigration, and colonial governance and that courts, political branches, and agencies often gave administrative decisions precedential value, Degetau launched claims involving citizenship before them. In Washington, Degetau also got a closer look at a U.S. empire- state rooted in the construction and enforcement of distinctions based on “racial” difference. In Puerto Rico he had portrayed lines between purportedly inferior peoples— Chinese, Filipinos, blacks, and American Indians—and Puerto Ricans as sharp and natural. But race was more socially constructed than he acknowledged. He now saw how public opinion cast islanders as a racially inferior, dependent people by stressing their African, native, and southern-European heritages. In a media campaign like the one he had conducted in Puerto Rico, he made arguments drawing on languages of race, masculinity, citizenship, honor, and domesticity in newspapers and before academic audiences. The challenge was to highlight the paternal respectability of Puerto Ricans

like himself without drawing undue attention to potential “racial” characterizations of the

social dependents who were to be the objects of elites’ benevolence.95

95 “Views of Porto Rico’s Delegate,” Washington Post, 3 Dec. 1900, 1; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy, 18 Jan. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VI/11; Federico Degetau to Manuel Rossy et al., 8 Dec. 1900, CIHCAM 2/V/12; Federico Degetau to Manuel Rossy, 4 Jan. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VI/2; Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); “American Life Split into Parts,” Bulletin of Philadelphia, 19 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 22/L2.

While the Supreme Court deliberated on Coudert’s argument, Degetau portrayed Puerto Ricans to mainlanders as a patriotic U.S. people seeking traditional U.S. status. Despite former Spanish ties, he told reporters, islanders were “naturally Americans” for whom “no more fortunate thing could have happened” than annexation. They sought eventual U.S. statehood and, in the interim, like U.S. citizens in other territories, “a territorial form of government” like that “of Arizona, Indian Territory, Oklahoma.” Puerto Ricans did not want a unique status “that can be designated as a difference between the United States and Porto Rico”; they advocated application of the U.S. Constitution to them and, like residents of other territories, planned to finance their

governments through self-taxation.96

Degetau sought to exemplify the admiration for and integration into U.S. life that he attributed to Puerto Ricans, a task made easier by his relocation to Washington. At a distance from island arguments over patria and regional-cultural Latin pride he could tell a reporter that he “object[ed] to the Spanish appellation, ‘Senor [sic]’” without derailing his political career. He also told newspapers, one of which found him “quite at ease in the use of the English language,” that he planned to study English further and believed the U.S. constitutional system to be ideal. Blurring his earlier advocacy of a Spanish

republic, his subsequent leadership of island Republicanos, and his current support for the U.S. national Republican Party, he asserted that “I have always been a Republican in politics.” The self-portrayal worked. Newspapers, federal officials, businessmen, and

academics treated him as important, capable, and worthy of attention. He addressed an

96 “Porto Rican Delegate,” Indianapolis Journal, 3 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quote 1); “Something about the First Porto Rican Delegate to the United States,” North American, 6 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quote 2); “Porto Ricans Improving,” New York Times, 3 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quotes 3-4); “American Life Split into Parts” (quote 5).

academic society, secured favorable coverage from and the opportunity to write in newspapers, and won a warm reception among Wall Street officials. Federal officials who welcomed Degetau included the President, Congressmen, and agency heads.97

Despite these warm personal receptions, many and often the same mainlanders

held opinions of Puerto Ricans that Degetau termed “much more negative than the worst ideas we had heard or imagined.” He learned that in correspondence and publications, mainlanders used racial, imperial, and gender analogies to deprecate Puerto Ricans and Spanish Antilleans as uncivilized, uncultured, or politically inept. For one author, the U.S. Reconstruction-era “experience with the colored man” illustrated “the danger of

conferring too many privileges on” “Porto Rico.” Another labeled Degetau’s constituents “only 85 percent Americans,” albeit preferable to the “fifty percent citizens” in the Philippines. Editorial cartoonists cast islanders as children and defenseless women, travel writers depicted them in ways that deprecated their “culture and state of civilization,” and the New York Times announced that “Porto Ricans have a great deal to learn about the drafting of laws.” Because support from framers of the Foraker Act would be the surest way to reform it, Degetau added, congressmen’s “ignorance” and concomitant belief that

the law treated islanders justly “ma[de] our political labor here hard.”98

97 “American Life Split into Parts” (quotes 1-2); “Something about” (quote 3); Joseph Miller to Frederick Degetau, 16 Jan. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VI/9; “Statehood Their Aim,” Washington Post, 15 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Porto Rican Delegate”; Samuel Lindsay to Frederico Degetau, 4 Dec. 1900, CIHCAM 2/V/8; Samuel Lindsay to Frederico Degetau, 5 Dec. 1900, CIHCAM 2/V/10; Degetau to Rossy et al., 8 Dec. 1900; George Morgan to Frederic Degetau, 17 Jan. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VI/10; Federico Degetau, “The Porto Ricans as Soldiers and as Legislators,” Philadelphia Record, 23 May 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Porto Rico Delegate’s Status,” New York Evening Post, 7 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Federico Degetau to Manuel Rossy et al., 14 Dec. 1900, CIHCAM 2/V/17; Degetau to Rossy, 4 Jan. 1901; Degetau to Rossy, 18 Jan. 1901; Draft, Federico Degetau to [Charles Allen?], n.d., CIHCAM 2/VII/62; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy et al., 1 Mar. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VIII/66; J.B. Foraker to Federico Degetau, 25 Apr. 1901, CIHCAM 2/IX/18.

98 Degetau to Rossy, 4 Jan. 1901 (quote 1 (“la idea que se tiene del estado de cultura y por consiguiente de aptitudes políticas del país, excede con mucho al que los mas pesimistas entre nosotros haya podido

expresar ni suponer que se expresara por otros”); Title unknown, Gazette of Taunton, Mass., 5 Dec. 1900,

“[R]ectifying . . . erroneous evaluations” of islanders by mainlanders, Degetau told Rossy and a co-partisan, was his “foremost duty.” Though mainlanders knew little about Puerto Rico, he wrote, they displayed “sympathy for and interest in our country.” To defend Puerto Rican honor and capacity for and compatibility with U.S. practices, he drew on travel accounts, U.S. constitutional histories, newspapers, and government documents, and he spoke out in public gatherings, the press, and official contexts. Rather than argue that the United States and Puerto shared shortcomings, he described common advances. When Princeton Professor John Finley told the American Academy of Political Sciences that “Porto Rico under native rule will never be developed,” Degetau objected. Depicting Puerto Ricans as the driving force behind the Spanish legislative action, he argued that islanders had abolished slavery voluntarily and peacefully. Under U.S. rule,

he added, Puerto Ricans had made “improvement in our judiciary, in our system of education and politics.” Describing islanders and mainlanders as “the blood and flesh of a single body,” he proposed that Puerto Ricans be “[t]reat[ed] as brethren” and, “in return,”

be “loving peaceful citizens.”99

available at CIHCAM 22/L1 (quotes 2-4); Title unknown, Register, [Dec. 1900?], available at CIHCAM

12/L2 (quotes 5-6); Degetau to Rossy et al., 8 Dec. 1900 (quote 7 (“de nuestra cultura y del estado de civilización”), 16-17 (quotes 9-10 (“El desconocimiento que hay sobre nuestro país, y la teoría del

‘precedente’, hacen nuestra labor política aquí difícil”)); “Porto Rican Lawmaking,” New York Times, 26

Jan. 1902, 8 (quote 8).

99 Degetau to Rossy, 4 Jan. 1901 (quotes 1-2 (“La obra magna de rectificar esa errónea apreciación,

entiendo que es mi primer deber”), 6 (“Somos como el cuerpo de un hombre que se tratara de dividir en dos partes; una misma sangre y una misma carne”)); [Federico Degetau] to Luis Sánchez Morales, 15 Mar.

1901, CIHCAM 2/VIII/79 (quote 3 (“simpatías é interés por nuestro país”); “Porto Rico Glad of Our Friendship,” Press of Philadelphia, Pa., 19 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 22/L2 (quotes 4-5, 7-9); Willard Thorp, “The Cleveland-West Correspondence: Record of a Friendship,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 31 (winter 1970): 92; see also, e.g., Notes of Federico Degetau, n.d., CIHCAM

2/VIII/82; [Federico Degetau?], reading notes, n.d., CIHCAM 16/L4; Comptroller to Federico Degetau, 8

Aug. 1901, CIHCAM 3/III/53; CR Edwards to Federico Degetau, 10 Aug. 1901, CIHCAM 3/III/57; Charles Magoon to Federico Degetau, 4 Jun. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/20; Edward McCauley to Federico Degetau, 23 Apr. 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/151; Edward McCauley to Frederico Degetau, 7 May 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/170; O.P. Crustin to [Federico Degetau], 7 Nov. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VI/346; W.H. Moore to Federico Degetau, 1 Jun. 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/200; “What to Do with Porto Rico,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 19 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 22/L2; Lindsay to Degetau, 5 Dec. 1900.

Similarly, in a letter to Puerto Rican Governor Charles Allen about a hearing of the House Committee on Insular Affairs, Degetau described a witness’s criticism of the morality of Puerto Rican judges as an attack on both the “honor of the judge” and “my own honor.” Fulfilling his “duty,” he continued, he “strongly protested to the Chairman.”100

When Degetau observed newspapers make the island legislature “the object of

censure and jokes of middling taste,” he defended it in a Chicago Daily Tribune interview and later relayed that Governor Charles Allen judged island “legislators honest, careful” contributors to a new “[s]tatute book [that] will start without a bad law upon it.” “We of Porto Rico,” Degetau also told reporters “are not a savage people,” having demonstrated no “small degree of civilization” in securing duty-free admission of Spanish-language “scientific, literary and artistic works”; having adapted to the secret ballot better than mainlanders; and often speaking multiple languages. As a Latin people, he added, Puerto Ricans were coauthors of U.S. democracy, for the “Constitution is not exclusively an American product”; it “would not exist had it not been for the principles formulated by Aristotle.”101

Degetau also tried to circumvent congressional unwillingness to act on Puerto Rican matters by bringing selected claims involving Puerto Rican status and citizenship before federal agencies. Each time he succeeded in convincing a federal actor to treat Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens or Puerto Rico as a traditional U.S. territory, he neutralized arguments that the status he sought would hinder federal administration of the newest

100 Draft, Federico Degetau to Charles Allen, 8 Feb. 1901, CICHAM, 2/VII/35.

101 Degetau to Rossy, 4 Jan. 1901 (quote 1 (“obgeto de censura y de bromas de mediano gusto”)); Degetau, “Porto Ricans as Soldiers and as Legislators” (quotes 2-3); “American Life Split into Parts” (quotes 4-6, 8-

9); Chapter 1, above, note 59 and accompanying text (quote 7); “Senor Degetau Here,” Evening Star, 14

Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 22/L2.

U.S. territories and peoples. Such victories were also precedents that subsequent decision makers might find persuasive. Degetau quickly learned that agencies were most likely to respond to claims involving status if individuals brought them and they did not require definitive resolutions of status questions, as when the Department of Agriculture made available a ration of seeds to Commissioner Degetau comparable to the one that it gave U.S. representatives without deciding whether Puerto Rico had the same status as other territories. A claim involving application of federal civil-service laws to Puerto Ricans illustrated the dynamic. How those laws applied to islanders, Degetau wrote, depended

on a view of “the status of a native Porto Rican.” When a U.S. official refused to let a Puerto Rican applicant take the civil-service exam, that applicant brought an individual appeal to the civil-service commission. Eschewing the issue of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans, the commission vindicated the applicant by finding that all who “prove

citizenship in Porto Rico” “had such right” to apply.102

In January 1901, Degetau sought to combine official responses to individual Puerto Ricans migrating throughout the United States into claims involving the status of all islanders. The migrations at issue dated to 1900 when Hawai‘ian sugar planters who faced tightening labor supply due to Chinese Exclusion had recruited financially distressed Puerto Rican laborers who they had anticipated would not be subject to U.S. immigration laws. Over the next two years they brought more than 5,000 islanders, most

signed to labor contracts, through New Orleans to Hawai‘i. U.S. immigration officials did not inspect them. Federal officials at Ellis Island had followed a different policy. On

November 24, 1900, Degetau wrote, “Mr. Alfonso Gómez y Stanley, a professor who had

102 “Citizens of This Country,” Washington Star, 1 May 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quotes); Degetau to Rossy, 18 Jan. 1901.

acted as U. S. Interpreter at the Paris Exposition . . . was [temporarily] detained at Ellis Island, N. Y., when it was known that he was a Porto Rican, and that he had no money.” Complicating matters further, the New York Tribune on December 7, 1900, had reported that a contingent of Puerto Ricans bound for Hawai‘i “claim they were taken . . . under false promises.” Subsequent articles claimed men in Texas with rifles had held those migrants captive, that the migrants had attempted to mutiny on a steamship in Honolulu Harbor after being denied food, and that police had accompanied the migrants from one

Hawai‘ian island to another.103

In response, Degetau drew on his recent acquaintance with Acting Secretary of State David Hill to put two claims involving the status of Puerto Ricans before the Department of State in late January 1901. After Hill told Degetau that the “private . . . relations between the emigrants and the planters” were beyond his reach, Degetau charged a potential “violation of the fundamental constitutional rights of the Porto Ricans.” Newspapers, he reminded Hill, had reported that migrants in Texas had been “arrested as violators, not of a contract, but of the criminal law” and that police had restored and maintained order on the steamship in Honolulu Harbor. As he later told the Puerto Rican newspaper La Correspondencia, these charges suggested that “Puerto

103 [Degetau] to Secretary of State, 31 Jan. 1901 (quote 1); Extract, “Contract Laborers from Porto Rico,” New York Tribune, 7 Dec. 1900, CIHCAM 2/VI/19 (quote 2); BCSPCEPHC, Folders 14-15: Migration to Hawaii, undated, 1900-1979 (especially Copy, “Seek Porto Ricans for Hawaii Plantation,” The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 2 Aug. 1900); W.O. Smith to Henry Cooper, 22 May 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/48; Henry Cooper to [State Department?], 27 May 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/14; Carlo Mario Fraticelli, “A Puerto Rican Poet on the Sugar Plantations of Hawai‘i,” Centro Journal 13 (spring 2001): 94; Iris López, “Introduction: Puerto Ricans in Hawai‘i,” Centro Journal 13 (spring 2001): 79; [Federico Degetau] to Secretary of State, 31 Jan. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VII/65; Federico Degetau y González, Memorandum in Relation to the American Citizenship of Porto Ricans, CIHCAM 2/VI/19-A; Wayne Patterson, The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 14; Henry K. Carroll, Report on the Industrial and Commercial Condition of Porto Rico, 2d ed. (San Juan,

P.R.: Ediciones Puerto, 2005 [1899]), 48-52; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Secretary of State, [30] Jan.

1901, CIHCAM 2/VI/19; “Puerto Ricans Fight for Food,” page and newspaper unknown, [Jan. 1901?], available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “Mutiny in Honolulu Harbor,” Washington Post, 26 Jan. 1901, available at CIHCAM 2/VI/19.

Ricans lacked all political protections, and did not know what type of citizens they were.” Hoping to clarify the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans, Degetau reminded Hill that immigration authorities had subjected Gómez but not the migrants to immigration examinations. Hill could prevent “trouble for the agents of the Government, and for Porto Ricans,” Degetau suggested, by stating when “Puerto Ricans are to be considered as aliens, according to the immigration law, and when they are to be allowed to land as

citizens of the United States.”104

Degetau’s claims produced immediate, limited benefits. Concerning treatment of Puerto Ricans for immigration purposes, Hill noted that there was “no judicial decision in the question.” Immigration officials, he explained, had not informed the State Department before detaining Gómez. The detention, he added, “arose from the lack of knowledge of some [immigration] officer as to the status of Porto Ricans.” The letter strengthened Degetau’s case. It implied that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens, conceded that U.S. immigration authorities made an “error” when they applied immigration laws to Puerto Ricans, and implied that it was not an error to let Puerto Ricans under labor contracts

pass through the ports of New Orleans and Hawai‘i despite bars on alien-immigrant contract laborers entering the United States. But, as Degetau observed, “[c]oncerning the Administration’s opinion of the status of Porto Ricans nothing was said.” When he

invited State to clarify its position, the Department, with no pending claim hinging on the

answer, refrained.105

104 “Las gestiones de Degetau en defensa de los emigrantes á las islas Hawaii,” La Correspondencia, 25

Sep. 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quotes 1 (“que dada la índole privada de las relaciones entre los emigrantes y los plantadores”), 4 (“los puertorriqueños carecían de toda protección política, y no se sabía siquiera qué clase de ciudadanos eran”)); Degetau to Secretary of State, [30] Jan. 1901 (quotes 2-3); [Degetau] to Secretary of State, 31 Jan. 1901 (quotes 5-6); Federico Degetau to Manuel Rossy, 1 Feb.

1901, CIHCAM 2/VI/24.

105 David Hill to Federico Degetau, 16 Feb. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VII/40 (quotes 1-3); Degetau, Memorandum

As to violations of islanders’ constitutional rights, Hill ordered and reviewed investigations of events in Texas and Hawai‘i. When critics in Puerto Rico charged Degetau with inactivity or ineffectiveness in the face of the alleged mistreatment of the migrants, he could respond that he had addressed the matter and would soon make a public report. Hoping to continue recruiting Puerto Rican laborers, Hawai‘ian officials and planters used the investigation to trumpet the benefits of migration. The final report included a statement by the alleged Puerto Rican mutineer affirming his “good choice of having come to this land of Hawaii,” reports by ship and police officials justifying their actions and downplaying the alleged mutiny, and a letter from the president of the Planters’ Association claiming that the migrants were “all satisfied with the treatment they received in transit.” Had Degetau wanted to question the report, he could have noted that all statements in it were made by or before planters and their allies. But Degetau was no radical on labor questions. With a response to potential critics in hand and no further progress on status issues immediately possible on the front, Degetau told the Secretary of

State on April 15 that he was glad the charges “were not true.”106

in Relation to the American Citizenship (quote 4); [Federico Degetau] to Secretary of State, 15 Feb. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VII/39. Degetau’s arguments offer a wrinkle on Hendrik Hartog’s observation that individuals often seek to counter oppressive structures with claims to rights, which they perceive to be durable and achievable. “The Constitution of Aspiration and ‘The Rights that Belong to Us All,’” Journal of American History 74 (Dec. 1987): 1020-1024. Unlike the claimants whom Hartog describes—who partially cabined the tension inherent in their view of rights as durable and achievable by attacking prior interpretations as misguided and lauding proposed ones as proper—Degetau argued that Puerto Ricans were already U.S. citizens. Ibid.

106 Baltasar Fortunio to Secretary of the H.S.P.A., 3 Feb. 1901, CIHCAM 2/IX/3 (quote 1); F. A. Schaefer to Sanford Dole, 6 Mar. 1901, CIHCAM 2/IX/3 (quote 2); [Federico Degetau] to Secretary of State, 15

Apr. 1901, CIHCAM 2/IX/13 (quote 3); Hill to Degetau, 16 Feb. 1901; “Las gestiones”; [Degetau] to

Secretary of State, 15 Feb. 1901; Federico Degetau, “Replica,” El País, 16 Feb. 1901; “Mr. Degetau?— Don’t Know Him,” San Juan News, 20 Mar. 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2. For newspaper reports of mistreatment of Puerto Ricans, see, e.g., articles collected at BCSPCEPHC, Folder 1: Citizenship and Status, 1899, 1991; BCSPCEPHC, Folders 14-15: Migration to Hawaii, undated, 1900-1979; Copy, “Well Treated Over in Hawaii,” San Juan News, 8 May 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/48. On attempts by planters to contest negative accounts of their treatment of Puerto Ricans and the limits of such attempts, see “Planters

Growing Disposed to Grant No Assurances Porto Ricans Asked at Indio,” The Examiner of San Francisco,

16 Dec. 1900, 1; [Federico Degetau] to J. B. Foraker, 15 May 1901, CIHCAM 3/I/19.

As Degetau’s inquiries concerning Puerto Rican migrants ran dry in April 1901, he sought to win recognition of his and by extension all Puerto Ricans’ U.S. citizenship by gaining admission to the U.S. Supreme Court Bar. Well aware that “the court permits only citizens of the United States before it,” he applied on April 29, 1901. The Court, acting summarily, admitted him. Interpreting this victory as judicial rather than administrative, he telegrammed and wrote fellow Republicanos, Puerto Rican newspapers, and the Puerto Rican governor that “[m]y admission . . . fixed my personal Status and that of my constituents as American citizens.” Some Puerto Rican newspapers

agreed. On April 30, El País declared: “Degetau Declared a U.S. citizen.” Another article entitled “Puerto Ricans are American Citizens: The Great National Constitution Covers Puerto Rico” declared that because Puerto Ricans had won “before the Supreme Court and the entire world the guarantees and privileges of the American citizen,” Puerto Rico held the same status as “other territories like Arizona [and] New Mexico.” Many mainland newspapers and lawyers also saw significance in Degetau’s admission. The New York Sun, Washington Post, New York Evening Post, and Washington Star judged that the Court’s decision had “given rise to considerable discussion” “among the lawyers in attendance,” while the Minneapolis Tribune declared that Degetau’s admission had been “taken to mean that the court will hold that the constitution follows the flag.” Charles Needham, the Dean of Columbian Law School (today the George Washington University School of Law), told Degetau, “Now I believe that the Constitution is in Puerto Rico.” The tariff that the Foraker Act imposed on Puerto Rico, these authorities

implied, might soon be struck as violative of the Uniformity Clause.107

107 “Admission of Mr. Degetau, Washington Post, 1 May 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quote 1); [Degetau] to Rossy, 3 May 1901 (quote 2 (“Mi admisión . . . fijaba mi Status personal y el de mis

Degetau also used his admission to the Supreme Court Bar to undermine adversaries in Puerto Rico. Although opposition leader Luis Muñoz was a strong advocate of autonomy, his political allies had decided to sacrifice that principle temporarily to ask the U.S. Congress and President to overturn a January 1901 tax law that Republicanos had helped enact in Puerto Rico. Casting himself as a defender of Puerto Rican self-government, Degetau had opposed these efforts in Washington and written in the Puerto Rican newspapers that the federal political branches had not and legally should not have been receptive to Muñoz’s allies’ entreaties. Despite these and other Republicano arguments, Barbosa told Degetau on May 13, “efforts to respond and shut [the Commission] up were inutile” initially. Only when Degetau entered the Supreme Court bar, he added, did island “opinion completely change[] to our

satisfaction.”108

representados, como ciudadanos americanos.”)); “Grata noticia,” El País, 30 Apr. 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quote 3 (“Degetau declarado ciudadano E. U.”)); Un Puertorriqueño, “Importante comunicación: los puertorriqueños son ciudadanos americanos: la gran constitución nacional cubre á Puerto-Rico,” newspaper unknown, 10 May 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 (quotes 4-6 (“ante el Tribunal Supremo y por tanto ante el mundo entero, las garantías y los privilegios de los ciudadanos americanos”; “los otros Territorios como Arizona, Nuevo Méjico”), 10 (“Ahora si que creo que la

Constitución está en Puerto Rico”); “Citizens of This Country” (quote 7); title unknown, New York Evening Post, 30 Apr. 1901, available at CIHCAM 18/L1 (quote 8); “Constitution Follows the Flag,” Minneapolis Tribune, 1 May 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L (quote 9); “Conferencia important,” newspaper

unknown, 9 Sep 1899, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy, 3 May

1901, CIHCAM 3/I/4; [Federico Degetau] to Alejandro Besosa, 2 May 1901, CIHCAM 3/I/3; José Barbosa to Federico Degetau, 13 May 1901, CIHCAM 3/I/17; Degetau to Hunt, 2 May 1902, AG/OG/CG/17: Justicia, Ciudadanía, May 1901, 1787; Title unknown, New York Evening Post, 30 Apr. 1901, available at CICHAM 18/L1; “Admission of Mr. Degetau.”

108 Barbosa to Degetau, 13 May 1901 (quotes (“Inutil eran nuestros esfuerzos para defenderle se callaban”; “cambió la opinión completamente para satisfacción nuestra”)); Federico Degetau, partial draft letter, n.d., CICHAM 6/V/2; [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy, n.d., in “Carta del comisionado de Puerto-Rico en Washington,” El País, 3 May 1901, available at CIHCAM 18/L2; “Ley Hollander será modificado,” San

Juan News, 23 Mar. 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L16; Title unknown, San Juan News, 23 Mar. 1901,

available at CIHCAM 12/L2; Foraker Act, Statutes at Large 31 (1900): 77-86, 83-84 (sec. 32); Charles Allen to Federico Degetau, 19 Feb. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VII/46; J.H. Hollander, “Porto Rico Revenue Act,” in New York State Library Comparative Summary and Index of Legislation, Bulletin 72, ed. Robert H. Whitten (Mar. 1902) 59-61 (summarizing the Hollander Act, The Acts and Resolutions of the First Session of the First Legislative Assembly of Porto Rico (1901), 43); Frank Moore Colby, ed., The International Year Book: A Compendium of the World’s Progress during the Year 1901 (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1902), 643 (same); Degetau to [Allen?], n.d.; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy, n.d.,

Ten days later, Degetau aimed at mainland opinion, promoting the capacity of Puerto Ricans for citizenship and self-government with a May 23 contribution to the Philadelphia Inquirer series “Public Men on Public Questions.” There and in other public writings, Degetau asserted that “Puerto-Rican citizens are prepared by their love of

liberty and their worship of justice to face with other American citizens, the responsibilities of solving the problems that we are called upon by Providential decrees to share together.” He also depicted islanders as praiseworthy voters and legislators, then aligned them with rights, ideals, and obligations frequently associated with the

citizenship of white men. To do so, Degetau read the current struggles of Puerto Ricans through prior battles around creole political status and Puerto Rican territorial status within the Spanish empire. Drawing on the history that liberal island reformers had memorialized and retold, Degetau depicted Puerto Ricans somewhat contradictorily as both committed, effective advocates for liberties they had not held and as having extensive experience in self-government. Ignoring longstanding indigenous populations, Degetau described Puerto Ricans as “not the youngest Americans, . . . but the oldest Americans,” a people who had had the “despotic and arbitrary” Ponce de León relieved of duty as governor in 1510 and who had gained commercial and political liberties and

privileges like those available to Spaniards in Spain by 1512. But it was not until after the U.S. and French revolutions released ideas of liberty that swept beyond their borders, Degetau wrote, that Spain had joined the circum-Atlantic struggle for liberty with what

he termed the “noble and glorious” 1812 Constitution that he asserted Puerto Ricans had

played a key role in creating. In one context he described a 19th-century Puerto Rico that

CIHCAM 6/V/3; see also Allen to Degetau, 19 Feb. 1901; Degetau to [Allen?], n.d. For President

McKinley’s opinion, see Degetau, partial draft letter, n.d.

had been “a province of Spain equal to the other provinces,” that had enjoyed more autonomy than U.S. states, that had sent representatives and senators to the Spanish Cortes, that had long had “practically . . . universal” male suffrage, and in which islanders had held an identical juridical status to that of other Spaniards. Elsewhere he celebrated Baldorioty de Castro, a Puerto Rican liberal leader whom both Republicanos and Federales could claim as a forefather, as having held “‘Yankee ideas’ and ‘democratic tendencies to which the youth, fascinated by the new American school, . . . are irresistibly drawn.” Degetau recalled that U.S. southerners had fought a bloody war to preserve slavery and that Lincoln had “recommended a gradual abolition with indemnification”

into 1863. By contrast, Degetau claimed, Puerto Rican commissioners to Spain in 1866-

67 had been inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s claim that “the Declaration of Independence

. . . gave liberty . . . to the world for all future time” and had sought “immediate abolition of slavery with indemnification . . . or without it.” In this vein, he emphasized the rights Puerto Ricans had won more recently: representation in the Cortes in 1869; inclusion in the Spanish Constitution in 1876; autonomy in 1897.109

Degetau sought to use the U.S. invasion to reconcile his stories of Puerto Ricans

both enjoying and struggling for liberties. Islanders, he wrote, embraced U.S. rule optimistically, not desperately. Praising the autonomy Puerto Ricans had won the year before, Degetau argued that the Puerto Rican embrace of U.S. troops that left the “few thousand Spaniards . . . practically disarmed,” reflected islanders’ “ardent love of liberty”

109 Degetau, “Porto Ricans as Soldiers and as Legislators” (quotes 1-2, 5, 7, 9-11); Federico Degetau, The

Political Status of Porto Rico (Washington, D.C.: Globe Printing Company, 1902), 4-7, 9-15 (quotes 3-4,

8); Jacob H. Hollander, Henry C. Adams, and Federico Degetau, Discussion, Publications of the American Economic Association, 3d ser., vol. 3 (Feb. 1902), 347-350 (quote 6); see also “La American Economic Association y el Comisionado Señor Degetau,” La Correspondencia, 22 Jan. 1902, available at CIHCAM

18/L1, 15; Fernando Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos de Puerto Rico (1809-1976) (Mayagüez, P.R.: Editorial Isla, 1977), 47, 11-45.

and not fear of Spanish tyranny. Conversely, he implied, neither Spanish despotism nor

U.S. might had ensured U.S. victory in Puerto Rico or vindicated U.S. rule there.110

Aware that mainstream, white, mainland opinion in 1901 condemned Reconstruction-era black voting and office holding, Degetau deemphasized how Puerto Rican home rule would mean voting and office holding by former slaves and their descendants. Though free Puerto Ricans read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and prayed for slaves, he argued, they ought “to have invoked the mercy of the Lord” “[i]n behalf of the poor unfortunate whites” “[b]ecause the whites were more enslaved by our mo[]nstrous crime than our legal victims.” By contrasting “our” to slaves, Degetau associated Puerto Ricans

with whiteness, not blackness or slavery. Then judging mastery worse than slavery erased slaves’ voices and experiences, emphasizing the point.111

When Degetau sent copies of his article to U.S. congressmen and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, the replies he received illustrated the success of his arguments with makers of federal colonial policy. Chairman Henry Cooper, for example, wrote: “I was very glad indeed to hear from you . . . . The article is a very forceful presentation, and I congratulate the Porto Ricans that they have so eloquent and effective a representative as your self.” These connections and arguments, Degetau anticipated, would facilitate

congressional lobbying after the Supreme Court decided the Insular Cases.112

110 [Federico Degetau], Something that the American People Must Know about Porto Rico, CIHCAM 7/I/2. Two drafts of this chapter have been preserved. I draw from both.

