For Better or For Worse
By Juan Ruiz Toro
As a young man, Luis Muñoz Marín had expressed far more interest in devoting himself to poetry than in following his father’s footsteps into politics. Nonetheless, he became politically active in his early 20s, and by the time he was 34 he’d already become a senator in Puerto Rico.
The year of his 40th birthday would turn out to be one of the most important in his life. In 1938, he broke from the Liberal Party and organized his followers into a new political party, the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party, or PPD). As senator, he had been an influential figure in Puerto Rico’s political scene for years. With the establishment of the PPD, however, Muñoz charted what would become his political legacy on the island.
From the early years, the PPD boasted that it was unlike any other party, notably because it emphasized that the war on poverty was significantly more important than the status question – or, more broadly, that economic concerns trumped political concerns.
The message resonated; by the early 1940s, the PPD was already the largest political party on the island. Muñoz’s vision of an economic transformation had begun to take root, as the Puerto Rican government began a broad initiative to attract investment and entice development on the island.
This renewed focus on economic development as a solution to Puerto Rico’s problems was a noticeable departure from Muñoz’s socialist beginnings. It was, at best, a statist and social democratic approach to policymaking, envisioning the state as the facilitator and regulator of capitalist growth. Within this vision, development would create jobs, which would in turn distribute the gains of capitalist growth to all sectors of society.
Although the PPD campaigned in its early years as a party devoted to ignoring the status question, by the mid-1940s then-Senate president Muñoz decided that the issue couldn’t be avoided forever. He and his inner circle thus began to develop the idea behind a new form of government, which would liberate Puerto Rico from colonialism without divorcing the island from the United States.
By 1948, Puerto Ricans had gained the right to vote for their local government, and Muñoz became the island’s first democratically elected governor. By 1951, the PPD introduced its vision for commonwealth status, and by 1952 the law had passed in both Washington and San Juan. Puerto Rico had a new constitution, and, perhaps more importantly, a political status that synergized with Muñoz’s economic vision.
This economic vision, broadly referred to as Operation Bootstrap, formed the core of the PPD’s agenda throughout the 16 years Muñoz served as governor. Muñoz supported initiatives that led to the growth of such industries as tourism, which was virtually non-existent on the island prior to 1948.
Economic growth during this time was palpable. The island’s economic landscape changed over night, as the governor passed laws that attracted foreign investment and development (most notably tax-exemption laws to American corporations setting up business in Puerto Rico). Poverty rates were down, health indicator rates were up, and Puerto Rico was becoming more and more industrialized, just as Muñoz had promised when he rose to political prominence in the 1940s.
Politically, Muñoz remained popular throughout his 16-year tenure as governor. He and the PPD regularly won elections with around 60% of the popular vote, which gave them substantial room to mold the island’s political, economic, and social infrastructure to their liking.
In 1959, speaking at the Godkin lectures at Harvard University, Muñoz philosophically rationalized the commonwealth as the tool through which Puerto Rico could simultaneously liberate itself from colonialism and nationalism. To him, it was a new type of state that would allow the island to grow culturally and economically – a better alternative, he believed, than either statehood or independence.
Of course, such a polarizing philosophy attracted substantial criticism from some of the island’s political sectors. Pro-statehooders, led by industrialist and future governor Luis A. Ferré, believed that Muñoz was obstructing the inevitable road to statehood. Pro-independence leaders, led, for some time, by revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos, charged Muñoz with betraying his ideals and his people by willfully entering into an agreement with the United States. For those two groups (however different their ideologies may be), the commonwealth was still colonialism, and Muñoz was a facilitator.
Whether or not Muñoz’s vision ultimately was beneficial for Puerto Rico is perhaps an impossible question to answer. Ideology will too often spill over and determine how one views Puerto Rico’s industrialization, adoption of the commonwealth, and other similar changes. However, it is incontestable that Muñoz was successful in implementing his vision for the island; he set out, in the 1940s, to attack Puerto Rico’s rampant poverty, and when he finished his political career in 1964 Puerto Rico had effectively become a healthier, more literate, and wealthier island. Under his leadership, Puerto Rico also ended the agricultural economy that had, for so long, funneled resources into the hands of a few foreign corporations while leaving behind a destitute population.
On the other hand, many Puerto Ricans agree today that the commonwealth is fundamentally colonial in nature. The “status” question was hardly resolved during those years; if anything, the Muñoz era paved the way for a prolonged political battle for the future of the island.
A look back at political, economic, and cultural discourse of the time suggests the extent to which Muñoz was a sort of founding father of modern Puerto Rico, and his influence in twentieth-century Puerto Rican history should not be understated. There was Puerto Rico before Muñoz and Puerto Rico after Muñoz, and the two iterations were radically different.