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Southern Political Science Association

Puerto Rico: A Case-Study of Change in an Underdeveloped AreaAuthor(s): Gordon K. LewisSource: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Nov., 1955), pp. 614-650Published by: Cambridge University Presson behalf of the Southern Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2126617.

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PUERTORICO: A CASE-STUDYOF CHANGEINAN UNDERDEVELOPEDAREAGopDONK. LEWISThe University of Puerto Rico

R. DOOLEY ONCE OBSERVEDthat no American ever heard ofPuerto Rico unless a friendgot a job down there. Today thatremark could not be repeated with any justice. In half-a-dozenways the island has become a laboratory in the development oftechnologically backward areas. Culturally, it has acclaimed itselfas a meeting-groundbetween the twin cultures of Latin America andthe American democracy. Politically, it has become an experimentin American constitutional development, a testing-ground of theAmericanclaim to be exempt from the laws of imperialism. For thehalf-century of its Americanoccupation its notoriety has been bornof melodramatic journalistic reports exploiting the "romanceof thetropics," exacerbated by the barrier of vast distance. With today'sNew York-San Juan airflight of six hours that barrier has beenlifted, while the Puerto Rican immigration into New York Harlemhas dramatized the island-problem for Americans. Few regions ofthe non-Communist world have witnessed so rapid a growth in sobrief a period. To live in Puerto Rican society for any length oftime is to feel the dynamics of a vast social-cultural change whichcan have been equalled in the earlier insular history only by thechanges brought about after 1493 by the Spanish conquistadoresasthey are described in the monumental Historia of the cleric FrayInigo Abbad.It is easy, of course, to exaggerate the significance of all this.For neither in governmentalregime nor in ethnic structure can Puer-to Rico claim to be unique. The culturalheritageof Spain is far moreevident in Mexico or Peru. The Spanish Council of the Indies re-garded the island, as the British view Singapore, as primarily afortress of empire rather than as a territory to be civilized, so thatthe Hispanic influence has been more a thing of language and socialcustom than of culture in any classical sense. Hence Mexico Cityis far more a representativeexchange-martof the two cultures thanis San Juan. A small society of only two million people, the islandis hardly of significance in its experience for the teeming masses of

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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 615Africa or Asia. There are no forces of religious fanaticism like theMoslem Brotherhood,no powerful student organizationscapable ofserious political rioting as in Cairo or Bagdad, no tradition of apolitically-minded army officer class as in the Latin-American re-publics. To urge, therefore, that the island may be reliably viewedas a microcosm of the development of backward areas is to misshow much of its composition is tool unique to be fully representa-tive. In his classic essay on Liberty and Despotism in SpanishAmerica, Cecil Jane has shown how much of the notorious insta-bility of Latin-American political life is traceable to an unresolvedconflict between a passion for liberty and a passion for order. Thatconflict, however, has rarely been central to the Puerto Rican ex-perience. On the whole, the Puerto Rican is a platient, even docileindividual. He rejects the appeal to violence; the Nationalist revoltof 1950 becomes for him an amusing episode in romantic revolutionand the Washington episode of 1954 a grotesqueoutrage. The issueof the political status of the island has never captured the imagina-tion of the Puerto Rican agricultural laborer. Puerto Rico is en-gaged in one of what Professor Knowles has termedthe silent socialrevolutions, but it is doubtful if much of the content of the revolu-tion has a universalimportance.Yet it is true to say that the recent advances of the PuertoRican community are at once exciting and significant. They sym-bolize in a tiny way the adjustment of America to other cultures.They symbolize, too, the impact of America upon other cultures.The average Puerto Rican is a proud American who looks to NewYork rather than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro as the PromisedLand. Even the insular intelligentsia, concentrated largely in theUniversity (itself, significantly enough, founded only under theAmericanregime), speak in terms of the traditional American liber-alism; and there is little, if anything, in the political philosophy ofthe insular political parties that is pre-American. Even the old So-cialist Party was for statehood within the Union. Much of theLatin-American educated mind thinks of the United States as analliance of technical genius and cultural illiteracy, but it is sugges-tive that that prejudice is found not so much in the Puerto Ricanintelligentsia as in the Spanish and Latin-American scholastic refu-gees who conceive of America in terms of Ortega y Gasset ratherthan of Santayana. Equally suggestively, there has been no effort,



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616 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17as in the case of the French in Canada or of the Boers in SouthAfrica, by the Puerto Ricans to insulate themselvesjealously againstthe dominant cultural influence of the occupying power. An Amer-ican can enter into the stream of native Puerto Rican life in a waydenied to the English Canadian in Montreal or the Englishman inMadras. Spain did little either to elevate the Puerto Rican massesin 1898 there was some 93 per cent illiteracy in the total popu-lation - or to bring the intelligentsia to her side. (The AutonomousCharter of 1897, finally yielding in part to the native liberal forceswhat they had been demanding since at least the Lares revolt of1868, came too late to do any real good.)On the other hand, and against all this, American occupationand control have left a very real colonial psychology in the PuertoRican people. There is a militant self-defensiveness,a resentmentof condescension, a proud assertion of puertorriquenismo. Thesetraits explain a number of phenomena: the search in politics for aconstitutional status which will yield the dignity of separate insularidentity as it also preserves the privileges of American citizenship,the effort to discover a special native "character"and personality,the emergence of a cultural nationalism seeking to preserve the"purity" of the home language against the vulgarities of Americanidiom. Accordingly, in educated Puerto Rico at least, there is anoticeable schizophrenia,al-though t is nothing like the tragic con-flict of loyalties Mr. Masters has portrayed in his pieces of Anglo-Indian fiction, where, after all, cultural and psychological pull be-tween East and West is far more deeply felt than that between theAmerican and Latin-American variations of a common Westerntradition. The sort of personal corruption described in Stevenson'sPolynesian stories is rare in the foreigner's ife in Puerto Rico. Thepull is there, nonetheless, and will become stronger as the processof industrializationleads to the further erosion of the older cultureforms. In this sense Puerto Rico, for all of its special conditions,becomes an example of what happens when new worlds are broughtin to redressthe balance of the old.

IThe year 1898 is the 1776 of Puerto Rican history. Despite thecomic-opera aspects of General Miles' insular campaign, the Amer-



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 617ican seizure marked the beginning of a new stage in Puerto Ricanlife. For some four centuries life had practically stood still; menstill had to travel around the island by boat because of a primitiveroad system. The dynamics of the American spirit were rapidlyfelt. That spirit, moreover, was directed toward Puerto Rico atthe height of the doctrineof Manifest Destiny in American ife: menlike Senator Beveridge saw in Puerto Rico and the Philippines thechance to apply the new sense of American nationalism; writerslike Josiah Strong and Admiral Mahan preached the divine missionof extending the "benefits" of "civilization" to conquered peo-ples.The subsequent material transformation n Puerto Rico has beenremarkable. The percentage of literacy of persons over ten hasincreased from 23 per cent in 1899 to 76 per cent in 1948. Duringthe same period, the number of public school pupils has increasedfrom 27,000 to more than 437,000. Imports from the Americanmarket have risen from a mere 12 million dollars' worth in 1898to some 192 millions in 1948. The transport system has improvedimmeasurably,especially with the construction of modern highwaysby the armed services. Industrialization has meant a serious reor-ganization of the insular economy; in this period the percentage ofthe island labor force engaged in domestic and personal servicesdeclined from 20.5 per cent to 9.8 per cent; those engaged in manu-facturing and mechanical industries increased from 8.4 per cent to23.7 per cent, both figures graphically illustrating the movementfrom a semi-feudal to a capitalist economy. Because public healthprograms have reduced to tiny proportionsonce widespreaddiseaseslike enteritis and malaria, the average life-expectancy of PuertoRicans has increased from 38.5 years in 1919 to 55.5 years in 1946.The transport revolution stemming from modem aerodynamics hasalso had a unique significance for Puerto Rico, since it has madepossible mass migration to the continent - an annual average ofnearly 40,000 emigrants since 1944 - with all that it implies: therapid acceptance of American values, the remittal of monies backhome, the erosion of habit which travel almost unconsciouslyeffects.Here is the last episode, as it were, in American colonization; thesight of continental airline ticket offices in remote little PuertoRican towns is an odd illustration of the impact of the outer worldupon the insular imagination. Granted the shortcoming of the



