President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well aware of the colonial nature of the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and made every effort to clarify that the Island is an integral part of the United States. He spoke of Puerto Rico’s importance in national defense and made plans to settle the territory’s political status in the future as well as expressing hopes for economic development.
In 1932, during the Great Depression, he spoke at the launch of a ship carrying food to the Island. “This is the Christmas Ship for Puerto Rico. It will not carry toys and games or Christmas trees; its cargo consists of food for the desperately needy children of our own American Island, which in these recent years has been visited time and again with disasters so severe that a less courageous people might have given up in despair,” he said. ” The heart of America has been repeatedly touched by the suffering of those far removed from us, but let us remember that Puerto Rico is in no sense foreign — the port to which this Christmas Food Ship will sail is within the boundaries of our own Nation.”
In 1934, speaking in San Juan, he admired the progress Puerto Rico had made and looked forward to better times ahead. He emphasized that the problems Puerto Rico was facing were the same kinds of problems people in the states were dealing with, and could be solved with the same measures. He spoke hopefully of increasing available jobs. The New York Times, in reporting the visit, suggested that Puerto Rico might be able to develop an industry based on rum production.
In a 1943 message to Congress, the president went beyond general expressions of kinship for some details. “When sovereignty over Puerto Rico was transferred from Spain to the United States in 1899, the Treaty of Paris did not settle the exact position of Puerto Rico in the orbit of American sovereignty. It left that for determination by the Congress of the United States. After a brief interval of military government, the Foraker Act in 1900 established a framework of colonial government,” he said, calling on Congress to approve local election of the Governor of Puerto Rico.” As to the future, it is not proposed that the political development of Puerto Rico be left to chance. On the contrary, it is recommended by the committee that a continuing Joint Advisory Council, under the chairmanship of the Secretary of the Interior, be appointed to conduct continuing economic and political studies of all the elements of the Puerto Rican situation and of American necessities, to guide us for the future. This Council must report at least once during the life of each Congress.”
The Council Roosevelt described does not exist at this time.
Roosevelt on colonialism
President Roosevelt also spoke about colonialism outside the context of Puerto Rico. In 1941, at an address at the Annual Dinner of White House Correspondents’ Association, he said, “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”
In the Atlantic Charter, an agreement between the United States, represented by Roosevelt, and the United Kingdom, represented by Winston Churchill, one of the major tenets was to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”
In private conversations, he was even more clear: “The colonial system means war,” he said to his son, who quoted him in a 1946 memoir. “Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.”
And yet, even though his remarks regarding Puerto Rico show that he was aware of the varying views about the future political status of the Island, Roosevelt never called for statehood or independence for Puerto Rico. He supported greater autonomy in the form of locally elected governors and a territorial government with authority over local laws, similar to a state, but did not choose to speak on its eventual position.
While Senator Millard Tydings (R-MD) claimed that his 1936 independence bill had “the support of the Administration,” the president was never mentioned among those members of administration who had worked on it or supported it. His comments on colonialism — apart from the 1943 acknowledgement that the U.S. and Puerto Rico has a colonial relationship — were made in the context of European colonialism.
We can’t speculate on what eventual outcome Roosevelt envisioned for Puerto Rico, but we know that he did not want to see “the political development of Puerto Rico be left to chance.” We also know that he considered Puerto Rico an important and integral part of the United States. He appointed the first Puerto Rico-born governor of the territory and sent a message to Congress asking them to allow Puerto Rico voters “to elect their own governor and to re-define the functions and powers of the Federal government and the government of Puerto Rico, respectively.”
If his call for a committee to study the questionable and report to every Congress had been carried out, Puerto Rico might be in a very different position today.