111 Ibid.; see also Degetau, Political Status of Porto Rico, 11; Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos,

17-45; José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 9-10; Luis A. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 108-109. On claims by slaves in the Spanish Antilles, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (Nov. 2007): 659-692; Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 1985).

112 Henry Cooper to Federico Degetau, 8 Jul. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/33 (quote); [Federico Degetau] to J.B.

While Degetau pursued claims to U.S. citizenship in early 1901, the Supreme Court deliberated on the opposing arguments that plaintiff’s counsel Frederic Coudert and the U.S. government had presented it in January in the Insular Cases of Downes v. Bidwell (1901) and DeLima v. Bidwell (1901). When the Supreme Court issued rulings

on May 27, it gave Coudert and the government a split decision, revealing that Degetau’s admission to the Supreme Court bar had not augured a robust embrace of Puerto Rico

into the U.S. constitutional fold. In DeLima, the Court struck down the tariffs that officials in Republican President William McKinley’s administration had levied on U.S.- Puerto Rican shipments prior to passage of the Foraker Act. Writing on behalf of the Court, Justice Henry Brown explained that no statutory authority existed for the administrators’ actions because Puerto Rico “was not a foreign country within the meaning of the tariff laws” in existence at that time. In Downes, however, the Court upheld the imposition by the 1900 Foraker Act of an explicit tariff on mainland-island commerce. In announcing that judgment, Justice Brown argued that because Puerto Rico was “not a part of the United States within the revenue clauses of the Constitution,” that legislation by the Republican-dominated U.S. political branches did not violate the U.S.

constitutional prescription of tariff uniformity “throughout the United States.”113

In holding that the United States included Puerto Rico for one statutory purpose but not for a different constitutional one, the Court caused as much uncertainty as it settled. As Degetau observed, “[t]he decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court . . . have

Foraker, 27 May 1901, CIHCAM 3/I/38; E.L. [?] to Federico Degetau, 5 Jun. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/5; Joseph Sibley to Frederico Degetau, 20 Jun. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/17; Theodore Roosevelt to Federico Degetau, 24 Jun. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/22; Charles Fairbanks to F. Degetau, 2 Jul. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/29; W. Moody to Frederico Degetau, 21 Jul. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/42; J.A. Tawney to Federico Degetau, 18

Jun. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/4.

113 Delima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 1, 200 (1901) (quote 1); Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 287 (1901) (quote 2); Art. 1, sec. 8, U.S. Const. (quote 3).

produced a perplexity.” After DeLima, “democrats shouted Victory . . . , although they did not proclaim it with the same intensity” following Downes. DeLima disappointed Republicans, but after Downes one functionary announced “that the Administration has obtained a victory on all material points.” “The confusion in the press . . . was great” as well, Degetau noted, with adversarial newspapers respectively proclaiming “victory” and

“triumph.” 114

This confusion resulted because the opinions were indeed fractured and ambiguous. In Downes, held by contemporary observers and their successors to be the most important of the Insular Cases, no opinion garnered five votes. In both cases four justices dissented. Republican Representative Charles E. Littlefield of Maine told the American Bar Association, “Until some reasonable consistency and unanimity of opinion is reached by the court upon these questions, we can hardly expect their conclusions to be final.”115

The most notable of the opinions was Justice Edward White’s Downes plurality concurrence. There, writing for three justices, White introduced a new doctrine, that of territorial non-incorporation. He reasoned that unlike prior territories Puerto Rico had not

114 [Federico Degetau], “Manifiesto del Comisionado Señor Degetau,” La Correspondencia, 6 Jun. 1901, available at CIHCAM 12/L2 ( “Las decisiones del Tribunal Supremo de los Estados Unidos . . . han producido una perplejidad”; “los demócratas gritaron ¡victoria! . . . , aunque no lo proclamaban con la misma intensidad”; “que el Gobierno habia [sic] obtenido una victoria en todos los puntos materiales”; “La confusión en la prensa . . . era grande”; “victoria”; “triunfo”).

115 Downes, 182 U.S. 244 (White, J., concurring); Charles E. Littlefield, “The Insular Cases,” Southern Law Review 1 (1901-1902): 477-521, 478. On the development, legacy, and doctrinal implications of the anomalous status of Puerto Rico and the Insular Cases, see, e.g., Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, ed., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Christina Duffy Burnett, “Untied States: American

Expansion and Territorial Deannexation,” University of Chicago Law Review 72 (summer 2005): 797-879; César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 177, passim; Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001); Sparrow, The Insular Cases, 80, passim; Juan R. Torruella, The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (Río Piedras: University of Puerto Rico, 1985).

been incorporated by Congress or by treaty into the U.S. Union. It was thus “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense”—that is, foreign for domestic-law purposes—but also part of the United States under international law. White here purported that the exigencies of empire could be reconciled with constitutional and democratic norms since the constitution did not need to apply uniformly throughout the territories. Yet he offered few details as to how specific constitutional provisions applied to unincorporated territories. Of that decision, which would become (and remains) binding constitutional law, Coudert later wrote, “The very vagueness of the [non-incorporation] doctrine was

valuable.”116

What White did make clear was his willingness to deny U.S. citizenship to inhabitants of U.S. territories in some cases. Echoing Attorney General John Griggs’s argument, White wrote:

Take a case of discovery. Citizens of the United States discover an unknown island, peopled with an uncivilized race, yet rich in soil…. Can it be denied that such right [to acquire] could not be practically exercised if the result would be to endow the inhabitants with citizenship of the United States…, even although the consequence would be to…inflict grave detriment on the United States to arise [from] the immediate

bestowal of citizenship on those absolutely unfit to receive it?117

By presuming that U.S. citizenship constituted too substantive a status for some

116 Downes, 182 U.S. at 341, 288-293, 300, 306 (White, J., concurring); Frederic R. Coudert, “The

Evolution of the Doctrine of Territorial Incorporation,” Columbia Law Review 26 (Nov. 1926): 823-850,

850. Justice John Harlan sought fuller constitutional rights for Puerto Ricans while also joining an opinion disclaiming any position on their U. citizenship status. Downes, 182 U.S. 244, 375 (1901) (Harlan, J., dissenting); Downes, 182 U.S. at 347 (Fuller, C.J., dissenting).

117 Downes, 182 U.S. at 287.

colonized peoples, he concluded that the United States either enjoyed the power to annex territories without extending inhabitants U.S. citizenship or it was “helpless in the family of nations.” Coudert perceived how White’s argument could make decisions concerning the distribution of U.S. citizenship depend upon characterizations of its content. In the months ahead he searched for a test case in which to argue, as we will see, that U.S. citizenship had a fairly minimal content that could be adapted to the exigencies of empire and thus safely extended to all conquered peoples, including, he would come to imply,

Filipinos.118

In the days and weeks that followed, Degetau developed an interpretation of the cases that served his legal-political ends. Republicanos advocated Puerto Rican integration into the U.S. polity. If the Supreme Court had held the island to be outside the United States, integration would be infeasible; if the Court renewed U.S. commitment to the territorial system integration remained a possibility. For Degetau, publicly characterizing mainland legal events so that they appeared to be consistent with his aims reinforced his political reputation based on legal acumen and promises to win U.S. citizenship and territorial status for Puerto Ricans. Such arguments would also be crucial in later urging courts to find claims to U.S. citizenship consistent with existing case law. To that end, Degetau had used an opportunity to meet Supreme Court Justice Henry Brown the day after the decisions came down to test his ideas.119

Satisfied by his conversation with Brown, Degetau portrayed himself and all

Puerto Ricans to readers of the Puerto Rican newspaper La Correspondencia as

118 Ibid.; Henry Randall Webb to Federico Degetau, 15 Nov. 1901, CIHCAM 3/III/99; Juan F. Perea, “Fulfilling Manifest Destiny: Conquest, Race, and the Insular Cases,” in Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, eds. Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 159.

119 Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Besosa, 31 May 1901, CIHCAM 3/I/43.

sufficiently removed from national U.S. politics to judge the decisions objectively. Unlike mainland politicians still “dazzled . . . by the cloud of dust of the battle” in Congress, he wrote, islanders could join the Supreme Court in analyzing the cases “independent of all influence of governments.” The legal issue in the case, he argued, was not the political hot-button issue of “whether ‘the Constitution follows the flag.’” It was whether and why the United States could impose a tariff on mainland-island shipments. He had earlier joined with those who hoped that the Court would integrate

Puerto Rico into the existing constitutional order by striking all tariffs on island-mainland shipments as violative of the Article I requirement of uniform U.S. tariffs. Now that it

had not, he reported himself nonetheless “very much pleased with the” decisions. Arguing that the “Supreme Court has decided with practical unanimity that Porto Rico is

‘a territory of the United States’ . . . and ‘a territory appurtenant and belonging to the

United States,’” he contended that one could not sensibly “speak of Puerto Rico like a

‘possession’ or ‘colony’ with better title than he would be able to apply such terms to

New Mexico or to Arizona.” The decisions, he argued, affirmed what he understood to be the anti-colonial underpinnings of the Monroe doctrine, facilitating “an expansion essentially ‘American’” and “forever ratif[ying] liberty in the hemisphere.” 120

While the Insular decisions removed one impediment to congressional legislation

concerning Puerto Rico, they revealed others. Degetau responded with a flurry of

120 [Degetau], “Manifiesto del Comisionado Señor Degetau” (quotes 1-3, 6-8 (“se hallan ofuscados por su misma intervención en la lucha, y con la nube de la pólvora de la batalla aún ante los ojos”; “independiente de todo influjo de gobiernos”; “si <la Constitución sigue á la bandera ó no>”; “hablar de Puerto Rico como de una <posesión> ó de una <colonia> con mejor título que podría aplicar tales términos á New México ó á Arizona”; “una expansión esencialmente <americana>”; “ratificado para siempre la libertad en el Hemisferio Americano”)); “As Degetau Sees It,” Baltimore Sun, 28 May 1901, available at CIHCAM

18/L1 (quote 4); “Porto Rico, Territory,” Buffalo Courier, 31 Jul. 1901, available at CIHCAM 18/L1 (quote

5); Art. 1, sec. 8, U.S. Const., quoted in Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy, 20 Feb. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VII/47; Untitled article, [News], 3 Dec. 1900, available at CIHCAM 12/L2; “American Life Split into Parts”; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to [?], [Dec. 1900?], CIHCAM 3/IV/24.

activity. On July 10 the Washington Times reported Degetau’s complaint that progress on status issues remained difficult because many U.S. officials “classed” Puerto Ricans

“with the Philippines and Hawaiians while as a matter of fact we have almost nothing in common with them.” Chairman of the House Committee on Insular Affairs Henry Cooper confirmed that Republicans “don’t want to bother with” Puerto Rican matters

now because “Puerto Rico can’t be considered in itself, but . . . the Philippines also has to be taken into account.” The Times recorded, Degetau’s complaints that “people do not seem to appreciate either our capacities, abilities, or political and civil status” and that “considerations affecting the Philippines, Hawaii, and other Territories and possessions

of the United States . . . are entirely foreign and irrelevant to Porto Rico.” The objections failed. The representative of a small, weak, distant island with no congressional vote, Degetau had little power. As his friend Ramón Lopez wryly observed of U.S.-island relations, “That country is so big, and this one so small, that it is smart to always be pushing something, just so they’ll remember us.”121

With Congress still largely closed to matters of Puerto Rican status, Degetau

continued to place such matters before federal agencies, asking the State Department to give Puerto Ricans U.S. passports as U.S. citizens and the civil-service commission to let Puerto Ricans participate in civil service without traveling to the mainland. These two actions illustrated the interrelated natures of the status of people and places. When

abroad, Puerto Ricans were “temporarily subject” to alien sovereignties that often

121 “Porto Rican’s Ambition,” Washington Times, 10 Jul. 1901, available at 18/L1 (quotes 1-2, 5-6); [Degetau], Diary, 10 Dec. 1901, CIHCAM 11/L4 (quotes 3-4 (“No quieren ocuparse de”; “no se puede considerar á Puerto Rico en sí, sino que hay que tener en cuenta á Filipinas”)); R. B. López to Federico Degetau, 6 Dec. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VII/7 (quote 7 (“Ese pais [sic] es tan grande, y este tan pequeño, que es preciso estar siempre promoviendo algo, para que se acuerdan de nosotros”)); Draft, Federico Degetau to Ramón B. Lopez, 31 May 1901, CIHCAM 3/I/42.

accorded those carrying U.S. passports a degree of protection. The civil service provided opportunities to individual job seekers via quotas and exams tied to the status of U.S. places as territories and states. Decisions by one agency were also likely to affect deliberations at the other.122

On July 15, 1901, Degetau told Chairman Cooper that he sought to force the State

Department to clarify the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. “I have presented the question,” he wrote, “as involved in the issu[]ing of a passport to me, in which my American citizenship has been omitted.” In a reprisal of State Department indifference to Degetau’s prior request for clarification of Puerto Ricans’ status for immigration purposes, the Secretary made no decision on Degetau’s application. Previously the Department had not faced an aggrieved client for whom redress required settlement of a citizenship issue. But now, because federal law prescribed that “[n]o passport shall be

granted or issued to or verified for any other persons than citizens of the United States,” it appeared that the State Department could only resolve Degetau’s action by clarifying Puerto Ricans’ citizenship status. Hoping to compel a decision through a test case, Degetau secured Henry Webb, a lawyer with connections to attorneys from the Insular Cases. Instead, Webb informed Degetau that federal courts were unlikely to intervene in

a case that involved “ordinary official duties,[ ]even when those duties require an interpretation of the law.” Without proposing alternative ways forward, Webb wrote some weeks later “that Coudert Bros, who were the lawyers who argued the De [Lima]

and Downes cases in the U. S. Supreme Court are anxious to take up your case with me

122 Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law, 6th ed. (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company,

1855), 392 (giving the source of the quotation as “Grotius, in the second chapter of his third book,” while describing all sojourners as merely “temporarily subject” to foreign laws).

and make a test case of it.” 123

On September 14, 1901, the governmental landscape changed abruptly as Theodore Roosevelt became president following the assassination of William McKinley. For Degetau, the tragedy was a potential boon. Three months earlier, Roosevelt had replied to Degetau’s enclosure of his Philadelphia Inquirer article by concurring as to “the admirable appearance of the Porto Rican troops” during McKinley’s inauguration and announcing, “I am proud to call them, and you, my fellow Americans.” It was a victory on which Degetau would now seek to build.124

In the interim, a civil-service claim was taking shape. On November 18, a San Juan resident named Hernandez forwarded Degetau a letter of protest that he had mailed to the civil service and asked Degetau for help. In the protest, Hernandez described being rejected for a job as an inspector of vessels in San Juan on the ground that he was not on the qualified civil-service list. Yet, he pointed out, qualification meant passing an examination not offered in Puerto Rico. In addition to offering no exams in Puerto Rico, the civil service had quotas requiring it to hire minimum numbers of residents from most states and territories but not from Puerto Rico. For Republicanos, the resultant near-total exclusion of Puerto Ricans from the civil service was bad politics. It potentially dishonored Puerto Ricans, as one letter writer indicated in a plea on behalf of his “honorable, educated, and intelligent” job-seeking brother-in-law. It also reenacted a

123 [Federico Degetau] to Henry Cooper, 15 Jul. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/33 (quotes 1-2); Revised Statutes of the United States Passed at the First Session of the Forty-Third Congress, 1873-1874, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878), Title 47, sec. 4076, 786 (quote 3); Henry Webb to Federico Degetau, 14 Aug. 1901, CIHCAM 3/II/61 (quote 4); Webb to Degetau, 15 Nov. 1901 (quote 5); Webb to Degetau, 10 Aug. 1901; United States ex rel. Dunlap v. Black, 128 U.S. 40 (1888); “Federico Degetau Gonzalez,” newspaper and date unknown, available at CIHCAM 18/L1/195 (quoting [Federico Degetau] to [Theodore Roosevelt], 7 Dec. 1901). This collaboration was underway by August 10. Webb to Degetau, 10

Aug. 1901.

124 Roosevelt to Degetau, 24 Jun. 1901 (quotes).

Spanish practice against which Puerto Rican liberals had long fought: preference for continental Spaniards over island ones in the distribution of positions administering the Puerto Rican state. As Republicanos told Degetau, “a clique of continental adventurers [in] official posts who are a discredit to the American government [and] who in their country would be nobody” “are preferred, and a consequent disgust here results.” Finally and relatedly, the Puerto Rican political system, like that in the United States, depended heavily on patronage. So long as government hiring and Puerto Rican status remained

entwined, both issues were likely to remain Republicano priorities.125

In November 1901, Degetau joined his continuing efforts to win Puerto Ricans recognition as U.S. citizens to a lobbying effort designed to win Puerto Rico full access to the civil-service system. He again met with Supreme Court Justice Henry Brown, now for a “conversation concerning the citizenship of Puerto Rico.” When Brown asked “if Puerto Ricans would like to return to Spain,” Degetau told him that “the Puerto Ricans

are and desire to be American, although they believe that they have not been done justice, but they trust.” A meeting with President Roosevelt “to speak of the Civil Service Law and citizenship” culminated in Roosevelt requesting a written statement. After a discussion with the “Com[missione]r of the Civil Service,” Degetau reported that “Puerto Ricans get a quota.” A week later, Degetau had a “Conference with the Sec of State

concerning the citizenship” of Puerto Ricans.126

125 J. Henna to Federico Degetau, 30 Nov. 1902, CIHCAM 3/IV/11 (quote 1 (“honrado, instruido, é inteligente”)); [?] Rossy to Bonifacio Sanchez, 21 Apr. 1902, CIHCAM 4/II/147 (quote 2 (“una camarilla de aventureros continentales ocupando puestos oficiales que son un descrédito para el gobierno americano que nos rije: estos empleados que en su pais [sic] no serian [sic] nunca gente”)); J. Sifre to Federico Degetau, 1 Jul. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/30 (quote 3 (“Son preferidos los de allá y existe el consiguiente disgusto”)); [?] [Hernanchez?] to President of Civil Service, 18 Nov. 1901, CIHCAM 3/IV/3; “Federico Degetau Gonzalez” (quoting Degetau to Roosevelt, 7 Dec. 1901).

126 [Degetau], Diary, 18 Nov. 1901 (quotes 1-6 (“conversación acerca de la ciudadanía de Puerto Rico”; “si los puertoriqueños [sic] querian [sic] volver á España”; “Los puertoriqueños [sic] son y desean ser

In the December 7 letter that Roosevelt requested, Degetau asked him to clarify ambiguous policy, remedy harms to Puerto Ricans, and settle a legal controversy by recognizing Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens. The administration, Degetau wrote, sometimes “consider[s] us to be American citizens,” as when the civil-service board opened the system to Puerto Ricans. At other times, as with the refusal of the State Department to respond to Degetau’s request for a standard passport, he continued, “doubts seem to arise.” The resultant ambiguity, he went on, caused Puerto Ricans “political and moral disturbance and . . . material harms.” By also claiming that “[m]y personal interests have been harmed” by the delay concerning the passport application, Degetau cast himself as a party seeking a concrete remedy and his request as a legal matter ripe for resolution. The Foraker Act, Insular Cases, Treaty of Paris, and U.S.

military rule, Degetau elaborated, all indicated that Puerto Ricans had a legal right to U.S. citizenship. The Treaty of Paris, he wrote, considered Puerto Ricans born in Spain who

did not preserve their Spanish nationality “as having accepted the nationality of the territory in which they resided.” That territory, Degetau read the Insular Cases to hold, was “a territory of the United States,” making those former Spaniards U.S. citizens. By then using the term “all the inhabitants” in describing the status of Puerto Ricans in the Foraker Act, Degetau continued, Congress gave island-born Puerto Ricans the same U.S.

citizenship as continental-Spanish-born ones.127

americanos, aunque creen que no se les ha hecho justicia, pero confían”; “para hablarle de la ley del Civil

Service y de la ciudadanía”; “Comr del Civil Service”; “Conseguida quota los puertoriqueños [sic]”)); 25

Nov. 1901 (quote 7 (“Conferencia con el Sec de Estado acerca de la ciudadanía”)), CIHCAM 11/L4.

127 “Federico Degetau Gonzalez” (giving source of quotations as Degetau to Roosevelt, 7 Dec. 1901 (“nos considera como ciudadanos americanos”; “parecen existir dudas”; “la perturbación política y moral, y los daños materiales”; “Mis intereses personales han sido perjudicados”; “habían aceptado la nacionalidad del territorio en que residían”; “un territorio de los Estados Unidos”; “todos los habitantes” )). In stating that

the Civil Service treated Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens Degetau appears to have mistaken the opinion of

one commissioner as that of the entire commission. Geo. Leadley to Federico Degetau, 29 Mar. 1904,

Degetau had an additional argument in case of need: the Foraker Act created the political body “the people of Porto Rico” out of mainlanders and Puerto Ricans residing on the island. Presuming that a “political body cannot be constituted with American citizens and other members of distinct nationality or distinct citizenship,” Degetau again concluded that all Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens. He saw a presumption of the same result in the Foraker Act rule that all Puerto Rican government employees “swear to maintain the Constitution of the United States.” As he argued elsewhere, such oaths were akin to mutually enforceable promises, the taker, agreeing to “maintain the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, national or foreign, thus solemnly contracting

duties and acquiring rights of other citizens.” Finally, he reminded Roosevelt that General Guy Henry had in 1898 promised islanders “protection as citizens of the American Union.” To deny them that status would make them “feel deceived” for having extended “a warm welcome to the American Soldiers.” 128

Roosevelt and U.S. officials chose to moot, not answer, Degetau’s petitions. After

Degetau sent his letter, the Washington Post reported civil-service plans to establish examination boards in three Puerto Rican cities. On December 27, 1901, the Secretary of State wrote Degetau that Puerto Ricans abroad would receive “the same protection of person and property as is accorded to the native-born citizens of the United States.” Days

CIHCAM 4/IX/26.

128 [Draft?, Copy?], [Federico Degetau?], “Conferencia de Degetau,” n.d., 3 available at CIHCAM

18/L2/57 (summarizing Federico Degetau, El Status Político de Puerto-Rico y de sus habitantes ante los departamentos legislativo, ejecutivo, y judicial de los Estados Unidos, address before the Ateneo, n.d.) (quotes 3-4 (“prestando el juramento de mantener la Constituci[ó]n de los Estados Unidos contra todos los enemigos nacionales ó extran[j]eros, contrayendo por este medio solemne los deberes y adquiriendo los derechos que los dem[á]s ciudadanos”)) (giving the source of the quotation or paraphrase as “el Articulo II del Protocolo de Washington de Agosto del 98” (“Protocol of August 98, article 2”)); “Federico Degetau Gonzalez” (other quotes (“el pueblo de Puerto Rico”; “una entidad o cuerpo político no puede constituirse con ciudadanos americanos y otros miembros de distinta nacionalidad o distinta ciudadanía”; “protección como ciudadanos de la Unión Americana”; “se sentirán decepcionados”; “una cordial bienvenida a los soldados americanos”)) (quoting Degetau to Roosevelt, 7 Dec. 1901).

later, the Secretary, eventually with Roosevelt’s support, asked the House Committee on Foreign Affairs for legislation letting the State Department grant passports to U.S. insular residents regardless of U.S. citizenship. The Committee soon reported a bill that would make passports available to “those owing allegiance, whether citizens or not, to the

United States.” After meeting with the chair of the committee, Degetau turned to Jean des Garennes, U.S.-citizen counsel for the French Embassy, to put into writing objections to a legislative mooting of his request for a U.S.-citizen passport. The efforts failed, and the bill became law. When Roosevelt issued executive guidelines for the issuances of passports to any “resident of an insular possession of the United States who owes allegiance to the United States,” he did not state whether Puerto Ricans were U.S.

citizens. He and other officials avoided that issue because it was hard. Many believed that successful U.S. imperialism precluded recognition of newly acquired peoples as U.S. citizens. Yet, many also understood the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments to make the peoples of the United States into citizens of the United States. Few relished a choice between constitutional violations and dooming U.S. imperial governance.129

Though Congress was willing to moot his passport claim, Degetau noted in late

1901 that otherwise “congressmen don’t plan to turn to Puerto Rican matters.” Deciding to “make his case in other circles,” Degetau attended the annual conference of the

129 “A Letter from Mr. Degetau,” Puerto Rico Herald, 11 Jan. 1902, 4 (quote 1); “Civil Service in Porto Rico,” Washington Post, 10 Feb. 1902, 4; H.R. 8129, 57th Cong., 1st sess., Report no. 559, 18 Feb. 1902, available at CIHCAM 3/V/20 (quote 2); Theodore Roosevelt, Rules Governing the Granting and Issuing of Passports in the Insular Possessions of the United States (19 Jul. 1902), available at MD NARA

350/5B/837/19929 (quote 3); [Degetau], Diary, 25 Nov. 1901, Feb. 1902, CIHCAM 11/L4; “Washington

Attorney Honored,” Washington Post, 16 Apr. 1899, 5; “Funeral of F. R. Coudert,” New York Times, 23

Dec. 1903, 9; “Jean des Garennes, French Professor, 66,” New York Times, 9 Jul. 1942, 21; Statutes at Large 32 (1902): 386; see also S. 2298, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 7 Jan. 1902, available at CIHCAM 11/L4; Congressional Record 35, pt. 5:4992-4995 (2 May 1902) (quoting Secretary of State John Hay as forwarding a draft of the passports bill to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 4, 1902); Congressional Record 35, pt. 6:5697-5699 (20 May 1902); Congressional Record 35, pt. 7:6588-6589 (11

Jun. 1902).

American Economic Association and delivered a lecture at the Columbian University in late 1901 and early 1902.130

Building on his earlier arguments he used such opportunities to stress Puerto

Rican civilization and to promote Puerto Rican capacity for self-government. In doing so, he drew on notions of honor among Puerto Rican Liberals that had shifted away from ideals of defending reputations through private violence and toward conceptions of masculinity based on restraint and civility. He thus celebrated Puerto Rican disinterest in bullfighting and Puerto Ricans’ ability “to file the claws of the Spanish lion” and thereby avoid the obligation of a revolution that would have transformed “a civilized, organized and relatively rich people [into] a beautiful cemetery.” The Treaty of Paris, by distinguishing “‘Spaniards born in the Peninsula’ and ‘natives of the territories,’” he suggested, had given many mainlanders the false “idea that Porto Rico . . . was peopled

by ‘natives,’” “some race of semi-savage ‘Indians.’” Because of mainlanders’ expectations, he added, it was “a great surprise” to “the public” that the “Porto Rico Battalion” at President McKinley’s 1901 inauguration included not “men of small stature and sallow complexion,” but servicemen who displayed “moral conduct,” “military bearing,” and “dexterity.” In fact, he claimed, Puerto Rico less resembled Guam, apparently on “the boundaries of a savage condition,” than Cuba, “considered on a level with general civilized countries, and socially speaking, . . . compare[able] with any other people of the South American republics, or of Europe.” For similar reasons, he

elaborated, Spain had established different government in the Antilles than in the

130 [Degetau], Diary, 8 Jan. 1902, CIHCAM 11/L4 ( “los congressmen no piensan ocuparse de PR”; “mover la cuestión en otros círculos”).