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618 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17American regime (the effort to supplant Spanish by English as thelanguage of school instruction was a pitiable miscalculation ofAmerican idealism), not even the champions of independence willdeny the vast benefits the regime has birought o the Puerto Ricanpeople. For the conditions of life in 1898 added up to a damningindictment of Spanish colonial enterprise. After four centuries ofrule the island at that time had no real banks, no effective circula-tion of money, only two or three roads, and a bare twenty kilo-metres of railroad tracks; and the total amount of money spent onpublic education, some 20,000 dollars, was just equal to, the per-sonal salary of the Spanish Governor.' That today the insularGovernmentspends some 35 per cent of its annual budget on edu-cation is only one fact underlining the quality of the transformationthat has taken place with the historic transferenceof sovereignty.It is not surprising that since 1898 there has been no demand byany native political party for a return to Spain. Madrid left herculture behind. But she did not leave behind, as did France inAlsace-Lorraine,a tradition of sentimental loyalty nor, as did Eng-land in India, a legacy of administrative efficiency upon which hersuccessors could build. From the first, consequently, Puerto Ricansembraced the American connection with an eagerness almost patheticin its earnestness.Some of this change, of course, has been the outcome of Amer-ican effort undertaken with American funds. Federal agenciesworked wonders during the New Deal period, and Mr. Tugwell'sTke Stricken Land is a monument to the memory of their work.One has only to talk with "old hands" who came soon after 1898to realize how much Puerto Rico owes to the numerous Americanswho, as teachers, judges, and administrators, and social-serviceworkers, did much to establish new standards of public welfare andservice. Since 1940, however, with the beginning of the PopularParty regime, the work has been increasingly sponsored and con-ducted by Puerto Ricans trained in that earlier period. Since 1940,too, the program of public policy, instead of being, as it had beenbefore that date, a series of makeshift arrangements leaving un-touched the basic problems, has become a complex of planned ef-

'Rafael Maria de Labra, Puerto Rico en 1885 (Madrid, 1885), p. 78.Quotedin Antonio S. Pedreira,El Aiio Terribledel 87 (San Juan: Bibliotecade AutoresPuertorriquenos, 948), pp. 30-31.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 619fort in a number of fields - emigration, education, agriculturalreform, public works, industrialization. An enormous enthusiasmhas characterized the undertaking. In the realm of public works,electric power facilities have been greatly expanded; with the LajasValley project, in particular, the old dream of great engineers likeAntonio Luchetti of bringing water and power to the semi-aridsouth coast of the island will soon become a reality. Separate gov-ernmental authorities have been set up for the developmentof sew-erage, transportation, and communications; within the last decade,much of the metropolitan road system of San Juan has been trans-formed. An ambitious slum-clearance and public-housing programhas begun to attack the evil slumdom of tropical shack-towns likeEl Fanguito; and to go through the immense San Jose housing de-velopment is to be made aware of what an active governmentcando to rectify the social damage created by the gouging landlordand the cheap jerry-builder. In the realm of larger social reformmany of the changes, as ex-GovernorTugwell's book makes evident,were borrowedfrom the armoryof the New Deal. A minimumwageboard and an insular labor relations board have been set up. A so-cial security scheme has been started: in the years between 1948and 1952, by means of pensions, the Commonwealth Governmentincreased its transfer payments, compensation payments, and in-surance benefit payments by some 75 per cent. New medical centershave been established; preventable diseases have declined, althoughmuch has yet to be done to ensure the Puerto Rican people, an ade-quate diet; electric power and drinking water have been carried tonumerous rural communities achievements, as the Ecuadoriandelegate to the UN General Assembly remarked in the debate of1953 on Puerto Rico, which many Latin American countries wouldbe happy to be able to boast about. In rural Puerto Rico, more-over, the Land Act of 1941 sought for the first time to alleviate theevils of excessive concentration of land ownership engendered bythe growth of latifundia in the sugar and coffee areas by the com-pulsory acquisition of land and its redistribution as proportional-benefit farms and owner-operatedfamily farms; so that whereasin 1940 some 51 corporations, mostly American, held one third ofthe best land, by 1947 some 36 per cent of that land had been re-



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620 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17distributed into smaller holdings.2 Nor has that redistributionmeant any neglect of the technical necessity of large-scale opera-tions in the sugar industry. Puerto Ricans, justifiably angered bya system of corporate absenteeism operated by New York and Bos-ton financiers who expected to be protected from public cross-examination by public officials and to be allowed to negotiate inthe back rooms of the banks,3 did not let their anger blind them tothe technical dangers inherent in small-scale ownership and opera-tion. In an economy still overwhelminglyagrarian, it is of interestto note the observation of an "old hand" of 1904 that perhaps themost significant change since 1900 has been the social elevation ofthe agricultural laborer. Finally, the industrialization program hassought at once to diversify an economy dangerously dependentupon a monocrop culture and to discover a solution to the grimimbalance of resources and population common to all under-devel-oped areas. Hence it has established 300 or more factories since1940 and a potential industrial employment of over 20,000 persons;its aim is to attain an average income of $2000 per family by 1960.The combined activities of the Popular administration since 1940have meant an increase of total national income some four timeslarger than that of 1940, and per capita net income has more thandoubled within the -same period. All in all, it is a remarkableachievement. Not the least index of its popularity is the fact thatnone of the rival political parties has attacked Governor MunozMarin on the essential outlines of his innovations. No one can readthe literature of the nineteen-thirtieson the Puerto Rican problemand compare it with the invigoratingclimate of ambition and hopeprevailing today without an acute awareness of the magnitude ofthe change that has been fashioned.Some features of this change present special interest. To beginwith, the high quality of the new governing class of administratorsthrown up by this little New Deal exhibits in a remarkablewaythe elements of the ideal public servant: competence, incorruptibil-ity, a readiness to embrace innovation, rapid adaptation to theunexpected, and a real enthusiasm for perfection. They combine2Teodoro Moscoso, Ciclo de Conferencias. Administracionde FomentoEconomico del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (San Juan, 1954),mimeo.'Puerto Rican Public Papers of R. G. Tugwell (San Juan: GovernmentofPuerto Rico Printing Division, 1945), pp. 337-338.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 621a healthy respect for American technical skill with a fierce passionfor Puerto Rico and an eager impatience to improve its livingstandards. In part, they are the outcome of the foresight of formerGovernor Tugwell and his associates in encouraging young PuertoRicans to go up to the best American universities; young leaderslike Ramon Colon Torres, Rafael Pico, and Teodoro Moscoso areall American graduates. They are, too, a surprisinglyyoung set ofmen; the average age of the seven state secretaries and thirty-sevenor so agency heads in the Government as a whole is forty-six.These men have the push, the sense of direction, the passion to getthings done which every civil-service machine must have if it is tobe a positive rather than a negative organization. Such is the casewhatever the field of their activity: the promotion of the touristindustry, adult education in the rural areas, experimental work inthe rum industry, a diversified agricultural program, the reorgani-zation of the insular marketing system, the creation de novo of anadequate statistical survey of national resources. Furthermore,theleaders have been helped by the peculiarities of the Puerto Ricanmachinery of government where the legislative branch has alwaysbeen a weak element with a membershipwhich tends, overwhelm-ingly, to be recruitedfrom local political "bosses," wealthy pa;trones,and labor leaders who know little of the sophisticated complexityof modern government. University graduates tend to move intoadministrationrather than into legislative politics. Most of the im-portant legislation emanates from the Office of the Governorandfrom the executive departments. The administrators have comefrom the outside rather than from legislative-political sources, withthe consequence that they are administrative technicians whoseauthority, backed by the immense prestige of the Governor,is suf-ficient to make them the main stars of the program. It is true thatlocal political influence is often powerful enough to enable a localmayor, for example, to influence the regional distribution of a newfactory. But that influence is offset by the fact that the Govern-ment party, like all the insular parties, is so highly centralized andeffectively disciplined that any serious revolt against its programis almost impossible. The fact that only recently, when a legisla-tive member of the party could be refused permission by the Gov-ernor to abstain from voting on a Government bill, he felt comr-pelled to resign his legislative seat is an interesting index of the



