15 NOBODY KNOWS IN AMERICA, PUERTO RICO’S IN AMERICA

In 1936 a twenty-four-year-old Wenzell Brown made his way from New York to Ponce, Puerto Rico. Brown would later make a name for himself as an author of pulp fiction, writing such ageless classics as Teen-Age Mafia, Prison Girl, and The Murder Kick. But for the moment he was just a young schoolteacher in a strange, new place.

Brown didn’t speak a word of Spanish, nor did he know anything about the island. In fact, he couldn’t remember Puerto Rico being mentioned once during his years in high school and college. When he’d applied for his teaching post, he had confused Puerto Rico for Costa Rica and so believed that he was going abroad.

It was a quick education. Ponce was Pedro Albizu Campos’s hometown, and Brown saw Albizu’s Liberation Army march regularly through its streets. He was there for the Ponce Massacre, when, as he put it, “complete madness descended upon the place” and the police went “berserk,” shooting more than 150 civilians. He saw poverty, too. “One cannot look at the slums of any Puerto Rican town without feeling that there has been grievous neglect and an obligation unfulfilled,” Brown wrote.

Yet what struck him most was the bitterness. Brown recorded with alarm his students’ anger as he sought to teach them English. He noted how, years after the publication of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads’s letter (which had described physicians delighting in the “abuse and torture” of their patients), many Puerto Ricans still refused to enter governmental hospitals. They feared that mainland doctors were plotting to kill them.

Brown left the island in 1939 but returned in 1945 and found things no better. The war had brought military investment to Puerto Rico, but it had also brought soldiers, censorship, the threat of martial law, shipping shortages, and frequent unrest. Brown perceived an “intense, fanatical nationalism” in the air. The island was, he warned his fellow mainlanders, “dynamite on our doorstep.”

Wenzell Brown wasn’t the only one to recognize Puerto Rico’s incendiary potential. The celebrated journalist John Gunther gasped when he saw the island’s crowded slums. The sight offered a “paralyzing jolt to anyone who believes in American standards of progress and civilization,” he wrote. Life magazine ran an exposé of the “cesspool of Puerto Rico” in 1943 and concluded that the colony was an “unsolvable problem.”

**“El Fanguito,” a notorious slum in San Juan, 1941. Such slums, wrote the governor at the time, “would have revolted a Hottentot.”**

Technically, it was Washington’s unsolvable problem. Puerto Rican affairs were the remit of the colonial office Ernest Gruening had established, the Division of Territories and Island Possessions. But that agency was—as was typical of U.S. imperial endeavors—laughably small. Though responsible for virtually all the United States’ empire, it had a skeleton crew for a staff. In 1949 it had only ten employees above the level of secretary.

With Washington offering little direction, responsibility fell to the appointed governor in San Juan. Yet, though governors held a great deal of formal power—they could, for example, veto laws—they struggled to use it effectively. Most knew too little and left too quickly to master Puerto Rican politics. FDR’s administration alone saw seven governors come and go, not counting three interim appointments.

Under the appointed mainland officials served elected Puerto Rican ones, less powerful but much cannier about local affairs. Chief among these was Luis Muñoz Marín, the leader of the island’s dominant party, who towered over the political scene from the 1940s through the 1960s. John Gunther deemed him “the most important living Puerto Rican.”

Born just three days after the USS Maine exploded in Havana Bay in 1898, Muñoz Marín grew up in the shadow of U.S. rule. His father had been Puerto Rico’s nonvoting representative in Congress, so he’d been shuttled back and forth between the mainland and the island. As a young man, Muñoz Marín joined the bohemian demimonde of Greenwich Village and worked as a journalist, writing occasionally for The Nation under Ernest Gruening’s editorship. He spoke, one governor remembered, a “full, flexible, meaty English without indication of origin, except, perhaps, a trace of New Yorkese in expression”—Muñoz Marín joked that his English was better than his Spanish.