Philippines.131

During these months, Degetau expanded his social network at White House receptions and congressional hearings; by lobbying administrators; and through meeting and working with mainlanders who shared his commitments to freemasonry, spiritualism, and charitable reform. After making new acquaintances, he cultivated them, often with correspondence, conversation, and gifts. Soon, newspapers wrote that Degetau was a “highly . . . diplomatic” “man of very pleasing address[,] courteous manners,” and “brilliant attainments” who “created a favorable impression in the public life of Washington.” Degetau’s personal notes from mid-November 1901 to mid-February 1902 confirm his reach. He reported often-daily visits to the Capitol and amicable

conversations and correspondence with the president, a Supreme Court justice, Congressmen, and heads of numerous agencies. He also had warm, cooperative relationships with high U.S. officials in Puerto Rico.132

But personal popularity did not change the island’s status. In January 1902

131 [Degetau], Something that the American People Must Know (quotes 1-2); Degetau, The Political Status of Porto Rico (quotes 3-5); Degetau, “Porto Ricans as Soldiers and as Legislators” (quotes 6-12); [Federico Degetau], Drafts, The Truth about Porto Rico and Puerto-Rico and Its People, n.d., CIHCAM 18/L2

(quotes 13-14); Hollander, Adams, and Degetau, Publications. On associations of bullfighting to barbarism in the Cuban context, see Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Between Baseball and Bullfighting: The Quest for Nationality in Cuba, 1868-1898,” Journal of American History 81 (Sep. 1994): 493-517.

132 “A Credit to Porto Rico,” Washington Times, 9 Nov. 1901, available at CIHCAM 18/L1 (quotes 1-3); “Hawaii and Porto Rico at Washington,” The Sunday Pioneer Press, 10 Feb. 1901, available at CIHCAM

12/L2 (quote 4); [Degetau], Diary, 18 Nov. 1901 to 18 Feb. 1902, CIHCAM 11/L4. On making

governmental contacts, see, e.g., Degetau to Rossy, 4 Jan. 1901; [Degetau], Diary, CIHCAM 11/L4. On nongovernmental networks, see, e.g., Geo. Moore to Federico Degetau, Feb. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/29; Draft, [Federico Degetau], Toast of Federico Degetau, 32°, on “The Government of the United States” at the Banquet at the Battle House, Mobile, Ala., April 22nd., 1903, CIHCAM 18/L1; Henry Cooper to Federico Degetau, 3 May 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/159; Manuel Rojas to Federico Degetau, 6 Jan. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/4; Fred Woodward to F. Degeteau, 18 Mar. 1903, CICHAM 4/I/91; E. Harris to Frederico [sic] Degetau, 11 Apr. 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/133; John Leathers to Frederico [sic] Degetau, 24 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/297. On follow-up, see, e.g., Degetau to Cooper, 15 Jul. 1901; Degetau to Rossy, 4 Jan.

1901; Henry Hoyt to Federico Degetau, 12 Dec. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VII/16; Degetau to Lopez, 31 May

1901; [Representative] J. Goulden to Federico Degetau, 6 Jun. 1904, CIHCAM 5/II/9; [Illegible] Hughes to Federico Degetau, 1 Jun. 1904, CIHCAM 5/II/1; E.D. Crumpacker to Federico Degetau, 15 Dec. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/65; J.B. Foraker to Federico Degetau, 22 Dec. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/70; Sereno Payne to Federico Degetau, 21 Apr. 1904, CIHCAM 5/I/14; [Degetau], Diary, CIHCAM 11/L4.

Degetau had told Congressman Henry Cooper that absent legislative action, he would bring a judicial test case. Shortly thereafter, Degetau sought to import from Biarritz, France, the paintings of a Puerto Rican artist he knew surnamed Molinas. Doing so raised the issue of whether the works were statutorily exempt from customs duties as “[w]orks

of art, the production of American artists residing temporarily abroad.” In a letter to the Treasury Department, Degetau argued they were, and on April 28, 1902, the Secretary of the Treasury forwarded Degetau’s letter to the Attorney General for an opinion. On May

13 the Attorney General opined that Puerto Rican artists were also “American artists” within the meaning of the statute, though cautioned that “it is clearly not inconceivable for a man to be an American artist within the meaning of such a statute and yet,” like an “American tribal Indian, or a native Alaskan,” be “not a citizen of the United States.”133

Around the same time, Representative Llewellyn Powers of Maine introduced a

bill by Degetau to make Degetau a delegate like other traditional territorial delegates, with a voice but no vote in the U.S. House. The House referred the bill to the Committee on Insular Affairs, where Degetau testified that the bill was a pragmatic, low-stakes way to align the Foraker Act and the Insular Cases. Currently, he explained, the Resident Commissioner had some traits of a representative of an island within the U.S. union and some of a representative of a politically distinct body. Because the Insular Cases had already decided that Puerto Rico was not politically distinct for purposes of foreign relations, Degetau implied, Congress could eliminate this ambiguity without unsettling existing doctrine. With most congressional statutes now applicable to Puerto Rico, the bill would also facilitate informed decision making by giving Congress ready recourse to

133 24 Op. Att’y Gen. 41, 40, 42-44 (13 May 1902) (quotes) (italics added in original); “Porto Rican an

American Artist,” Washington Post, 17 May 1902, 11.

a Puerto Rican delegate. To concerns that Puerto Rican legislation would become a precedent for the Philippines, Degetau stressed that the archipelagos held different peoples facing separate circumstances and conditions. Though aware that Congress was on the cusp of passing an organic act for the Philippines that closely resembled that enacted for Puerto Rico, Degetau stressed differences in how U.S. military authorities had treated the two archipelagos. They had, he claimed, promised Puerto Ricans but not Filipinos U.S. citizenship and required from Puerto Rican but not Filipino officeholders naturalization-like oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution, give allegiance to the United States, and renounce fidelity to foreign nations. Such acts, he added, were law under the Foraker Act. In any case, Degetau continued, Congress could avoid a precedent by

drafting the law to so state.134

With political friends supporting his efforts, Degetau initially appeared to make progress. Committee Chair Henry Cooper elicited that Degetau had represented Puerto Rico before the Spanish Cortes, a privilege that Puerto Rico but not the Philippines had enjoyed under Spain. Implying that Puerto Rico and the Arizona Territory differed only in population, not status, Republican committee member John Lacey of Iowa pointed out

134 “Bill haciendo delegado al comisionado por Puerto Rico,” El País, 2 Jun. 1902, 11-12, available at CIHCAM 18/L1; [Degetau], Diary, 10 Dec. 1901, 6 Jan. 1902, Jan. 1902; but cf. ibid. 20-21 Dec. 1901 (describing two Congressmen’s positive, if initially ineffective, responses to Degetau’s lobbying); House Committee on Insular Affairs, Committee Reports, Hearings, and Acts of Congress Corresponding Thereto,

57th Cong., 1st and 2d sess., 1901-1903 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903), 34-37; Philippine Organic Act, Statutes at Large 32 (1 Jul. 1902): 691. On the shape of the bill, see Draft, “A Bill to amend an Act entitled ‘An Act temporarily to provide revenues and a civil government for Porto Rico, and for other p[u]rposes’”, approved April twelf[t]h, nineteen hundred, and to provide for a delegate to the House of Representatives of the United States from Porto Rico,” 57th Cong., 1st sess., House of Representatives, CIHCAM 11/L14. According to the published report of the hearings that the House Committee on Insular Affairs held on the bill, Degetau authored and Representative Samuel Powers of Maine introduced by request the bill proposing to make the Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner into a delegate. House Committee on Insular Affairs, Committee Reports, Hearings, and Acts of Congress, 33, 37. Samuel Powers, however, was the representative from Massachusetts. Llewellyn Powers was the representative from Maine. According to Congressional Record, 35, pt. 5:4850 (29 Apr. 1902), it was Representative Powers from Maine who introduced the bill “by request.” See also Congressional Record

35 (1902) [P index]:554 (identifying “Powers, Llewellyn” as the author).

that Arizona with “about 105,000 people,” but not Puerto Rico with “near a million people,” enjoyed floor privileges. Contrasting Puerto Rico with neighboring nations that many mainlanders associated with blackness, Lacey also noted that the “minister from Santo Domingo or the Minister from Haiti has the privilege of the floor of the House,” but not Degetau. Governor Hunt similarly described his support for and efforts on behalf of the bill. In mid-May, the Committee on Insular Affairs unanimously recommended Lacey’s bill to the House, and Degetau triumphantly telegrammed Hunt and Rossy,

signing off to the latter, “Glory to God above.”135

That small victory soon gave way to larger setbacks. In a June 2 letter to the Detroit Journal, Degetau declared himself “shocked and mortified” that the anti- imperialist Bishop John Spalding had publicly argued that in “the tropics the race is and, probably always will be, indolent, ignorant, weak and sensual.” Degetau had previously expressed hope that education would eliminate mainlanders’ false criticisms of Puerto Rico. But Spalding made what Degetau termed his lazy, ignorant mistake despite having countervailing data at hand. Degetau implied that Spalding had ignored how “highly cultured” islanders were, how “[our] women are just as pure and our men just as good as those of any race under the sun.” Several weeks later, the U.S. Senate struck language extending Puerto Ricans a congressional voice from a bill that it passed, thus dooming the effort for the term.136

135 “Floor Privileges to Dagatau,” Washington Post, 22 Apr. 1902, 4 (quotes 1-3); Degetau to Rossy, n.d., CIHCAM 6/III/35 (quote 4 (“Gloria á Dios en las alturas”)); “Bill haciendo delegado”; House Committee on Insular Affairs, Committee Reports, Hearings, and Acts of Congress, 34-37; Wm. Hunt to Federico Degetau, 19 May 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/6; Elliott to Degetau, 26 May 1902; [Federico Degetau] to William Hunt, 16 May 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/5; House Committee on Insular Affairs, Amending the Act to Temporarily Provide Revenues, Etc., for Porto Rico, Report no. 2158, 57th Cong., 1st sess. (20 May 1902) (concerning H.R. 14083).

136 “Prelate Vexes Porto Ricans,” Detroit Journal, 2 Jun. 1902, available at CIHCAM 18/L1 (quotes); “Porto Rican Land Bills Passed Senate,” [News], 26 Jun. 1902, available at CIHCAM 11/L4; Degetau,

By mid 1902 a pattern had emerged. Degetau had access to powerful individuals and myriad outlets through which he could defend his people. On status and mainland perceptions of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, however, he made little progress. These disparate outcomes resulted in part as Degetau failed to convince mainlanders to judge Puerto Rico on its best men, not its average members. Such best men in Puerto Rico, he indicated, were equals of white U.S. leaders and were the ones whose paternal influence shaped and controlled island society as a whole. This argument had been implicit in his Philadelphia Inquirer essay. He made it explicitly in a coauthored report on delinquency: “[J]ust as we see fathers, older brothers, and strong and weak relatives in a family, in society and the State we see rich, educated, influential, well-provided-for individuals who provide paternal charity to their uneducated, weak, miserable brothers . . . .” Thus, when Degetau helped the less fortunate, he also sought to exemplify the modernity, liberalism, and progressive reforms of better Puerto Rican men that he claimed made islanders

worthy of U.S. citizenship. Many mainlanders disagreed, judging Puerto Rican on what they perceived to be representative members, not leading ones. As a result, Degetau’s claim that enlightened native leadership of a racially diverse island population made islanders worthy of U.S. citizenship relied on evidence that led some mainlanders to the contrary conclusion. Degetau’s support of Puerto Rican enrollment into mainland schools

for blacks and American Indians sheds light on this dynamic.137

After annexation, a mainland degree became a valuable, elusive commodity.

Political Status of Porto Rico, 3-4; cf. J.L. Spalding, Socialism and Labor and Other Arguments Social, Political, and Patriotic (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1902), 83.

137 Federico Degetau y Gonzalez, Origen y desarrollo del movimiento protector de la infancia abandonada y de la juventud delincuente, n.d., CIHCAM 6/II/82 (“come vemos en la familia, que son los padres, los hermanos mayores, los más fuertes, los más débiles, así en la sociedad, el Estado, las clases más cultas, más

ricas y más influyentes[?] los que por sus condiciones de vida pueden considerarse come mejor dotados,

cuidarán paternalmente de sus hermanos más incultos, más miserables ó mas débiles”).

Puerto Ricans wrote Degetau for help enrolling in mainland schools. Degetau, who encouraged and sometimes facilitated such ambitions, discovered that many mainland schools required a fluency in English and an annual tuition beyond the reach of aspirants. The Tuskegee Institute and Carlisle Indian School were frequently exceptions to this rule.138

Tuskegee and Carlisle traced their roots to the Hampton Institute, which Civil

War veteran Samuel Armstrong had opened in Virginia in 1868. Seeing similarities between U.S. freedmen and what he perceived to be dark-skinned indigenous Hawai‘ians, Armstrong sought to uplift former slaves by offering them the vocational and agricultural education that his father had provided in Hawai‘i. Booker T. Washington, among the Institute’s top pupils, had become principal of the new Tuskegee Institute on Armstrong’s recommendation in 1881. Cast in the Hampton model, Tuskegee was a major trainer of black teachers. Richard Pratt, the founder of Carlisle, had come to education after “subduing” American Indians with the army between 1867 and 1875. Seeking to provide native prisoners educational opportunities, he had initially brought his wards to Hampton, but then had decided that because blacks faced more prejudice than American Indians, his students needed a separate school with opportunities to socialize with whites. With a mix of charitable and federal support, Pratt had launched and maintained an English-language vocational school committed to what he termed “acculturation under duress.”139

138 C[illegible] [illegible] de Denton to Federico Degetau, 14 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/285; Isabel Gonzalez to Federico Degetau, 10 Apr. 1904, CIHCAM 5/I/5. On Degetau’s encouragement of prospective students, see, for example, Luis Gonzalez to Federico Degetau, 5 Feb. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/35. On the cost of education, see, for example, Gonzalez to Degetau, 10 Apr. 1904; Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for Cuban Negroes,” New York Times, 16 Aug. 1898. On the need for English, see, for example, A. T. Stuart to Federico Degetau, 10 Feb. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/45.

139 José-Manuel Navarro, Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological

Control in Puerto Rico, 1898-1908 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 120-121 (quote 1), 115-119; Pablo

Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation under Duress: The Puerto Rican Experience at the Carlisle Indian

Washington and Pratt saw opportunities in U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico and

U.S. officials on the island saw opportunities in Washington and Pratt. As early as

August 16, 1898, Washington began publishing letters in major U.S. newspapers arguing that blacks in general and the institute in particular were crucial to U.S. success in its new relationships to lands where the “[o]ne-half of the population . . . composed of mulattoes or Negroes” “need . . . the strength that they can get by thorough intellectual, religious

and industrial training.” The United States, he wrote, had “one advantage . . . . The experience that we have passed through in the Southern States during the last thirty years in the education of my race, whose history and needs are not very different from the history and needs of the Cuban and Porto Ricans . . . .” The plan, Washington knew, could beget prestige and funds. It would cost $150 to cover tuition and expenses, and, as the Washington Post wryly noted, “[H]e invites anybody who feels like helping . . . to write him. We suspect that the inclosure of a check in the first letter would do no harm.”

By the end of the year, Tuskegee had its first Puerto Rican student.140

Then in early 1899, John Eaton brought decades of experience in southern, post- emancipation U.S. education to Puerto Rico as its head of education. Formerly associate commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, superintendent of Tennessee public instruction, and U.S. Commissioner of Education, he had substantially influenced education in the U.S. South. He also frequently visited Carlisle, becoming what the school’s newspaper called “one of Carlisle’s staunchest supporters.” Eaton laid groundwork for sending

Industrial School 1898-1918,” Centro Journal 18, no. 1 (2006): 222-259 (quote 2); “Civilizing Indian Youth,” New York Times, 16 Mar. 1880, 2 (giving an early overview of the school as a federal program); “The Indian at School,” Washington Post, 9 Nov. 1884, 3 (describing contributions by “philanthropic ladies”).

140 Washington, “Industrial Education for Cuban Negroes,” 16 Aug. 1898 (quote 1); Sonia M. Rosa, “The

Puerto Ricans at Carlisle Indian School,” KACIKE: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology, http://www.kacike.org/SoniaRosa.html (28 Dec. 2003) (quote 3); “A Word from Booker Washington,” Washington Post, 18 Aug. 1898, 6. (quotes 2, 4).

Puerto Ricans to Carlisle. After serious illness cut short his tenure, his successor Martin Brumbaugh expanded his efforts, producing dozens of scholarships for Puerto Ricans seeking to attend Carlisle or a vocational school in the Tuskegee mold.141

In 1901-1902, Brumbaugh pressed both schools on how many students they could

accept. U.S. officials in Puerto Rico promoted these schools as part of what they understood to be their civilizing mission on the island. Familiar with the reputations of Tuskegee and Carlisle for uplifting purportedly inferior races, U.S. officials modeled schools reforms on the island after Washington’s and Pratt’s programs and hoped that returning students from them would become agents of U.S. culture on the island. Soon, somewhat fewer than 20 Puerto Rican students had enrolled at Tuskegee and more than

40 had started at Carlisle.142

Degetau embraced the schools that were willing to accept Puerto Rican pupils. In a letter published by La Correspondencia in August 1901, Degetau recommended Carlisle as a modern institution, describing the commendable food and grounds and healthy, active, co-educated Puerto Rican students that he encountered there. Students complained of homesickness and manual work, he recounted, but less so after he had spoken with them. Degetau quickly took a role akin to prominent mainland supporters of Carlisle, Tuskegee, and Hampton. In February 1902 he had joined U.S. senators as an invited guest to the Carlisle commencement. Several months later he worked with high

141 Rosa, “Puerto Ricans at Carlisle” KACIKE: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology, http://www.kacike.org/SoniaRosa.html (28 Dec. 2003) (quote); “Cubans in a Southern Negro School,” New York Times, 2 Dec. 1898, 3; see also Navarro, Tropical Yankees; Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation.” Scholars studying Puerto Rican students at Carlisle and Tuskegee have focused on the cultural coercion that these students faced. Navarro, Tropical Yankees; Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation”; Rosa, “Puerto Ricans at Carlisle.” I gratefully draw on this work to examine Degetau’s responses to that coercion.

142 Victor S. Clark, “Porto Rico under American School System,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 May 1900,

41; “Porto Rico Nomination,” New York Times, 5 Jun. 1900, 7; Navarro, Tropical Yankees; Navarro- Rivera, “Acculturation”; Rosa, “Puerto Ricans at Carlisle.”

U.S. officials to secure federal legislation to increase Puerto Rican enrollment there. Then he made a trip to Tuskegee, visiting with Puerto Rican students and exchanging letters

and gifts with Booker T. Washington. A. T. Stuart, the superintendent of schools in

Washington, helped him as he tried to place a ward at the Hampton Institute.143

Observers often saw these events differently. Degetau’s support for Puerto Rican enrollment at Carlisle and Tuskegee created opportunities and pressures for the mainland press and U.S. officials to corroborate portrayals of Puerto Ricans as uncivilized. To establish the usefulness of Tuskegee to U.S. empire and to seek an advantageous position for former U.S. slaves and their descendants in the newly expanded racial hierarchy of

the U.S. empire-state, Booker T. Washington had depicted Puerto Ricans as less civilized and less American than mainland blacks, but also capable of fulfilling obligations of citizenship through training at Tuskegee. Washington told the Los Angeles Times that

one island student “was quite savage when he came,” but that after “one of our boys, [a] young American[,] . . . gave him a good thrashing,” he “changed his methods.” Thus: “I cannot see why they [the Puerto Ricans] should not be educated into being good American citizens.” In April and May 1901 the New York Times, in articles entitled “Porto Ricans Coming Here to Study” and “Porto Rican Boys to Study at Carlisle,” had described two groups of Puerto Ricans—26 in all—arriving to study at Carlisle at state

expense. Mainland readers had thus learned that U.S. officials expected islanders and

143 “Una visita á Carlisle,” La Correspondencia, 17 Aug. 1901; R.H. Pratt to Federico Degetau, 8 Aug.

1901, CIHCAM 3/III/52; R.H. Pratt to [Federico Degetau], 19 Jan. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/13; “Annual Exercises at Carlisle,” Washington Post, 3 Feb. 1902, 3; Pratt to Degetau, 20 Dec. 1902; R.H. Pratt to Federico Degetau, 24 Jan. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/17; Stuart to Degetau, 10 Feb. 1903; Eugenio Lecompte

to Federico Degetau, 13 Feb. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/47; Booker T. Washington to Ana Moreno Degetau, 16

May 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/182; Antonio Trujillo to Federico Degetau, 19 May 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/186; Booker T. Washington to Federico Degetau, 28 May 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/198; G.w.a. Johnston to Federico Degeteau, 20 May 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/187. Elitism like that Degetau displayed could

sometimes help intended beneficiaries, as when years later Carlisle surveyed alumni and responding Puerto

American Indians to benefit from the same education.144

Such associations worried parents and students. In 1901, Arturo Schulze thanked Degetau for visiting his daughter, then worried that she might not “fulfill her higher desires” at “the Indian School.” Reflecting on her attendance, Providencia Martínez related that “I talked to my dear papa about the Indian school and the poor father he used to cry . . . . Down here we do not know anything about good Indians but of those that you read in books that are regular animals.” Some Puerto Rican students, listed as belonging to the tribe “Porto Rico” on certain forms, crossed off “Indian” and “tribe” on other forms, replacing them with “Puerto Rico” or “Puerto Rican.” José Osuna remembered, “I did not like the place. I never thought it was the school for me. I was not an Indian; I was a Puerto Rican of Spanish descent.” Similarly, Angela Rivera-Tudó later complained that

the situation amounted to an unforgivable injustice, abusive treatment by our “masters,” directed to denigrating Puerto Ricans further, by their choosing the only college they had for educating and civilizing the savage Redskin Indians for also educating and “civilizing” the wretched Puerto Ricans.

Such families, instead of attacking racial hierarchy, guarded what they saw as their rightful place in it.145

The situation also created financial pressures on officials to equate Puerto Ricans

and American Indians. Congressional funding for Puerto Ricans at Carlisle required that

144 “The Negro’s Future,” Los Angeles Times, 17 Dec. 1899, 16; “Porto Ricans Coming Here to Study,”

New York Times, 28 Apr. 1901, 23; “Porto Rican Boys to Study at Carlisle,” New York Times, 17 May

1901, 5.

145 Arturo Schulze to Federico Degetau, 13 Aug. 1901, CIHCAM 3/III/59 (quotes 1-2 (“aprovecharse segun son sus mejores deseos”; “Yndian School”)); Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation” (quotes 3-9) (quoting Juan José Osuna, “An Indian in Spite of Myself,” Summer School Review 10, no. 5 (1932)) (translations are

Navarro-Rivera’s); Rosa, “Puerto Ricans at Carlisle” (quote 10) (quoting Angela Rivera-Tudó, “The Puerto

Rican Indians,” trans. Vilma Irrizary, La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico, 3 Jan. 1931, 4).

interested parties like Degetau ally with congressmen committed to Puerto Rican and American Indian affairs by telling them that Puerto Ricans were a good fit at a school devoted to serving U.S. native peoples. Senator Joseph Foraker agreed, and tried to add a funding measure to a bill involving American Indian matters. The measure failed. Other funding did not materialize. Seeking to forestall the extinction of Puerto Rican attendance at Carlisle, Pratt asked Degetau to urge upon the “Indian committee” that “[t]here is some Indian blood among your Porto Ricans and on that ground there is a claim for them.” It was a strange request. Degetau sought not tribal status for Puerto Ricans, but U.S. citizenship, a relationship to the United States that not all American Indians yet enjoyed. Previously, he had dismissed the argument Pratt now proposed, describing a near-total Spanish genocide of indigenous Puerto Ricans that made characterization of Puerto

Ricans as akin to American Indians an absurdity. But the request was also timely. Only five Puerto Ricans arrived at Carlisle after 1901, and, as money ran dry, those there left. By contrast, scholarship funds for Puerto Ricans remained available at Tuskegee, and as late as 1915, the Chicago Defender reported, Puerto Ricans attended there. 146

By mid 1902, Degetau’s horizons had narrowed. With little to show for his

attempts to influence mainland opinion, executive agencies, and political branches, he focused and integrated his efforts. In an English-language book that he envisioned writing to support U.S. citizenship and traditional territorial status, he planned to reprise his Philadelphia Enquirer essay, his readings of the Insular Cases, and his efforts before

U.S. officials, and add analysis of the Foraker Act and Treaty of Paris and comparisons of

146 R.H. Pratt to Federico Degetau, 15 Mar. 1904, CIHCAM 4/IX/14 (quotes); “Riverside: Filipinos in Indian School,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Feb. 1903, 12; Degetau, Political Status of Porto Rico; see also Pratt to Degetau, 20 Dec. 1902; Pratt to Degetau, 24 Jan. 1903; Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation”; Navarro, Tropical Yankees, 125 and n. 77; “Tuskegee Institute Opens 35th Session,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 25 Sep. 1915, 4.

peoples in various U.S. territories. Though he ultimately abandoned that project, he continued intertwining historical and legal arguments, now looking for a legal rather than literary vehicle through which to advance them.147

The Legalization of Labor: Santiago Iglesias and the American Federation of Labor

Although labor-leader Santiago Iglesias had come to the mainland fleeing violence and repression, rather than bearing Federico Degetau’s electoral mandate, he shared Degetau’s faith in mainland alliances. Seeking to carve out a political space in Puerto Rico for organized labor and aware that his mainland socialist friends had failed to protect him in fall 1900, he wrote to the American Federation of Labor on December 6,

In addressing the craft-union-based organization known for its emphasis on expressive liberties, Iglesias both described “15,000 skilled workmen” in Puerto Rico without indicating that many were not unionized and promoted “freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and free speech.” The Federation—always competing with rival labor groups for members—welcomed the overture, authorizing funds to organize island affiliates. Iglesias then met with Federation President Samuel Gompers, who conveyed the Federation’s commitment to voluntarism, a philosophy promoting ostensibly private group actions like collective bargaining, boycotts, and demonstrations and disfavoring legislative intrusions into the employment relationship like minimum-wage laws. The “best thing the state can do for Labor,” Gompers stated, “is to leave Labor alone.”

Gompers expressed his support for sending Iglesias to Puerto Rico as a paid organizer.148

147 [Degetau], Something that the American People Must Know.

148 Report of Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor Held at

Louisville, Kentucky, December 6th to 15th Inclusive, 1900 (American Federation of Labor, [1900]), 64-65 (quotes 1-2), 115-119, 202-211; William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor

In April 1901, the dispute between Iglesias’s Federación Libre and the Republicanos over worker loyalties and support for U.S. rule reignited. The New York Sun reported that a commission from the Republicano-aligned Federación Regional had visited Secretary of Puerto Rico William Hunt to denounce Iglesias as an anti-American, foreign, socialistic agitator. That month, Iglesias took advantage of ambiguities surrounding Puerto Ricans’ U.S. citizenship status and eligibility by taking out naturalization papers in Brooklyn. Back in Puerto Rico, Federación Libre members collected 6,000 signatures protesting poverty on the island. On April 16, Iglesias met with President McKinley, eliciting the President’s promise to work to improve island conditions. Iglesias then told reporters, “I represent” “actual workingmen,” and the “American Federation of Labor has extended its protection to this organization, and recognized me as its duly accredited representative.” When Senator Joseph Foraker wrote Degetau about the petition of the Federación Libre, Degetau replied that the Federación Regional was the true representative of workers and dismissed Iglesias as a socialist

Spaniard with little connection to organized labor.149

Gompers subsequently wrote to Iglesias that the Executive Council had appointed

Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 2 n.3 (quotes 3-4) (quoting Samuel Gompers, “Judicial Vindication of Labor’s Claims,” American Federationist 7 (1901): 284), 1-2 n.3 (providing the text which I paraphrase in describing voluntarism); Samuel Gompers to Santiago Iglesias, 12

Sep. 1901, SGL 46/283; William George Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case, 1901-1902: Origins of American Trade Union Involvement in Puerto Rico,” The Americas 24 (Apr. 1968): 380; Gervasio L. García and A.G. Quintero Rivera, Desafío y solidaridad: breve historia del movimiento obrero puertorriqueño (San Juan, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán, 1986), 35-41. Juan Ángel Silén puts the April 1901 membership of the Federación Libre at 5,500. Apuntes para la historia del movimiento obrero puertorriqueño (San Juan, P.R.: Publicaciones Gaviota, Inc., 1978), 62.

149 The New Associated Press, “Porto Rico Emigration Nothing Remarkable,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr.