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622 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17un-American character of insular party organization. In the samefashion, the Governor controls a party with a heavy legislative ma-jority; of a total of ninety-six senators and representatives, thereare seventy Popular members. Accordingly, despite an intenselyactive political atmosphere, the Puerto Rican experiment has bieendominated by the planner to a degree that would be quite impos-sible in the American democracy. The system has obvious weak-nesses, of course; at the moment there is no apparent candidateto step into the Governor's shoes as a gifted master of the "greatgame of politics." Even so, it has been of enormous advantage forthe planners to have been able to work with a machinery of gov-ernment wherein a legislative-executive unity imposed by a coimmonand strong party membership has offset the crippling effects of theseparation of powers doctrine. It would not be too much to saythat no underdeveloped area undertaking any serious rehabilitationcould afford the dangerous uxuryof that doctrine.For the Popular program has been a planned program. In 1940,it would have been easy for a reform movement to have attendedmerely to surface social reforms or even to have exploited thepathetic sterility of anti-Americanprejudice. But from the beginningthe Popular leadership recognizedthat the necessary foundation ofany worthwhile change lay in the secret of enlarged productivity.Hence the Governor's dictum that "Justice can distribute, whatthere is, but it cannot distribute what has not been produced." Interms of machinery, it has meant the establishment olf agencies likethe Central Planning Board. In terms of purpose, it has meant aconscious emphasis upon the ideal of public service to the island-home. Puerto Rican nationalism has a peculiarly poetic qualitywhich seems capable of evoking quite extraordinary sacrifice ofprivate self. Whereas in Washington since the New Deal's declinethere has been a serious drift away frojmpublic service, the life ofthe public servant in San Juan is still attractive enough to, recruitthe best talent, even to the point of robbing the University of someof its teachers. In part, of course, other reasons are present: privateindustry cannot yet offer the financial rewards of government ap-pointment; and the latter, in turn, has a much higher social prestigethan that of the American public service. Furthermore life in SanJuan offers the emoluments of urban gentility, always at a highpremium in a changing "backward'" rea. In any case, the sense of



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 623public service is impressive. Consider, for instance, planners likeTeodoro Moscoso, who learned a social conscience in earlier work inthe Ponce Housing Authority, and the dynamic vigor of the WestIndian hurricane who is Antonio Colorado; figures like the youngDean Muinoz-Amatoof the College of Social Sciences and Chancel-lor Benitez of the University; above all, the figure of the Governorhimself. He has all of the ckarisma of personality capable of mov-ing the average Puerto Rican (who is Latin enough in psychologyto respond to the tradition of personalismoin politics) to an affec-tionate loyalty, and a democratic sense, acquired in a long conti-nental residence, capable of resisting the temptations of caudillismo.He aptly fits Bagehot's remark that "A constitutional statesmanmust sympathize in the ideas of the many." In the present climateof American politics, it is doubtful if a politician who was once asocialist and still retains deep sympathy for the social aspirationsoflabor (he could remind the American Federation of Labor conven-tion of 1954 that he started his piolitical career oiver thirty yearsbefore under the leadership of the old socialist Santiago Iglesias,the father of the Puerto Rican labor movement) could become astate governor; and that he has been a poet in his time would bean even more damning handicapi. It is furthermore doubtful thatan American state administrationcould undertake the bold programof ptlanning e has undertaken-and survive the ordeal.Certain cultural and psychological traits olf Puerto Rican char-acter concededly encourage public policies of such quasi-collectivistovertones. The native radical literature is full of a sad regret forthe passivity of the individual Puerto Rican, for the fact thatcolonialism has produced, in Geigel Polanco's phrase, a multitudedeep in ignorance rather than a people alerted to its rights.4 Thepassivity enables a central government to set up a large planningbureaucracy without the opposition which such a move would breedin American state politics. Again, the absence of any strong tradi-tion of local self-government,neglected both by Spain and America,encourages the localities to look to the insular capital for innova-tions. Finally, the opposition parties have been too much obsessedwith the sterile debate on political status to make themselves effec-tive critics of the Popular program. It is symptomatic that the

'Vicente Geigel Polanco, El Despertar de un Pueblo (San Juan: Bibliotecade Autores Puertorriqueiios 1942), p. 33.



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624 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17most critical battle on this score has been offered the Governmentby an American construction firm over differences concerning tax-exemption and building subsidies. Yet the final worth of the wholeprogram is the worth of the leadership that conceived it and carriedit through despite the opposition, at the beginning, of the banks,the press, the Chamber of Commerce, the sugar interests. If thefigure of Muinoz dominates the island's politics, it is not becausethe gubernatorial office is more akin to the Presidency than to astate governorship but because no other leader has yet emerged tomatch his stature. He has been the main architect of the changessince 1940. Just as the names of Luis Mun-ozRivera and Jose CelsoBarbosa are linked with the transition of Puerto Rico from Spanishto Americandependency, so will the name of Munoz be linked withthe transition of the island from a backwardagrariansociety to anagricultural-industrialsociety coming to terms with modern tech-nology.

IIYet the Populares have only started a revolution. They haveby no means completed it. The final impact of the forces they haveunleashed upon Puerto Rican morals and manners cannot yet befully foreseen. Machine technology engineers cultural change un-like any other factor, save perhaps war. It is not surprising,there-fore, that much of the contemporaryPuerto Rican debate should bepreoccupied with this cultural change and all that it implies. Justfifty years have passed since the most famous of all Puerto Rican

leaders wrote that the social problem is without doubit more im-portant than all other problems in Puerto Rico.5 The statementis even more pregnant with truth today as the changes wrought byAmericanizationand industrializationwork their will. Indeed, thisissue may well come to replace the older issues of status; for where-as the latter has been, historically, the darling of the intelligentsia,the issue of social change, by its very nature, goes deep into thedaily experienceof the ordinaryman. The report of his experiencewill reflect the influence more and more.To begin with, we must note the limits of the Popular achieve-ment. Despite the early social radicalism of the Popular leaders

