A closer look
The New Deal in Puerto Rico
How did the New Deal shape the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico in the 1930s?
Manuel R. Rodríguez, PhD, Curator, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Division of U.S. Political and Military History
Puerto Rico: A History of Colonialism in a U.S. Territory
On April 21, 1898, the United States declared war on Spain. This conflict, better known as the Spanish-American-Cuban War, is considered by many historians as an event that would define the role of the U.S. in the world during the twentieth century. Two months later, on July 25, 1898, General Nelson Miles arrived at the southern town of Guánica, Puerto Rico, commanding an invasion force whose mission was to end Spanish rule on the island. Before the invasion, General Miles sent a proclamation to the population of Puerto Rico. In this document, the American officer reinforced the notion that “this war was not one of devastation but one that will provide all, with the support of the military and naval forces, the advantages and prosperity of splendid civilization.” The military invasion of Puerto Rico did not last long. On August 13, 1898, the war ended. In its aftermath, the Treaty of Paris transferred the territorial possessions of Spain in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea to the United States.
This territorial transfer made Puerto Rico a de facto American colony without political representation on the mainland. During the first two years of the American occupation, the island was under military rule. The Foraker Act (1900) established the parameters of a civilian government whose legislative chamber was elected by Puerto Ricans, but its executive council and governor were appointed by the president of the United States. In 1901, the Supreme Court of the United States debated in the Insular Cases whether the constitution applied to its newly acquired territories. The court’s decision relegated Puerto Rico to the obscure category of a non-incorporated territory, where the island belongs to but is not part of the United States. As a result, the rights and protections of the U.S. Constitution only partially applied to Puerto Rico. Despite this political ambiguity, Congress approved the Jones Act (1917), extending U.S. citizenship to all Puerto Ricans. Together, these legislative and legal decisions made in Washington during the first two decades of the twentieth century firmly established a colonial rule over Puerto Rico that lasts to the present day. Such a situation sharply contrasts the prosperity promised by General Nelson Miles just a few years earlier.
The arrival of the United States in Puerto Rico in 1898 profoundly transformed local politics and the island’s economy. Some local political organizations advocated parting ways with the United States and becoming an independent country. Working-class Puerto Ricans saw the annexation to the United States as an opportunity to expand their rights. Local business interests envisioned statehood as an opportunity to prosper within a system that protected and encouraged capitalism. From 1898 to 1929, Puerto Rico experienced some improvements in the fields of education, health, and infrastructure. However, almost three decades of U.S. domination had shifted the economic landscape of the island away from subsistence farming to export crop production. By 1930, sugar production constituted the main economic revenue, followed by coffee and tobacco farming, the garment industry, and small fruit cultivation. A majority of the island's population of over 1.5 million people worked for low wages in the agricultural sector and faced widespread poverty as Puerto Rico became a one-crop economy based on sugar.
When the Great Depression descended on the United States in 1929, Puerto Rico was still under this colonial political arrangement. The island’s economy was in shambles, and most of the population was living in conditions of extreme poverty. Amid these difficult conditions, the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented the New Deal programs as a government initiative to cope with the harmful effects of the Depression in the United States. Most of the New Deal programs implemented in the continental United States were extended to Puerto Rico during the early years of the Depression to alleviate its equally damaging impact on the island. But this extension also constituted an attempt to shape a new colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, based on the development of government programs to improve economic and social conditions on the island.
The Arrival of the Depression and the New Deal in Puerto Rico
The Great Depression worsened the material conditions of thousands of Puerto Ricans. For sugar workers, wages fell from 90 cents per day to 50–60 cents per day in 1931–1932, and the cost of living rose one third above the average. The arrival of federal funding through the New Deal registered a modest increase on the average income, but it was a far cry from the prospect of a healthy and sustainable economy.
In August 1933, the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) established the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA) to carry out the U.S. government’s relief programs in Puerto Rico. The PRERA created a broad range of social programs to address emergency rations, health, education, and housing, and employed hundreds of Puerto Ricans. Through the establishment of new divisions of personnel, engineering, agriculture, education, social services, and research and statistics, a new bureaucracy and governing system emerged in Puerto Rico. This administrative networking under the guidance of American New Dealers and Puerto Ricans from the local government established the footprint of a governance structure that went beyond the rigid parameters of traditional colonial rule.