1901, 4 (quotes); [Degetau] to Foraker, 15 May 1901; Santiago Iglesias Pantín, Luchas emancipadoras (crónicas de Puerto Rico) vol. 1, 2d ed. (San Juan, P.R.: [Imprenta Venezuela] 1958 [1929]), 214-216; Gonzalo F. Córdova, Resident Commissioner, Santiago Iglesias and His Times (Río Piedras, P.R. : Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993), 101; Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 389 n.52; Foraker to Degetau, 25 Apr. 1901; “Is This True?” Los Angeles Times, 10 Apr. 1901, 8; The New Associated Press, “Petition to President,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 1901, 4.

him as its sole paid organizer in Puerto Rico. Two weeks later Gompers wrote to the newly named governor, William Hunt, to ask that Iglesias be protected from harassment. Gompers also wrote President Roosevelt that Iglesias required legal guarantees and protections to do his work, and Roosevelt asked Hunt to ensure that Iglesias not be molested.150

Despite Gompers’s efforts, Iglesias confronted a maelstrom of official and extra-

legal hostility in Puerto Rico. Problems began when officials arrested him upon arrival, charging him with conspiring to raise the price of labor during August 1900 strikes and with failing to appear for the trial on that charge. Unable to raise bail, Iglesias sent a jailhouse protest to Governor Hunt and cables to the Associated Press and Gompers. 151

Seeing both a crisis and an opportunity, Gompers sprang into action. He met with

Roosevelt on November 11. As he later recounted to Iglesias, Roosevelt was “greatly astonished” by, “expressed his regret” over, and “order[ed] investigation [into] your case.” Prominent mainland media like the Associated Press, and New York Times reported events from Gompers’s perspective, describing his preemptive efforts to secure protection for Iglesias, his meeting with Roosevelt after the arrest, and Roosevelt’s decision to investigate. Then Gompers cabled bail money to a reporter at the bilingual island-based San Juan News. In an accompanying letter, he denounced the case against Iglesias as unjust. When Governor Hunt arrived in Washington that month, Gompers also secured a meeting with him and with President Roosevelt. Predicting in late November that persecution could “redound to the success and advantage of our cause,” Gompers

150 Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 380-381; Samuel Gompers to Santiago Iglesias, 1 Oct. 1901, SGL 46/578; “New Governor of Porto Rico,” New York Times, 31 Aug. 1901, 6; Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 216-217.

151 Samuel Gompers to Executive Council, 20 Nov. 1901, SGL 48/260; Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 218-219; Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 381-383.

counseled Iglesias to stand trial and “plead justification.”152

While out on bail, Iglesias put law itself on trial by seeking official protection from extralegal violence. He accused the Republicano-supported Federación Regional of having shot at Federación Libre offices. The police, he charged, had harassed Federación Libre members rather than arrest shooters. Two attempts on Iglesias’s life and eight armed attacks apparently followed. Iglesias saw these events as a test of whether “the laws and authorities in Puerto Rico are able to correct and punish such criminality” and whether in Puerto Rico “Liberty and Order are protected by the sovereign Constitution.” The priority for island workers under these conditions, Iglesias and a companion told a crowd of 1,500 later that month, was winning a U.S. citizenship accompanied by full constitutional rights.153

Initially, Gompers’s and Iglesias’s legal maneuvers failed. Republicano trial judges convicted Iglesias of conspiracy to raise the price of labor, sentenced him to more than three years in prison, and ordered that the Federación Libre—by then a constituent member organization of the American Federation of Labor—be disbanded. The Republicano newspaper El País approved, though Republicano leader José Barbosa privately told Degetau that while “it is often said that all individual rights of the U.S. Constitution apply in Puerto Rico, . . . practically that does not happen.” Rather, he wrote,

152 Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 384, passim (quotes 1-4); Samuel Gompers to Santiago Iglesias, 20 Nov. 1901, copy available at SGL (quotes 5-8). For articles on related matters where Gompers was a likely source, see, e.g., “Iglesias to Be Free To-Day,” Washington Post, 18 Nov. 1901, 2; “Iglesias Still in Jail,” New York Times, 20 Nov. 1901, 2.

153 “Una carta de Santiago Iglesias,” La Democracia, 12 or 13 Dec. 1901 (quotes 1-2 (“las leyes y las autoridades en Puerto Rico son incapaces para corregir y castigar tales criminalidades”; “la Libertad y el Orden están garantidos por la soberana Constitución”)) (quoting Santiago Iglesias to Chas. Hartzell, 11

Dec. 1901); Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 220-221, 272-273, 277-278, 282-289; Mariano Negrón

Portillo, Las turbas republicanas 1900-1904 (San Juan: Ediciones Huracán, 1990), 75, 90, 103, 105, 109,

112-117, 125, 135, 156, 209; Ángel Silén, Apuntes para la historia, 61; Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias

Case,” 385, 389 (citing San Juan News, 24 Dec. 1901).

“the law of Association imposes restrictions on the right of Association that permit any mayor or police officer to make a joke of the right by declaring any meeting illegal and dissolving it, then making claims before the courts that cause them to sentence participants.” That, he claimed, was what had “just happened to Iglesias.”154

Iglesias and Gompers sought to portray his conviction as inconsistent with U.S.

institutions and legal norms. Because the Federación Libre was “under the Constitution of the American Federation of Labor,” Iglesias contended, the court had effectively outlawed that longstanding mainland organization, which the San Juan News described as formed by “hundred of thousands of the best citizens of the Union.” “Governor Hunt is American and will recommend the annulment of the laws” under which he was

convicted, he also told the News, “because they conflict with methods eminently American.” The annual convention of the American Federation of Labor quickly resolved to use all available means to undo the decision. Gompers argued that the “antiquated Spanish laws” under which Iglesias had been convicted resembled the conspiracy laws against which a not-so-distant generation of mainland laborers had struggled. “In defending the workmen of Porto Rico,” he explained, “we American unionists are but safeguarding and promoting our own vital interests.” The New York Times reported that

Gompers was “prepared to carry the case to the United States Supreme Court on

154 José Barbosa to Federico Degetau, 28 Jan. 1902, CIHCAM 3/V/9 (quotes (“se dice con frecuencia que la Constitución de los Estados Unidos rige en Pto Rico en todo aquello que se refiere á los derechos individuales, pero en la práctica no resulta. Ejemplo: el derecho de Asociación está destruida por la ley de Asociación que exi[g]e tanto requisito para poder gozar de ese derecho que cualquier Alcalde ó Policía

[sic] puede burlarse de aquellos, declaran ilegal cualquier reunión disolverla y hacen comparecer ante los Tribunales á los Directores y sentenciarla como acaba de hacer con Iglesias.”)); Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 227-242, 249-250; Whitaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 382, 385-386; Alfonso García Martínez, “El proceso judicial de Santiago Iglesias 1901-1902,” Revista del Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico 40 (Feb. 1979): 125-148; “Una carta de Santiago Iglesias” (quoting Iglesias to Hartzell, 11

Dec. 1901), reprinted in Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 221; “Labor Union in Porto Rico,” New

York Times, 8 Dec. 1901, 3; Juan Carreras, Santiago Iglesias Pantín: su vida, su obra, su pensamiento

(datos biográficos) (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial Club de la Prensa, 1965), 110-111.

constitutional grounds.” 155

Newspapers quickly became vehicles for and partners in the men’s protests. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Associated Press provided ongoing coverage. Quoting and summarizing Iglesias’s statements, they temporarily overlooked fraught mainland relations between organized labor and the courts. Iglesias’s acts were, the New York Times claimed, under “modern, that is, American, ideas . . . no offense at all.” The New York Evening Post declared, “If

we have annexed a lot of barbarous medieval statutes, . . . [they] must be stamped out like yellow fever or any other tropical plague.” Federales, who had long complained of violence by the Federación Regional and persecution by Republicano officials, saw an opportunity. Their organ, La Democracia, referred to “our particular friend, the señor,

don Santiago Iglesias,” and savaged “republicano judges with their . . . injustices[] and . .

. ineptitude.” Earlier that year, Federal leader Luis Muñoz had joined Iglesias in fleeing extralegal violence and official repression in Puerto Rico by going into self-imposed exile in New York. There he had founded the Puerto Rico Herald and opened its pages to Iglesias. Now he used it to condemn attacks on the Federación Libre and to advocate freedoms of assembly, press, and speech.156

155 Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 244-245 (quote 1 (“bajo la Constitución de la American Federation of Labor”)); Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 387-390 (quotes 2-6) (quoting San Juan News, 24 Dec. 1901, 2; Gompers, “Conspiracy to Raise”); “Appeal of Santiago Iglesias,” New York Times,

30 Mar. 1902, 10 (quote 7).

156 “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, 17 Apr. 1902, 8 (quote 1); Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias

Case,” 388 (quote 2) (quoting Samuel Gompers, “The Conspiracy to Raise the Price of Labor,” American Federationist 9 (Jan. 1902): 27-28 (quoting the Post)); “Santiago Iglesias,” La Democracia, 25 Dec. 1901 (quote 3 (“nuestro particular amigo el señor don Santiago Iglesias”)); “La sentencia contra Iglesias,” La Democracia, 19 Dec. 1901 (quote 4 (“jueces republicanos con sus . . . injusticias[] y . . . su ineptitud”)); “Porto Rico Labor Laws,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 Dec. 1901, 12; Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol.

1, 243-244; “An Un-American Law,” Washington Post, 7 Jan. 1902, 5; “Labor Agitator Sent to Prison,” Chicago Tribune, 13 Dec. 1901, 1; “Jail for Iglesias,” Washington Post, 13 Dec. 1901, 1; García and Rivera, Desafío y solidaridad; Carreras, Santiago Iglesias Pantín, 111; Santiago Iglesias, “Obreros Puerto- Riqueños ¡Unirse!” Puerto Rico Herald, 4 Oct. 1901, 10; Santiago Iglesias, “Federación del Trabajo

Facing continuing and mounting pressure from mainland newspapers, President Roosevelt, and Gompers, mainlanders at the head of the Puerto Rican state began to favor applying progressive strands in U.S. labor and constitutional law to Iglesias’s case. For once, they sided with the Federación Libre against Republicanos. On January 2, 1902, Governor Hunt declared that “the right to organize to secure better wages by peaceable measures is perfectly lawful” and that potentially contrary laws were “unworthy of an American government and should be abrogated.” The U.S. Attorney General, at Roosevelt’s urging, separately argued in a communication to his counterpart on the island that Iglesias’s conviction violated U.S. constitutional norms. In a letter to the public prosecutor representing the island on appeal, the Puerto Rico Attorney General then cited the “right to assemble,” condemned Iglesias’s conviction as an “abridgement of personal liberty,” and declared that any law that “impairs this right” had “become a nullity with

the change of sovereignty.” Heeding this advice, the prosecutor told the Puerto Rican Supreme Court at April 9 oral arguments that Iglesias’s appeal was well taken. Six days later, the court agreed, reversing the conviction.157

These events strengthened Iglesias and the Federation and weakened

Republicanos and the Federación Regional. In January 1901, the Federación Regional

Americana,” Puerto Rico Herald, 2 Nov. 1901, 10; “Unionism a Crime in Puerto Rico,” Puerto Rico Herald, 21 Dec. 1901, 4; “The Discrediting of a Country,” Puerto Rico Herald, 28 Dec. 1901, 3. Cooperation between Iglesias and Muñoz was visible by April 1901. “Porto Rican Lies Refuted,” Los Angeles Times, 11 Apr. 1901, 8; “Reply to Gov. Allen,” New York Times, 11 Apr. 1901, 8; “Porto Rican Conditions,” New York Times, 25 Apr. 1901, 5.

157 Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 390-391 (quotes 1-2) (quoting Samuel Gompers, “For Justice

Even in Porto Rico,” American Federationist 9 (Feb. 1902): 75 and citing San Juan News, 10 Apr. 1902,

8); “The Porto Rico Labor Case,” New York Times, 11 Apr. 1902, 3 (quotes 3-6); Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 268-269; see also “Gov. Hunt’s Message to the Porto Ricans,” New York Times, 3

Jan. 1902, 2; Report of Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor Held at New Orleans, Louisiana, November 13 to 22, 1902 (Washington, D.C.: The Law Reporter Company, 1902), 15 (President’s Report); García Martínez, “El proceso judicial de Santiago Iglesias,” 145. While U.S. labor law and constitutional norms remained contested terrain in 1902, criminal-conspiracy

charges like those that Iglesias faced had fallen into relative disuse in mainland courts. Forbath, Law and

Labor, 61.

had sent a representative to New York in order to discredit Iglesias and ally with the American Federation of Labor. The effort had failed. Then during Iglesias’s case Republicanos had appeared to back anti-labor laws while members of the Federación Regional had attacked a champion of workers’ liberties. By risking prison and injury and by rallying mainland newspapers, the American Federation of Labor, and President Roosevelt on behalf of organized labor, Iglesias had displayed influence, accrued prestige, and become a top labor leader to workers and officials. His victory also increased workers’ confidence in their ability to represent their interests and be heard, as illustrated by the 3,000 Federación Libre members and sympathizers who celebrated Iglesias’s victory with a parade and mass meeting. The decision, Iglesias later recalled, “[c]hanged the juridical status of the labor associations.” Police and judges continued to target Iglesias and the Federación Libre, but with fewer legal tools. Iglesias’s alliance with the Federation also gave him new opportunities to advance his arguments aligning the Federación Libre with U.S. practices and ideas. Thus, at the 1902 convention of the American Federation of Labor, Iglesias cosponsored successful resolutions calling on the Federation to lobby Roosevelt and to demand U.S. citizenship and associated rights for Puerto Ricans. The Federation also gained ground in Puerto Rico as Iglesias increasingly tied his fortunes to it rather than mainland socialists and led an energetic, island-wide

organizing campaign.158

During these months, Iglesias and Degetau displayed the different ends for which

158 Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 268 (quote 1 (“Cambió jurídicamente el status de las asociaciones del trabajo en Puerto Rico”)), 269, 299-300, passim; José Maulion to Federico Degetau, 24

Jan. 1902, CIHCAM 3/V/7; José Maulion to Federico Degetau, 30 Jan. 1902, CIHCAM 3/V/10; Report of Proceedings . . . , 1902, 15-16, 78-79, 133, 194, 226; Ángel Silén, Apuntes para la historia, 61; Whittaker, “The Santiago Iglesias Case,” 383-385; 388-389, 392, passim; Santiago Iglesias Pantín, Luchas Emancipadoras (Crónicas de Puerto Rico) (1910-1917) vol. 2 (San Juan, P.R.: [Imprenta Venezuela],

1962). The Representative of the Federación Regional received funding from Degetau. Maulion to

Degetau, 24 Jan. 1902; Maulion to Degetau, 30 Jan. 1902.

they sought mainland allies. Degetau, who moved in elite, highly educated circles, believed that countries should be judged on their best men. He sought to uplift workers, receiving their votes and speaking for—though rarely answering to—them. By contrast, Iglesias, a lifelong artisan whose associates were laborers, measured national civilization and success by worker wellbeing and rights, and more often he let worker complaints guide him. The men’s reactions to events in Hawai‘i would bring these differences to the fore.

In late 1901, reports of Hawai‘ian planters abusing Puerto Rican workers had returned to the news. The New York World had announced that islanders “cannot stand the severe strain put upon them by the Yankee planters” and were arrested “by the police on the charge of vagrancy.” La Democracia relayed that one dispute ended as “our poor countrymen hid in the woods where they were persecuted by gunfire and set after with a pack of hunting dogs.” Some Puerto Ricans in Hawai‘i eventually protested en masse, describing the events in a February 17, 1902, letter to the San Juan News. The events

surrounding the protest formed part of a larger pattern of self-help by and official reaction to Puerto Ricans in Hawai‘i. According to official numbers, 2,930 Puerto Ricans had accepted offers to work on Hawai‘ian plantations. As they grew dissatisfied and left to seek better terms of employment, that number fell to 1,851 in late February 1902. Sugar planters refused to rehire them. Police initially arrested hundreds, primarily on charges of theft, prostitution, and vagrancy. Eventually arrests fell and planters ended their rehiring

ban.159

159 “Porto-Ricans ‘Vagrant,’” Puerto Rico Herald, 12 Oct. 1901, available at CIHCAM 17/III/1 (quotes 1-

2) (citing the New York World); “De Hawaii a Puerto-Rico,” La Democracia, 27 Dec. 1901 (quote 3 (“al huir nuestros pobres paisanos, refugiándose en los bosques, se les persiguió á tiros y se lanzó contra ellos una jauría de perros de caza”)); Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 261; Draft, [Federico Degetau] to

Degetau responded to his constituents’ concern for their countrymen in Hawai‘i by requesting a State Department investigation, but this time expressed skepticism in correspondence that soon became public. Seeing worker-planter relations as largely personal matters to be handled by the state, if at all, in private-law courts, Degetau focused his inquiry on only a portion of laborers’ complaints, especially those of false arrests, prosecutions, and convictions. Degetau, who ultimately wished to be treated as the equivalent of Hawai‘ian officials and not to have his fate determined by association with Puerto Rican workers, also received and apparently trusted assurances from Hawai‘ian officials. They had convinced him with their exculpatory 1901 report and, he argued, had sought to help him pursue U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans:

[T]he representative of the Planters’ Association of Hawaii . . . told me that he sought to have the emigrants’ citizenship rights recognized so that they could vote in Hawaii[,] that he was disposed to prepare an appeal to the Supreme Court in a case upholding a sentence of Hawaiian courts refusing to recognize Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens, and that . . . he hoped that I would argue the case . . . , understanding that this would guarantee

success.160

Degetau went on to argue that “it doesn’t seem likely that were the complaints true, the

Francisco Valls de la Log, 25 Apr. 1902, CIHCAM 3/V/57; Smith to Cooper, 22 May 1902; Cooper to [State Department?], 27 May 1902; L.A. Andrews to A. M. Brown, 27 Jun. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/48; A.M. Brown to S.B. Dole, 10 Jul. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/48; Sanford Dole to Secretary of the Interior, 4 Sep.

1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/48.

160 [Degetau] to Valls de la Log, 25 Apr. 1902 ( “el Sr. Representante de la asociación de plantadores de aquellas Islas, . . . me manifestó su interés porque los emigrantes tuvieran sus derechos de ciudadanos reconocidos, para que pudieran ejercer el derecho electoral en el Hawaii[,] que estaba dispuesto á preparar un recurso ante el Tribunal Supremo en el caso de que se confirmase una sentencia de los tribunales de aquellas Islas negandose [sic] á reconocer la ciudadanía americana de los puertoriqueños [sic] y que . . .

deseaba que yo fuese quien arguyese el caso . . . , por entender él que esta era una garantía de éxito.”);

“Well Treated.”

planters would manifest such interest in investing Puerto Ricans with constitutional guarantees and in providing them the vote.” In a separate meeting, Governor Sanford

Dole told Degetau that many of the claims involving abuse of the criminal law were false. Degetau was predisposed to credit statements from a fellow member of a propertied, political class, and though working conditions on Hawai‘ian plantations were generally awful, Degetau concluded “that that letter to the press [by the emigrants] involved some evident exaggerations.”161

Iglesias took the opposite tack, cosponsoring a resolution to seek federal action to

repatriate Puerto Rican emigrants in Hawai‘i and prosecute their abusers. The convention of the American Federation of Labor ordered an investigation of the charge that Hawai‘ian planters and officials had deceptively lured Puerto Ricans there, “maltreated, whipped, and treated [them] like criminals,” and met their protests and reclamations by having them “robbed, shot and taken to jail.” The Federation commission that visited the island deemed official conduct there unsatisfactory.162

Drawing on paternal and patriotic concepts, some Puerto Ricans in Hawai‘i petitioned Degetau to let us keep “the idea that we will manage to return to the homeland six or seven thousand of her sons and daughters” from a Hawai‘ian life that they compared to slavery and racial degradation. They asked for help both as heads of households, swearing truthfulness “in the name of our families,” our “wives, sisters, and

161 [Degetau] to Valls de la Log, 25 Apr. 1902 ( “no parece verosimil [sic] que si los hechos denunciados fueran exactos, los plantadores se manifestaran tan interesados en investír [sic] con las garantias [sic] constitucionales y de proveer del voto á [ellos]”; “que en esa comunicación dirigida á la prensa se incurre por los firmantes en notorias exageraciones”); “Desde Washington,” La Correspondencia, n.d., available at CIHCAM 18/L1; [Degetau], Diary, 23 Apr. 1902, CIHCAM 11/L4; John Hay to Federico Degetau, 12 May

1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/4; “Well Treated”; Stanley L. Engerman, “Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 43 (Sep. 1983): 635-659.

162 Report of Proceedings . . . , 1902, 88 (Resolution No. 82) (quotes 1-2), 155; Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 1, 261.

daughters,” and as dependents within a patriotic family, writing that “Puerto Rico is humanitarian and patriotic, so feels sorry for its sons and daughters just as a [loving?] mother would for the son she adores.” They needed help, they related, because mainlanders in Hawai‘i extended little “consideration [to] those not of the Saxon race.” They did not here argue against racism, but rather, like Degetau, objected to being treated like races that they believed were degraded. Claiming that planters were accustomed to Asian laborers, the writers asserted that Puerto Ricans did not share the “dishonor of this people” and so should not receive the same wages or “law that they apply to the Asian.” Planters and authorities were, “as in the times of the slaves and masters of plantations, denying the right of movement” as well as the right to withhold labor. To enforce such oppression, the emigrants asserted, employers arrived at workers’ doors with whips. They added that police arrested any Puerto Rican walking between plantations on the theory that “the emigrant who walks abroad has no family and robs to eat.” As a paternal, patriotic leader, “the person who represents the island of Puerto Rico in Washington,” Degetau should have valued “the honorable and sincere word that a dozen honorable workers offered under sacred oath” rather than “explicit assurances of the Governor of Hawaii.” Instead, they implied, he had dishonored working Puerto Ricans, trusted elite Hawai‘ian exploiters, and failed to live up to his paternal, patriotic obligations. In short, a

Puerto Rico defined, judged, and led by the best men had failed them.163

163 Manuel Rojas et al. to Degetau, 24 Jun. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VII/51 (“la idea que salvará volviendo á [la?/dar?/dan?] patria a seis ó siete millares de sus hijos”; “el nombre de nuestras familiares”; “esposas ó hermanas ó hijas”; “Pto Rico es humanitario, es [patriota?], siente por sus hijos como una [amanbsonia?] madre por su hijo adorado”; “consideración a otra individualidad que no se llama hija de la raza sajona”; “El caracter [sic] poco digno de esta gente”; “no podía acordar que por ningun [sic] medio se les aplicase la misma Ley que al asiático”; “[suena?] a tiempo para el esclavo y los dueños de plantaciones niegan el derecho de traslado”; “el emigrado que anda errante no tiene familia y roba para comer”; “la persona del representante de la Ysla [sic] de Puerto Rico en Washington”; “la frace [sic] honrada y sincera que bajo un

Reconstruction Redux: Luis Muñoz Rivera and the Opposition Seek Mainland

Allies

While Luis Muñoz Rivera and Iglesias had begun to form an alliance after both had arrived in New York fleeing violence in Puerto Rico, in some ways it was Iglesias and Degetau who were most similar. Unlike these men, Muñoz took a more oppositional stand to U.S. rule. He did not align the Federales he led with a major non-governmental organization like the American Federation of Labor as had Iglesias or celebrate recent actions of the U.S. state as had Degetau. Instead, he founded the Puerto Rico Herald in

1901 in New York City. A bilingual Spanish-English newspaper distributed by mail, the Herald aspired to reach journalists, clubs, hotels, congressmen, important public figures, and interested readers “in Porto Rico, Cuba, South America and the United States.” Advertisers, anticipating a more modest reach, primarily targeted Puerto Ricans on the island and in New York with Spanish ads for room, board, luxury goods, transportation,

communications, and professional services. Like La Democracia, the organ of Federales

Gobernador del Hawaii”); see also Carmelo Montalvo to [Federico Degetau], [Jun. 1903?], CIHCAM

4/III/233. For a letter from a Puerto Rican in Mexico who believed that Degetau should act as a kind of consul for islanders abroad, see [Loren?] [Proscini?] to Federico Degetau, 6 Feb. 1902, CIHCAM 3/V/15; Sotero Rosario to Federico Degetau, 28 Mar. 1902, CIHCAM 3/V/39. On cultural formation, conceptualization of the homeland, and claims making among immigrants who engage in unidirectional or circular migrations, see, e.g., George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, Conn.” Yale University Press, 2003); Marc C. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cuba, 1912-1939,” Journal of Social History 31 (spring 1998): 599-623; Barry Carr, “Identity, Class,

and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communists, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1915-1934,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (Feb. 1998): 83-116; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998); Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” Callaloo 23 (summer 2000): 1086-1111; Nina Glick Schiller and

Georges Eugene Fouron, Georges Woke up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for

Home (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

on the island that Muñoz had founded a decade and a half earlier, the Herald did not become self-supporting as it protested perceived abuses by Republicanos and their U.S.- official supporters. In 1901-1902, the newspaper tried to delegitimize the U.S.- Republicano coalition before island voters and mainlanders and to shame U.S. officials into abandoning it. During that time Federales and Republicanos engaged in pitched battles; the Federación Libre and Federales complained of extralegal, pro-Republicano violence; and Federales and U.S. officials identified voter fraud in favor of Republicanos. Federales did not boycott the vote as in 1900, but did again charge in the press that U.S. officials incited and condoned electoral violence. Comparing conditions in the island with conditions that white mainlanders had come to associate with Reconstruction became a

key strategy.164

Three days before the November 1 election of 1902, the newspaper announced that a new Reconstruction was underway in Puerto Rico: “[W]e study history and see . . . the scandals of the south repeated. . . . The similarity between the carpet-baggers of the south and the carpet-baggers of Puerto Rico is likewise a point worthy of notice. . . . The south peacefully overcame its wretched exploiters. Puerto Rico will also overcome hers.” It was a metaphor calculated to resonate with island and mainland audiences. To Puerto Rican readers, the reference to officials from the metropole tyrannizing locals was likely to recall Liberals’ resentment at the outsized role continental Spaniards had once played

164 Puerto Rico Herald, 27 Aug. 1901, 2 (quote); Negrón Portillo, Las turbas republicanas, 144-149, 151-

153, 193; “Porto Rican Editor Coming Here,” New York Times, 21 Mar. 1901, 1; Puerto Rico Herald, 7

Sep. 1901; “Al público y á las agencias de ‘The Puerto Rico Herald,’” Puerto Rico Herald, 3 Aug. 1901,

13; B. Diaz to Federico Degetau, 6 Oct. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/312; Federico Ribes Tovar, 100 biografías de Puertorriqueños ilustres (New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers, Inc., 1973), 206; “Sobre ‘The Puerto Rico Herald,’” La Democracia, 26 Jul. 1904. To determine the content of advertisements in 1901 I looked at all the ads on 15 pages chosen from 11 issues between August 27, 1901 and December 28, 1901. These pages included 99 ads from 48 advertisers. Eight advertisers primarily used English in 18 of these ads. For the 1904 period I examined the 83 ads of 61 advertisers that appeared in the January 2 and June 25 issues. Only 7 of the 83 ads used solely English.

in the Puerto Rican state. It thus aimed to align all Puerto Ricans—regardless of race— against U.S. officials. For mainland readers, by contrast, the comparison was most likely to trigger memories of Reconstruction, not Spanish rule, and thus have racial overtones. In this reading, Federales cast themselves as Reconstruction-era white-supremacist Democrats in the U.S. South. U.S. officials on the island played carpet-bagging northern

Republicans. Perpetrators of extralegal, pro-Republicano violence—already characterized by Federales as lower-class riffraff perverting island democracy—stood in for what had

in white mainlander popular imagination come to be remembered as the violence and perversion of U.S. freedmen and their role in Reconstruction-era politics. The island government, comprised by Republicanos and republican appointees, represented the black Republican misrule that had supposedly pervaded Reconstruction.165

The approach had several benefits. At a time when the white U.S. mainstream

celebrated so-called southern “Redeemers,” Federales could cast their electoral failures in romantic terms with reference to that “history.” They argued that intrusive federal rule temporarily subjected them, just as it had southern U.S. whites during Reconstruction, to

a misrule that they had to suffer, resist, and overcome. This “Redemption” story— ostensibly vilifying electoral winners in an illegitimate system—cast Federales as a legitimate, temporarily displaced political class. Quoting Paul de Roussier’s La Vie Americaine, the Herald characterized Reconstruction as a time when northerners came to the U.S. South to “oppress[] it” and “exploit the resentment of the former slaves against their former masters” “WHICH THEY [northern carpet-baggers] HAD KEPT ALIVE AND

STIRRED UP THEMSELVES.” Without such outside agitation, the newspaper implied,

165 “American Politicians,” Puerto Rico Herald, 1 Nov. 1902, 243; see also “The Porto Rican Elections,”

New York Times, 6 Nov. 1902, 8.