'Luis Mufioz Rivera, Obras Completas (Madrid: Editorial Puerto Rico,1920), Vol. III, p. 82.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY 60 CHANGE 625their work, especially since 1946, has been essentially conservativein its fundamentals. Few will deny the boldness of a program in-cluding the purchase of corporationsugar lands, the dissolution ofcompany villages, the end of forecloisures,all of them reforms thataccount for the continued support the Government enjoys fromthe cane-workers. Yet the reforms have been nurtured within theframework of a social philosophy taking for granted the perpetua-tion of a welfare-capitalismalong American lines. The earlier pro-gram of governmental ownership and administration of industrialenterprises has been replaced by the current system of encourage-ment of private capital investment, ostensibly for reasons of man-agerial incapacity. Yet in the long run, such incapacity is only amatter of training; and the other reasons advanced certainly do notsound very persuasive.6 It is far morelikely that nationalizationwasabandonedin order to gain the "confidence"of continental investorssuspicious of anything smacking of socialism. Nationalization, infact, was never really given a properchange to prove itself. The gov-ernment-owned"proportional-profitfarms," especially in the sugarareas, have been run by a managerial class of mayordomoslackingany socially constructive idealogy, suspicious of worker-participa-tion in management, unexcited by technical experimentation. Theinsular culture-study undertaken by Dr. Julian Steward and hisassociates found that the social atmosphere of the farms was notreally different from that of the American-ownedsugar plantationson the south coast and that any new attitudes concerningworker-participation in management and policy-making were conspicuouslyabsent.7 In turn, the whole industrialization program has beenorientated towards a careful cultivation of mainland capital, with ajudicious tenderness for its prejudices. As described by Mr. Mos-coso, the promotional activities for enticing businessmen to the is-land, however necessary, reveal an almost desperate anxiety toassure them that Puerto Rico is a "respectable"economy; and thecontinuous entertainment of such a clientele in the luxuriousatmos-phere of the Caribe-Hiltonhotel is bound, for all of the social con-sciousness of the governmentleadership, to predisposethem to listen

8Moscoso,op. cit., III, 9-11.7RobertA. Mannersand Julian H. Steward,"The CulturalStudy of Con-temporarySocieties: Puerto Rico," The AmericanJournal of Sociology,LIX,No. 2 (September,1953), 123-130.



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626 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17more readily to the voice of foreign capital than to, that of nativelabor.8 The consequent conservatism of temper can bie seen in anumber of ways: first, in the failure to draw the insular labor forcesinto any sort of real participation in the economic and industrialprogram (to give them, in the Economic Development Administra-tion, for example, any adequate consultative or representationalfunction); second, in the move in public policy away from the veryreal effort of the early years to attack the social question to thesafer preoccupationsof constitution-makingalong orthodoxAmericanlines; third, in the shifting elements of the social composition ofthe Partido Popular Democratico... (If the Government has lostsome support from labor since 1946, it has gained new supportamong the commercial middle class, whose new wealth stems fromthe enormousfederal expenditures of the war period and who see inthe slogans of political independence a threat to the continuation ofthose expenditures and to their own economic welfare. During thedock strikes of 1954, there were not critics wanting who insistedthat the intervention of the Government was undertaken in the in-terests of American shipping companies quite capable of concedingthe wage-increases demanded by the maritime unions.)9 Finally,the conservative temper can be seen in the effort to adjust to themore conservative views reigning in Washington since 1952, forPuerto Rico is in many ways still governed by Congressional com-mittees the memberships of which are recruited on principles thathave nothing to do with either interest in or knowledg* of thePuerto Rican problem. To the degree, indeed, that the insularofficialdom is reluctant to sever the informal political relationshipswith Washington fashioned during the Tugwell governorship,therewill continue to be a psychological atmosphere in which very littlewill b edone that might displease the prejudices of the federal capi-tal. After all, dependence upon a dominant foreign power is notmerely a matter of formal po-liticalsubordination. It can be equallya matter of half-conscious adjustments to a balance of power whosesprings are secret and rarely publicly acknowledged. If Disraeli wasright to say that the key to India was in London, it is not altogetheruntrue to say, despite the enormous volume of sales-talk that has

8Moscoso, op. cit., V, 3-8.9El Mundo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), July 26, 1954.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 627come out of San Juan since 1952, that the key to Puerto Rico isstill in Washington.The Governmentparty has invested deeply in the industrializa-tion program. Yet it is no discredit to the courage and hop,ethathave gone into its launching to emphasize its essentially fragilecharacter. The industries already established have been basicallysecondary in type, with a heavy concentration upon the textile,cement, clothing, and assembly fields. The Government, perforcecompetinghere with the southern mainlandstates, has had to acceptwhat comes, with the result that the industries attracted have comefrom those already stabilized or indeed declining. Even more dan-gerous, these industries have come in response to long-range tax-exemptions and low wages in the insular task-force. Certainly thetax-exemptionscannot remainpermanently without serious injusticesemergingin the field of public finance; as for the low wages, clearlythey are dependent upon the readiness of labor to accept an inelas-tic level of reward. The debate over insular acceptance of thefederal minimum wage-law dramatizes the difficulties. It is evenopenly admitted that low wages, in combination with a large laborforce, constitute the most important factor in the appeal to themainland investor.10 Furthermore, it is admitted that the earlyproject of nationalization was given up, among other reasons, be-cause such enterprises, by paying higher wages than private con-cerns, would produce a dangerous increase in the insular wage-structure.11 So long as this view prevails, it will place a heavypremiumupon a docile working-class prepared to accept the growthof marginal ndustriespaying low wage-levels.All this, of course, is not to deny the very real increase in work-ing-class living standards since 1940. Rather, it is to, question thejustice of the emerging pattern of distribution of shares in thenational income between the various groups of the economy. Pro-portionately speaking, the larger share of the new wealth is goingto the new growing professional-managerialmiddle class, togetherwith the profits flowing to absentee ownershipstill in the sugar in-dustry. If unchecked, such a process might well produce in PuertoRico an industrial revolutionbased, as in Japan and India in recentdecades, upon low wage-standardsfor workers and the enrichment

'?Moscoso, op. cit., I, 11."Ibid., III, 9-10.



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628 THE JOURNALor POLITICS [Vol. 17of a small manufacturingclass. It is of note, here, that the tax-structure of the economy favors the upper-incomegroup. Despitethe fact that between 1940 and 1953 the insular net income rosefrom 228 million dollars to some 960 million dollars, taxes paid tothe insular Government and local municipalities remained at thelow figure of 13 per cent of that total, compared to a figure of 23per cent in the United States and 31 per cent in Great Britain.32Tax exemption is not a deserved concession to the capital investor.If he is an American, tax-exemption encourageshim to leave the so-cial costs of enterpriseto be looked after by the local government.Ifhe is a Puerto Rican, his notoriousconservatism n risk-enterpriseen-titles him to no privilege at all. The Maccoby and Fielder studyof local upper-income habits reveals that people in that categoryprefer the unproductive habits of expanding their own small busi-nesses or investing in land or real estate or encouragingthe wide-spread weakness of consumer-indebtedness, ather than engaging inmore adventuresome enterprise.13 So long as the regime can relyupon mainland capital and savings for continued investment, thisfailure to tap the home capital-saving resources may present nodangers. Yet it could have serious consequences in the event ofeconomic trouble on the mainland. There is much to be said for abolder government-investmentprogram,financed in part by a moreprogressive tax policy, to build up defense-mechanismsagainst suchcontingencies. But that awaits, in turn, a radicalismnot yet evidentin the officialdom.It is quite possible, indeed, that growing industrializationmayslowly transform the elements of the local political scene. By com-mencing that program, the Populares have given birth to a volumeof great expectations on the part of the masses which may wellbecome at some time a serious challenge to their leadership. A gen-eration ago, Munoz could start his new movementby a lengthy cam-paign among the poor of the rural highlands. Today, with mech-anization slowly depopulating the land and industry drawing theagregados to the expanding coastal cities, a new party, if it springsfrom anywhere, will almost certainly spring from the urban masses.And there is room, and need, for such a party. Puerto Rican

