It was a Faustian bargain, though. To secure Puerto Rico a comfortable berth within the U.S. economy, Muñoz Marín had to make peace with the United States. Whereas Albizu insisted on independence, Muñoz Marín sought a less overbearing form of colonialism. Whereas Albizu had used the Cornelius Rhoads affair to whip up nationalist sentiment, Muñoz Marín collaborated eagerly (though quietly) with mainland doctors in their field trials. His debate with Albizu in the thirties—“getting rid of the Americans” versus “getting rid of hunger”—had turned from a friendly dinner disagreement into a profound divergence in worldview.
Albizu and Muñoz Marín had gone their separate ways after that dinner. Muñoz Marín joined the government; Albizu, after the violence of the thirties and his conviction for conspiracy, spent more than a decade on the mainland in federal custody. For Muñoz Marín, Albizu’s long absence from Puerto Rico was a relief. Negotiating with Washington was a lot easier when the Liberation Army wasn’t drilling in the street.
Yet Albizu returned to the island in December 1947, and several thousand people greeted him at the dock.54 Forty cadets from the Liberation Army formed an honor guard around him.
Prison had done nothing to dull Albizu’s zeal. He regarded Muñoz Marín as a “puppet,”55 the “high priest of slavery,” for pulling Puerto Rico closer into the orbit of the mainland. He called for independence. If that couldn’t be won peacefully, he wanted “revolution.”
“We have to revert to the attitude of those people in the hills who have a machete handy to kill anyone who does not respect his wife or his son,”56 he told his followers.
Violent protection of the family loomed particularly large in Albizu’s thinking after his return. He saw contraceptives as an insidious imperial plot (“The United States tells us that we shouldn’t have been born”).57 Sterilization, in his view, was an assault on Puerto Rican women. “The surgeon who sterilizes our women should have his scalpel thrust into his throat,” he advised.
Luis Muñoz Marín was aghast. This sort of talk was “ten years behind the time,”58 he scolded, and quite likely to derail the anticipated political settlement. He urged the legislature to make it a felony to oppose the government by force, or even to suggest it. The bill, known as the Gag Law, provided for juryless trials and punishments of up to ten years in prison.
Newspaper editors protested. The American Civil Liberties Union complained that this went “far beyond” any legislation on the mainland and would “threaten the civil liberties of all Puerto Rican citizens.”59 But the law passed and went into effect six months after Albizu’s return and six months before Muñoz Marín took office as the colony’s first elected governor.
Thus began a delicate waiting game between the two leaders. The police held nationalists under obsessive surveillance,60 transcribing their speeches and following their movements. Yet Muñoz Marín, hoping to avoid incident, held off making arrests. Time was on his side. The more the economy developed and the more power devolved from mainlanders to locals, the less compelling revolutionary nationalism would seem. The growing migratory stream to New York undercut the cause of independence still further.61 Each Puerto Rican living there tied the island more tightly to the United States.
Albizu needed time, too. Revolutions don’t happen overnight. Winning popular support and rebuilding his organization would take months, if not years. Albizu started secretly stockpiling weapons. If he was going to war, he’d need an arsenal.
In 1950 Albizu concluded that the moment for action had come.62 His preparations were far from complete, but in July, at Muñoz Marín’s urging, Truman signed a law calling for a Puerto Rican constitutional convention to frame a new government. Voter registration for a referendum was scheduled for November. The portcullis was descending and, if Albizu wanted independence, he’d have to grab it soon, before Muñoz Marín won support for his proposal at the polls.
It was the “hour of immortality,”63 Albizu declared.
*
That hour struck on October 30, 1950, just days before voter registration.64 More than a hundred nationalists declared independence and staged attacks on seven towns and cities at once. They struck governmental buildings, hoisted flags, cut telephone lines, and destroyed records. In Jayuya, they set the police station and post office on fire. It took three days before police rousted them from the area.
At the same time, six nationalists drove up to the governor’s mansion in San Juan and started shooting. Machine-gun fire sprayed the front of the building, sending a bullet through the window of Muñoz Marín’s office, where he was taking a meeting.65 He hit the floor; his daughters cowered behind a bureau. The shoot-out lasted an hour before the police killed five of the would-be assassins and wounded the last.
It was an uprising. Under Muñoz Marín’s orders, the Puerto Rican National Guard and the insular police fought back with machine guns, bazookas, and tanks. The 295th Infantry of the National Guard flew planes over Jayuya and the rebel-held town of Utuado, strafing them from the air.
Nor, incredibly, was that the end. The next day, two nationalists in New York, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, made their way down to Washington, D.C. They were seeking Harry Truman, who was living not at the White House (it was being renovated), but at the nearby Blair House. They wore suits, and they carried guns.
Their idea was simple: shoot their way into Blair House, find Truman, and kill him. All in all, it wasn’t a terrible plan, especially in those days of laxer presidential protection. Collazo and Torresola came impressively close to carrying it out.