Republicanos could not win or hold power.166

The analogy also answered mainland deprecations of Puerto Ricans without denying Puerto Rican racial diversity or explicitly deprecating islanders of color. A September 6, 1902, response in the Herald by four San Juan students to charges

published in the Boston Globe by Peter MacQueen, a San Juan resident and veteran of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, illustrated the difficulty. To MacQueen’s claim that “Puerto Ricans . . . are so mixed of race—negro, Indian, Spaniard, European—that all the evil of the races have come to a focus in them,” the students countered:

The majority of the Puerto Ricans come from Spanish families and

through their veins runs as pure blood as that which runs through the veins of the inhabitants of the United States, France, Italy, Russia, Germany or England. There are negroes, indeed, and there has never been a case in which one of them has been united in marriage to a white, reason by

which it has been impossible to find such a mixture of races.167

These were not sentiments calculated to endear Puerto Ricans of color to the Herald. Moreover, many mainland commentators and officials neither viewed Spaniards, Italians, and Russians as equals of U.S. and English peoples nor would credit claims of universal Puerto Rican racial purity over U.S. census statistics describing a 32% “mestizo” or “mulatto” island population. References to Reconstruction were less likely to alienate island voters of color. And because members of the U.S. media and state often remembered Reconstruction as a regrettable departure from white rule, it provided them a framework through which they might see Federales sympathetically, as oppressed whites

166 “American Politicians.”

167 Peter MacQueen, “Puerto Rico Has Improved,” Puerto Rico Herald, 6 Sep. 1902, 117; Juan Benst

Valdés et al., “Puerto Ricans Answer,” Puerto Rico Herald, 6 Sep. 1902, 117.

ready to govern a local population of color.168

But to emerge from “appalling tyranny” within the Reconstruction metaphor, Puerto Rico needed a new federal policy, a difficult predicate to secure. “Washington will flow down a thundering torrent of justice,” the Herald envisioned, “sweeping away” U.S. officials on the island. Though Reconstruction had taken years to end, Federales

portrayed high administrators as immediate potential allies against bad local officials. Quoting Roussier, they claimed, “On the chairs of the Supreme Court, in the Senate, among the judges, there are no doubt men deserving of high esteem.” But high officials were unlikely to join Federales in opposition to local officials. They appointed, oversaw, and enacted the laws guiding U.S. officials on the island. Officials in Puerto Rico pursued superiors’ policies. As Muñoz had seen in past fights, superiors were loath to reverse

subordinates.169

Republicanos faced problems of their own. In 1902, having promised voters that cooperation with U.S. officials would bring good local legislation and incremental advancement toward Puerto Rican statehood, Republicanos faced attacks by Federales for their recent lack of progress. Having built relationships with and portrayed themselves as akin to mainland Republicans for some time, Republicanos had moved to advance their program in May 1902 by officially making membership in the national party a goal.

168 Charles H. Allen, First Annual Report of Charles H. Allen, Governor of Porto Rico, Covering the Period from May 1, 1900, to May 1, 1901 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 33 (quote 1) (citing the census of 1899-1900); War Department, Report on the Census of Porto Rico, 1899 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 85 (quote 2); “The Porto Rican Elections”; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, commemorative ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 75; see also, e.g., Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86 (Feb. 2001); Mark S. Weiner, “Teutonic Constitutionalism: The Role of Ethno-Juridical Discourse in the Spanish-American War,” in Foreign in a Domestic Sense, ed. Burnett and Marshall.

169 “American Politicians.” Other articles from the period similarly anticipate intervention from

Washington. See, e.g., “A Complete Farce,” Puerto Rico Herald, 8 Nov. 1902, 257.

Degetau had publicly dissented, contending that islanders denied U.S. civil and political membership and U.S. citizenship had no place in U.S. national parties. But, he also told a Republicano, his

word of honor to the U.S. Congress and sense of duty to our patria and party, compels me again to solicit from my colleagues the honor of being their candidate and from the electorate the honor of being reelected to continue the work I have undertaken in favor of [both] our American citizenship [and] the admission of Puerto Rico into the Union as an organized Territory to become in the not-distant future a state.

Despite their differences, Republicanos nominated Degetau for reelection.170

Though Federales won no “torrent of justice,” they were able to make U.S. intransigence on status issues into a campaign issue. After also building an alliance with the Federación Libre, they gained a substantial minority of seats in the House of Delegates in the November 1902 elections. Republicanos maintained a reduced majority in the House, and Degetau won a second term as Resident Commissioner.171

As Degetau contemplated a second term as Resident Commissioner, he elected to pursue a more legal strategy than did his political opponents and allies, one that would

170 Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Pedro Besosa, 6 Sep. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/49 (quote (“considero un compromiso de honor para con el Congreso de los Estados Unidos y una razón de deber para con nuestra patria y nuestro partido, me obligan á solicitar de nuevo de mis correligionarios el honor de ser su candidato, y del cuerpo electoral el de ser reelegido para continuar la labor emprendidad [sic] en favor de nuestra ciudadanía americana; de la admisión de Puerto-Rico en la Unión como un Territorio organizado para ser en dia [sic] no lejano uno de tantos Estados”)); Informe de los delegados del Partido Republicano de Puerto Rico ante la Convención Nacional Republicana celebrada en Chicago, en 21 de junio de 1904 ([San Juan?], P.R.: Tipografía “El País,” 1904), available at CIHCAM 6/L8, 5-6; Copy, [Federico Degetau] to Teodoro Moscoso, 2 Oct. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/309; Ramón Lebrón to Federico Degetau, 10 Oct. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/57. For media campaigns by Federales against Republicanos, see La Democracia and the Puerto Rico Herald.

171 García and Rivera, Desafío y solidaridad; Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos, 119-121; see also Carreras, Santiago Iglesias Pantín, 111; Iglesias, Luchas emancipadoras, vol. 2, 241.

soon come to center on the Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Williams (1904). Throughout his first term he had sought a dispute in which he could intervene that to be settled would require a federal entity both to hear his claims to U.S. citizenship and territorial status and to clarify the status of islanders or their island. An opportunity had arisen on August 2, 1902, when the Treasury Department had issued a circular prescribing that Puerto Ricans be treated as aliens for immigration purposes. After learning of the policy, Degetau had considered seeking to be denied the right to enter New York under it, hoping thereby to frame a dispute as to whether Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens or aliens. His friend Manuel Rossy, however, had reminded him that his position all but guaranteed his entry, alien or no. Instead, he had protested to the

Secretary of the Treasury on October 5 in legalistic terms. Describing the Treaty of Paris, Foraker Act, and Insular Cases as together naturalizing islanders, Degetau had asked for

a ruling. On October 15, Treasury had declined to address Degetau’s arguments, noting a recent decision of the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, Gonzales v. Williams (1902), which had held Puerto Ricans to be aliens before upholding the immigration guidelines against which Degetau protested. No appeal had been taken, but time remained to file. With nearly two years until fellow Republicanos or Federales could challenge his action and seek to replace him in office, it appeared that Degetau had found a vehicle with which to test his strategy for clarifying the status of himself and his countrymen. His political rivals, he knew, would be ready to act if the

effort failed.172

172 Copy, Federico Degetau to Secretary of Treasury, 5 Oct. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/56 (quoting Circular of 2

Aug. 1902); Manuel Rossy to Federico Degetau, 26 Jan. 1904, CIHCAM 4/VIII/14; Amicus Curiae Brief, no. 225, Gonzalez v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (1904), 2; Transcript of Record, Gonzales, 9. On law and people’s relationships to it as too variegated to render bottom-line analyses of its utility for social change

practicable, see John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1-22. On the capacity of law to divide movements seeking common ends, see Joan G. Zimmerman, “The Jurisprudence of Equality: The Women’s Minimum Wage, the First Equal Rights Amendment, and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 1905-1923,” Journal of American History (Jun. 1991): 188-225.

CHAPTER 4

“AMERICAN ALIEN”: ISABEL GONZALEZ AND THE SUPREME COURT, 1902-1905

Federico Degetau’s second term as Resident Commissioner marked the culmination and eclipse of his strategy as the elected representative of the Puerto Rican people of using legal claims to U.S. citizenship to seek improvements in his constituents’ relationship to the United States. After pushing numerous U.S. officials to define Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens, Degetau finally found a test case when U.S. immigration officials excluded Isabel Gonzalez from the mainland as an undesirable alien. Little about Gonzalez indicated that she would soon force the U.S. Supreme Court into a choice between undermining U.S. imperialism, repeating the mistakes of Dred Scott, or dodging the politically controversial constitutional issue of Puerto Rican citizenship status. Not

yet twenty-one in 1902, Isabel Gonzalez had sought to mitigate financial hardship at home by migrating from San Juan to New York. But because Puerto Ricans held uncertain residence rights on the mainland, she first confronted immigration inspectors who refused to permit her to land in New York. With the help of her uncle, the former Antillean revolutionary Domingo Collazo, she challenged that decision in federal court, launching what the New York Times would describe as a “Porto Rican test case” on “the status of the citizens of Porto Rico.”

Both Frederic Coudert, a lead attorney in the 1901 Insular Cases, and Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner Federico Degetau saw Gonzalez’s dispute as a legal opportunity. Coudert hoped to convince the Court to integrate the narrow, vague, and fractured Insular decisions with which it had met his 1901 arguments into a new, more robust doctrinal approach to Puerto Rican status. Degetau still maintained that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens who, once recognized as such, would have confirmation that their island was on the road to statehood. Having failed to win this recognition from agencies, Congress, the President, or the press, Degetau aimed to present a judicial action squarely raising the issue of U.S. citizenship and thereby forcing the court to clarify Puerto Ricans’ status.

Island politicians remained skeptical of the Coudert-Degetau gambit. Federales— advocates of political confrontation—disparaged faith in U.S. institutions. Republicano leaders had also begun to doubt U.S. intentions, and soon quarreled over whether they should oppose or join the U.S. Republican Party.173

Origins of a Test Case, 1902-1903.

The year 1902 started badly for Isabel Gonzalez, who became pregnant for the second time shortly before her fiancé and brother left to find factory jobs in the Linoleumville neighborhood of Staten Island. Though her brother Luis Gonzalez sent money back to his mother and sisters in San Juan, Isabel Gonzalez left for New York in mid-1902 with plans to marry her fiancé, secure educational opportunities for a younger sister, and perhaps find factory work herself. Steaming away from San Juan, Isabel

173 “Porto Rican Test Case,” New York Times, 3 Nov. 1903, 6. I thank Christina Burnett and Veta Schlimgen for sharing helpful research in progress.

Gonzalez had reason to hope that she would be among the many Puerto Ricans who, as Degetau had noted, had “frequently disembarked unmolested in New York.” Although U.S. officials had carefully avoided granting citizenship to Puerto Ricans, neither had immigration agents treated them uniformly as aliens. This changed while Gonzalez was

en route to New York. Altering its policy toward Puerto Ricans, the Treasury Department instructed immigration officials that Puerto Ricans were henceforth “subject to the same examinations as are enforced against people from countries over which the United States claims no right of sovereignty.” Following the new rules, port officials transferred Gonzalez to Ellis Island.174

At Ellis Island, Gonzalez confronted a powerful arm of the U.S. administrative

state. Exercising both prosecutorial and judicial functions, and insulated from most formal judicial review, hundreds of immigration inspectors determined the residence rights of as many as 5,000 immigrants a day. Their line inspections were standardized, high-volume, and summary. They sent ambiguous cases before Boards of Special Inquiry that could end their non-public hearings in minutes and deny immigrants rights to an attorney or to see or rebut evidence. Several months earlier Wall Street lawyer William Williams had become the new Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island. Promoting cleanliness, politeness, and strict, efficient enforcement of immigration laws, he doubled his exclusion rate in his first year by aggressively construing the statutory bar on aliens “likely to become a public charge.” As a practical guideline, he directed inspectors to

174 Federico Degetau to Secretary of Treasury, 5 Oct. 1902, CIHCAM 3/VI/56 (quote 1); Circular No. 97, 2

Aug. 1902, in Circular Instructions of the Treasury Department Relating to the Tariff, Navigation, and Other Laws for the Year Ended December 31, 1902 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903) (quote 2); Domingo Collazo to Federico Degetau, 27 Aug. 1903, CIHCAM 18/L1; Transcript of Record, No. 225, Gonzales v. Williams, 192 U.S. 1 (1904), 3-6, available at CIHCAM 6/VI/32; Luis Gonzalez to Federico Degetau, 5 Feb. 1903, CIHCAM 3/VII/35; Isabel Gonzales to Federico Degetau, 10 Apr. 1904, CIHCAM 5/I/5; “Porto Ricans Not Aliens,” New York Times, 5 Jan. 1904, 8; “Porto Rican Test Case.”

treat aliens as suspect if they traveled with less than ten dollars. Inspectors often attached the label of “public charge” to unmarried mothers and their children, while Ellis Island policy dictated that “unmarried pregnant women were always detained for further investigation” and single women were only released if family members came to claim them. Here, Williams and his subordinates prefigured the welfare laws that other reformers would soon institute. Those laws, like Ellis Island guidelines, conceptualized women and children as dependents (though in fact many worked). In both cases, the state distributed and denied benefits to women and their children based on criteria that had more to do with middle-class respectability than with the realities that most working

women and their children faced.175

Isabel Gonzalez carried $11 in cash, apparently left her two-year old daughter Dolores Gonzalez in the care of her mother in San Juan, and telegraphed ahead to her family to pick her up. She was not, however, able to pass smoothly through the administrative process. Officials discovered her pregnancy during her early-August 1902 line inspection. Consequently, a Board of Special Inquiry opened a file on Gonzalez, one

175 Immigration Act of 1891, Statutes at Large 26 (3 Mar. 1891): 1084 (sec. 1); Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 147, 141-148, 154, 184, 196-197, passim; Louis Anthes, “The Island of Duty: The Practice of Immigration Law on Ellis Island,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 24 (1998): 565-566, 581-582, 587-589, passim; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era,

1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Secretary to the President to William Williams, 1 Apr. 1902, Box 1, WWP, NYPL; Linda Gordon, “Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the United States, 1890-1935,” American Historical Review 97 (Feb. 1992): 19-54; Joanne L. Goodwin, “‘Employable Mothers’ and ‘Suitable Work’: A Re-Evaluation of Welfare and Wage-Earning for Women in the Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of Social History

29 (winter 1995): 253-274. Kunal M. Parker explores the relationship between migration, dependence, and status in the context of state law in antebellum Massachusetts in “State, Citizenship, and Territory: The Legal Construction of Immigrants in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 19 (autumn 2001): 583-643.

that would grow and circulate as her case progressed.176

The next day, Gonzalez’s uncle, Domingo Collazo, and her brother, Luis Gonzalez, joined her at a hearing turning on whether she was “going to persons able, willing and legally bound to support” her and not entering for immoral purposes. Here

the administrative inquiry reflected both a movement for racial exclusion and ideas about moral behavior of and proper relations between female and male family members. Inspectors weighed proof of legitimate family relations through presumptions that certain kinds of women were inadequate mothers and certain kinds of men were insufficient fathers and husbands. In a speech to Princeton’s senior class somewhat later, Commissioner Williams explained his strict policies in terms of the “radical sociological, industrial, racial and intellectual distinctions” separating northwestern and southeastern Europeans: “It will be a very easy matter to fill up this country rapidly with immigrants upon whom responsibility for the proper bringing up of their offspring sits lightly, but it

cannot be claimed that this will enure to the benefit of the American people.”177

The hearings raised matters that many people in Puerto Rico and on the mainland associated with dishonor, lower-class status, and racial inferiority: lack of membership in an economically self-sufficient man’s home, absence of sexual propriety, and classification as pregnant and abandoned. Collazo and Luis Gonzalez sought to portray Isabel Gonzalez as an upstanding, dependent woman in an honorable man’s household.

176 Transcript of Record, Gonzales, 4-5, passim; Manifest for the S.S. Ponce, Arrival at Port of New York,

18 May 1903, 78, EIA. A final version reached the Supreme Court and appeared in the Gonzales opinion, informing much scholarship on the case. See, e.g., Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), 3, 6.

177 Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 147 (quote 1 (providing italics)); William Williams, Outline of Address Delivered to the Senior Class of Princeton in November, 1904, Box 6, Folder 4, WWP, NYPL (other quotes); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick,

N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European

Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Isabel Gonzalez explained her first child through widowhood. For the second pregnancy, Collazo converted a missing fiancé into a husband whom he had seen “[a]bout two weeks ago,” but who “could not come today” because “he is working.” Collazo hedged his bets, however, offering to assume the role of patriarch. He earned “$25 a week” as “a printer” and was “willing to take [Isabel Gonzalez] and provide for her.” Inspectors were wary. They sent Collazo and Luis Gonzalez home, urging them to produce the husband: “his wife is here and he should come for her.” Two days later, still with no help from the

father of Gonzalez’s expected child, Collazo’s wife, Herminia Dávila, tried again.

What does your husband do?
He is a t[y]pographer and I do embroidery work; I also give lessons in embroidery work.
What is your husband’s business worth? A. $25 a week.
Does your husband know that you came here in the interest of your niece? A. Yes, sir.
Can you satisfy this board that, in case this woman is released, you will stand by her and see that she does not get into trouble?
Yes, sir, that goes without saying.
Your husband will aid you in assisting the woman? A. Yes, sir.

While inspectors solicited Dávila’s claims to moral supervision, they concentrated on her husband’s income and authority, questioned her for coming to testify unaccompanied by her husband, and failed to record her name. They also refused to reconsider their demand to see Gonzalez’s husband.178

When Isabel Gonzalez’s brother, Luis Gonzalez, testified, he tried a new tack, portraying Isabel Gonzalez as a victim of rapto, or seduction, but assuring the inspectors that her family had taken the necessary steps to restore her honor. Thus, though Isabel Gonzalez’s lover had not married her and did not intend to, Luis Gonzalez could explain:

I have been to the church and have made arrangements and as soon as I have my sister with me, we are going there and are going to have them married. I have also gone to the authorities and told them and everything is waiting for the release of my sister . . . . My aunt . . . has made arrangements and is sure of making a reconciliation . . . and will have them married.

Although Luis Gonzalez apparently believed that this would mollify inspectors’ concerns about Isabel Gonzalez’s family’s capacity to care for her, inspectors were indignant: “An arrangement then has been made by which a marriage is to take place without the husband’s consent?” Luis Gonzalez affirmed that this was the case. The Board excluded Isabel Gonzalez from entry.179

With Isabel Gonzalez in detention on Ellis Island, the case now shifted onto

explicitly judicial terrain. On August 18, 1902, Collazo swore out a habeas corpus

petition for Gonzalez. At about the same time, “She told her story to a friend, who in turn

178 Transcript of Record, Gonzales, 4-6, passim. On honor in Puerto Rico, including its relations to class, race, gender, and periodicals, see Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality

and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 4, 7, 20, 25-26, 32, 34-

35, 40-46, 56, 85-86, 94-95, passim. I have previously identified Domingo Collazo’s wife as Hermina Collazo. Sam Erman, “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1895 to 1905,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27 (summer 2008): 13. Evidence I have found in the interim suggests that she went by Herminia Dávila. Manifest for the S.S. Ponce, 18 May 1903, 78.

179 Transcript of Record, Gonzales, 5-6. Findlay, Imposing Decency, 40-46; Eileen J. Findlay, “Courtroom

Tales of Sex and Honor: Rapto and Rape in Late Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” in Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam, eds., Honor, Status and Law in Modern Latin America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 205, passim.

told it to [lawyer] Orrel A. Parker.” On August 19, Parker’s partner, Charles E. Le Barbier, filed Collazo’s petition with the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, which promptly paroled Gonzalez pending its decision. Seeing at stake in the case “the very difficult question of Constitutional law whether or not a Porto Rican was a citizen of the United States,” Commissioner of Immigration William Williams hired a private lawyer who, he later wrote, performed “exceedingly well.” On October 7, the Court announced its decision. Narrowing the issue to “whether or not petitioner is an alien,” it stated that she was an alien and upheld her exclusion. Though a loss for Gonzalez and her allies, the decision also gave them a chance to press courts to decide: as a native of an unincorporated territory, was she an alien or a national, a subject or a citizen? With Gonzalez now back in detention, Collazo found a way to present an “express solicitation” to Frederic Coudert, the lawyer known for his arguments in

DeLima v. Bidwell and Downes v. Bidwell (1901) concerning the territorial status of Puerto Rico. Coudert soon filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. Pending a decision in that new action, the Circuit Court again paroled Gonzalez. Now the question was no longer whether immigration inspectors, following the guidelines designed by Commissioner Williams, deemed Isabel Gonzalez and her family desirable. Desirable or not, the case would determine whether she was a foreigner. It could also, Coudert wrote, “settle the status of all the native islanders,” including Filipinos, “who were in existence

at the time the Spanish possessions were annexed by the United States.”180

180 “Porto Ricans Not Aliens” (quote 1); William Williams to Henry Burnett, 26 Aug. 1903, DC NARA

85/151/4~340/394/19045 (quote 2); William Williams to William Anderson, 2 Sep. 1903, DC NARA

85/151/5~340/97/19045 (quote 3); Transcript of Record, Gonzales, 7 (quote 4), 1-2, 8-14, passim; Domingo Collazo to José Pérez Losada, 19 Dec. 1928, in “Debemos los puertorriqueños tener un poco de mas cuidado con la verdad histórica de nuestras cosas regionales—dice Domingo Collazo,” El Imparcial,

24 Dec. 1928, available at CIHCAM 18/L1 (quote 5 (“expresa solicitud”)); Appellant’s Brief, Gonzales, 3 (quotes 6-7); William Williams to Commissioner General of Immigration, 24 Aug. 1903, DC NARA

Consistent with his emerging persona as a public intellectual on matters of international law, Coudert described and proposed to solve the issues in Gonzalez’s appeal in a January 1903 Columbia Law Review article. He depicted the imposition of alien status on Puerto Ricans as the equivalent of a husband denying his obligations to and over his wife. “The new master, viz, the United States,” he wrote, ideally “takes her allegiance with a burden, and having deprived her of all claim on the old master, has taken his place.” U.S. failure to do so put Puerto Ricans like Gonzalez in an untenable

position. “What ‘commodum’ or advantage does the Señorita reap from her situation,” he asked, before later casting “Miss Gonzalez[, as]…an undefined waif, on the sea of political certainty.” He continued, “[w]hat nation in the wide world will raise, nay, will

be permitted by us to raise a finger or even a voice in behalf of this woman if she is injured,” then added that “she belongs to the United States, and may look to it for protection.” Moreover, the United States failed to exercise a masterly discipline that was the common obligation of husbands. As he wrote, “if she could commit . . . that crime [of

treason], would she go unwhipped of justice because she had not been naturalized a

85/151/4~340/268/19045; D. Collazo, “Desde Nueva York,” La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico, 19 Dec.

1903, 1; Petition of Federico Degetau, Resident Commissioner from Porto Rico, Gonzales; Brief Filed by Leave of the Court by Federico Degetau, Resident Commissioner from Porto Rico, as Amicus Curiæ, Gonzales; Frederic Coudert to Federico Degetau, 20 Apr. 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/144. In subsequent years some legal scholars included Gonzales among the Insular Cases. E.g., Pedro Capó Rodríguez, “The Relations between the United States and Porto Rico,” American Journal of International Law 13 (1919):

483-525; Quincy Wright, “Treaties and the Constitutional Separation of Powers in the United States,” American Journal of International Law 12 (1918): 64-95. Many modern scholars would agree that it belongs there. Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Rivera Ramos, Legal Construction of Identity; Christina Duffy Burnett, “A Note on the Insular Cases,” in Burnett and Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense,

389-392. On women, dependency, and U.S. citizenship, see, e.g., Adam Winkler, “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” New York University Law Review 76 (Nov. 2001):

1456-1526; Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1934,” American Historical Review 103 (Dec. 1998): 1440-1474; Linda K. Kerber, “Toward a History of Statelessness in America,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 728-749; Martha

Jones, “All Bound Up Together”: The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830-1900

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

citizen of the United States?”181

Fortunately, Coudert argued, the problem was easy to solve. Article IX of the Treaty of Paris held that the “political status of [Puerto Ricans] shall be determined by Congress.” The treaty, he contended, was thus written to avoid naturalizing the Puerto Ricans who nonetheless necessarily ceased to be aliens upon annexation. Declining to join the Attorney General in calling Puerto Ricans “American subjects,” a term “alien to our trend of political thought,” Coudert proposed a term that he cast as unburdened by monarchical implications but otherwise synonymous with subject: “national.” “National” and alien were complements, he wrote, mutually exclusive yet “together . . . universally inclusive.” Citizenship was narrower: all “citizens must be nationals,” he explained, “but all nationals may not be citizens.”182

The argument was a departure from that which he had presented the Supreme Court during the Insular Cases. Then he had claimed that while Filipinos could be nationals akin to American Indians, Puerto Ricans were similar neither to Indians nor to antebellum free blacks and thus bore no relation to the two categories of people who had been neither citizens nor aliens under prior U.S. law. Coudert still acknowledged the similarity between the status Puerto Ricans would hold if they were to become U.S. non- citizen nationals and that upon which Scott v. Sandford (1857) depended. As he wrote, “Dred Scott was not an alien; he was a national, but he was not, under the famous

181 Frederic R. Coudert, Jr., “Our New Peoples: Citizens, Subjects, Nationals or Aliens,” Columbia Law Review 3 (Jan. 1903): 22-23 (quotes 1-3, 5, 7), 17, passim; Appellant’s Brief, Gonzales, 12 (quotes 4, 6). E.g., Veta Schlimgen, “Intermediate Citizens: ‘American Nationals,’ Filipino Americans, and U.S. Imperialism” and Christina Duffy Burnett, “Citizenship in the Time of Empire: The Noncitizen National in Constitutional and International Law” (both presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Seattle, Wash., 27-28 Mar. 1909). Astrid Cubano-Iguina has observed how gendered concepts and legal categories that have different implications for men and women developed in tandem in late-19th- century Puerto Rico. “Legal Constructions of Gender and Violence against Women in Puerto Rico under Spanish Rule, 1860-1895,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 531-564.

182 Coudert, “Our New Peoples,” 32 (quotes 1-2), 17 (quotes 3-6), 19, 25, 29.

decision, a citizen.” But Degetau no longer saw that similarity as dispositive. Instead, he reassured readers that his proposal would not reprise that infamous case because other nations in the interim had taken similar steps without betraying their national principles, ratifying slavery, or descending into civil war. They “have for years past had the same problem before them as we have now,” he related, “and have solved it in line with the

theory herein set forth.”183

Soon thereafter, Federico Degetau won permission to enter Gonzalez’s case as amicus curiæ. By this time he had failed to clarify the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans before political, administrative, public, and media audiences and in two attempted Supreme Court tests cases concerning his admission to the Supreme Court bar and his application for a passport as a U.S. citizen. Nonetheless, Degetau apparently still believed, as he had written in 1901, that “the profound respect that this pueblo has for its judicial institutions” meant that a decision of the Supreme Court could change the situation in Washington. As the case progressed, he agreed to provide the New York Independent an article in favor of U.S. statehood for Puerto Rico that would run after the Supreme Court ruled.184

At the same time, and as he had during his first term, Degetau sought both to exemplify the fitness of Puerto Ricans for citizenship and to document instances where

183 Ibid. 29 (quotes), 17, 19, 25, 32. Coudert’s argument was unfamiliar and unsettling to many. When he told Commissioner of Immigration William Williams, “Should you win the case . . . you will then be able to keep out Americans from the country,” Williams failed to grasp Coudert’s premise and contested his

conclusion: “Assuming that you use the term Americans as synonymous with U. S. citizens, then before the

Government can win the case the court must have decided that Porto Ricans are not U. S. citizens . . . . Am I not right?” William Williams to Frederick Coudert, 16 Dec. 1903, DC NARA 85/151/12~340/4/19045 (quoting Frederic Coudert to William Williams, 15 Dec. 1903).

184 Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Manuel Rossy, 20 Feb. 1901, CIHCAM 2/VII/47 (“el respeto profundo que este pueblo tiene por sus instituciones judiciales”); Petition of Federico Degetau, Gonzales; Hamilton Holt to Federico Degetau, 5 Nov. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VI/342; Hamilton Holt to Federico Degetau, 12 Nov. 1903,

CIHCAM 4/VI/354; Hamilton Holt to Federico Degetau, 19 Nov. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VI/364; [Hamilton

Holt] to Federico Degetau, 27 Nov. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VI/379.

an arm of the U.S. state acted as if Puerto Ricans were or should be U.S. citizens—even

if they had done so inadvertently. He thus had the Secretary of the Puerto Rican Supreme Court certify that U.S. military authorities had administered to him an oath to meet citizenship-like obligations of national defense and to renounce, as during naturalization, all foreign allegiances. He then secured a report of the House Committee on Insular Affairs recommending that Puerto Rico enjoy the right to send a delegate to Congress

like those from traditional U.S. territories.185

Degetau’s efforts often faltered in the face of federal indecision. When Degetau inquired about census officials classifying Puerto Ricans as “U.S.” in the citizenship column of the 1899 census, he learned that their instructions included those “desir[ing] to be American subjects” under that head. Degetau also observed that the Foraker Act ordered the Commissioner of Navigation, to undertake, in his words, “the nationalization of all vessels owned by the inhabitants of Porto Rico,” while a second statute required U.S. vessels to be “wholly owned by citizens . . . of the United States.” Upon inquiry, Degetau discovered that the Bureau of Navigation had not reconciled the statutes, instead variously classifying owners of Puerto Rican boats as U.S. or Puerto Rican citizens, inhabitants of Puerto Rico, or citizens of San Juan.186

185 Amicus Brief, Gonzales, 25-26; Copy, [Federico Degetau] to Teodoro Moscoso, 2 Oct. 1903, CIHCAM

4/V/309; “El Sr. Degetau: su conferencia de anoche,” newspaper unknown, 5 Aug. 1903, available at

CIHCAM 18/L1; H.R. 3540 [Report No. 8], 58th Cong., 2d sess., 14 Dec. 1903, available at CIHCAM

4/VI/358; Chapter 3 above, notes 116-118 and accompanying text (concerning Downes v. Bidwell, 182

U.S. 244, 287 (1901) (White, J., concurring)).