Yet for all his cultural ties to the mainland, Luis Muñoz Marín was a sharp critic of colonial rule. As a young man he had concluded, just as Pedro Albizu Campos had, that Puerto Rico needed independence. It was the only way the island could escape poverty.

One evening in the late 1920s, while dining at the Hotel Palace in San Juan, Muñoz Marín noticed Albizu sitting alone. Muñoz Marín invited Albizu to join him. The two had much in common. They were young, charismatic leaders who spoke English fluently and held law degrees from prestigious mainland universities (Georgetown for Muñoz Marín, Harvard for Albizu). As they talked, they found that their political visions matched. Still, Muñoz Marín noticed a difference in their motives. Whereas Albizu was obsessed with “getting rid of the Americans,” Muñoz Marín’s chief concern was “getting rid of hunger.”

Were those two goals the same? Given the hardships Puerto Rico faced because Washington controlled its trade, it was easy to suppose they were. Muñoz Marín met with Albizu often and told a newspaper in 1931 that he would vote for Albizu. But as the turbulent decade wore on, Muñoz Marín started to wonder if the relationship between colonialism and poverty wasn’t more complicated.

He had cause to rethink his commitment to independence in 1936, when two of Albizu’s followers assassinated the chief of police and Ernest Gruening drafted an independence bill in retaliation. The bill was a “weapon of imperial vengeance,” wrote Muñoz Marín, one that would subject Puerto Rico to a steep and immediate tariff. He saw, to his horror, that the island had become so dependent on sales to the mainland that any interruption of trade would trigger an economic collapse, destroying “all hope of life and civilization.” He felt “emotional confusion” at “wanting independence but not wanting economic upheaval.”

In 1938 he launched the Partido Popular Democrático, the party he would lead until the end of his career. It campaigned on a slogan of “Bread, Land, and Liberty,” though that last term, liberty, was kept ambiguous. It resonated with the widespread resentment of colonial rule in Puerto Rico, yet it was vague enough to encompass many possibilities. Muñoz Marín instructed PPD leaders to studiously avoid the status question. It was, he believed, a political trap.

That wasn’t a bad call. In 1940 Muñoz Marín’s party received 38 percent of the vote. In 1944 it won 65 percent, establishing itself as the island’s dominant party.

In 1946, the year the Philippines gained its liberty, Muñoz Marín came out publicly against independence and purged his party of members who favored it. The PPD would instead champion a middle solution—not independence, not statehood, but something in between. The hope was to gain autonomy for Puerto Rico without losing access to the U.S. market (“the biggest and most prosperous in the world,” Muñoz Marín noted).

It was the right time to push. In an age of rapid decolonization, when the Philippines got its independence, Guamanians got citizenship, and Alaska and Hawai‘i were on the road to statehood, Washington was ready to resolve the Puerto Rican conundrum. “Two million people cannot permanently be kept in the twilight zone of colonialism,” insisted the New Dealer Rexford Tugwell, then serving as this island’s governor.

Tugwell agreed with Muñoz Marín’s autonomy-plus-development vision, expecting that it would ease the palpable unrest among Puerto Ricans. State Department officials supported the plan, too, hoping that it would relieve the United States of the embarrassment of having to submit a yearly report to the United Nations on the “non-self-governing territory” of Puerto Rico—a report that gave Soviet diplomats an annual opportunity to mock the United States for its hypocrisy.

In 1946 the Truman administration appointed a Puerto Rican as governor, Muñoz Marín’s colleague Jesús T. Piñero. In 1948, Congress allowed Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor. Muñoz Marín won easily, and he would keep the position until 1964. Now, holding the highest political office in the colony, he could move Puerto Rico down the new political path. He could also address the island’s social issues.

He’d have to, in fact. In gaining local power, Muñoz Marín had also gained responsibility for local affairs. Poverty, resentment, political violence—these were his problems now.