`Ibid., II, 12-13."3EleanorE. Maccoby and Frances Fielder, Saving among Upper-incomeFamiliesin Puerto Rico (San Juan: Universityof Puerto Rico Press, 1953),pp. 70-72.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 629dynasties like the Ferres, the Roigs, and the Serralles still dominatemuch of the insular economy. Despite the lyrical assertions of glibobservers like Mr. Stuart Chase to the effect that the Puerto Ricanexperiment is a "new dimension"of social effort between all islandgroups labor, capital, government it is, rather, an alliance ofgovernment and business with labor remaining a minor and weakthird element. To take only a single example, note the weakness oflabor representation in the insular legislature. The total member-ship of the bicameral body is ninety-six. Of those, thirty-two arelawyers, seventeen are farmers, twenty-eight are from the businessand professional classes, six are teachers, three are journalists, oneis a student, and one is a cab-driver. Of the eight trade-unionleaders, most are the type of small labor "boss" of a local or re-gional "machine." Clearly labor has far to go before it can speakwith its own genuine voice in the national counsels. It may not wishto raise that voice so long as the flow of economicbenefits continueswithout interruption. But once the flow declines, or once an aware-ness of social inequality is felt, the existing political parties willhave to satisfy new demands or, if they fail, see new rival move-ments emerge.Of the Populares, it must be said that although the leader'sper-sonal sympiathieswith the masses is unimpeachable, a long tenurein office has converted toio many of its top-ranking members intorather smug bureaucrats exercising a benevolent paternalism overthe people (the people, in turn, being regarded, as, for example, the"movies" of the San Juan Community Division project illustrate,as "good" and "simple" individuals to be guided into the paths ofcommunal democracy by their "educated" leaders). The attitude isalmost inescapable in an underdeveloped area, and especially in anarea where the Spanish tradition of personal authority in social andeconomic relationshipshas left its mark upon the communal psychol-ogy. Even so, ithereis a distinct feeling that the self-righteousnessof the Populares is becominga little unbearableand that too manyof them have become overly comfortable in authority. The Inde-pendentistas, on the other hand, are handicapped by a variegatedmembtershipwhich makes it difficult to fashion a programacceptableto all. As a party they rely chiefly upon the urban middle class,carrying effectively, first, in the large cities and, secondly, in high-land communitieslike San Sebastian, Cidra, and Quebridillas,where



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630 THE JOURNAL OF- POLITICS [Vol. 17small independent farm operators are still prevalent. The partyleadership,however, is composed too narrowly of profesores, aboga-dos, and doctores who, as a class, lean towards legalistic talk aboutstatus rather than to the social question. The Estadistas, of course,make statehood their central preoccupation. They are strong insocially conservative cities like Ponce; and that the island's leadingindustrialist, Luis Ferre, is an important leader indicates that theyare unlikely to embrace radical social change. Finally, the old So-cialist Party is now not much more than a remnant in mourningfor its lost leader, Santiago Iglesias. Unless any of these groupsmoves to the left, the Puerto Rican peasant and worker may wellconstruct a new movement within the next decade or so. For thereis a certain logic about industrialization in "backward"areas en-couraging that possibility. It sets loose, first, a powerful streamof new and impfatientconsumer-demand, ustained further,in PuertoRico, by the intimacy with the American capitalism. For despitethe fact that Puerto Ricans are, ethnically, a Caribbeanfolk, it isto Americanizationthat they passionately turn. It is only necessaryto read the startling figures of their recent consumption-expendi-tures, especially in fields like household goods, automobiles, medicalexpenses, and clothing, to realize the enormous magnitude of thoseconsumer expectations.14 In the second place, industrialization, byits concentration of rootless masses into urban centers, generatesconditions of incipient social and political explosion, conditionsmodified for Puerto Rico only by an unlimited entry into the state-side cities. Clearly, the main task of any Government n San Juanin the next generation will be to construct a solid foundation ofcapital productivity capable of holding up the superstructureof ris-ing consumer demands. To be so capable, it will have to be some-thing more than its present self, a local job-making technique dan-gerously dependent upon matters such as tax-exemption and largewage-differentials in favor of Puerto Rican investment that canonly be transitory weapons. The pattern of insular politics willundoubtedly develop around the answers provided to that problem.

It would be unfair, of course, not to recognize the very realJdilemma confronting the insular leadership on this issue. As Pro-"Gross Product of Puerto Rico, 1947-1953 (San Juan: Bureau of Eco-nomics and Statistics, Puerto Rico Planning Board, 1954), Table III, Con-sumption Expenditures.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY Oi CHANGE 631fessor Nurkse has shown in his Problems of Capital Formation inUnderdeveloped Countries, the primary requisite of successful in-dustrialization in underdeveloped areas is the presence of large-scale capital for ready investment. For Puerto Rico, naturally, thesearch for American capital has provided in its turn an assuranceof ready, even high, profits to the investor. That assurance, how-ever, severely limits the freedom of the regime to undertake a wel-fare policy founded, among other things, upon progressive taxation.To adopt a bold welfare policy, it is felt, would be to risk the with-drawal of foreign capital, and it is obvious that the Popular Gov-ernment has decided not to take that risk. The implications of thedecision are far-reaching; as one administratorhas implied, if thereis a choice finally to be made between a welfare policy and a devel-opment policy, the latter will prevail.'5 The end-result could benothing less than a new style of colonialism, less crude than theold, but a reality nonetheless; for it would mean that public policywould be shaped to meet the prejudices of mainland capital. So longas the American connection remains, and so long as the resourcesof insular capitalization are insufficient, there can be no, ready wayout of the dilemma. -Yet two general considerations may be emphasizedhere. First:programs like the Colombo Plan point to methods of technical aidand capital investment whereby the world's poorer countries mayreceive help from the richer ones in such a way that, public authori-ties being made responsible for administratioln, he influence of theprivate foreign capitalist may be somewhat curbed. Second: thePuerto Rican future in the long run will have to be related tol hernatural economic environment in the Caribbean-MiddleAmericanstates system as a whole, instead of being consideredwithin the ex-clusive frameworkof the Americancommercial system. In that way,less emphasis might be placed upon a forced industrializationwithits mercantilist overtones than upon the Puerto Rican contribution,as an economy, to the larger Caribbean and Latin-American area.Clearly enough, these are long-term considerations. The first de-p,endsin large part upon the readinessof the United States to lendher immense capital wealth to genuine international assistance pro-

1"Teodoro Moscoso, "Industrial Development in Puerto Rico," The Annalsof the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 285 (January, 1953),p. 67.



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632 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17grams. Here the outlook is not encouraging, for the original pur-poses of the Point Four programhave becomeabsorbedinto a globalmilitary-assistanceprogram: instead of being a democratic, people-to-people experiment in mutual aid, it has become overwhelmingly,as Indo-China, German rearmament,the American-Spanishaccord,and the artificial extension of the NATO system all show, a weaponemployed to sustain an American strategic imperialism.16 The sec-ond consideration, likewise, awaits the day when the organized re-habilitation of the Southern-Americanhemispheric economy takesplace within a frameworkof regional planning and in the real inter-ests of the Latin masses. That would mean, frankly, a socialistframework, for only in such a way could the continental economicchange escape remaining something controlled by absentee corpora-tions, army cliques, oil adventurers,and graspingpoliticos. In sucha framework,perhaps, resides the ultimate goal of the Puerto Ricaneconomy. It might seem utopian to anticipate the Industrial Revo-lution in Latin America. Yet the next half-century is sure to wit-ness that change, as much in the South American continent tomor-row as in the Asian continent today. It will be the task of PuertoRican statesmanship within the same period to think within thelarge termsof such things to come.