186 Translation of Extract from “Special Instruction for the Enumerators of Department Number 2,” n.d., CIHCAM 2/IV/15 (quotes 1-2); Amicus Brief, Gonzales, 38 (quotes 3-4) (respectively identifying sources

of quotations as “Section 9 of the Foraker Act” and “Sec. 4131 of the Revised Statutes of the United

States”) (alteration in original); Draft, Federico Degetau to Clarence Edwards, 20 Jun. 1903, CIHCAM

4/III/222; Charles Magoon to Federico Degetau, 8 Jul. 1903, CIHCAM 4/IV/239; Edgard Mc[¿?] to Federico Degetau, 27 Jun. 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/230; E. Cha[¿?] to Federico Degetau, 15 Jun. 1903, CIHCAM 4/III/217. Not every claim by a Puerto Rican involving questions of status advanced Degetau’s cause. For J. O. Abril’s and his family’s unsuccessful claim that they should not have to pay U.S. customs duties because they were not U.S. citizens, see Christina Duffy Burnett, “‘They say I am not an American .

In some cases Degetau encountered U.S. officials who delayed deciding Puerto Rican status matters pending the further judicial guidance that they now anticipated. The Department of Commerce and Labor embraced this strategy after February 1903 federal legislation transferred the Bureau of Immigration to it from Treasury. Throughout 1903, Commissioner of Immigration William Williams used his victory over Isabel Gonzalez in the U.S. Circuit Court to treat Puerto Ricans arriving at Ellis Island as aliens for immigration purposes. He told one superior that even though a billing error made it likely that he would pay the $250 fee of the lawyer at the Circuit Court out of pocket, “[s]uch loss will be very slight in comparison with the satisfaction of having secured a favorable decision for the Government in the Gonzalez case.” A few weeks after he wrote that

letter, his policy caught fifty-year-old María Coy in its web. At Ellis Island, Coy’s lawyer recounted, inspectors deemed Coy “an invalid” of “extreme age” “unable to care for herself.” Her daughter, they concluded, despite her decade of experience making ends meet in New York, was an unreliable guarantor who “has to rely on her own daily labor for her support.” Rosendo Rodríguez, an acquaintance of Coy or her daughter and a co- founder of the Las Dos Antillas revolutionary club of which Collazo had been a member in the 1890s, had also “promised to take [Coy] in.” Inspectors nonetheless deemed Coy a

likely public charge.187

Coy’s daughter subsequently hired a lawyer to appeal the decision, but lost.

. . ’: The Noncitizen National and the Law of American Empire,” Virginia Journal of International Law 48 (2008): 691-692; see also C. H. Kean to Melchior, Armstrong & Dessau, 10 Nov. 1903, CIHCAM

4/VI/351; C [Illegible] to Frederico Degetau, 11 Nov. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VI/352.

187 Williams to Commissioner General of Immigration, 24 Aug. 1903 (quote 1); O.B. Thomas to Angel

Reys, 10 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/282 (quotes 2-5); Rosendo Rodríguez to Federico Degetau, 11 Sep.

1903, CIHCAM 4/V/286 (quote 6 (At Ellis Island, Coy’s daughter “presento [sic] una targeta [sic] mia [sic] donde la garantizaba se agarraron”)); An Act to Establish the Department of Commerce and Labor, Statutes at Large 32 (12 Feb. 1903): 825-830; Elinor des Verney Sinnette, Arturo Schomburg: Black Bibliophile

and Collector: A Biography (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 21;

Rodríguez then approached Degetau, addressing Degetau less as the representative of residents of the territory of Puerto Rico then as someone akin to a consul who represented all Puerto Ricans regardless of whether they lived in Puerto Rico or on the mainland. Degetau won Coy a rehearing, after which she gained entry to New York. He also used

her case as a basis to claim U.S. citizenship, writing the Secretary of Commerce and

Labor “protesting against the application of the restrictions of the immigration laws to the natives and residents of Porto Rico.” The Department declined to comment, electing instead to wait “until a decision has been rendered by the Supreme Court.”188

In early 1903, Manuel Rossy, the Republicano Speaker of the Island House of

Delegates, derided Degetau’s judicial strategy as blind to political realities. Separation of powers, he argued, was more theory than practice. Observing that congressional support for presidential expansionism showed “that legislative action is not as free from executive influence as one would guess from reading books,” he indicated that courts were unlikely to alter Puerto Rican status absent strong legislative guidance. “We here do not share

188 [Illegible] to Frederico Degetau, 14 Dec. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VII/23 (quotes); Thomas to Reys, 10 Sep.

1903; Rodríguez to Degetau, 11 Sep. 1903 (“No teniendo los Puertoriqueños [sic] residentes en esta representacion [sic] alguna me creo en deber de hacer llegar las quejas á Ud.”; “Because the Puerto Ricans here do not have local representation, I thought I should direct my complaints to you.”); Rosendo Rodríguez to Federico Degetau, 20 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/292; Rosendo Rodríguez to Federico Degetau, 25 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/299; William Williams to Chief of Deportation Division, 15 Sep.

1903, DC NARA 85/151/5~340/795/19701; Copy, Degetau to R. Rodríguez, 15 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM

4/V/308; Rosendo Rodríguez to Federico Degetau, 16 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/289; F. H. Hitchcock to Federico Degetau, 18 Sep. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/291. On the advantages of access to a consul or the disadvantages of its lack, see Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Marc C. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cuba, 1912-1939,” Journal of Social History 31 (spring 1998): 599-

623; Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1915-1934,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (Feb. 1998): 83-116; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998); Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, Conn.” Yale University Press, 2003); Mary Niall Mitchell, “‘A Good and Delicious Country’: Free Children of Color and How They Learned to Imagine the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana,” History of Education Quarterly 4 (summer 2000): 123-144.

your view that” “conced[ing] the Commissioner of Puerto Rico a seat and voice like delegates to other territories . . . would mean recognition of Puerto Rico as an organized territory,” Rossy wrote, “just as your admission to the Supreme Court bar did not bring us citizenship.” Even U.S. citizenship, Rossy claimed, “your opinion notwithstanding, will have to be via legislation.”189

This intra-party dispute intensified as Republicanos moved closer to a merger

with U.S. Republicans. As Rossy told Degetau, Republicanos planned to attend the Republican National Convention, where they hoped to be recognized as delegates. Such alliances with political parties in the metropole had long been a part of island politics, including among Republicanos’ Autonomista predecessors. They had always involved a balance of principles and expediency that sometimes included partnerships with parties willing to support Puerto Rican politicians’ immediate demands for official posts or new freedoms but not their longer-term goals. Luis Muñoz Rivera’s agreement in the 1890s with a monarchical Spanish party, for example, had divided Puerto Rican Autonomistas over the relative values of potential autonomy and fidelity to liberal-republican principles. Degetau had dissented then, and he dissented from Republicanos’ plans now too. He had entered post-invasion politics on the understanding “that Puerto Rico would be a state of the union like the others,” he stated. “[I]f the politics of the Republican Party” is “to keep us indefinitely as a dependency” and so “impedes making an explicit declaration” that Puerto Rico is “an organized territory with the intention of recognizing

189 Manuel Rossy to Federico Degetau, 12 May 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/176 (“no es tan libre la accion [sic]

legislativa del influjo de la accion [sic] ejecutiva como nos habiamos [sic] firugado leyendo lo que dicen

los libros”; “no participamos aquí de su opinion [sic] de que”; “concederle asiento y voz al Comisionado de Puerto Rico equiparandolo [sic] á los delegados de los Territorios . . . implicaria [sic] el reconocimiento de un principio de Territorio organizado”; “como nada influyó su admision [sic] como Abogado ante el Tribunal Supremo, en lo referente á la ciudadania [sic]”; “a pesar de su opinion [sic], será mediante una ley”); see also Herminio Diaz to Federico Degetau, 5 Jan. 1904, CIHCAM 4/VIII/3.

us as a state in a reasonable time,” Degetau wrote, “I will not enter” that party. The question, he predicted, could hinge on whether “the Supreme Court declares us American citizens.”190

Isabel Gonzalez and her family pursued her appeal under different circumstances

and for different reasons than did Coudert and Degetau. Luis Gonzalez sought reunification of his family. On February 5, 1903, he wrote to Degetau from San Juan not as the brother of the litigant in the case in which Degetau would soon submit a brief but as a potential beneficiary of charitable paternalism. He reminded Degetau of “the offer you made me to wish to be able to help me study something” when he had been “the young man from the laundry in San Juan who regularly washed your shirts.” But “as a poor man with obligations to my mother and two little sisters, I have not been able to devote myself to studies,” he explained, and instead “I decided to come to this country

where my work” “in a rubber factory” “lets me live and help my mother.” Now, he wrote, his mother was “unwell.” Hoping to return and “live in reduced circumstances with what

I can earn,” he concluded, “I seek your good heart to help me . . . remain more time in

San Juan.”191

190 Degetau to Moscoso, 2 Oct. 1903 (quotes (“que Puerto-Rico seria [sic] un Estado de la Unión como los demás”; “compromiso fundamentál [sic] que los republicanos puertoriqueños [sic] tenemos contraido [sic]”; “si la politica [sic] del partido republicano de aquí le impide hacer esa declaración esplícita [sic] porque quieran mantenernos como una dependencia indefinidamente, por mi parte no ingresaré en él”; “un Territorio organizado con el compromiso de reconocernos como Estado en un termino razonable de tiempo”; “el Tribunál [sic] Supremo nos declara ciudadanos americanos”)); Informe de los delegados del Partido Republicano de Puerto Rico ante la Convención Nacional Republicana celebrada en Chicago, en

21 de junio de 1904 ([San Juan?], P.R.: Tipografía “El País,” 1904), 4-12, available at CIHCAM 6/L8; Manuel Rossy to Federico Degetau, 2 Dec. 1903, CIHCAM 4/VII/3; title unknown, Evening Star, 11 Dec.

1903, available at CIHCAM 18/L1; José de [??]man [Semilez?] to Federico Degetau, 7 Jan. 190[4], CIHCAM 3/V/4; “Recognition of Porto Rico,” Washington Post, 12 Dec. 1903, 3; “Chicago Secures Big Convention,” Chicago Daily, 13 Dec. 1903, 1.

191 Gonzalez to Degetau, 5 Feb. 1903 (“el ofresimiento [sic] que Ud. me hizo para si queria [sic] estudiar alludarme [sic] en algo”; “el joven del tren de lavado de San Juan que acostumbraba a lavarle sus camisas”;

“yo como soy pobre y tengo la obligacion [sic] de mi madre y dos hermanitas no he podido dedicarme al

estudio”; “me resolvi [sic] venirme a este pais [sic] adonde con mi trabajo vivo aqui [sic] y alludo [sic] a mi

Three months later Luis Gonzalez instead brought his family to New York, buying tickets for Isabel Gonzalez’s mother, younger sisters, and daughter aboard the

S.S. Ponce that departed San Juan on May 12. Aware that Ellis Island officials sometimes excluded unmarried immigrant mothers and their children, Isabel Gonzalez’s mother

listed herself as married on the ship’s manifest and claimed Isabel Gonzalez’s daughter as her own. On May 18 Ellis Island officials cleared the ostensibly traditional, nuclear

family members for entry and released them into the care of Luis Gonzalez and his mother’s sister, Herminia Dávila.192

Isabel Gonzalez herself seems to have wanted both to secure her own position and to clarify and thus improve the status of all Puerto Ricans. Though her voice is absent from the administrative and trial records, she apparently assented to the shift from an argument designed to redeem her individual honor and secure her entry to New York to one intended to secure citizenship for all Puerto Ricans. While she was out on bond, the New York Times later reported, “the young man, who she came here to find, turned up,” the two wed, and she became “a citizen of this country through marriage,” thus acquiring a right to remain on the mainland. Rather than end her appeal on these grounds, however, she hid her marriage, delaying individual redemption in order to press her claim that all

Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens.193

As a result of her discretion about the wedding, the official record came to portray

madre”; “estoy trabajando en una fabrica de Hule”; “encontradose [sic] ella en muy mala posicion [sic] en San Juan deseo traermela [sic] a esta pues con lo que yo gano podemos vivir aunque sea un poco reducido, y para esto deseo de su buen corazon [sic] me allude [sic] . . . permanezca mas [sic] tiempo en San Juan”).

192 Manifest for the S.S. Ponce, 18 May 1903, 78, EIA.

193 “Porto Ricans Not Aliens” (quotes). This article merits additional study. Most Puerto Ricans in 1903 could not naturalize as U.S. citizens, and few Puerto Ricans held U.S. citizenship at the time. Further research may reveal whether Gonzalez’s fiancé was among that minority or whether the Times misreported the story. Had Gonzalez’s lawyers known of Gonzalez’s marriage mooting her case, deceived the Court by

not mentioning it, then revealed the deception immediately after the decision, they would have risked

judicial ire. Subsequent investigation may cast greater light on their motives and activities.

her as did immigration inspectors: dependent, silent, and an object of state policy. There is an irony here. Gonzalez made huge efforts to put claims to dignity and belonging before decision makers who worked for the U.S. state, a leading producer and custodian of archival materials. Because her efforts succeeded, the U.S. Supreme Court would read

and repeat the “legal story” that immigration inspectors had crafted out of the testimonies witnesses had generated to sway them. Historians have only begun to correct this depiction of Gonzalez as a passive victim of governmental machinations. Yet she pressed and, as we will see, articulated claims to citizenship.194

While Gonzalez intentionally preserved ambiguity concerning the citizenship

status she could claim through marriage, Degetau sought to ensure that the citizenship status she claimed as a Puerto Rican could not be questioned. The Foraker Act, he knew, made “citizens of Porto Rico” of those “continuing to reside” on the island on April 11,

The U.S. Attorney General, responding to a claim that Degetau had helped engineer, had construed that provision also to include Puerto Ricans “residing temporarily abroad.” But which absences qualified as temporary remained a matter of some debate. Moving to preclude any challenge along these lines, Degetau met with Collazo in mid-1903 on the pier of the New York and Porto Rico Steamship Company

and asked him to confirm that Gonzalez had been present in Puerto Rico in 1899.195

194 Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution,

1865-1920 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 234-245 (quote 2); Gonzales, 192 U.S.

1, 7 (1904); Burnett, “‘They say I am not an American’”; cf. Rivera Ramos, Legal Construction of Identity. I thank Monica Kim for suggesting this line of analysis.

195 Foraker Act, Statutes at Large 31 (12 Apr. 1900): 79 (sec. 7) (quotes 1-2); 24 Op. Att’y Gen. 40-45 (13

May 1902) (quote 3); Collazo to Degetau, 27 Aug. 1903. The question of the temporariness of an absence became dispositive in the case of Lorenzo Mercado, an islander who had relocated to Venezuela and headed a revolutionary group there. During the U.S. war with Spain, Mercado had offered his services to the U.S. military. After the war, initially still in Venezuela and then briefly also in Puerto Rico, he had taken steps to preserve and document his Puerto Rican status. Nonetheless, in July 1903 he and U.S. authorities were still disputing the matter. AG/OG/CG/179/11510 justicia—ciudadanía diciembre 1901

There is little evidence concerning how Collazo spent the years immediately following the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, but Degetau’s question and Gonzalez’s case provided him opportunities to engage questions of Puerto Rican status in new ways. Moving beyond the tight-knit world of revolutionary Antillean artisans with whom he

had formed political clubs and published newspapers in the 1890s, Collazo began to build ties to island political leaders and seize a voice in matters of island-mainland relations.

On May 25, 1903, he sought favor with Luis Muñoz Rivera, the leader of the Puerto Rican opposition party, by positively reviewing his new book of poetry, Tropicales. Writing to Degetau on August 27 that the 1899 census showed Isabel Gonzalez to be a San Juan resident, Collazo also sent Degetau his Muñoz review, describing it as part “of a series that I propose to publish and that will take a political character.”

The new acquaintanceship took hold. Degetau sent Collazo his book, Cuentos para el viaje, which Collazo praised. Soon, they had friends in common. Collazo addressed Degetau familiarly and even let his name be used by an acquaintance seeking a job from Degetau. Collazo also made a “constant friend” of the director of the island newspaper, La Correspondencia, which in late 1903 published his letter describing his niece’s case as a matter of democratic norms and the differences between presumably Latin or Spanish Puerto Ricans and native Pacific islanders. U.S. “possession of

‘dependencies’” and colonial governance of them, Collazo told islanders, had produced an “oligarchy in Puerto Rico” that was inconsistent with the “institutions” and “democratic . . . spirit” of the United States. Embracing the validity of racial hierarchies and seeking an advantageous place for Puerto Ricans within them, Collazo described the

Court as deciding whether to treat Puerto Ricans like Filipinos or indigenous Hawai‘ians.

Lorenzo Mercado.

If the Supreme Court denied U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, he explained, Puerto Ricans could also, like Filipinos, be “denied to the right to trial by jury,” as well as other rights. Though he had told Degetau that the Court would “say that we are not Americans,” he wrote in La Correspondencia that he “cherish[ed] hope.” “[T]wo of the judges who supported” the prior anti-Puerto Rico verdict, he explained, “have descended to the tomb: and it remains to be seen if their successors, Judges [Oliver Wendell]

Holmes and [William] Day, agree in the opinion of the narrow majority.”196

Throughout 1903 Puerto Ricans thus lived in institutional limbo, uncertain whether they possessed U.S. citizenship or remained alien to their new sovereign. Gonzalez consequently hung suspended between colony and metropole, alien and national, and citizen and subject. As she, her family and attorneys, and U.S. officials all understood, the attributes and distribution of U.S. citizenship remained unsettled long after Dred Scott (1857) and its 1868 reversal by the 14th Amendment.197

Gonzales v. Williams (1904)

The U.S. Supreme Court received the briefs in Gonzales v. Williams in late 1903. U.S. Solicitor General Henry Hoyt’s filing on behalf of the United States focused on the peculiar purposes of U.S. immigration laws. Reviewing bars to entry by Chinese,

196 Degetau to Collazo, 27 Aug. 1903 (quote 1 (“de una serie que me propongo publicar, y que tomarán carácter político”)); Collazo, “Desde Nueva York” (quotes 2-7, 9-11 (“amigo consecuente”; “posesión de

<dependencias>”; “oligarquía puertorriqueña”; “instituciones”; “espíritu . . . democrático”; “se les niega el juicio por jurado”; “podemos acariciar la esperanza de que dos de los jueces que apoyaron tan extraño verdicto en las cuestiones aduaneras, han bajado á la tumba; y queda por ver, si sus sucesores, los jueces Holmes y Day, abundan en la opinión la escasa mayoría”)); D. Collazo to Federico Degetau, 21 Nov. [1903], CIHCAM 6/I/42 (quote 8 (“nos dirá once again la Corte Suprema que no somos americanos”)); [Matter?] to Federico Degetau, 21 Oct. 1903, CIHCAM 4/V/327; B. Díaz to Federico Degetau, 6 Oct.

1903, CIHCAM 4/V/312; D. Collazo, “Cosas Literarias de Puerto Rico: ‘Tropicales,’” newspaper unknown, n.d., available at CIHCAM 18/L1.

197 Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

prostitutes, “idiots,” “insane persons,” “paupers,” certain diseased persons, and anarchists, among others, he highlighted Congress’s desire to protect the mainland from harmful immigration. Hoyt then described how Puerto Rico and the Philippines were remote in time, space, and culture and suffered (in his eyes) problems of climate, overcrowding, primitive hygiene, low standards of living and moral conduct, and the extreme and willing indigency that characterized the tropics. Until Congress crafted exceptions to the immigration laws, Hoyt concluded, the Supreme Court ought to respect congressional intent to protect the mainland from “these very evils at which the law was

aimed.”198

On November 30, 1903, Frederic R. Coudert, Jr., opposed the government with his brief on behalf of Isabel Gonzalez. He argued: 1) The Treaty of Paris transferred sovereignty over, and hence the allegiance of, Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States; and 2) Under English and U.S. law, such transfers effected transfers of subjection or nationality. If accepted, these two points were sufficient to win Gonzalez entry to the mainland; existing immigration laws only excluded aliens. This was the clear but minimalist argument that Coudert had made in his earlier law review article. But both Collazo in his letter to La Correspondencia and Gonzalez through her choices sought citizenship as well as non-alienage. In line with these goals, Coudert now contradicted his article to return to a version of the claim he had earlier presented the Court—that finding Puerto Ricans to be neither aliens nor U.S. citizens would be tantamount to reprising

Dred Scott. He thus argued: 3) U.S. law appropriately deemed all U.S. subjects or nationals also to be U.S. citizens. Moreover, he assured the Court, recognizing Puerto

Ricans as U.S. citizens would not hamper U.S. imperial designs. U.S. women and people

198 Brief for the United States, Gonzales, 55-60.

of color, he explained, possessed a U.S. citizenship similar to the status that other empires bestowed upon their subordinated peoples.

Coudert discussed the status of Puerto Ricans in the United States by comparing the United States to France and England and Puerto Ricans to Europe’s colonial subjects, free U.S. blacks, American Indians, women, and children. Significantly, he did not cast Puerto Ricans as white men who deserved full membership in the U.S. political community. Instead, he construed U.S. citizenship narrowly. By extending that status to its newly acquired peoples, he argued, the United States would both continue the practice that it followed in states and incorporated territories and follow the example of other imperial powers that had found it convenient and natural to grant women and minorities narrow forms of membership.

Turning to case law, Coudert portrayed a U.S. citizenship which generally accompanied U.S. nationality and that, similar to nationality in other empires, was widespread and minimal in its content. He chose cases in which the Court affirmed that men and women born within U.S. jurisdictions were U.S. citizens whatever their sex, race, or ethnicity. In the same cases, the Court had eviscerated those aspects of the 14th Amendment that implied a substantial array of rights entailed by U.S. citizenship. The Slaughter-House Cases (1873) virtually nullified the Privileges and Immunities Clause. Minor v. Happersett (1875), a case about women’s suffrage, eliminated voting as a potential federal-citizenship right. Striking a federal anti-race-discrimination law, the Court forbade Congress to regulate private action under the 14th Amendment in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). Wong Wing v. United States (1896) confirmed that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed some individual rights for all people, but offered few protections

specifically to U.S. citizens. Coudert did not have to add that in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Giles v. Harris (1903) the Court had blocked the invocation of the 14th Amendment as a tool against what litigants had respectively portrayed as “caste” distinctions and intentional black disfranchisement. By late 1903, the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the Court, both distributed U.S. citizenship widely and attached slim protections to federal status. U.S. citizens had to look to their states for the balance of their rights. When U.S. women and people of color complained that their states denied them such rights, the Court declared itself impotent.199

The problem that the Gonzalez case raised, Coudert contended, was how to adapt

the postbellum jurisprudence of U.S. citizenship—itself adapted to the challenges of “expansion and assimilation” posed by recent acquisitions—to a new problem: U.S. “imperialism, i.e., the domination over men of one order or kind of civilization, by men

of a different and higher civilization.” To make this distinction between earlier expansion and the new imperialism, Coudert relied upon myths of a vacant West and Southwest. Prior territories, he claimed, had only contained American Indians who did “not long survive contact with civilization” and an “insignificant…number” of people “largely of Caucasian race and civilization” whom the U.S. nation had integrated. Puerto Rico, by contrast, had a large, stable population. If previously migration to the frontier had “soon made the new lands thoroughly American,” neither “extermination” nor “assimilation”

would solve “the problem of to-day.”200

199 Appellant’s Brief, Gonzales, 18-28; Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873); Minor v. Happersett, 88

U.S. 162 (1875); The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883); Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228 (1896); United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903); Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge,” Michigan Law Review 106 (Mar. 2008): 777-804; Richard H. Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon,” Constitutional Commentary 17 (summer 2000): 295-319.

200 Appellant’s Brief, Gonzales, 32, 3-4.

Coudert rejected placing Puerto Ricans in the “seemingly paradoxical legal category of ‘American Aliens.’” He explained that doing so would make outsiders of residents of domestic territory. Under British common law that U.S. courts had long respected, he argued, transfers of legal allegiance like that effected by the Treaty of Paris automatically also transferred subjection. Moreover, because Puerto Rico was part of the United States under international law, holding against Gonzalez “would declare the law

of the United States, as expounded by its highest tribunal, to be that there exists under the jurisdiction of the United States a large class of persons who are strangers and aliens here and in every other nation of the globe.”201

So what to do with a people the nation would not assimilate, exterminate, or

exclude? The Court, he suggested, could synthesize U.S. jurisprudence on citizens of color with sister empires’ treatments of colonized peoples. Doctrines limiting the claims of U.S. blacks, American Indians, and women, among others, could serve as a model for the legal status of residents of the newly acquired territories: grant citizenship, but withhold rights.202

In its citizenship jurisprudence, Coudert contended, the Court had inadvertently

paralleled the practices of other empire-states, notably France. France’s approach to status helped Coudert delineate what he took to be the central confusion in the case: a failure to distinguish tiers of citizenship and subjection. In France, “the holder of political rights or privileges in a State” was an “active citizen[],” the status to which the word “citizen” referred in normal U.S. discourse. By contrast, U.S. law recognized as U.S.

201 Ibid. 4-5, 3, 6-7, 13-21, 28, 32.

202 Ibid. 12, 15, 10, 13-27, 36-39. On judicial paternalism, see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

Rapto was not part of U.S. law, but U.S. justices had come of age in a legal culture that enforced a civil

action for breach of contract to marry. Ibid.

citizens nearly all U.S. nationals regardless of political rights: women, children, and blacks. Coudert explained that France had also always recognized the French nationality of its subordinate peoples, be they minors, married women, “Cochin” Chinese, “Taïti[ans],” or Algerians. It had then divided these peoples into two groups. People “such as minors, women and incompetents” were “passive citizens,” a status identical with “subjection at common law” and carrying “full civil but no political rights.” “[U]ncivilized or semicivilized tribes or people who become wholly subject to [French] jurisdiction” were called “subjects” and enjoyed neither French political nor civil rights; in matters of private law they were “left under their own rules and customs.” Thus, though French citizens and subjects in Coudert’s rendering differed in the types of private-law rights they enjoyed—the civil rights of the French nation or the traditional

private-law rights of their locale—all French nationals enjoyed some form of private-law protection. U.S. citizenship, much less U.S. nationality, did not guarantee its holders such private-law protections. Access to federal courts aside, the U.S. Supreme Court had held that most rights deemed civil and popularly thought to attach to citizenship came through state law and state citizenship and could only be vindicated at the state level. Thus, the Court had three options: declare Puerto Ricans to be aliens, recognize an intermediate status between alien and citizen, or follow a model even more flexible than those of other

great powers and grant Puerto Ricans a rights-poor U.S. citizenship.203

Coudert argued that the Court had to choose between deeming Gonzalez a mere U.S. subject or judging her to be a U.S. citizen, but assured the justices that neither option would guarantee her full political or civil rights. Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), he

203 Appellant’s Brief, Gonzales, 6, 35-36, 33-34, 1-7, 22-24, 27-28, 37; see also Argument of Coudert,

Gonzales, 51-53, 62-65. Coudert did not suggest classifying Puerto Ricans as active citizens.

reminded them, had held that free blacks were not U.S. citizens, and yet were also “not aliens but American nationals or subjects because their allegiance, complete and absolute was owing to the United States.” Elk v. Wilkins (1884) had been to the same effect for American Indians who took up residence among white U.S. citizens. In both cases, U.S. history and democracy had repudiated the Court: the Civil War and the 14th Amendment undid Dred Scott, and the congressional Dawes Act (1887) reversed Elk. To create anew “a situation in which citizenship and subjection were not identical,” Coudert argued, would betray “the spirit of our Constitution[] and the jurisprudence of this Court” and depend upon “the two precedents in history of which we are least proud.” Luckily, he

reasoned, there was no need to make subjects anew. There already was a status in U.S. law that the Court had adapted to the needs of U.S. imperialism: U.S. citizenship. Because the Court had already drained much of the content from U.S. citizenship, the justices did not have to deny it to Puerto Ricans. They could thus facilitate the project of imperialism while avoiding historical censure for repeating Dred Scott.204

In his amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, Federico Degetau took a

dramatically different approach from that of Coudert. Degetau, a former Spanish citizen, associated his island with markings of male honor like economic self-sufficiency, martial experience, and exercise of political and civil rights. Reinterpreting rather than rejecting colonial and expansionist precedents, he drew imperial and cross-cultural comparisons. He did not seek “passive” U.S. citizenship akin to that enjoyed by women and people of color, nor did he seek to gain active citizenship for other colonized and marginalized people. Instead, he claimed—for Puerto Ricans like himself—a robust U.S. citizenship

204 Appellant’s Brief, Gonzales, 6, 38-39, 25, 28-32; Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857); Elk v. Wilkins,

112 U.S. 94 (1884); The Dawes Act, Statutes at Large 24 (8 Feb. 1887): 388; Patrick Weil, How to be

French: Nationality in the Making, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).

associated with white men, civilization, economic, legal, and political opportunities, and military and tax obligations.205

A key to this argument was the contention that Puerto Ricans were not “natives” in the colonial sense. The Treaty of Paris might vest Congress with discretion to determine the citizenship status of “native inhabitants” of Spain’s former possessions, he admitted. But he argued that these encompassed “the uncivilized tribes of the Philippine Islands” and not “Spanish citizens born in Porto Rico.” Just as some Cuban representatives had done during their constitutional convention the year before, Degetau

portrayed liberties that existed under Spanish rule as both indicative of islanders’ capacity and as a baseline below which no new government should fall. Puerto Ricans, he contended, had enjoyed such rights as representation in the national legislature, national citizenship accompanied by constitutional protections, “the same honors and prerogatives as the native-born in Castille,” and broad autonomy. Even after U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico, Spain let returning Puerto Ricans be Spanish military officers, embassy officials,

and Senators.206

This attempt to conflate the status of those Puerto Ricans born in continental Spain with those born on the island tracked a goal that predominantly island-born Autonomistas had long pursued but not achieved during Spanish rule. The distinction between the two groups had persisted throughout negotiations over the Treaty of Paris. Though Degetau, then too an elected Puerto Rican representative, had sought to be heard,

205 See sources cited above note 178. On manhood, mastery, honor, and U.S. citizenship rights, see Glenda

Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina,

1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

206 Amicus Brief, Gonzales, 30 (quotes 1-2), 18 (citing as the source of the quotation “Zamora y Coronado,

‘Legislación Ultramarina,’ Tomo I, p. 255-257”), 19-22, 27-29, 36; Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 205-206.