On the afternoon of November 1, the pair walked up to the Blair House entrance. Collazo was supposed to fire first, but his gun jammed at the crucial moment, which cost them the element of surprise. Still, they held their own, shooting a police officer and two Secret Service agents. Truman, napping inside, inadvisably poked his head out the window, only thirty-one feet above where Torresola was standing. It’s unclear if Torresola saw the president, but as two journalists who sorted through the ballistic details have noted, it was a close brush:
What is known,66 indisputably, is that a trained, determined assassin with extraordinary combat shooting skills and a known predilection for the highly accurate two-handed shooting stance stood with a gun he was loading, looking in the proper direction at the proper moment and unimpeded by any law enforcement agents. He had a clear shot at the window, and the president was either there or within seconds of getting there.
Albizu’s aborted revolution: The failed assassin Oscar Collazo outside Blair House, where Truman had been napping
Before Torresola could sight his target, though, a dying police officer, who himself had been shot multiple times, returned fire and struck Torresola in the head, killing him.
The very near assassination rattled the Secret Service, which drastically increased its security measures.67 It rattled Truman, too, who brought it up when explaining why he chose not to run for reelection in 1952. That “shooting scrape,”68 as he put it, “has caused us all so much worry and anguish.”
Yet the mainland public made surprisingly little of the “scrape.” A seven-city revolt in the United States’ largest colony that included an assassination attempt on its governor, that required suppression by airpower, and that nearly killed the U.S. president made brief headlines, but rarely were the dots connected. The New York Times shrugged it off as “one of those mad adventures that make no sense to outsiders.”69 It was, as one journalist put it, the “news of a day and quickly over,70 to be forgotten by the average American.”
Oscar Collazo, the surviving assassin, insisted to whoever would listen that this wasn’t a “mad adventure,” but a determined attempt to draw attention to Puerto Rico’s plight. He told how his family had lost its farm due to the restrictive sugar quota Washington had slapped on the island in the 1930s.71 He spoke at his trial of how Cornelius Rhoads had “tried to bring about a campaign of killing the Puerto Rican people.”72 Collazo was astounded that Rhoads had ne
ver been punished. It stuck in his mind for decades as a sign of the contempt in which Puerto Ricans were held.73
“How little the American people know of Puerto Rico!” Collazo exclaimed in frustration during his trial.74 He doubted if one in a hundred could place it on a map. “They don’t know Puerto Rico is a possession of the United States, even though it has been so for the last fifty-two years.”
*
Oscar Collazo received a death sentence (later commuted to life in prison). Back on the island, Luis Muñoz Marín assured the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover that he’d do everything in his power to eradicate the “lawless lunatics.”75 His police rounded up more than a thousand purported nationalists and tried them on various charges for violating the Gag Law.76 They arrested people for flying the Puerto Rican flag. They arrested lawyers who represented the nationalists. If a town mayor identified a rival as a nationalist, the police arrested him or her, too.
One arrest was important above all others, though: that of Pedro Albizu Campos. Police besieged his apartment, which also served as the Nationalist headquarters, and a two-hour gunfight commenced. One officer testified to seeing Albizu personally throw three bombs off the balcony.77 Doris Torresola, the sister of Griselio, the failed Blair House assassin, got shot in the throat, the bullet lodging in her left lung. The inside of the apartment “looked like a cheese grater” from all the bullet holes,78 one nationalist observed. Finally, police used tear gas to clear it and arrest Albizu.
None of this was pretty. Yet the 1950 uprising was, for Muñoz Marín, an unexpected boon. Free to arrest virtually anyone he wanted, he cleared the island of nationalist leaders during the all-important voter registration period.79 The violence allowed him to promulgate a clear story, which the mainland press reinforced. Reformers pursuing prosperity, like him, were rational. Nationalists, by contrast, were lunatics.
During the two-day registration period,80 more than 150,000 new voters registered—the largest registration bump in Puerto Rico’s history. The referendum that followed didn’t ask Puerto Ricans if they wanted statehood or independence. It just asked them if, within the confines of their existing colonial relationship to the mainland, they’d prefer a new constitution. By four to one, they voted that they would.
The new government was called, in English, a “commonwealth” and in Spanish a “free associated state.” The actual lines of authority didn’t change. Puerto Ricans still fell under the discretionary power of a government for which they could not vote (and Congress used that power immediately to strike a bill of economic rights from the proposed constitution). The difference, Muñoz Marín argued, was that now the relationship had been approved by the Puerto Rican electorate and was therefore consensual rather than coerced. This was enough to round Puerto Rico up to “self-governing” for the purposes of the United Nations.81
On July 25, 1952—the anniversary of the U.S. invasion in 1898—Luis Muñoz Marín was sworn in as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. He raised the Puerto Rican flag slowly up the pole until it reached the height of the Stars and Stripes.
It was hard to know what that flag meant. Was this liberation, or was it empire by another name? Despite having “free” and “state” in its Spanish-language name, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, the commonwealth was neither. Muñoz Marín, waxing entomological, boasted that it was a “butterfly of a new species.”82 The writer Irene Vilar called it a “no-nation,”83 a “somewhat shapeless” polity suspended uncomfortably between inclusion and independence. The arrangement “defies duplication and often even description,”84 exclaimed a baffled diplomat.