IIIThe impact of modernindustry upon rural communities,whetherit be aluminum in Canada or copper in Central Africa or factories

in Puerto Rico, raises fascinating problems. In Puerto Rico, ofcourse, that impact has been only a small part of the longer andlarger influence of the American culture dating back to 1898, sothat it becomes difficult to separate one from the other. Both haveworked, be it so, to subject the local parallelogramof custom andmanner and belief to stresses and strains noticeable at every turn.What Pedreira has termed the "tropical laissez-faire" of the insularsociety has been challenged by the galvanizing push, the socialdynamics, the passion for technology of the American competitivespirit. The political relationshipbetween the United States and the

16Thetransformationof the Point Four programafter 1952 is cataloguedin a seriesof articles by Paul P. Kennedy n The New YorkTimes, Sept. 24,25, and 26, 1953.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDYOF CHANGE 633island may be, as the Populares assert, one of compact betweenequals. Culturally, however, it has been and remains one of Amer-ican penetration: of the zealous imposition by the conquering powerof its own standards and of a Puerto Rican response at once recep-tive and hostile, eager to embrace the material consequencesof thechange, yet bitter and resentful about much of the moral-culturalupheaval worked inexorably by the advent of machine-technology.The changes have affected all aspects of life. Professor Hansen'svolume, Transformation,although impossibly adulatory in tone, isa good enough record of the impact of these changes, which go farto make the island a cross-cultural laboratory of no mean signifi-cance.In all directions a rich variety of evidence faces the culturalanthropologist. Developing mechanization in the sugar industryhas congregated landless farm-workers into the slums of Ponce,Arecibo, and San Juan. The social costs of such migration are in-calculable: it means slums, family dislocation (although crimes ofphysical assault, apart from those of sexual jealousy natural in asociety of male chauvinism, are very rare and when they occur are"front-page news"), and prostitution, the latter organized alongsocial class lines, the high-class girl modelling herself along con-ceivably American lines, her lower-class counterpart still retainingmuch of the colorful spontaneity of her rural proletarian back-ground. Yet the passion for the city is quite understandable. Forthe proletarian the country means poverty, the city a bright releasefrom its tyranny. If the consequent overurbanization s to be con-trolled, it will demand a planned policy of industrial location andagriculturalrehabilitation, the first runningcounter, be it noted, tothe preference of American managers and their families for theurban ambiente. For the insular working class, as for all classes,the national game is baseball. Their hero is a star player like Ru-ben Gomez; and the foreign visitors who excite them are not dig-nitaries like Mayor Wagner or ex-President Betancourt of Vene-zuela but Willie Mays on a winter tour with the team of the San-turce Cangrejeros. As agricultural workers, many work as fruit-pickers in the States and thereby reinforce their Americanpredilec-tions (I have met them as far west as Lansing, Michigan, so thatthe insular Governmentcan hardly succeed in persuading many ofthem to emigrate to uncivilized frontier sections in Costa Rica or



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634 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17Venezuela. Perry Como is as well-known to them as Bobby Capo.They see American "movies," although language difficulties heremake the exotically romantic Mexican and Spanish products theirmain fare. Many of them prefer to be "artful dodgers," loterry-tic-ket vendors, or individualist cab-drivers rather than to accept thediscipline of the factory-system. Hence Puerto Rico has few of askilled working-class with middle-class standards, but industrial ad-vance and technical education are certain to fill that gap,in time.Industrializationhas also produced a growing middle class, mostof them of moderate income and desperately eager to parade theirnew social aspirations. They model their lives on the standards oftheir American counterparts. They read the popular Americanmagazines, copy institutions like the Elks and Rotary clubs, buyautomobiles and television sets; and if they have not yet developedthe middle-browhabit of the book-of-the-month clubs, it is becausethey still retain an active fiesta tradition to consume their leisuretime. Their class-consciousness s markedly acute, for many of themhave left a lower social background they are eager to forget. Asmany of them, too, have gone through the University as a mechan-ism of social promotion, the utilitarian tone of that institution, de-spite much Latin rhetoric about educational idealism, is even morepronouncedthan in the Americancollege.Finally, Puerto Rico has an upper middle class of well-to-doelements, jealous of their cultura hispanica and not particularly re-ceptive to American penetration. Yet even in this class penetrationis noticeable. Their children attend the more socially exclusiveAmerican private schools. The social pages of El Mundo are fullof their activities. Their younger set constitute the membershipofthe university fraternities and sororities, although thosie are still farfrom the vulgar magnificenceof the American variety. Their cam-pus queen elections, for instance, are a dreadful disappointmentafter those of UCLA and Ohio State. It is even permissiblefor oneof their number to enter the Miss Universe contest of San Diego.If the old criollista racial pride survives, it survives in this context.It is not in their social circles so much as in those of Governmentpolitics that entry will be made for Negro leaders like Ramos An-tonini. Their spending habits have become somewhat "democra-tized"; a Puerto Rican wealthy man who in the last century wouldhave established a family library today is more likely to buy a base-ball team or, as with Cobian,a string of movie-theaters.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OC CHANGE 635It is true, of course, that in sexual mores the old modesty-pat-

tern of Latin-American life, itself the outcome of the subjection ofwomen in Hispanic society, holds out strongly against Americanliberalism. The careerwoman emergesbut slowly, and the bachelorgirl is practically unknown. Much of the nice ritual of an oldercourtship pattern remains. To attend a "movie" unescorted, todance with a man other than one's husband, to entertain an abstractidea - these still, for many Puerto Rican wives, are acts tantamountto marital infidelity. Even the habit of European travel seems todo little to break down the cult of pre-marital virginity inculcatedby a bleak Catholic puritanism; here, Puerto Ricans are almostEnglish in their ability to travel abroad without suffering the in-dignities of mental enlargement. Although divorce is now accept-able, the divorced woman still suffers such a real social penalty thatnot infrequently she moves to New York in search of a more toler-ant climate of opinion. Even so, the University is effectively co-educational; the mayor of San Juan is a famous feminine figure; thesocial custom of the chaperoneis in rapliddecline; and it is not un-known for a middle-class girl to engage in the outrageously radicalpractice of smoking in public.Specialist studies on these facets of Puerto Rican culture arenumerous, as the publications of the University Social Sciences Re-search Center make evident. It is more exciting, however, to getaway from the quaint prejudice of moral neutrality oin the part ofthe social scientists and to relate the data to the debate about theultimate implications of the acculturation process. The initial re-sponse of Puerto Ricans after 1898 was to welcome the Americanrcgime because it brought with it, so it was believed, a practicalsense of democracy that had been known only to a few informedpersons, and even then merely as abstract truths unrelated to dailyexperience.17 The result was a pathetically earnest pursuit ofAmericanization. Americanism for Puerto Ricans, it was urged,meant transplantingAmerican institutions to Puerto Rico and cul-tivating in Puerto Ricans the tradition of Washingtonand Lincoln,Marshall, and Lougfellow.'s But that urging invoked the literarytheory rather than the pungent reality of American civilization.

"Juan B. Soto, Causas y Consecuencias San Juan, 1922), p. 248."8Emiliodel Toro y Cuebas, Patria (San Juan: Biblioteca de AutoresPuertorriquefios, 950), pp. 133-134.



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636 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17Seeing the reality in practice, the later generation has begun toqualify the earlier enthusiasm. It has resented the American arro-gance towards the past, the drive towards assimilation so centralto the American dream. (It took nearly fifty years to abolish thecompulsory use of English as a teaching instrument in the localschools, but the result, on one side, is a distressing insufficiency inthe sophisticated use of Spanish and on the other, a deep psycho-logical resistance against English.) The present generation alsoresents an American life-style in which the gifts of organization,industry, perseverance, and technique flourish, but where, in deTocqueville's term, the love of the beautiful is sacrificed to the cul-tivation of the useful. By 1930, educated Puerto Ricans, men likeJose Padin and Antonio Pedreira, were beginning to question thiscultural imperialism, to seek a definition of Puerto Rican "char-acter" and "tradition," and ways of preserving them against com-plete erosion. More latterly, the debate has centered around theissue of "Westernization" versus puertorriquenismoand certainlywill become more wide-spread as industrialization sharpens the out-lines of change.Certain aspects of the controversymerit particularattention. Ithas been charged that the champions of the native culture areschizophrenic intellectuals seeking to evoke a local past that can-not be recovered, a past where the poor, although hungry, alwaysrespected their social betters.19 Undoubtedly, the charge is exag-gerated and might be a libel on the Puerto Rican intelligentsia as aclass.20 Yet such a tone of social reaction has certainly beenpresent in some form of the literature, particularly in Pedreira'sInsularismo, for instance, the most complete statement of the cul-*tural-nationalistposition. Starting off with an almost racialistthesis of insular history, Pedreiralaments the decline of the fermen-tacion patriotica under the American suzerainty. He does not denythe material achievements of the regime but insists that they havehelped to engineer the moral degradationof the native society. Inan almost Burkian phrase, he says that the proper dimension ofculture is one not of length or breadth, but of depth.21 By such a