Puerto Rico suffered from many maladies, but, in the near-unanimous view of mainlanders, they all stemmed from a single root. The island’s women, as one official put it, “kept shooting children like cannon balls at the rigid walls of their economy.” Mainlanders lamented the overcrowding on the small island, which by 1950 had nearly 650 inhabitants per square mile. Today, that’s not impressive—Bangladesh has nearly 3,000 inhabitants per square mile and the city-state of Singapore has close to 20,000. Yet at the time it was one of the highest population densities on the planet.

“If the United States were as crowded as Puerto Rico,” wrote the sociologist C. Wright Mills, “it would contain almost all the people of the world.”

Muñoz Marín shared this concern. He’d been talking publicly about overpopulation since the 1920s. As he’d put it then, the problem of hunger in Puerto Rico could be solved in two ways: more food or fewer mouths. Getting more food was a lifelong obsession of his, and he would superintend Puerto Rico’s gradual rise from poverty by promoting economic development. Yet he was also drawn to the second solution. Of the two approaches, he wrote, “I believe that reducing the population is the most important, the most practical, and the cheapest.” He identified as a “Malthusian,” meaning that he supported birth control.

Muñoz Marín wasn’t alone in this. Although the men who controlled Puerto Rico held a variety of opinions on the matter, a good many—including Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were troubled enough by the island’s growing population to deem birth control a necessity. The practice remained deeply controversial on the mainland, but it was, in Ernest Gruening’s judgment, Puerto Rico’s “only hope.”

Still, as Gruening well knew, in an overwhelmingly Catholic society this was a delicate matter. The church attacked Muñoz Marín frequently for his position—at one point, the local bishops declared voting for him to be a sin.

Birth control also stoked the ire of the nationalists, who had learned from the Rhoads affair to view doctors and diagnoses of “overpopulation” with deep suspicion. Albizu regarded Puerto Rico as underpopulated and saw birth control as an insidious attempt to “invade the very insides of nationality,” to carry the war against Puerto Rican freedom to the womb.

To avoid controversy, officials—both Puerto Rican and mainlander—soft-pedaled their support for family planning. Government-run clinics provided contraceptives but didn’t aggressively foist them onto their patients. Instead, officials fostered birth control quietly through a series of philanthropic initiatives, corporate partnerships, and university pilot projects, starting in the late thirties and gaining speed under Muñoz Marín’s governorship. Publicly, the government was agnostic about birth control. Privately, it encouraged doctors, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies to try their best.

That was all it took. The island was, in many ways, the perfect site to test new medical techniques. It was close to the mainland, with doctors and nurses who spoke English and were trained in U.S. methods. Whereas most states had laws outlawing contraception as well as aggressive “bluenose brigades” to enforce them, Puerto Rico had legal birth control and an obliging government. And, of course, Puerto Ricans had a history of serving as subjects for experimental medical research, from anemia to mustard gas. Their poverty and marginal position in U.S. society made them all-too-convenient fodder.

It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that Puerto Rico became the proving ground for one of the twentieth century’s most transformative inventions: the birth control pill.

Like many key figures in Puerto Rico’s history, Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the pill, was a Harvard man. In fact, while there he’d shared a mentor with Cornelius Rhoads: the geneticist William Castle. Castle had directed the Rockefeller Anemia Commission in Puerto Rico and had brought Rhoads to the island. He had also trained Pincus.

But Pincus, a Jew, had struggled to gain the official support Rhoads had always been able to count on. After some sensational research involving the in vitro fertilization of rabbits (headline: RABBIT WITHOUT PARENTS AMAZES MEN OF SCIENCE), Pincus found himself portrayed in the press as a Frankenstein. His bid for tenure at Harvard failed.

Pincus left Harvard and founded his own research center, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His concern about the world “population explosion” led him to propose a study of contraception. Might there be a pill or a shot that could reliably suppress ovulation? It was a fine question, but Pincus couldn’t get funding to answer it, either from pharmaceutical companies or from Planned Parenthood.