If the politics of Puerto Rico’s new status was ambiguous, the economics was clear. A loophole in the tax code exempted corporations from federal taxes if they were based primarily in the territories. It was one of the many legal anomalies resulting from the Insular Cases, which had denied the automatic extension of federal law to the unincorporated territories. Latching onto it, Muñoz Marín’s government turned Puerto Rico into a tax haven. Mainland corporations were enticed to move to the island with tax holidays, subsidies from the insular treasury, low-interest loans, and other aid. The island’s economy became more tightly linked than ever to that of the mainland.
By Muñoz Marín’s reckoning, it was worth it. Operation Bootstrap,85 as the campaign was called, drew hundreds of mainland firms to Puerto Rico. By the fifties, its economy was visibly shifting from agriculture to industry. Its gross national product shot up by more than two-thirds in that decade. At the same time, incomes rose, death rates fell, literacy increased, and manufacturing wages more than doubled.
Puerto Rico was still poorer than any state in the union and poorer than Mexico—hence the stream of migrants to the mainland—but it was doing better than nearly all its Caribbean neighbors. In 1954, Life, which had labeled the island an “unsolvable problem” just eleven years earlier, described it as “one of the few spots on the globe that all Americans can feel happy and hopeful about these days.”86
*
For Luis Muñoz Marín, the problem had been solved. The new constitution had erased “all traces of colonialism,”87 he insisted, and the economy was improving. Yet not everyone agreed. Muñoz Marín’s chief legal adviser, who had drafted that constitution, maintained that Puerto Rico was still a colony, subject to the “almost unrestricted whim of Congress.”88 Nationalists, too, believed that all Muñoz Marín had done was brush empire under the rug. The UN’s reclassification of Puerto Rico as self-governing, in their eyes, only further perpetuated the lie that Puerto Rico was now free.
On March 1, 1954, shortly after the UN’s decision, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington. They made their way to the upstairs gallery, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and shouted “¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” Then they pulled out pistols and fired twenty-nine rounds into the body politic below. It was, the Speaker of the House remembered, “the wildest scene in the entire history of Congress.”89 Splinters flew as the bullets sprayed over the chamber.
In all, five congressmen were shot. One, Alvin Bentley from Michigan, took a bullet in the chest and went gray. His doctor gave him a fifty-fifty chance of living.90 He did survive, as did the other four, but a colleague judged that he was never really the same.91
To this day, the drawer in the mahogany table used by the Republican leadership has a jagged bullet hole in it.92
Had Albizu ordered this? Lolita Lebrón, the chief shooter, took full responsibility. Albizu declared the shooting an act of “sublime heroism” and said no more.93 Yet Muñoz Marín had little doubt Albizu was behind it. Though he’d previously pardoned Albizu for political reasons, he revoked the pardon and sent police once more to the Nationalist headquarters in San Juan. As before, Albizu and his comrades fired on the police before tear gas filled the apartment.94 Albizu was carried out, gasping, “I am choked.”95
It was his third arrest, and it would put him in custody till the last months of his life. For Albizu, this was more than just incarceration. Starting with his second imprisonment, he and his supporters had become convinced that—in a horrifying recapitulation of all the medical experiments run on Puerto Ricans—the government was using cutting-edge technology to kill him. He complained to the warden of a “poisonous wave of electronic emanations” entering through his windows.96 He perceived “black rays,” “white emanations,” and “pestilent gases” being pumped into his cell, and he started wearing wet towels on his head to block out radiation.
“We live in the era of the scientific savage,”97 he reflected, “where all the wisdom of science, mathematics and physics are used for the purposes of assassination.”
*
Yet again, the mainland press treated the political violence as a freak event. Nationalism in Puerto Rico was “about as lunatic a movement as could exist in the world,”98 wrote The New York Times. Albizu and his followers were “fanatics” or “terrorists” in the press’s telling—kooks, easily dismissed
and quickly forgotten.
They have largely stayed forgotten. Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history. He’s not in comprehensive scholarly series such as the Oxford History of the United States or The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, and I haven’t found a single textbook used in mainland schools that mentions him. Even books designed to uncover suppressed histories, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, ignore Albizu. The most important academic venue in U.S. history, The Journal of American History, has never printed his name.
Of course, Puerto Ricans themselves—on and off the island—are fully aware of Albizu. In my home city of Chicago, there’s a public high school named after him (with an adjoining family learning center for teen parents named after Lolita Lebrón, the leader in the 1954 House shootings). There’s a K–8 school named for Albizu in Harlem: P.S. 161. Then there’s the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in the mass-produced suburb of Levittown, Puerto Rico (by the same builders as the more famous New York and Pennsylvania Levittowns).
In 2000, the massive Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York was dedicated to Albizu. Hundreds of thousands marched in it, including Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
*
Clinton and Giuliani marched in a parade for Albizu, but did they know who he was? Very likely not. The epic battle between Muñoz Marín and Albizu in the fifties transformed Puerto Rican society, but it barely registered elsewhere. If mainlanders think about Puerto Rican history in that period at all, the image that comes to their mind is an entirely different one: juvenile delinquency.
How to Hide an Empire Page 29