"9Thomas ayes,El Mundo, December14, 1954.20AntonioJ. Colorado,El Imparcial (San Juan, Puerto Rico, December19, 1954)."Antonio S. Pedreira, Insularismo: Ensayos de InterpretacionPuertor-requetia (San Juan: Bibliotecade AutoresPuertorriquenios942), p. 99.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 637criterion,alien rule has sapped the sourcesof Puerto Rican collectiveaction. There are more schools and offices, but also more crimes,more suicides, more personal dishonesty. American influence hascentralized social life and destroyed, save in towns like Ponce, theolder tradition of local recreation. Under the fierce onslaught ofthe American tempo, the arts of dance and conversation decline.The springs of public service dry up; now the country has no figuresof public men to carry on the great tradition of the Puerto Ricanpatriots. Above all, the "sordid utilitarianism" of the Americanway has worked a pitiable intellectual vulgarization. Demnocracymeans the sovereignty of the mediocre man and the decline of theintelligentsia. It rewards the inept and punishes the wise. It evenvulgarizes politics; for to be a politician yesterday was a patrioticduty; today it is a mere profession. Yet all this, Pedreiraconcludes,is merely a historical moment of transition in the insular life. Thetask, in that moment, is to undertakea "reaffirmation" f the uniquevalues separatingPuerto Rico from the United States, even from therest of Latin America; for in the rich musical score of the Spanishtradition, Puerto Rico sustains her own special note.22The complaintholds much of real merit. Yet, in the last resort,it is a pathetic complaint, since it looks back to an imaginary pastand describes an unreal present. Pedreira is committing the mis-take, common to all Platonically conservative thought, of making apriori assumptions about democracy and of then seeking to forcethe facts into the straitjacket of the assumptions. He therebymistakes the degradation of the democratic dogma for the dogmaitself. For what has shaped Puerto Rico since 1898 is not the puredemocratic spirit but, quite a different thing, the capitalist demo-cratic spirit of America. The "sordid utilitarianism"he dislikes isnot the fruit of democracybut of the Americanacquisitive society.In reality, his is the protest of a cultured mind against the acquisi-tive ethic and, even more, against the social rule of the masses whichliberalism, as a creed, has always distrusted. In a suggestive sen-tence, he writes that if Ortega y Gasset had been a Puerto Rican, hewould have written Tke Revolt of the Masses twenty-five yearsearlier.23 The remark reveals how too many Puerto Rican mindshave been seduced by that too-famous book to embrace a socialtheory that converts any mass political movement into the road to

22Ibid., p. 200.""Ibid.,p. 104.



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638 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17the totalitarian society; nor is it clear how the adulation of thePuerto Rican "people" is to be reconciled with that attitude.Nor are the remedies P'edreiraoffers at all based upon a senseof the realities. Puerto Rican "reaffirmation" s to be a "reaffirma-tion" of traditional insular activities like dancing, horse-riding, act-ing, speaking the native forms of Splanish. Yet it would be difficultto identify any of them as an expression of the local "collective per-sonality," and some of them are of a leisure-class character notreadily available to the masses. Nor are too many of the phenomenaof the contemporary scene uniquely Puerto Rican. The nativedanzas are cultivated by the upper class only; native crafts havelargely been replaced by the mass-production sales of the new de-partment stores; and all the really popular songs and dances-the bolero, the mambo, the merengue- originate from the outerLatin-Americanworld. Moreover, it is difficult to see by what pre-cise methods these "native" phenomenaare to be protected againstchange and decay, especially when Pedreirahimself admits that thespirit of change is not so much the result of American rule as it isof the very nature of the whole twentieth century. Similar diffi-culties reside in the arguments of contemporary publicists, clearlyinfluenced by Pedreira, that Puerto Rico must reassert her own tra-dition against the spirit of occidentalismo exciusivista. One notesthe growth of an official effort to "protect" the "culture" of thenative farmer and peasant. One notes at the same time, however,a half-recognition of the utopianism of the effort, that mere lawcannot protect custom; a realizationalso that when practically everysmall community in the island-society contains a World War Twoveteran or people who have family contacts with New York, theworker-typeof the old picturesque tradition of the Patria Chica nolonger really exists; that the development of industrialization en-courages the depreciationof the countryside and of its social types;that "reaffirmation"in many ways is a reactionary affectation ofthe intelligentsia. Nor is that sort of cultivated nostalgia withoutits own dangers. When a local music critic is attacked because heneglects to note the work of native composers; or it is argued thatthe University press should publish a Puerto Rican novelist likeZeno Gandia because it has already published Dostoevski; or theclassical theory of higher education is underminedby insisting thatthe social function of the university is to reflect, as a creature of thestate, the "culture" of the Puerto Rican "people," one begins to



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1955 ] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 639wonder whether "reaffirmation,"despite all disavowal, might notbecome a narrowand antiquariancultural nationalism, and particu-larly when much of the argument is conducted by its championswith bad taste and ill-feeling against its opponents.24For it would be tragic if the dogma of "reaffirmation"were tolead into sterile pathways for Puerto Rico. Too much of thisdogma is the growth of -acolonial psychology. Too much of it isexpressed in vague and empty rhetoric. In a more general way, abook like Jose Coll Cuchi's Pensamientos, is a good example of thedefects of that style in Puerto Rican letters. Too much of the booktakes for granted the doubtful thesis of national personality. Hav-ing admitted this weakness, however, one may readily feel thejustice of mu.ch of the argument. Puerto Rican attributes havebeen built up in a colonial atmosphere,where the mass-mediahaveportrayed to the native population a culture which is not their own.Progress has been identified with metropolitan life, biackwardnesswith the native rural tradition; so that what Professor Frankel hastermed the "silent disease" of colonial mass-uprootednesshas beenallowed to take place without plan or purpose.25 The Americanignorance of and contempt for the Latin-Americanworld has beentaken over so uncritically by the Puerto Rican intellectual that itis utterly right to complain that so far the latter has not produceda first-class history of Puerto Rico.26 Because the Puerto Ricanchild has been taught Americanrather than local history, Americanleader-figuresare better known to him than the great men of hisown culture; yet culturally mature Puerto Ricans are justifiablyproud of their nineteenth century tradition in fields like poetry,music, science, and politics. Such a tragic depreciation oif thenative culture leads to a correspondingself-depreciation:n individ-uals. The pathology of Mr. Forster's A Passage to India destroystalent and intelligence that could have been placed to more cre-ative use. Bitterness, inferiority, chauvinism become the elementsof too many lives; the life of a gifted spirit like Albizu Campos isa tragic monument to these elements in Puerto Rico politics. The

24Antonio J. Colorado, "Puerto Rico y la Cultura Occidental," El Im-parcial, October 31, 1954; "La Autonomia Universitaria," El Imparcial, Janu-ary 23, 1955; also issues of January 4 and January 5, 1955; and MiguelMelendez Munoz, "La Cultura del Jibaro," El Imparcial, January 23, 1955.2"S. Herbert Frankel, The Economic Impact on Under-developed Societies(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 177.26Antonio J. Colorado, El Imparcial, October 31, 1954.