Spain had negotiated unilaterally with the United States. Neither treating party had recognized rights of Puerto Ricans to participate. The resultant agreement reproduced the birthplace distinction, giving colonists born in continental Spain but not those born in the colonies the option to retain their Spanish nationality. By ignoring this history in construing the Treaty, Degetau aimed to position Puerto Rico favorably within the broader context of historical U.S. expansion. Claiming that Puerto Ricans differed from Filipino “tribes,” “Mongolians,” and the “uncivilized native tribes [of] Alaska,” he indicated that Puerto Ricans resembled the French and Mexicans who had been incorporated into U.S. citizenship in earlier U.S. cessions. He did not, of course, mention his efforts to enroll and support Puerto Rican students at such schools serving American

Indians and U.S. blacks as Carlisle and Tuskegee.207

The United States, Degetau admonished, was tardy in extending appropriate treatment to his traditionally rights-bearing, self-governing people. Though Puerto Ricans shared with American Indians simultaneous struggles to define the status of their people and their land and imperfect accesses to dual status as U.S. citizens and distinct peoples, Degetau stressed differences in how the United States approached the two groups. Under U.S. naturalization laws, which required that applicants renounce allegiance to a foreign sovereign, Puerto Ricans could not become U.S. citizens. But tribal American Indians could renounce tribal allegiances and become U.S. citizens. Because Congress had not organized Puerto Rico “with the separate national character accorded to some Indian Tribes,” he explained, the United States provided less access to U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans than to American Indians. Moreover, on the mainland the U.S. Civil Service

207 Amicus Brief, Gonzales, 28 (citing as the source of the quotation “Foreign Relations of the United

States, 1898. Correspondence with the United States Peace Commissioners, p. 961”).

Commission and West Point equivocated over participation by Puerto Ricans, and Puerto

Rican voting rights varied by jurisdiction. But it was not too late. He noted that the

United States had made advances toward treating Puerto Ricans—especially Puerto Rican men—like U.S. citizens. They paid U.S. taxes, swore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and laws, elected a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, and were Americans and citizens of a U.S. territory. Now, the Court could redeem U.S. democratic traditions.208

Degetau also sought to distinguish the active Puerto Rican citizenry from Cubans

and Filipinos by describing the differences between what “was asked by the American Government of the inhabitants” of each locale. Using language that could have described a marriage contract, he recounted that President William McKinley had instructed the Secretary of War in 1898 that Cubans were to grant their “honest submission” to receive from the United States “support and protection.” Under a different presidential instruction, he continued, Filipinos swore to “recognize and accept the supreme authority

of the United States.” Here, the relationship that he described sounded like that of child to

parent. By contrast, he claimed, Puerto Ricans had become U.S. citizens as a result of

208 Ibid. 33-34, 21-22, 32, 36. José Trías Monge clarifies that Puerto Rican rights under Spanish rule varied throughout the 1800s; just before U.S. annexation, Puerto Rico had little guarantee that the autonomy Spain had just accorded it would be permanent. Historia constitucional de Puerto Rico, vol. 1 (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial Universitaria, 1980), 133-134, passim. On American Indians’ struggles with status and related issues, see Andrew Denson, Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture

1830-1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992); Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian

Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Donald A. Grindle, Jr. and Quintard Taylor, “Red vs Black: Conflict and Accommodation in the Post Civil War Indian Territory, 1865-1907,” American Indian Quarterly 8 (summer 1984): 211-229; E. Stanley Godbold, Jr. and Mattie U. Russell, Confederate Colonel and Cherokee Chief: The Life of William Holland Thomas (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); John R. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees 1819-

1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); Mary Young, “The Exercise of Sovereignty in Cherokee Georgia,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (spring 1990): 43-63; William G. McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees’ Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

military orders ratified by Congress. In line with military rules, 1,100 prospective Puerto Rican officeholders (including Degetau) had renounced their allegiance to Spain and agreed to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies home or foreign.” This, Degetau claimed, effected “a plain renunciation of all foreign allegiance and an explicit acceptance of the duties of citizenship.” The oath invoked male realms of political rights and participation by speaking of defending the nation from foreign enemies, occupying political office, and upholding the U.S. Constitution. Taken together, Degetau’s comparisons implied that Cuba agreed to receive protection from the United States like a wife; the Philippines accepted the authority of the United States like

a child; Puerto Rico swore allegiance to and took up the defense of the United States, like a man.209

Degetau portrayed a population actively and naturally blending into the United States against which barriers to citizenship seemed out of place. Under the Foraker Act, he related, mainlanders resident in Puerto Rico, along with all Puerto Ricans, constituted a single body politic—the people of Puerto Rico. Since mainlanders retained their U.S. citizenship while becoming Puerto Rican, which he treated as equivalent to becoming a citizen of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican citizenship could not be an alternative to U.S. citizenship. Thus, Degetau argued, Puerto Rican citizenship was territorial citizenship,

coexisting with the U.S. citizenship that the 14th Amendment guaranteed to all those born

within the U.S. nation. Focusing on fields dominated by men, Degetau also illustrated how Puerto Ricans needed U.S. citizenship to exercise autonomy and control within business and law. Without U.S. citizenship, U.S. policy nationalizing Puerto Rican

209 Amicus Brief, Gonzales, 25-26 (quoting Degetau’s own certificate); Foraker Act, Statutes at Large 31 (12 Apr. 1900): 77.

vessels would cripple the industry—another law required such vessels to be owned and commanded by U.S. citizens. Non-citizens could not be bank directors or prosecute actions in the Court of Claims. Although the Foraker Act indicated that Puerto Rico ought to benefit from most U.S. laws, many statutes applied only to U.S. citizens. Degetau’s arguments implicitly asked the court to consider him, an accomplished civil servant, rather than Gonzalez, an unmarried mother, as the model for Puerto Rican citizenship. He closed on a personal note, which reprised one his earlier gambits in

pursuit of U.S. citizenship. “If I were an alien, I could not have attained the highest honor in my professional career, that of taking, as a member of the bar of this Honorable Court, the oath to maintain the Constitution of the United States, this oath being incompatible with allegiance to any other power.” 210

By the time the Court held oral arguments on December 4, 1903, the issue had

shifted from whether Puerto Ricans were aliens to what non-alien status they held. According to one observer, Solicitor General Henry Hoyt argued that Degetau had only “been admitted by the courtesy of the” Court to its bar. Chief Justice Melville Fuller disagreed. “[T]he Commissioner,” the observer recalled him saying, “was there by right.” When Hoyt then “confessed that it was not possible to establish [a] line of distinction” between Degetau’s and Gonzalez’s status, the observer continued, Hoyt all but conceded.211

Degetau’s well-honed performance as a cultured, white Puerto Rican gentleman

210 Amicus Brief, Gonzales, 43, 6-7, 12-14 (noting that if Puerto Rican citizenship were held to be exclusive of U.S. citizenship, Puerto Ricans would be foreign citizens from whom the United States could not demand allegiance under international law), 37-42.

211 Letter to Editor, Pedro García Olivieri, “Puerto Rico en la Corte Suprema Nacional,” Puerto Rico

Herald, 12 Dec. 1903, 1127 (“admitido por cortesía del”; “el Comisionado estaba allí por su derecho”; “confesó que no le era posible establecer esa línea de distinción”). Hoyt’s initial argument was that which Degetau’s co-partisan Manuel Rossy had earlier made.

was thus largely successful. The justices were willing to consider that someone like Degetau could be a U.S. citizen, or something similar. Yet they also knew that more than Degetau’s individual status was at stake. As all parties in the case appeared to agree, Puerto Ricans and most likely Filipinos held a common status under U.S. law. If Degetau were a U.S. citizen, then Gonzalez and likely very many Filipinos were U.S. citizens too.

Coudert, in his oral arguments, faced resistance concerning his portrayals of the statuses other than alienage that the Court could accord Puerto Ricans. A key source of that resistance was a justice who had not taken part in the 1901 Insular Cases, the Court’s most junior member, William Day, who had accrued his experience with U.S. empire and law as Secretary of State in the late 1890s and as lead U.S. negotiator for the Treaty of Paris. His objection came when Coudert described a choice between reprising Dred Scott by creating U.S. subjects and extending Puerto Ricans a U.S. citizenship with minimal content:

Mr. Coudert: …there have been two instances…in which subjection or nationality and citizenship were not determined by the same tests….

Justice Day: Would not ‘allegiance’ be a better word than ‘subjection’ there? Mr. Coudert: Well, I use the world ‘subjection’ because it is the common-law term….

Justice Day: You will probably not find that term in any American discussion of the relations between the people of either the United States or its territories.

Mr. Coudert: [T]he Attorney-General at this bar stated that…these persons were American subjects;…perhaps it would be more proper to have called them liegemen….

Justice Day: I prefer that term to the other.212

Rather than affirm Puerto Rican alienage or grant Puerto Ricans broad U.S. citizenship rights, Day proposed a term intermediate to “alien” and “citizen”—“liegemen”—that did not carry what Coudert had portrayed as the monarchical implications of “subject” and its associations with Dred Scott. Day apparently wanted to decline Coudert’s proposal that the Court recognize a relatively modest version of U.S. citizenship and thereby avoid creating U.S. subjects or new rights for Puerto Ricans. Though Day was reluctant to acknowledge explicitly that the Court had drained much meaning from U.S. citizenship, that did not mean he had qualms about U.S. treatment of women, people of color, or colonized peoples. In Downes, for instance, Justice White had depicted U.S. citizenship

as a status rich in rights without addressing the ways that unequal U.S. treatment of women and people of color appeared to belie that claim. Coudert forged ahead. Functionally, he reiterated, it did not matter whether Puerto Ricans were “liegemen, nationals or subjects, all of which terms are absolutely identical as far as the law is concerned.” The Court, he insisted, had to choose: reintroduce “subjects” into U.S. law or

extend Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship.213

On January 4, 1904, Chief Justice Fuller announced the unanimous holding of the

Court: “[W]e…cannot concede…that the word ‘alien,’ as used in the [immigration] act of

1891, embraces the citizens of Porto Rico.” Reviewing U.S. law he explained that the

United States had made “[t]he nationality of the island…American” and integrated Puerto

212 Argument of Coudert, Gonzales, 49-56, passim; Sparrow, The Insular Cases, 147. My analysis here benefits from Christina Duffy Burnett, “Empire and the Transformation of Citizenship,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2009), which emphasizes the Court’s apparent acceptance of the idea of U.S. non-citizen nationals.

213 Argument of Coudert, Gonzales, 49-56, passim.

Rico into the United States. In Puerto Rico, the United States had created a civil government with heads named by the U.S. President; implemented congressional oversight; established a U.S. district court; run judicial process in the name of the U.S. President; nationalized Puerto Rican vessels; and put most U.S. statutes into force. This was a modest victory for Puerto Ricans. It struck down the Treasury guideline under which Gonzalez had been held. It did not, however, address congressional power to regulate the movement of Puerto Ricans from the island to the mainland. As to whether Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens, nationals, subjects, or liegemen, Fuller wrote: “We are not required to discuss…the contention of Gonzales’s counsel that the cession of Porto Rico accomplished the naturalization of its people; or that of Commissioner Degetau, in his excellent argument.” This strategic silence solved Justice Day’s dilemma and united the Court. While refraining from interfering with congressional and administrative control of new territorial acquisitions, justices also declined the choice between either reprising Dred Scott by reintroducing “subjects” into U.S. law or acknowledging that U.S. citizenship now carried very few rights. The decision avoided openly contradicting

the widely held belief that U.S. citizenship and U.S. nationality were coextensive, but left Congress and administrators room for maneuver in the control of new territorial acquisitions. As in Downes v. Bidwell, vagueness proved valuable as the Court sought to accommodate U.S. empire and constitutional democracy.214

“[N]either Americans nor foreigners”: Law and Politics after Gonzales, 1904-1905

Like the Treaty of Paris, the Foraker Act, and the Insular Cases before it,

Gonzales v. Williams (1904) altered the legal, social, and political landscape for Puerto

214 Gonzales, 192 U.S. at 12, 10, 12, 8-11, passim (1904).

Ricans. Isabel Gonzalez and Domingo Collazo struggled, in its wake, with the damage it had done to their honor through its failure to recognize Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens. Federico Degetau faced a choice: construe the ruling as the result of his failure to frame a sufficiently focused test case or concede that courts were not the best institution from which to win U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. Island politicians who had already concluded the latter had another decision to make: would cooperation or confrontation bring more liberal U.S. policies in Puerto Rico?

Aware that the events of Gonzales v. Williams (1904) had denied that Gonzalez was a dependant woman—either as a wife or as a relative to be taken in by Collazo as an independent man—she and Collazo tried to undo and rework the dishonorable reversals that U.S. officials had imposed on them. Newspaper reports described Gonzalez as one who “had come here in search of a man who had promised to marry her and had failed to keep his promise.” Collazo recalled that immigration inspectors had presumed he would not fulfill his patriarchal and honorable obligations of support of dependent, female relations. “Isabella Gonzalez, a niece of my wife,” he wrote, “was forbidden to land,” by inspectors, “the reason alleged being that she was . . . liable to become a public charge.” Both sought to set the record straight. On the day of the Court’s ruling, one of Gonzalez’s lawyers, Orrel Parker, told the New York Times of her matrimony and consequent change in status. Her honor, it was thus revealed, had been restored. Rebutting inspectors’ conclusions in a letter to the New York Times, Collazo identified his niece as the presumptively married “Mrs. Gonzalez” and explained that the inspectors’ decision came “notwithstanding my guaranteed assurances of her support as a member of my family.” But Gonzalez also sought to benefit from a self-portrayal similar to the one U.S. officials

had imposed on her. Signing a letter to Degetau with her maiden name and mentioning

her “mother” but no father, she asked Degetau to become the symbolic head of her needy, presumably female household. Any money he offered, she indicated, would go to female education, a “charitable errand” that was a longstanding cause of his. “One reason I came to the United States,” she wrote, “was for the education of a little sister who I today have by my side and who I would like to place in one of these colleges of poor students in which many of our countrymen are placed.” Gonzalez deployed a complicated mix of concepts of independence and dependence. Seeking male protection, she sought to win

her sister an education that would promote her economic independence. Gonzalez’s dependence upon Degetau, in turn, implicitly rested on an absence of husbands and fathers.215

For Republicanos like Manuel Rossy, Gonzales was primarily evidence that

Degetau’s judicial strategy had been misguided. It “did not interest opinion,” he related, “because everyone expected what occurred.” “If the Supreme Court could make U.S. citizens of the inhabitants of a country based just on . . . annexation,” Rossy reasoned, the United States “would have to concede citizenship to whatever upstart or enemy that it happened to annex.” This, he claimed, would mean that the United States “would not

form a true nation, because germs destructive of its sovereignty would arise within in.” Instead, he claimed, citizenship would only come by federal statute. Some prominent

Republican lawmakers already supported such a measure, and the Republican caucus in

215 “Porto Ricans Not Aliens” (quote 1); Letter to Editor, D. Collazo, “Nationality of Porto Ricans,” New York Times, 13 Sep. 1904, 8 (quotes 2-6); Gonzales to Degetau, 10 Apr. 1904 (other quotes (“madre”; “obra de caridad”; “Una de las cosas por que vine yo á los Estados Unidos fue por la educación de una hermanita que hoy tengo á mi lado, y que desearía poner en uno de esos Colegios de pobres en los que están poniendo muchos de nuestros paisanos”)). I thank Christina Burnett, for alerting me to Collazo’s letter. See Burnett, “‘They say I am not an American,’” 660, 670, 710.

Washington had made Degetau a member. If pursued, Rossy implied, an alliance with Republicans would help Republicanos make progress toward U.S. citizenship and potentially even eventual U.S. statehood. Thus, he reported, he and other Republicanos had formalized plans to select and send delegates to the 1904 Republican National Convention.216

Degetau was not deterred. True, he had to delay his article on Puerto Rican

statehood for the Independent. But as an opposition newspaper reported, he embraced the Gonzales decision, viewing it as “a stepping stone to a more decided recognition of the rights of Puerto Ricans in the United States.” On January 9 Degetau launched a new action, writing the Board of Election Commissioners in Chicago about the voting rights

of Puerto Ricans. Five days later an attorney for the board, William Wheelock, told Degetau that “a couple of Porto Ricans applied to be registered as voters” recently. They had claimed that U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico made them U.S. citizens eligible to vote in Chicago. Based upon the lower-court decision in Gonzales v. Williams, “I held that they were not voters,” Wheelock explained. Sending Wheelock his Amicus Brief in

Gonzales and that decision, Degetau asked him to reconsider.217

While awaiting Wheelock’s reply, Degetau won floor privileges, though still no vote, in the House of Representatives. Because the Senate refused to act, he also

216 Manuel Rossy to Federico Degetau, 26 Jan. 1904, CIHCAM 4/VIII/14 (“no interesó á la opinión”; “así la esperaban todos”; “Si el Tribunal Supremo pudiera declarar ciudadanos americanos á los habitantes de un pais [sic] por el mero hecho de la . . . anexión”; “tendrian [sic] que conceder la ciudadania [sic] [a

]cualquier advenedizo ó enemigo que por azares de la vida hubiese necesidad de anexar ó conquistar”; “no formarian [sic] una verdadera nación, porque llevarian [sic] dentro de sí los gérmenes destructores de su propia soberania [sic]”); Informe de los delegados del Partido Republicano; [Federico Degetau] to Joseph Babcock, 30 May 1904, CIHCAM 5/I/35. For examples of Puerto Rican media coverage of Gonzales, see “Puerto Ricans Admitted,” Puerto Rico Herald, 9 Jan. 1904, 1188; “Puerto Rico ante la Corte Suprema,” Puerto Rico Herald, 9 Jan. 1904, 1191; “Porto Ricans Not Aliens,” San Juan News, 6 Jan. 1904, 1.

217 “Puerto Ricans Admitted” (quote 1); W. Wheelock to Federico Degetau, 14 Jan. 1904, CIHCAM

4/VIII/11 (quotes 2-3); Hamilton Holt to Federico Degetau, 25 Feb. 1904, CIHCAM 4/VIII/40; W. W. Wheelock to Frederico Degetau, 23 Feb. 1904, CIHCAM 4/VIII/39.

remained a Resident Commissioner. There was, in his words, a new “peculiar indefiniteness of the status” he thus held, “in the language of the law, only a ‘Resident Commissioner’” yet “‘with functions similar to those of a Delegate.” Using his new powers to seek clarification of the status of all Puerto Ricans, he introduced a bill asking Congress to “expressly declare” islanders “to be citizens of the United States.”218

Two weeks later, a new test case on the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans took

shape when Juan Rodríguez, a nineteen-year-old native of Puerto Rico, requested that the Board of Labor Employment at the United States Navy Yard register him as a candidate for possible employment. Because navy-yard rules stated that “[n]o applicant will be registered unless he furnished satisfactory evidence that he is a citizen of the United States,” his application appeared to raise the question that the Gonzales Court had avoided. Some months earlier, President Roosevelt had tried to avoid such problems by declaring that applicants “who show[] birth or naturalization in Porto Rico will not be required to show further evidence of citizenship.” Yet, as government lawyers would

soon argue, Roosevelt’s rule could be read to encompass only a subset of federal jobs and not that for which Rodríguez had applied. The matter reached the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, who concluded “that as Mr. Rodríguez is not a citizen of the United States he is

not eligible for registration.” Two days later the Board denied Rodríguez’s application.219

218 Federico Degetau, The Constitution and the Flag in Porto Rico: Why the Porto Ricans Are Proud of Their Regiment: Speech of Hon. Federico Degetau of Porto Rico in the House of Representatives, Thursday, January 19, 1905 (Washington, D.C.: [Government Printing Office?], 1905), available at CIHCAM 6/L10 (quotes 1-2); [Degetau] to Babcock, 30 May 1904 (quote 3); H.R. 11592, 58th Cong., 2d sess., 2 Feb. 1904, available at CIHCAM 4/VIII/19 (quotes 4-5); “Delegate from Porto Rico,” New York Times, 3 Feb. 1904, 6.

219 W. H. Moody, Navy Yard Order No. 26—Revised: Employment of Labor at Navy Yards, 7 Jul. 1902, available at CIHCAM 3/VI/33 (quote 1); Brief for Appellant, No. 1504—No. 8 Special Calendar, Rodriguez v. Bowyer, 25 App. D.C. 121 (1905), CIHCAM 6/VI/33 (quote 2) (citing as the source of the

quotation “Rule V of said present [Civil Service] rules of March 20, 1903” in “Twentieth Report, Civil

Service Commission, page 48”); Brief for Appellees, Rodriguez, CIHCAM 6/VI/34, 11-13; Transcript of

On February 23, Wheelock wrote Degetau that upon reconsideration he had affirmed his judgment that Puerto Ricans were not U.S. citizens eligible to vote in Chicago. He dismissed Gonzales as having “carefully avoid[ed]” “[t]he question of citizenship.” Annexation could not naturalize islanders, he wrote, because Downes v. Bidwell (1901) held “that power to acquire territory by treaty implies . . . power . . . to prescribe . . . what [its inhabitants’] status shall be.” As then-Secretary of War Elihu Root had appeared to do during U.S. military governance of Puerto Rico, Wheelock defined

Puerto Rico as outside the United States, hence unaffected by 14th Amendment insistence

on U.S. citizenship for “all persons born or naturalized” there. And like Frederic Coudert in 1903, he read the Treaty of Paris to reserve determination of the political status of islanders to Congress. Treating U.S. citizenship for Filipinos as reductio ad absurdum and arguing that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans likely held the same status under their respective organic acts, Wheelock concluded that neither act naturalized. To what he described as Degetau’s claim that Puerto Ricans “are citizens of the United States” because they “had

a right to vote for you” as “Resident Commissioner . . . to Washington,” he replied that citizenship was not always a prerequisite to voting and that Chicago repeatedly denied the franchise to people accustomed to voting elsewhere. When Degetau then sought the identities of the rejected Puerto Rican applicants who now appeared to be potential test- case litigants, Wheelock informed him that “as is the rule in such cases [of refused

registrations] neither their names nor address were kept.”220

Rodríguez’s rejected application for navy-yard employment thus became

Degetau’s most promising test case, and he reunited with Jean des Garennes, the U.S.-

Record, Rodriguez, 5-6 (quote 3), 3; Draft Petition for Mandamus, Rodriguez, n.d., CIHCAM 6/III/56.

220 W.W. Wheelock to Federico Degetau, 26 Feb. 1904, CIHCAM 4/VIII/41 (last quote); Wheelock to

Degetau, 23 Feb. 1904 (other quotes).

citizen counsel for the French Embassy, to take it. Degetau and des Garennes had earlier collaborated during Degetau’s passport challenge, at which time Degetau had described to President Roosevelt a civil-service decision that classified Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens. When Degetau got in touch with George Leadley, lately Chief of the Civil Service Record Division, for confirmation, however, he learned that only one civil- service commissioner had “prepared an opinion to the effect that the natives of Porto Rico were citizens of the United States, in the International sense.” “[T]he other two Commissioners [had] dissented,” Leadley reported on March 29, and “[t]he opinion was never published.” Soon thereafter, Degetau and des Garennes filed their Petition for Mandamus asking the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia to compel the navy-

yard board to register Rodríguez.221

As Rodríguez’s case kept Degetau in Washington through April and May and into June, Republicanos in Puerto Rico prepared for the November election and moved ever closer to a merger with U.S. Republicans. On April 25, leaders met in Ponce to elect delegates for the Republican National Convention. An attendee told Degetau that R. H. Todd, the Mayor of San Juan, aspired to be Resident Commissioner, as did Mateo

Fajardo, the Mayor of Mayagüez who had joined Domingo Collazo on the Puerto Rican Commission during the U.S. invasion and now advocated Republicano integration with U.S. Republicans. But opinion in Ponce, the attendee reassured Degetau, held that neither could do the job as well as Degetau. On May 30, Degetau wrote Representative Joseph Babcock of Wisconsin to decline membership in a committee of the Republican Caucus.

“I did not deem it entirely consistent . . . to take a side in the internal differences of our

221 Geo. Leadley to Federico Degetau, 29 Mar. 1904, CIHCAM 4/IX/26 (quotes); Geo. Leadley to Bonifacio Sánchez, 7 Apr. 1903, CIHCAM 4/II/124; Draft Petition for Mandamus, Rodriguez; Transcript of Record, Rodriguez, 1-2.

national political parties” he explained, “so long as I was not recognized as a citizen of the United States, and was called ‘Resident Commissioner.’” A week and a half later Degetau, des Garennes, and Navy Yard officials stipulated that Rodríguez was a citizen of Puerto Rico, leaving it to the judge to decide whether such citizens were qualified for registration. As Degetau left for Puerto Rico, Republicano delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention. They secured two votes there, the same as Hawai‘i and the Philippines, and on June 21 proposed—but did not win—a platform plank favoring

U.S. citizenship and territorial government for the island.222

After reaching San Juan on June 24, Degetau campaigned on his judicial strategy. Opposition newspaper La Democracia predicted that his July 9 speech in San Juan on the “political status of the island and its inhabitants before the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the United States” “will be less a lecture than a political document.” Two and a half weeks later, it described Degetau’s well-attended Ponce talk on “the status of Puerto Rico,” in which he argued “that the Supreme Court in Washington had to determine it.” Like many Republicanos, La Democracia disagreed: “Few share this opinion” of Degetau’s, it reported, for many “express the view that it is the National Congress that can and should take action concerning American citizenship.”223

222 Degetau to Babcock, 30 May 1904 (quotes); Draft, [Federico Degetau] to Mr. Henry, [Jun. 1904], CIHCAM 5/II/8; Transcript of Record, Rodriguez, 3-8; Jean des Garennes to Federico Degetau, 2 Jun.

1904, CIHCAM 5/II/2; [Illegible] to Federico Degetau, 7 May 1904, CIHCAM 5/I/25; “Scandal at

Mayaguez,” Washington Post, 19 Apr 1903, 1; “Plans a Surprise in Porto Rico,” Chicago Daily, 25 Jul.

1898, 1; Informe de los delegados del Partido Republicano, 19-21, “D. Federico Degetau y González,” La Democracia, 24 Jun. 1904, 2; Republican Party Platform of 1904, 21 Jun. 1904, in John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, “Political Party Platforms: Parties Receiving Electoral Votes: 1840-2008,” The American Presidency Project (2009), at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29631.