Pincus’s research would quite likely have gone nowhere had the activist Margaret Sanger (who founded Planned Parenthood and popularized the phrase birth control) and the heiress Katharine Dexter McCormick not intervened. Recognizing the value of his work, they gave him virtually limitless funding—privately—to research synthetic hormones.

Pincus first tested nearly two hundred compounds on animals. His colleague John Rock meanwhile administered hormone injections to “eighty frustrated, but valiantly adventuresome” infertile women in Massachusetts who were hoping to conceive (the hormones that inhibit ovulation could also, Rock believed, be used to strengthen the reproductive system). But Rock’s tests were burdensome, the side effects were serious, and the whole thing depended on the desperation of childless women.

McCormick was impatient for large-scale field trials. “How can we get a ‘cage’ of ovulating women to experiment with?” she asked Sanger.

The team considered tests in Jamaica, Japan, India, Mexico, and Hawai‘i. In 1954 Pincus visited Puerto Rico and was suitably impressed. Here was a place where they could undertake, as Pincus expressed it to McCormick, “certain experiments which would be very difficult in this country.”

The first experiment used medical students at the University of Puerto Rico. Despite having their grades held hostage to their participation in the study, nearly half dropped out—they left the university, were wary of the experiment, or found it too onerous. The researchers then tried female prisoners, but that plan fizzled too. In 1956 they began a large-scale clinical trial in a public housing project in Río Piedras.

The pill that Pincus’s team administered had a far higher dosage than the pill does today. Many women complained of dizziness, nausea, headaches, and stomach pains. The lead local researcher concluded that the pill caused “too many side reactions to be acceptable generally.” Pincus, however, was undaunted. He blamed the complaints on the “emotional super-activity of Puerto Rican women” and tried giving some the pill without warning them of its side effects—a clear violation of the principle of informed consent.

The next year, a team of researchers allied with Pincus began another large-scale trial of the pill in Puerto Rico. Yet again, the side effects were hard to ignore. One researcher noted that the women appeared to be suffering from cervical erosion (“whatever you call it, the cervix looks ‘angry’”), but the tests continued. Stopping them would mean delaying approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which the researchers were eager to get.

They got it. In 1960, basing its decision largely on the Puerto Rican trials, the FDA approved the birth control pill for commercial sale.

Nor was it just the pill. With a supportive government and a network of clinics, Puerto Rico became a laboratory for all sorts of experimental contraceptives: diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, spirals, loops, intrauterine devices, hormone shots, and an “aerosol vaginal foam” known as “Emko” distributed to tens of thousands of women. Searle, Youngs Rubber, Johnson & Johnson, Hoffman-La Roche, Eaton Labs, Lanteen Medical Laboratories, and Durex all sponsored research there in the forties and fifties.

Puerto Rico is central to the history of contraceptives. Yet contraceptives are not central to the history of Puerto Rico. By the late 1950s, the island had “one of the most extensive systems of birth control clinics in the world,” a study found. That same study, however, noted that Puerto Ricans had “a fairly low tolerance for modern contraceptive methods” and used them so irregularly, infrequently, and incorrectly that the effect on population growth was “minimal.”

Why did contraceptives fare so poorly in Puerto Rico despite the boundless zeal of birth control advocates? Surely, social stigma was part of the story. But another part was the aggressive promotion of a different form of birth control: female sterilization.

The practice began in Puerto Rican hospitals in the early 1940s, just as Luis Muñoz Marín was rising to power. It quietly spread, typically administered after the birth of a child. By 1949, a survey revealed that 18 percent of all hospital deliveries were followed by “la operación.”

No governmental program championed sterilization. The advocates were doctors themselves, both mainlanders and locals. Worried that Puerto Ricans lacked the education to use other methods of birth control, they steered their patients toward the surgical procedure. Sometimes, hospitals offered it free.