The PRERA as well as other New Deal programs were received with enthusiasm by a significant number of Puerto Ricans while other sectors complained about their bureaucratic procedures in letters to the president and first lady. The Liberal Party and its leader, Luis Muñoz Marín, with the support of the American PRERA administrators, considered this New Deal agency an opportunity to provide economic development and prosperity to Puerto Rico within the limits of colonial rule. Other local political organizations, such as the governing Coalition Party—a political pro-statehood alliance that encompassed the Republican Party pro-business sector—and the working-class-based Socialist Party were against the New Deal policies. The Coalition, specifically its Republican members, saw the New Deal as a threat to their business interests and accused the Liberals of establishing a parallel government to the elected one with the help of the American New Deal administrators. The political tensions caused by this controversy and the lack of federal funding undermined the support initiatives of the PRERA in Puerto Rico and eventually led to its dismissal in 1936.
Despite its short existence, the PRERA was able to establish an institutional footprint in Puerto Rico. The Education Division was responsible for the establishment of almost fifty nurseries to provide daycare for children across the island. It also played an instrumental role in improving adult literacy and establishing industrial schooling programs for adults. The Agricultural Division sponsored rural economic development focusing on establishing local house gardens and communal farms, and providing technical support to local farmers. Urban development programs funded the construction of sanitary systems, housing projects, and slum clearance. The Art Division backed programs that supported Puerto Rican native theater, painting, drawing, and music. Health programs were extended to some municipalities in the island, contributing to the establishment of new hospitals, providing nursing care, medical personnel, maternity wards, dental facilities, and operating rooms.
These PRERA programs inspired future initiatives oriented to the economic and social development of Puerto Rico. Two of those initiatives were the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA), a local relief and economic development agency modeled after the PRERA of the mid-1930s, and the social and economic platforms enacted by the Popular Democratic Party in the 1940s.
The New Deal in the Tropics: The PRERA as an Attempt to Bring Progress to Puerto Rico
Regardless of the PRERA’s collapse, Puerto Rican and American administrators saw this federal agency as an opportunity to redesign the island’s economy and material conditions. In a visit to Puerto Rico in the early 1930s New Dealer and future governor of Puerto Rico Rexford Tugwell described the New Deal as a “lesson of the tropics . . . a more abundant life,” based on a fair distribution of wealth. James Bourne, administrator of the PRERA, joined Tugwell’s assessment, arguing that in response to the island’s deplorable conditions, his agency was looking for immediate solutions. For these American officials the economic stabilization of the island was oriented to protect and even expand American business interests while also conducting a civilizational project able to bring the promises of progress and prosperity. Puerto Rican administrators of the PRERA often joined their American colleagues to present to the public an assessment of how this agency would solve the problems of unemployment, provide nutritional assistance, promote public works programs, and improve agricultural production on the island. As Justo Rivera, deputy director of the agency, pointed out, the PRERA proposed “a renovation of our lives as a country not only throughout the distribution of emergency aid but in providing the means to the unemployed to earn their own living.”
American and Puerto Rican administrators of the PRERA envisioned the agency as a development project that would improve the miserable living conditions of thousands of Puerto Ricans. Doing so, they also contributed to easing the harsh face of colonialism, intending to transform the American presence on the island from that of a distant colonial power to a governmental institution committed to the eradication of poverty in Puerto Rico. Despite its elimination in 1936, the PRERA established an important precedent that transformed the political relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico for the next four decades. It firmly established that any economic and social changes would not succeed based on crude colonial domination but rather required a consensus between American New Dealers and the political and intellectual sectors of Puerto Rican society. Such processes transformed the nature of the colonial government established in 1898 and set the foundations for a new political relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico during the second half of the twentieth century.
Reflection Questions
What impact did the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico in 1898 have on the island’s economy and politics?
What were the economic conditions of Puerto Rico at the beginning of the 1930s?
How did Puerto Ricans view the PRERA?
How did the PRERA help to transform the political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States?
Additional Reading:
James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Thomas Matthews, Puerto Rican Politics and the New Deal (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960).
Manuel R. Rodríguez, A New Deal for the Tropics: Puerto Rico During the Depression Era, 1933–1935 (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2010).
Rexford Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (New York: Doubleday, 1947).