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1955] PUERTO Rico: A CASE STUDY OF CHANGE 641this trait, already evident in the acceptance of those Americantheories of education so deadly to the growth of genuine individu-ality. Furthermore, Puerto Ricans feel a contempt for manuallabor and a snobbish adulation of the "white-collar"job character-istic of all developing "backward" countries; an American socialethic in which manual labor is respectable only if it is part of ahobby will not discourage those prejudices. There is a public re-ligion of the machine, continually being reinforcedby the Americanworship of "know-how," with all its unsatisfying artistic results.Nor are these traits excusable by the argument that our "mass-society" makes such debased standards inevitable. Unfortunately,these standards are largely the outcome of the greed and bad tasteof our amusement executives who, as Mr. Seldes has shown in hisThe Great Audience,have used their ownershipof mass-communica-tions for the most vulgar of purposes.Nor can it be argued that a democraticgovernmentcan do noth-ing about this degradation of the democraticdogma. In his studyof Radio, Television and Society, Mr. Seipmann has revealed howmuch of the failure of government regulation in the United Stateshas been due, not to any inherent necessity of failure, but to theunwillingness of timid administratorsto challenge in any real waythe dismal standards set by the radio and television sponsors. Ourfashionable theories of "mass-society" fail to see that the habitsthey deplore are the result, not of democracy,but of capitalist de-mocracy. In "backward" areas, moreover, the power of govern-ment is not inhibited, as it is in the United States, by the socialrespectability of private enterprise engendered by the "folklore ofcapitalism." Government in Puerto Rico has at once a great re-sponsibility and a great opportunity in this field. It can do much,as the University already does much in its cultural activities, topresent the best of the Americanculture to its people. It can do it,moreover, by cultivating an already existing resistance on the partof the Puerto Rican psychology against a complete acceptanceof theethics of a business society. For it is of interest to note that intheir hero-worshipPuerto Ricans tend to acclaim an operatic starlike Graciela Rivera or an actor like Jose Ferrer or a musician likeSanroma rather than their business leaders. It is a healthy andcivilized preference. If Puerto Rican leadershipaccepts this respon-sibility, it may perhaps manage to give some concreteness to its



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642 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS [Vol. 17present claim that the island-society is a bridge between the twoseminal cultures of the American hemisphere.

IVFrom the very beginning the heart of the Puerto Rican politicaldebate has been the question of political status. Every issue of thenational experience has been bedevilled by its ramifications. Thepolitical parties have grown up, primarily, around its discussions.It has consumed energy and ability to the neglect of the more press-ing social and economic questions. It is true, of course, that thePopular party has announced the end of colonial status with thepassage of the 1952 Constitution; it is also true that the UnitedStates Governmenthas been able to obitainUnited Nations approvalfor the claim that, with the passage of that constitution, PuertoRico has been removed from the category of non-self-governingpeoples. Those interpretations, however, are challenged by bothopposition parties and by Puerto Rican patriotism. Like love, it

is too fierce a thing to be satisfied with the nice subtleties of legaldefinition. Even if the issue be dead, it refuses to lie down.To begin with, there can bie little doubt about the difficultiesthat go with the twin ideals of statehood and independence.Eitherwould mean economic sacrifices of no mean proportions. Inde-pendence would mean the lapse of the present massive federal ex-penditures in the island, the loss of federal excise taxes and ofgrants-in-aid to public works projects. That the federal govern-ment gives out to -Puerto Ricans some three times the total pay-ments disbursed by the insular Government in old age benefits,veterans' pensions, and civilian pensions is evidence of the largevolume of personal vested interests tied up with continued connec-tion with the metropolitan country.27 Even more important: with-drawal from the protection of the American tariff-market wouldtruly play havoc with the insular sugar industry, whose uneconomicproduction-costs are now insulated from the competitive challengeof Cuban and southern United States sugar by tariff pro,tection.Clearly, independence would require an economic policy of greatertechnical efficiency at home and a search for non-Americanmarketsabroad. Neither requirement would be impossible of attainment,

27TheNet Income of the Commonwealth f Puerto Rico (San Juan: TheEconomic Development Administration, March, 1953), Table 9.



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1955] PUERTORico: A CASE STUDYOiV- HANGE 643but there is little to show at the moment that either could bereached rapidly enough to offset the immediate disadvantages ofseparation from the mainland economy. Statehood would be a lessprecariousventure, but it would mean the loss of vital revenues aswell as a new heavy burden of federal income-tax payment forPuerto-Ricancitizens, both of which would seriously hamper the in-sular government in its spending policies.Added to these considerationsare others of an equally stubbornnature. There is the ineluctable fact that, concerning statehood,the federal Congress has never been ready at any time to bringthe island into the Union. The opinion of GovernorYager beforethe HoluseCommitteeon Insular Affairs in 1916 that Puerto Ricanswere a "tropical" people lacking the "stamina" and "initiative" toadjust to conditions of American life28 has always been a suffi-ciently widespread animus in Congressionaland public opinion todiscourage statehood sentiment. The dismal story of Hawaiian andAlaskan claims for statehood shows that unless a territory canmuster powerful pressure in Washington its ambitions will be de-stroyed on the rocks of Congressionalconservatism and economicvested interests; and Puerto Rican Harlem has a long way to gobefore it builds up, like the Irish and the Italians, before them, apowerful political "machine." Independence, on the other hand, isin many ways a charminganachronismof political idealism that hasfailed to accommodate itself to the conditions of the age. It pro-poses the ideal of sovereignty at a time when, in any real sense,sovereignty belongs only to the great powers. Formal independence,however ready Washingtonmight be to grant it, would be a spuriousand unreal thing. It would not diminish tlie Americanreal as distinctfrom formal power. The episodes of Guatemalaand British Guianaare proof enough that no small power, formally free or not, canconduct policies distasteful to the dominant power-forces of itsgeographic area. All in all, Independentista mentality works in anatmosphere of fantasy. It is ridiculous to speak of the San Juanregime as if it were the Trujillo regime in Santo Domingo or theSomoza regimein Nicaragua. It is equally ridiculousto talk in termsof American "oppression." No fair observerercould agree that thePuerto Rican moral climate has not improvedsince 1898; certainly,

28ACivil Government or Porto Rico, Hearings before the Committee onInsular Affairs, House of Representatives, 64th Cong., first sess. on HR 8501(Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1916), pp. 33-34.



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644 THE TOURNAL O POLITICS [Vol. 17there is little evidence in today's insular life of the general paraly-sis of spirit described by patriots like Hostos and Baldorioty ascharacteristic of the Spanish period.29 Nor can the Independentnostalgia for a free Spanish tradition go without some comment, forit is ironic that the libertarian ideology they embrace owes little toSpain and far more to the principles of 1789, as they were restatedby the Puerto Rican liberals of the nineteenth century like Belvisand Betances and Acosta. Yet, when all this has been said, thenostalgia has the power still to make the Independentistas thelargest opposition party. The task of its leadership is to try toaccommodate its ideal to the conditions of a new age. Until theyaccomplish that task, their ideal will remain, in ex-GovernorTug-well's phrase, a cruel and delusive one.What all this means is that Puerto Rico confronts a conditionand not a theory. Insular political leadership has tended eversince 1900 to overestimate Congressionalreadiness to innovate. Thehistory of Congressionalpolicy, on the contrary, has been one ofinertia implemented by the third-rate politicians American Presi-dents have tended to appoint as Puerto Rican Governors: the MontReilly governorshipunder the Harding regimewas perhaps only theworst of many. Congress from the start acted on the prejudicesofSenator Beveridge's remark that to give self-rule to Puerto Ricoand the Philippines would be like giving a typewriter to an Eskimoand telling him to publish one of the great dailies of the world.As a result of this prejudice, Congresstook some nineteen years togive Puerto Rico an elective Senate and some forty-nine years togive it an elective governorship. It is the special genius of GovernorMuinozMarin to have recognizedthe implicationsof the record. Ifthere is little Puerto Rican enthusiasm for independenceand littlefederal en

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