Did doctors go beyond mere steering? At times, yes. One hospital refused to admit women for their fourth delivery unless they agreed to be sterilized after. And most sterilizations were performed within hours of childbirth—hardly ideal conditions for informed consent.

Still, documented cases of outright compulsion are hard to find. And given Puerto Rico’s strict laws against abortion, taboos against contraception, and patriarchal culture, women had their own reasons to want the operation. “The only way to avoid having children was getting sterilized—free,” one remembered. “I just got my husband’s signature, went in and got operated on.”

Whether because doctors pushed or women pulled, female sterilization in Puerto Rico grew to staggering proportions. In 1965 a governmental survey found that more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers between the ages of twenty and forty-nine had been sterilized, at the median age of twenty-six. Of the mothers born in the latter part of the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized.

Such numbers, stunning on their own, become even more so in comparative context. This was a time when India’s rate—one of the world’s highest—was six sterilizations for every hundred married women. Puerto Rico had more women sterilized, by far, than anywhere else in the world.

Puerto Rico’s adventures in reproductive health happened out of view of the mainland. Life reported in depth on the field trials for the pill (“a brilliantly successful example of scientific insight and collaboration”) but mentioned their colonial location only glancingly.

Yet mainlanders were all too aware of another maneuver in the demography game. Cheap and regular aviation had made it possible for Puerto Ricans—who were, after all, U.S. citizens—to simply leave the island. A trip between San Juan and New York, which took days in the thirties, was by the fifties a matter of hours. And so, just as African Americans made their way in the mid-twentieth century out of the impoverished rural South toward Northern cities—the “Great Migration”—Puerto Ricans made a similar trip. Most landed in New York City.

The difference was that Puerto Ricans had a government prodding them along. In 1947 Muñoz Marín’s party created a migration bureau, a rare case of a state agency dedicated to getting people to leave an area. The government distributed millions of pamphlets to help people adjust to life on the mainland. Muñoz Marín’s colleagues set up a three-month training program for women seeking to enter mainland domestic service. They practiced talking in English, washing dishes, polishing silver, answering the phone, and doing laundry.

When economic forces carry sojourners from a poorer area to a richer one, the fortune seekers are usually men. But the Puerto Rican Great Migration was strikingly female—in the half decade after World War II it was 59 percent so. That was partly because foreign women had a harder time crossing U.S. borders, which left an opening for Puerto Rican women, often in domestic service. But it also owed to the encouragement of the island government, which was eager to see the departure of women of childbearing age.

Many did leave. In 1950 about one in seven Puerto Ricans lived not on the island, but on the mainland. By 1955, it was closer to one in four.

For Luis Muñoz Marín, this all hung together. Turning Puerto Rico from an “unsolvable problem” into a viable economy meant doing a lot of things at once: tamping down birthrates, ushering the surplus population off the island, and channeling profits from tariff-free trade into economic development. More food, fewer mouths.

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. 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,” 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,” 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”). 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,” 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.” 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, 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. 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. 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,” Albizu declared.

That hour struck on October 30, 1950, just days before voter registration. 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. 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, 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.

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. It rattled Truman, too, who brought it up when explaining why he chose not to run for reelection in 1952. That “shooting scrape,” 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.” It was, as one journalist put it, the “news of a day and quickly over, 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. He spoke at his trial of how Cornelius Rhoads had “tried to bring about a campaign of killing the Puerto Rican people.” Collazo was astounded that Rhoads had never been punished. It stuck in his mind for decades as a sign of the contempt in which Puerto Ricans were held.

“How little the American people know of Puerto Rico!” Collazo exclaimed in frustration during his trial. 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.” His police rounded up more than a thousand purported nationalists and tried them on various charges for violating the Gag Law. 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. 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, 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. 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, 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.

