Puerto Rico Become the 51st State

By : Mr. B. Pradeep
Date: 06-05-2015
Views : 1188
[Caguas, Puerto Rico]

Burn your outdated American flags; make room for the fifty-first star on the star-spangled banner.

For the first time in Puerto Rico’s more than hundred-year history as an American territory, on Election Day early last month, a slim majority voted in favor of U.S. statehood in a non-binding referendum that now goes to the U.S. Congress.

Puerto Ricans had been given a similar option three times before -- in 1967, 1993, and 1998 -- but with opposite results.

Why this apparent volte face?

Because of a weakening economy, a decreasing population, and because “the current relationship simply does not create the number of jobs that we need,” says Puerto Rican Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock.

As it stands, 58 percent of Puerto Ricans now live in the mainland United States. Puerto Rico’s four-million residents -- the 42 percent remaining on the island -- are American citizens but can’t vote in American elections. Such has been the status quo since 1917.

But all this could change if Puerto Rico becomes the fifty-first state of the Union.

Whatever the outcome, this historic moment deserves due attention. Instead, aside from a brief flurry of superficial analysis, the implications of Puerto Rico’s self-determinative vote have quickly been overshadowed by CIA sex scandals, speculation over who will make a presidential run in 2016, and looming fiscal cliffs.

We might easily blame American political ADD for such a short attention span. More uncomfortably, such an imperial absence of mind is also a garish reminder of how much Puerto Rico’s complicated, century-long, semi-colonial status has become an accepted part of the American subconscious.

Remnants of Empire

So how did Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status come about?

Put simply, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico became an American colonial dependency, but one piece of a new American empire, acquired in what historian Robert Osgood once provocatively described as “a fit of absentmindedness.”

Republican President William McKinley famously led the nation to war against the Spanish Empire in 1898, caught up in the jingoism that gripped the American public following the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in the Spanish-held harbor of Havana, Cuba.

Spanish defeat led to various American colonial acquisitions, among them de facto U.S. control of Cuba and de jure control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

The United States was left with a quandary. What was the United States to do with its newfound empire? Should the United States incorporate the new colonies within the American union as equals, as if they were American states? Or should the United States treat these non-contiguous territories differently, as subordinate colonies?

Fascinatingly, the future of American imperial policy rested upon how it first treated Puerto Rico.

The McKinley administration’s actions toward Puerto Rico in 1900 therefore laid the groundwork for subsequent ad hoc American imperial policies toward its other colonial acquisitions. As the pro-imperial American Economist described in 1900: “No question that has been before Congress during ... any recent session has caused greater interest among the leaders of both parties” than how the United States would deal with Puerto Rico.

McKinley had at first favored a liberal trade policy, to fiscally treat Puerto Rico “like Oklahoma and Alaska.” But the Republican administration quickly reversed this decision upon the realization that such a precedent would play out throughout the new colonies, including in Cuba and the Philippines.

A combination of economic and xenophobic fears over direct competition with Cuban sugar growers, “shrewd, cheap” Filipino labor, and a potential deluge of exports and Asian immigration to the United States curtailed this more liberal economic approach toward Puerto Rico. As a spokesman for the McKinley Administration put it: “He don’t want any legislation for Puerto Rico that will keep us from legislating for Manila.”

The McKinley administration therefore ignored various American and Puerto Rican calls for equal treatment and instead instituted a protective tariff policy upon Puerto Rican goods imported into the United States.

Impotent American anti-imperialists promptly condemned this decision to treat Puerto Rico “in a manner different from ... an organized Territory of the United States,” calling it “the entering wedge of ‘imperialism.’”

Puerto Rico and the Insular Cases

The U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent May 27, 1901 decision thereafter legalized the burgeoning American Empire.

The Supreme Court’s legal decision in Downes v. Bidwell (1901) became the first of the now-infamous Insular Cases. By allowing McKinley and Congress to implement protective tariffs upon Puerto Rican goods rather than granting them free access to the American market, the decision “decreed” that the Constitution “does not follow the flag.”

In The "Insular Cases" and the Emergence of American Empire, Bartholomew Sparrow has reminded us how the Supreme Court’s decisions had long-lasting ramifications for American imperialism. As late as 1922, in Balzac v. Porto Rico, the Supreme Court held that Puerto Ricans, while U.S. citizens, were not guaranteed the rights of the U.S. Constitution.