President Taft and the Puerto Rican Appropriation Crisis of 1909

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Truman R. Clark

William Howard Taft was a central participant at the birth of American imperialism. He won praises for his work with the Philippine Islands, first as head of the commission created to restore the Islands to a peaceful state, then as the first civil governor. He gave up this office to become Secretary of War under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. In his position in the Cabinet Taft had direct or indirect oversight over most of America's scattered empire.By March, 1909, when Taft succeeded Roosevelt in the Presidency, the constitution of the American empire had largely been formulated, even if strictly speaking, it had not been formalized. Civil governments had been set up in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands. The “insular cases” of 1901 had defined the limits of claims of the dependent peoples upon the Constitution of the United States; the new possessions were neither foreign nor domestic, and thus even though the Constitution did not follow the flag, tariffs might. The only armed resistance to American control—in the Philippines—had long since ended. It was then to the surprise and dismay of President Taft that tiny Puerto Rico immediately presented a hostile challenge to his new administration, the constitutional rebellion known as the appropriation crisis of 1909.

1961 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Burton

In the antithesis of Western imperialism and colonial nationalisms and the still uncertain synthesis the United States has had a significant and in some ways a determining role. By the extension of its frontiers into the Caribbean and the Pacific at the turn of the century, the United States found itself an imperialist power. American imperialism consciously endeavored to bring what was best of the Western way of life to its colonial peoples. Nevertheless, it depended on the conventional instruments of military force and colonial-civil government imposed by the conqueror. For the United States the Philippines became the fittest subject for this Westernizing process for which Theodore Roosevelt was the outstanding spokesman and apologist. Under President Roosevelt's direction the work of civilizing a backward people received a full American expression, and from a consideration of that enterprise the temper of American imperialism may be sounded. Drawing from the Philippine experiment and from experience with the Caribbean countries Roosevelt combined practical judgments with certain intellectual and emotional attitudes to elaborate a comprehensive doctrine of imperialism.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kaganiec-Kamieńska

Borders and Boundaries, Real and Symbolic: The Case of Puerto RicoThe aim of this article is to outline the real and symbolic borders and boundaries, of geographical, political, cultural and racial nature, in the history and present of Puerto Rico, and their role in shaping and transforming the Puerto Rican identity. The main part of the article focuses on the borders and boundaries between Puerto Rico and the United States. The second part looks at the lines dividing the population in the island and the Puerto Rican diaspora in the US. Granice rzeczywiste i symboliczne. Przypadek PortorykoCelem artykułu jest zarysowanie rzeczywistych i symbolicznych granic, geograficznych, politycznych, rasowych i kulturowych, wpisujących się w historię i współczesność Portoryko oraz ich roli w kształtowaniu się i przekształcaniu tożsamości portorykańskiej. Główna część artykułu skupia się na granicach biegnących między Portoryko a Stanami Zjednoczonymi. W drugiej części wskazano linie podziału powstałe między mieszkańcami wyspy a diasporą portorykańską w USA.


2000 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 266-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose J. Cabiya ◽  
Denise A. Chavira ◽  
Francisco C. Gomez ◽  
Emilia Lucio ◽  
Jeanett Castellanos ◽  
...  

In this brief report, we present MMPI-2 basic validity and clinical scale data of Latino-descent persons from Puerto Rico ( n = 290), Mexico ( n = 1,920), and the United States ( n = 28). All were administered one of three Spanish translations of the MMPI-2. A review of the mean scores of these respective groups indicates similarities across all scales. Differences among these three groups, with the exception of the Mf scale (which is keyed to sex), were well within the one standard deviation band. More importantly, these findings are promising given the fact that three different translations of the MMPI-2 were applied.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-446
Author(s):  
Theresa Ventura

AbstractThis article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.


1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT DAVID JOHNSON

During his five years as chief US policy-maker towards Puerto Rico, Ernest Gruening strove to create a model – based on the anti-imperialist principles he had outlined in the 1920s – for a reformist policy which the United States could pursue towards the rest of Latin America. The initial support of Franklin Roosevelt allowed Gruening to position his Puerto Rican programme as one of the three ideological alternatives present in the early stages of the Good Neighbour Policy. The collapse of Gruening's scheme provided US policymakers with an early illustration of the difficulty of imposing reform with insufficient local support.


Author(s):  
John A. Thompson

Between the Spanish-American war of 1898 and World War I, a progressive movement, in which Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were rival leaders, greatly extended the authority of the federal government in the nation’s domestic life, and also to some extent equipped it better to conduct foreign relations. Conscious that its economic growth had made the United States a great power, policymakers sought to expand the scope of its influence, but their ability to do so was limited by the difficulty of obtaining domestic support for actions involving significant costs. In practice, the extent to which the United States was able to affect the course of events beyond its borders varied in different regions. It established its hegemony over the Caribbean and Central America, and strengthened its political as well as economic links with the other countries in the western hemisphere. In East Asia, where it fought a brutal three-year war in the Philippines to suppress native resistance to its rule, the principal policy objective was to establish equal access for all foreign interests in China. But Washington found it difficult to uphold this Open Door principle in the face of challenges from Russia and Japan. With regard to Europe, the traditional posture of non-involvement in its great power politics was maintained, although Theodore Roosevelt and other leaders did come to see the relations of the European powers as affecting US interests, which they defined in a way that brought their perspective close to Britain’s. The establishment of peaceful methods of resolving international disputes was a goal of successive administrations, but the arbitration treaties that were negotiated won Senate approval only with reservations that severely limited their scope and authority.


Author(s):  
Faye Caronan

This book explores how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critiques are delegitimized and obscured by U.S. imperialism and global power. Drawing on Raymond Williams's dual definitions of culture as both the experience of everyday life within a society and the cultural productions that circulate within society, the book analyzes the ways that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans have been represented to affirm narratives of U.S. exceptionalism in the early twentieth century and today. It considers how recent Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural productions across multiple genres critique these justifications, and how the U.S. cultural market contains these critiques to reaffirm revised narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. This introduction provides an overview of the institutionalized narrative of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the politics and economics of Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural representation, and hegemonic narratives of racial stereotypes in the United States.


Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

‘The doldrums and the new navy (1865–1900)’ describes the period after the end of the Civil War: an era of swift retrenchment with little forward progress. When the Civil War ended, the U.S. Navy boasted 671 warships, yet within a decade, all but a few dozen had been sold off, scrapped, or placed in ordinary—mothballed for a future crisis. The concept of a peacetime standing navy was finally embraced with Congressional approval for new battleships in 1890. The war with Spain in 1898 also resulted in the United States assuming significant authority on Cuba and gaining control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island.


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