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By Root 357 0

Ferré and Muñoz Marín commenced in the years following World War II. With the war’s end, Puerto Rican leaders resumed their efforts to get the attention of Congress. Violence had, for the time being, been replaced by flight. “Puerto Ricans are swelling this city’s population by 1,500 new arrivals a week,” the New York Times reported in January 1947. “The migration of Puerto Rican natives to New York is a ‘bloodletting’ of the 2,200,000 residents of the overcrowded island.” Economic studies showed that emigration alone would help, but not solve, the problem of poverty in Puerto Rico.3

Ferré believed the solution was statehood. The statehood option was supported primarily by wealthy Puerto Ricans and those professionals who perceived themselves as easily adaptable to becoming American.4 Socially, for example, one would be hard-pressed to imagine anything more American than membership in a businessmen’s club—which is where one could find Ferré in 1947. “The International Association of Lions Clubs closed it four-day annual convention today,” California’s Oakland Tribune reported. “Members of the new executive board of governors elected during this week’s convention were: Jack Peddycord … Luis A. Ferre …”

The following year President Harry Truman set aside his authority to appoint Puerto Rico’s governor and permitted Puerto Ricans to elect the candidate of their choice. They chose Muñoz Marín. He was now a member of the Popular Democratic Party, which did not support independence but instead sought a uniquely defined status. In that election, Ferré’s prostatehood party finished second and the independence party third.

In the United States, the greater autonomy that President Truman had granted to Puerto Rico and the gubernatorial election that followed cloaked the intensity of the island’s conflicting visions for its future. On November 1, 1950, that cloak was removed, right across the street from the White House. “Two members of the revolutionary Puerto Rican National party were shot down this afternoon while attempting to blast their way with pistol fire … with the expressed purpose of shooting President Truman,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “One of the assassins was slain. The other was wounded. One White House policeman was wounded fatally.… The gunman who was killed … carried in his pocket a letter from Pedro Albizu Campos, Harvard educated leader of the Puerto Rican revolution.”

Four years later, with Puerto Rico now having written and ratified its own Constitution, syndicated columnist John Dixon wrote that “the party for independence … isn’t taken too seriously, except for a fanatical few.” The day after this column appeared on March 1, 1954, the “fanatical few” were front-page news:

Five members of [the United States] Congress were shot today, one of them wounded critically, when three Puerto Rican men and a Puerto Rican woman whipped out pistols and sprayed the assembled House [of Representatives] with bullets.… When it ended, the automatic pistols empty, five members of the House were left sprawled on the floor. First aid was administered … first by physician members [as] … members shouted to the press gallery to summon other physicians.… The gunmen were part of the same group which attempted to assassinate President Truman.5

Columnist Dixon next focused on Ferré:

The main fight now is between the statehood forces led by Luis Ferre … and the leave-well-enough-alone forces headed by Gov. Munoz Marin.… I spent an exceedingly entertaining, if not informative, couple of hours with each of the two leaders. I wound up as confused, undecided, and dizzy with contradictory notions as nearly every U.S. legislator and bureaucrat who has poked into Puerto Rico’s problem.

Ferré challenged Muñoz Marín for the governorship in Puerto Rico’s 1956 election. He lost. In 1960 he challenged him and lost again. One key factor contributed significantly to the victories of Muñoz Marín: he had been navigating Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States in ways that, over time, had made Puerto Rico more prosperous than any