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.” The writer Irene Vilar called it a “no-nation,” a “somewhat shapeless” polity suspended uncomfortably between inclusion and independence. The arrangement “defies duplication and often even description,” 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, 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.”

For Luis Muñoz Marín, the problem had been solved. The new constitution had erased “all traces of colonialism,” 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.” 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.” 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. He did survive, as did the other four, but a colleague judged that he was never really the same.

To this day, the drawer in the mahogany table used by the Republican leadership has a jagged bullet hole in it.

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. 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. Albizu was carried out, gasping, “I am choked.”

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. 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,” 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,” 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.

Young Puerto Ricans didn’t actually commit many crimes in the postwar period. The evidence suggests that they misbehaved less than other New Yorkers. But as Puerto Ricans poured in from the island, the tabloid press trumpeted sensational tales of their malfeasance. Journalists who had had conspicuously little to say about the anticolonial uprising of 1950 were only too happy to sound off about Puerto Rican gangs, dope fiends, and switchblade artists.

The inflammatory reportage quickly made its way into the culture at large. Wenzell Brown, who by the 1950s had become a major pulp fiction writer, introduced his readers to the Puerto Rican underworld with such lurid novels as Monkey on My Back, The Big Rumble, and Run, Chico, Run. Puerto Rican teens featured in the films The Young Savages and Blackboard Jungle. The mute youth accused of murder in 12 Angry Men appeared Puerto Rican. And of course, a Puerto Rican gang—the Sharks—was at the center of one of the most successful musicals ever staged: West Side Story.

That musical, written by Arthur Laurents with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, premiered in 1957, three years after the House shooting. It was first conceived as a Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Jewish woman and a Catholic man (flying initially under the unappetizing title Gang Bang). But the creative team, seeking relevance, swapped out the Jews for Puerto Ricans.

Sondheim was nervous. “I can’t do this show,” he protested at first. “I’ve never even known a Puerto Rican.”

His lyrics bore that out. In one draft, the characters fantasize, like the farmers and cowmen of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, about statehood. “When we’re a state in America, then we migrate to America!” they sing excitedly in broken English. Of course, Puerto Ricans were already citizens with the right to move anywhere in the country they chose. And, the commonwealth constitution having just passed, statehood was a dim prospect.

Sondheim cut those verses but left in a portrait of island life, offered in the song “America,” that managed to capture nearly every stereotype about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was, in the song, an “ugly island” of “tropic diseases,” with “hurricanes blowing” and its “population growing.”

Before West Side Story premiered, the editors of La Prensa, a Puerto Rican paper in New York, called the show’s producers to object to the portrayal of Puerto Rico as disease-ridden. They threatened to picket if the song wasn’t altered. Sondheim conceded, later, that their complaint was justified. But he changed nothing.

“I wasn’t about to sacrifice a line that sets the tone for the whole lyric,” he sniffed.

West Side Story was phenomenally popular; it’s had some forty thousand productions since 1957. In 1961 the producers turned it into an equally popular film (with the controversial verse modified), which won ten Academy Awards, including for best picture. It quickly became, as it remains today, the first point of reference for mainlanders thinking about Puerto Rico. And yet, however sympathetically it portrayed young Puerto Ricans in New York, it offered little hint of the island’s place within the U.S. Empire or of the political tumult of the 1950s. Whatever ailed the Sharks, it wasn’t colonialism.

Oddly, this wasn’t the only time Stephen Sondheim would dodge Puerto Rican politics. His 1990 musical, Assassins, told the story of nine assassins or would-be assassins of U.S. presidents, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. But it didn’t include Oscar Collazo or Griselio Torresola. Because their motives were political, Sondheim explained, they were “less complex psychologically” than the other assassins. And so Sondheim ended up writing one Broadway musical about New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties and another about presidential assassins—without ever mentioning the New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties who tried to assassinate the president.

Still, he got one thing right. As Sondheim put it, indelibly, in West Side Story: “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”