223 “Conferencia del Sr. Degetau,” 8 Jul. 1904, 1 (quotes 1-2 (“Status político de la isla y sus habitantes ante los departamentos legislativo, ejecutivo y judicial de los Estados Unidos”; “será, más que una

conferencia, un documento político”)); “El señor Degetau dio una conferencia en Ponce,” La Democracia,

Though La Democracia joined Mateo Fajardo, Degetau’s opponent for the Republicano nomination for Resident Commissioner, in favoring a political strategy over a judicial one, it rejected Fajardo’s plan to influence Congress from within the U.S. Republican Party. Ridiculing Fajardo’s praise of U.S. efforts on behalf of island health and prosperity, the newspaper labeled him a “Little Candidate[]” who, it implied, had a misplaced faith in U.S. good intentions. Instead, La Democracia advocated a more confrontational approach, frequently looking to the experiences of other groups that struggled for autonomy from intermediate positions in the global order. In some cases

this meant Mormons, Cubans, or Boers, all groups that included members who saw their groups as racially superior to at least some other communities and that sought autonomy from a U.S. or British empire-state that perceived them as racial or moral inferiors.224

But in 1904, with Japanese victories in its war with Russia mounting, it was that

island nation that became the newspaper’s key referent. As a country that once “did not figure among the civilized nations,” La Democracia related, “Japan has realized a work that justly astonishes and that is the admiration of all Europe,” becoming the first race to

1 Aug. 1904, 2 (quotes 3-5 (“el status de Puerto-Rico, manifestando que es la Corte Suprema de Washington la que ha de determinarlo”; “De esta opinión del señor Degetau no son muchos aquí, que opinan que es el Congreso Nacional el que puede y debe tomar acuerdo sobre la ciudadanía americana”)). In “Evaluating Legality: Toward a Cultural Approach to the Study of Law and Social Change,” Idit Kostiner observes that the activists whom she studied initially saw law as an instrumental means both to achieve particular material ends and to empower marginalized people. Law & Society Review 37 (Jun.

2003): 323-368. Most only attempted to alter societal views more broadly after discovering the limits of the former strategies. Ibid. In following his vision of paternal leadership, by contrast, Degetau focused on instrumentalism and changing the views of the U.S. public but did not seek to empower marginalized

people by bringing them to law.

224 “Candiditos [sic] á Washington,” La Democracia, 6 Jul. 1904, 1 (“Candiditos [sic]”); Sara Barringer

Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Cardell K. Jacobson, “Black Mormons in the

1980s: Pioneers in a White Church,” Review of Religious Research 33 (Dec. 1991): 146-152; Scott, Degrees of Freedom; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba between Empires 1878-1902 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983); see also, e.g., “La nueva republica Boer,” La Democracia, 11 Mar. 1904, 3; “Los mormones y el Senado,” La Democracia, 7 Apr. 1904, 5; “La misma raza,” 21 Apr. 1904, 2.

challenge global dominance by whites. Because the “superiority of the white race above the red and black was never doubtful,” the newspaper explained, the Russo-Japanese “conflict of races” involving the “highly civilized” “yellow man” would establish whether, in the words of liberal-Zionist Max Nordau, “our [white] race” is “really supreme” or “we will have to recognize the yellows as our equals and resign ourselves to share the world with them.” As Japan scored major early victories, the newspaper trumpeted that “fear of a final disaster grows daily” among the Russians who once

“contemptuously called the [Japanese] monkeys.”225

Japanese successes were a thrilling, unsettling development for La Democracia. Perhaps, the newspaper worried, Puerto Rico resembled Korea. “Japanese generals devastated” that peninsula in the 16th century “as the Spanish did in America,” it wrote. “By its geographic situation, Korea is destined to have an important role in the commerce of Asia,” the newspaper added, echoing an oft-expressed sentiment about the place of Puerto Rico in the Americas. And with a logic many applied to the United States, it wrote that as “an industrial, producer country,” Japan “need[ed] new and large markets” and would not let a “rival seize such an important territory” within its sphere of influence. But Puerto Rico could also hope to become Japan. Tobacco—a leading Puerto Rican

225 Emilio Sánchez Pastor, “La grandeza de Japan,” La Democracia, 25 Feb. 1904, 1 (quotes 1-2 (“no figuraba entre las naciones civilizadas”; “ha realizado el Japón una obra que asombra con justicia y que es la admiración de toda Europa”)); Max Nordau, “Un capítulo de antropología,” La Democracia, 27 Dec.

1904, 4 (quotes 3, 5-9 (“superioridad de la raza blanca sobre la roja y la negra, no fué [sic] nunca dudosa”; “hombre amarillo”; “altamente civilizado”; “nuestra raza”; “realmente suprema”; “Tendrá que resignarse á reconocer las pretensiones de igualdad de la raza amarilla y á compartir con ella la posesión del globo”)); “Los blancos contra los amarillos,” La Democracia, 27 Jul. 1904, 5 (quote 4 (“conflicto de razas”)); “La guerra entre Rusia y Japon,” La Democracia, 18 Mar. 1904, 1 (quotes 10-12 (“crece diariamente el temor de un final desastroso”; “conceptuosamente los calificaban de monos”)); “La guerra entre Rusia y Japon,” La Democracia, 5 Mar. 1904, 1; “[main title unknown]: destrucción of Puerto Arturo,” La Democracia, 15

Mar. 1904, 2; George L. Mosse, “Max Nordau, Liberalism and the New Jew,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (Oct. 1992): 565-581; P.M. Baldwin, “Liberalism, Nationalism, and Degeneration: The Case of Max Nordau,” Central European History 13 (Jun. 1980): 99-120; Meir Ben-Horin, Max Nordau: Philosopher of Human Solidarity (New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1956).

industry—was also a major crop in Japan, the newspaper claimed. Some Puerto Ricans saw their island as having escaped from rule by a decadent Spanish Empire and to rule by a modern, rising, and coercive U.S. power from which they now sought self-government. Japan, the newspaper indicated, was merely one step ahead. “Two centuries of lethargy” there had preceded militarily coerced concessions to western powers, the newspaper related, which had only recently ended with “Restoration of the Mikado Power.” Though Japan outstripped Puerto Rico militarily, the Japanese insisted that they not be measured “as a fighting people only.” Just as many Puerto Ricans envisioned their island making moral and intellectual progress if given the chance, a Japanese official, according to La Democracia, claimed, “We aspire to be a nation” “at the head . . . of all manifestations of human knowledge” without “help from any power” beyond “the justice and moral

support Japan has the right to demand of the world.” The newspaper did not specify whether the Japanese example gave Puerto Ricans hope as a second non-white people with the potential to be the equals of European peoples or because as a white people the success of non-white Japanese was a fortiori proof that Puerto Ricans could similarly thrive.226

For Republicanos unhappy with their lack of power in their party and opposed to

integration with U.S. Republicans, the Federales’ celebration of confrontation could be appealing. Memories among island-born politicians of resentment over prior Spanish

226 [Main title unknown]: Corea y la guerra Ruso-Japonesa,” La Democracia, 16 Apr. 1904, 1 (quotes 1-6 (“Los generales japoneses devastaron”; “lo mismo que habían hecho . . . los españoles en América”; “Por su situación geográfica, Corea está destinada á representar un papel importante en el comercio de Asia”;

“país industrial y productor”; “necesita nuevos y grandes mercados”; “no está dispuesto á dejar que su rival se apodere de territorio tan codiciado”)); “Resume de la historia del Japón,” La Democracia, 22 Apr. 1904,

1 (quotes 7-8 (“Dos siglos de letargo”; “Restauración del poder del Mikado”)); “Poder y propósitos del Japón,” La Democracia, 20 Jul. 1904, 4 (quotes 9-13 (“como pueblo de combatientes solamente”; “Aspiramos á ser una Nación”; “á la cabeza . . . de todas las manifestaciones del saber humano”; “el auxilio de ninguna potencia, sino sólo la justicia y el apoyo moral que el Japón tiene derecho a demandar del mundo”)); “El tabaco en Japón,” La Democracia, 16 Apr. 1904, 2.

unwillingness to make government posts on the island available to Puerto Ricans remained fresh. Thus, Republicanos frustrated that their support of U.S. rule had not brought them good or better government posts were particularly susceptible to proposals to take harder lines with U.S. officials. To recruit such rivals, Luis Muñoz and other Federales had dissolved their party in early 1904 and formed a new Partido Unionista. Aspiring to represent all islanders favoring greater home rule, Unionistas declared themselves equally in favor of Puerto Rican statehood, autonomy, and, in a likely first for a major island party, independence. Critiquing Republicano faith in an alliance with U.S. Republicans, La Democracia reported that the U.S. “republican administration” acted “disgracefully,” making it “perhaps . . . necessary that the Democrats come to do us justice.” The strategy worked. On July 31, La Democracia reported, a “[L]ARGE ASSEMBLY” of “REPUBLICANOS . . . RAISED . . . THE FLAG OF THE <UNIÓN OF PUERTO RICO>” in Ponce. More Republicano defections followed. Unionistas also sought a boost from the growing organized-labor movement. In 1900, Santiago Iglesias’s Federación Libre had encompassed craft unions representing several thousand artisans in a handful of urban centers but few of the hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers who formed the bulk of island labor. Four years later, the Federación was building on enthusiasm generated by the visit of American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers to launch a campaign to organize rural workers. Exploiting Iglesias’s longstanding feud

with Republicanos and prior working relationship with Muñoz in New York, Unionistas won his support—he began writing a regular column in La Democracia—and that of

many of his followers.227

227 “Puerto Rico ante la Corte Suprema” (quotes 1-3 (“la administración actual republicana”; “Por desgracia”; “acaso se necesite que vengan los demócratas á hacernos justicia”)); “Ponce viene á ‘LA

Unionista gains among Republicanos and organized laborers left Degetau in a weakened party with fewer members sympathetic to his opposition to a Republicano- Republican alliance. When he nonetheless continued to seek re-nomination, La Democracia republished his campaign jeremiads against other Republicanos. In one, Degetau claimed that the Republican National Convention “put Puerto Rico . . . on the colonial basis” by giving Puerto Rico two votes like Hawai‘i and the Philippines rather than six votes like other U.S. territories. Even “Indian Territory,” Degetau asserted, which lacked the public schools, bridges, asylums, prisons, local courts, and half the

inhabitants—“including . . . Indians”—of Puerto Rico, received six votes. By nonetheless seeking to join the Republican Party, Degetau argued, Republicanos like his rival Mateo Fajardo acted in ways “diametrically opposed to the principles to which we Puerto Rican Republicanos have sworn loyalty.” U.S. Republicans also pursued national policies “contrary” to “our Puerto Rican program,” he charged, by declaring in their platform, in implicit support of a “continuation of the present state of economic and political affairs,” that “‘[w]e have organized the government of Porto Rico, and its people now enjoy

peace, freedom, order, and prosperity.’” Republicanos like Fajardo condoned such

UNIÓN,’” La Democracia, 1 Aug. 1904, 1 (quotes 4-5 (“”GRAN ASAMBLEA”; “REPUBLICANOS . . . LEVANTARON . . . LA BANDERA DE LA <UNIÓN DE PUERTO RICO>”)); “Asamblea para constituir la Unión de Puerto Rico,” Puerto Rico Herald, 5 Mar. 1904, 1317; “De cómo puede hacerse la unión,” Puerto Rico Herald, 9 Jan. 1904, 1191; “Candidato a Washington,” La Democracia, 25 Jun. 1904, 1; “La disciplina del Partido Republicano,” La Democracia, 13 Jul. 1904, 1; Miles Galvin, “The Early Development of the Organized Labor Movement in Puerto Rico,” Latin American Perspectives 3 (summer 1976): 24; Juan Carreras, Santiago Iglesias Pantín: su vida, su obra, su pensamiento (datos biográficos) (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial Club de la Prensa, 1965), 120-126; Carlos Sanabria, “Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor in Puerto Rico,” Centro Journal 17 (spring 2005): 149-152; Juan Ángel Silén, Apuntes para la historia del movimiento obrero puertorriqueño (San Juan, P.R.: Publicaciones Gaviota, Inc., 1978),

64-65; “Republicanos que ingresan en ‘la unión,’” La Democracia, 24 Aug. 1904, 6; Gonzalo F. Córdova,

Resident Commissioner Santiago Iglesias and His Times (Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de

Puerto Rico, 1993), 102-103; Pedro A. Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898-1932 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 184; Santiago Iglesias Pantín, Luchas emancipadoras (crónicas de Puerto Rico) vol. 1, 2d ed. (San Juan, P.R.: [Imprenta Venezuela] 1958 [1929]), 309-311; Gervasio L. García and A.G. Quintero Rivera, Desafío y solidaridad: breve historia del movimiento obrero puertorriqueño, 3d ed. (Río Piedras, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán, 1991 [1982]).

oppression, Degetau implied, by declaring “that ‘before governing ourselves we should prove that we know how to do it.’” The choice for Republicanos in nominating a Resident Commissioner, he concluded, was between himself “fighting for our citizenship” and Fajardo’s cynical embrace of U.S. Republican colonialism. Several weeks later, Republicanos elected Fajardo.228

Back in New York in the summer and fall of 1904, Domingo Collazo used his

connection to Gonzales v. Williams (1904) to propel himself into the pages of the New York Times, writing letters about the relationship between Puerto Rican status and mainland electoral politics. Contending that Puerto Ricans should be U.S. citizens and that Puerto Rico should be a traditional territory, he argued that a Democratic electoral victory was the best means to those ends. Gonzales v. Williams (1904) left islanders like amnesiacs “who have forgotten who they are,” he wrote, “[b]ecause, if they ceased to be Spanish citizens and have not been American[] citizens, what in the name of heaven have they been?” He told mainlanders that the ambiguity, was “arbitrary and flagrantly unjust” because “a Jamaican negro or an Italian from Calabria could reach the category of American citizens by means of naturalization” while Puerto Ricans who owe “actual allegiance to the very same flag” cannot. A new test case was not the answer, he added, for “unless . . . something extraordinary and unfor[]seen happens to enable the highest tribunal to settle the question,” the Supreme Court would let Puerto Rican citizenship

228 “Habla Degetau,” La Democracia, 24 Aug. 1904, 5 (quotes 1-4 (“colocó á Puerto Rico, Hawaii y las Filipinas on the colonial basis”; “Territorio indio”; “incluyendo . . . indios”; “diametralmente opuesto á los principios á que hemos jurado lealtad los Republicanos puertorriqueños”)); “Párrafos del Manifiesto del señor Degetau,” La Democracia, 2 Sep. 1904, 4 (quotes 5-10 (“contrario”; “nuestro programa puertorriqueño”; “Hemos organizado el gobierno de Puerto-Rico y sus habitantes ahora gozan de paz, libertad, orden y prosperidad”; “que ‘antes de gobernarnos debemos probar que sabemos hacerlo’”; “luchando por nuestra ciudadanía”)) (respectively citing as the source of the quotations the platform of the National Republican Party and Mateo Fajardo); “Candidatura republicana,” La Democracia, 19 Sep. 1904,

1; A. Navarrete to Federico Degetau, 30 Sep. 1904, CIHCAM 5/II/17; “Porto Rico Nominations,”

Washington Post, 11 Oct. 1904, 4.

status “continue[] to be in suspense.”229

Instead, Collazo suggested changing the status of Puerto Rico from one the courts had approved to one that faced legal objections. Currently, he wrote, Puerto Ricans were “legally ‘ruled’ as ‘colonies,’” which “invert[ed] the spirit of the American Constitution and inject[ed], by so doing, into the veins of the Republic the venom of autocratic laws.” Those with “inalienable American citizenship” lost rights in Puerto Rico, and U.S. national security suffered as “indignant natives” “deprived of . . . self-government” became a potential “source of vulnerability and weakness.” Collazo added that “Republican carpetbaggers” and their co-partisans claimed that were Puerto Rico to become an “integral part[] of the Union,” it would become constitutionally obliged to pay a proportional share of U.S. federal expenses that it could ill afford. But Collazo also believed that Congress could “waive [Puerto Rico] from the[se] duties.” Given that the United States had “imposed on Puerto Rico an exotic government . . . departing from the Constitution,” he wrote, it could also take the necessary steps “to bring the island a territorial government in consonance with the Constitution.” Like Unionistas and some Antillean revolutionaries in 1896, Collazo thus supported William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic candidate for President, predicting that Democratic victories would bring a law recognizing that Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens “since Jan. 1, 1899.”230

229 Collazo, “Nationality of Porto Ricans” (quotes 1-2, 6-7); Letter to Editor, D. Collazo, “Status of Island Colonies,” New York Times, 12 Aug. 1904, 6 (quotes 3-5); Letter to Editor, D. Collazo, “The Plight of Porto Rico,” New York Times, 24 Oct. 1904, 8. On support for Bryan among Antillean revolutionaries in

1896, see Bernardo Vega, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican

Community in New York, ed. César Andreu Iglesias, trans. Juan Flores (New York: Monthly Review Press:

1984 [1977]), 72-73. A search for earlier published letters by Collazo on the Proquest New York Times

database produced no hits.

230 Collazo, “Nationality of Porto Ricans” (quote 12); Collazo, “Status of Island Colonies” (quotes 1-9); D. Collazo, “Metropolitanas,” La Democracia, 17 Aug. 1908, 2 (quotes 10-11 (“imponerle á Puerto Rico un

gobierno exótico . . . saliéndose de la Constitución”; “llevar á la isla un gobierno territorial en consonancia

con ella”)); Collazo, “The Plight of Porto Rico.”

On November 8, Collazo’s and Degetau’s aspirations failed to materialize. Republican Theodore Roosevelt won reelection as U.S. President, Unionista Tulio Larrinaga became Resident Commissioner-elect, and Unionistas captured the House of Delegates.231

Though their case had ended and Degetau’s term would soon expire, he and Isabel

Gonzalez continued their activism around U.S. citizenship in December 1904 and early

On December 12, the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia denied the demand of Degetau’s client, Juan Rodríguez, to be registered by the navy-yard board. Degetau, his co-counsel Jean des Garennes, and Rodríguez appealed.232

A month later Degetau appeared as a lame-duck Resident Commissioner on the

floor of the House of Representatives, drawing on concepts of honor and natural law to advocate U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. As “loyal[] Americans,” he contended, Puerto Ricans “have won our American citizenship.” By declining to resist invasion in implicit exchange for the “long-loved American institutions” and by offering service and loyalty after being promised U.S. citizenship, Degetau argued, islanders had “lawfully contracted” a “permanent tie” to the United States. Though “Porto Rican officers” also sympathized with the U.S. cause, he added, they had “heard the voice of their military honor” and “remained loyal to the flag that they had sworn to support.” Drawing on his earlier writings, Degetau asserted that island soldiers served a U.S. master equally well, a

source of pride for Puerto Ricans “because we understand that we are American citizens.” But it would not be a source of “patriotic pride” “[i]f we were placed in an inferior civic

condition” he related. Islanders valued “the sacred[] . . .civic duty . . . of maintaining and

231 Fernando Bayrón Toro, Elecciones y partidos políticos de Puerto Rico (1809-1976) (Mayagüez, P.R.: Editorial Isla, Inc., 1977), 125-126.

232 “El señor Degetau,” La Democracia, 29 Nov. 1904, 2; Transcript of Record, Rodriguez, 8-10.

defending, with the other American citizens, the same ideal of justice articulated in the

Constitution.”233

Degetau joined des Garennes to submit a mid-February 1905 brief in Rodríguez’s case, reprising Coudert’s earlier arguments on the approach of courts to U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans. In Gonzales, Degetau had largely presumed that Puerto Ricans were either aliens or citizens. In this view, in his and des Garennes’s words, Gonzales decided “the negative aspect of the question of citizenship, to-wit, that of ‘alienage,’” in Degetau’s favor. But, the men now implicitly acknowledged, the Court could still accept Coudert’s 1903 argument that Puerto Ricans were U.S. non-citizen nationals. In response they reminded the court that Congress had made most federal statutes applicable in

Puerto Rico. Those statutes, they contended, included ones referring to U.S. citizens. In Gonzales, Degetau had inferred from this decision that Congress believed Puerto Ricans were not aliens. Now, he and des Garennes argued that because the statutes referred to U.S. citizens and “not . . . ‘nationals,’” the decision to apply them in Puerto Rico indicated a congressional belief that Puerto Ricans were not only U.S. nationals but also U.S. citizens. Noting that the Supreme Court had “declared that Porto Rico is a territory of the United States,” the men argued that Puerto Ricans were also U.S. citizens under a federal statute declaring “‘[a]ll persons born in the United States [with irrelevant

exceptions] . . . to be citizens of the United States.’”234

Reading the Foraker Act to naturalize Puerto Ricans as well, Degetau and des

233 Degetau, The Constitution and the Flag in Porto Rico. For Degetau’s earlier references to U.S. promises of U.S. citizenship, see Chapter 2 above, notes 27, 48, 70, 75-78, Chapter 3 above, notes 128, 134 and accompanying text.

234 Brief for Appellant, Rodriguez, CIHCAM 6/VI/33 (quotes) (citing as the source of the quotation

“Section 1992 of the Revised Statutes of the United States”); “The Legal Record,” Washington Post, 8 Feb.

1905, 9; “Porto Rican Eligible,” Washington Post, 8 Mar. 1905, 6.

Garennes reprised took a Coudert-like turn to international law, positioning that jurisprudence and not the Insular Cases as an interpretive guide. They cited international- law commentator Robert Phillimore and Supreme Court Justice and prominent constitutional-law commentator Thomas Cooley for the proposition that U.S. acquisition and incorporation of foreign territory transformed the people of such territory into U.S. citizens. They then indicated that the necessary incorporation was not that which Justice Edward White had found lacking in Downes v. Bidwell (1901). Rather they quoted an earlier High Court definition: “‘To incorporate means to form into a legal . . . body politic.’” Because the Foraker Act dictated “‘that the citizens of Porto Rico [and others] shall constitute a body politic’” shown to be within the United States by the federal requirement that its officers swear “‘to support the Constitution of the United States,’”

they reasoned, the Act made U.S. citizens of Puerto Ricans.235

Despite Degetau’s portrayals in Gonzales of Puerto Ricans as independent, militarily and legislatively experienced male citizens, he and des Garennes now deployed Coudert’s depiction of U.S. citizenship as widely distributed and relatively modest in its implications. Similar to Degetau’s 1899-1900 arguments, the men contended that the “middle ground” of being a “‘national[]’” but not a citizen “does not exist” under the

U.S. “constitutional organization.” Unlike France or Spain, they wrote, “[o]ur

constitution is not based on the principle of the sovereignty of the nation,” for it is “‘[w]e the people’” who “‘ordain and establish it.’” But universal citizenship did not mean universal rights, Degetau and des Garennes assured the Court, citing the “‘minors and married women’” who were citizens in the United States if not in France while insisting

235 Brief for Appellant, Rodriguez (quotes) (citing as the source of the quotation “Copeland v. Memphis A. R. co., 3 Woods, U.S., 651”) (quoting Foraker Act, Statutes at Large 31 (12 Apr. 1900): 79 (secs. 7, 16)) (italics altered in original); see above note 180.

“that political privileges are not essential to citizenship.”236

Degetau’s final status claims as Resident Commissioner proved unavailing. On March 4 Congress adjourned the 1903-1905 term, ending Degetau’s tenure as Resident Commissioner without making him a Delegate or Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens. Three days later the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia lifted a page from Gonzales and ruled for Rodríguez on non-citizenship grounds. President Roosevelt’s instructions that those demonstrating Puerto Rican citizenship “will not be required to show further evidence of citizenship,” it held, applied.237

Though she was still married and thus still a dependent, Isabel Gonzales, whose voice had been noticeably absent during the hearings and trials that had brought her and Degetau to the U.S. Supreme Court, now seized a public voice. Beginning in April 1905, she wrote to the New York Times that she did not view the Supreme Court ruling in her favor as a victory. “Gen. Miles went to Porto Rico to save us, and proclaimed to the wide winds his ‘liberating’ speech,” she wrote, but instead of U.S. citizenship Puerto Ricans got “the actual incongruous status—‘neither Americans nor foreigners,’ as it was vouchsafed by the United States Supreme Court apropos of my detention at Ellis Island for the crime of being an ‘alien.’” The romance between the United States and Puerto Rico in her tale implicitly ended in a rapto—a breach of promise—like that her brother

had described to immigration officials in 1902. Having deceived Puerto Ricans out of one

honorable status—Spanish citizenship—the United States was obliged to extend Puerto

236 Brief for Appellant, Rodriguez (citing as the source of quotes 2, 8 “Monsieur de Cogordan, in his book on French Nationality”) (citing as the source of quotes 6-7 Preamble, U.S. Const.).

237 “Porto Rican Eligible” (citing as the source of the quotation “Rule 5” “of the civil service” “commission”); “Congress at an End,” Washington Post, 5 Mar. 1905, 6; Congressional Record 38 (1904) [House Bills]:307; Congressional Record 39 (1904-1905) [House Bills]:87. On Degetau’s non-involvement

in partisan politics see, e.g.,, “General Comment,” The Porto Rico Review, 22 Aug. 1908, 1, available at

CIHCAM 8/L1.

Ricans a new honorable status—U.S. citizenship. But instead of meeting its obligation to Puerto Rico, the United States made the plight of the victim, Puerto Rico, into what Gonzalez now termed her “crime.” The island’s predicament became the basis of investigations into Gonzalez’s honor. In using this romantic metaphor to protest U.S. policies in Puerto Rico, Gonzalez did not seek a passive citizenship like that which Coudert described. Instead, she sought restoration of the “liberties and franchises” that constituted the active, male citizenship advocated by Degetau in her case. Her implicit

claim: harmed like a woman, Puerto Rico ought to be recompensed like a man.238

In its decision in the case of Gonzales v. Williams on January 4, 1904, the Supreme Court “decided,” Domingo Collazo complained, “that it had not decided anything.” Ruling that Puerto Ricans were not aliens for purposes of the immigration law at issue, the justices explicitly declined to clarify whether Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens. That narrow ruling let the Court avoid a hard choice: undercut U.S. imperial rule by equalizing the rights of peoples in new territories or reject what some saw as 14th Amendment insistence that all people born within U.S. jurisdiction and territorial sovereignty be U.S. citizens. Judicial vagueness, it appeared, would remain the doctrinal basis of choice for U.S. empire.239

The outcome in Gonzales helped shift Puerto Rican politics away from Degetau’s

heretofore popular approach to status matters. Island leaders in 1904 increasingly saw

238 Isabel Gonzales [sic], “What Porto Rico Demands,” New York Times, 20 Dec. 1905, 10; Isabel Gonzalez, “Sauce for Goose and Gander,” New York Times, 5 Aug. 1905, 6. Like Coudert, Gonzalez drew lessons from other colonial experiences, and like Degetau she complained that the United States treated civilized Puerto Ricans with less dignity than other empires treated their natives. Isabel Gonzalez, “Where England Shows Tact,” New York Times, 3 Sep. 1905, 6.

239 Collazo, “Nationality of Porto Ricans.”

legislation and not judicial rulings as the most promising means to liberalization of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico. When Republicanos split over whether to pursue such legislation from within or outside the U.S. Republican Party, Federales, with their commitment to

more confrontational approaches, saw an opening. Reorganizing as the Partido Unionista, they recruited organized workers and dissatisfied Republicanos under an inclusive platform seeking self-government through statehood, autonomy, or, in a likely first for a major island party, independence. The effort produced a Unionista coalition that would dominate island politics for two decades.

Unionista electoral victories brought the end of Degetau’s six-year-long, increasingly judicially oriented campaign to accrue and deploy expertise on U.S. law and institutions in pursuit of winning for Puerto Ricans the full benefits of membership in the U.S. Union as U.S. citizens, perhaps soon to be citizens of the U.S. state of Puerto Rico. By most measures the campaign failed. The United States had consolidated a colonial regime in Puerto Rico on Degetau’s watch. Neither Congress nor courts had recognized Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens. And statehood seemed less likely in 1905 than it had in

Yet, with Unionistas now in power and Degetau out of office, partly as a result of the strategies that he had pursued, Puerto Rico found itself lacking its most fervent advocate both of U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans and of legal action as a means to advance their ends.

Untethered from litigation and speaking in her own voice, Gonzalez wrote in

1905 that the evasion by the Court in her case marked Puerto Ricans as inferior to “full- fledged American citizens” and showed General Miles’s pledges on behalf of the United States to be “nothing but bitter mockery and waste paper.” Though she would reemerge

as a commentator on U.S.-Puerto Rican relations years later, it was her uncle, Domingo Collazo, whose activities soon after the Gonzales decision prefigured a growing role in the politics of Puerto Rican status. Having advocated Democratic partisan politics rather than test cases as the surest route forward for his island, Collazo, like the Unionistas, faced the challenge of articulating and pursuing a program to achieve their ends in the

face of ongoing U.S. Republican popularity and power.240

240 Gonzalez, “Sauce for Goose and Gander”; Gonzales [sic], “What Porto Rico Demands.”