"Some Porto Ricans As Our Artist Saw Them," Li-Om Our Islands and Their People, /899

"Some Porto Ricans as our artist saw them," li-om Our Islands and Their People, /899.

32 Their Islands and Our People: U.S. Writing About Puerto Rico, 1898-1920'

Felix V. Matos Rodriguez "Indications are not wanting of an approaching change in the thoughts and policy of Americans as to their relations with the world outside their own borders." Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Atlantic Monthly, December 1890

The Spanish-American-Cuban War brought the islands of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico into direct U.S. influence. As a result of acquiring these new "possessions"—either through formal colonial control or through indirect economic and political influence a large literature emerged in the U.S. focusing on the territories taken after the war.' This literature included quite diverse yet often overlapping genres: military histories (Richard Harding Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns [1898]), resource assessment and investment guides (Frederick A. Ober, Porto Rico and Its Resources [1899]), academic studies (Leo S. Rowe, The United States and Porto Rico [1904]), popular histories (R. A. Van Middledyk, History of Porto Rico [1898]), official government reports (Henry K. Carroll, Report on the Island of Porto Rico [1899]), journalistic accounts (William S. Bryan, ed., Our Islands & Their People [1899]), and even children's and juvenile books (Oscar Phelps Austin, Uncle Sam's Soldiers [1899]). There were, of course, books on all or some of these genres published in the U.S. about these islands prior to 1898. The ample Cuban travel literature published in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century is an example of pre-1898 publications.' Yet it is undeniable that the volume of writing about Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the U.S. increased both in terms of numeric quantity and of diversification of literary genres after 1898. The centennial of the Spanish-American-Cuban War has encouraged the publication of several important studies regarding the writing published in the United States immediately before and after the war.' In this essay, I focus specifically on the literature regarding Puerto Rico produced in the U.S. during the first three decades of the twentieth century.' I address two sets of questions here. The first, and perhaps most basic one, deals with the authors and the conditions that prompted and facilitated their writing and publication. Who was writing these books? Why? Was knowledge of Puerto Rico the realm of the journalist, the travel writer, or the historian? How were these people connected to Puerto Rico'? Or were they? How did the writing about Puerto Rico affect, or not affect, the historiographical debates occurring in the U.S. at the turn of the century? The second set of questions focuses on the agenda(s)—shared and/or contradictory—that these books had. What were some of the main concerns of those writing about Puerto Rico at the turn of the century? What kind of portrayal were these books presenting to the different U.S. audiences that they targeted? What kinds of rhetorical strategies were authors employing to represent Puerto Rico and the Puerto Ricans? How was this writing connected to the agenda(s) the U.S. had for the island? How were these books trying to portray Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans before the U.S. public? In the first part of this essay, I present some of the U.S. authors who wrote about Puerto Rico and some of the literary genres employed by these authors. I also include some brief biographical data, where available, on these authors. In the second part of the paper, I utilize ana- lytical concepts emerging from the field of post-colonial studies to decipher and decode the agenda(s) of U.S. writers.' I explore how these agendas were achieved through the use of different rhetorical strategies or tropes. These strategies were vital in shaping the early corpus of

33 knowledge about Puerto Rico that was bein g produced for different audiences in the United States and the world.

Authors and Genres

The Spanish-American-Cuban War attracted the attention of the U.S. public like few late- nineteenth-century events did. There was extensive—if very biased and sensationalist coverage of the struggle for independence by the Cuban rebels prior to the war.' Such attention led to a number of journalist accounts printed in newspapers and leading magazines, such as Harper's Weekly and The Atlantic Monthly—from 1895 to 1898. The writings coming from Cuba were combined with the techniques of photojournalism, insuring U.S. readers a glimpse of the exotic scenery and people that inhabited the crumbling remains of the Spanish Empire in We Caribbean and Pacific. Photographs also served to familiarize, throu gh the "real" images of the camera, the U.S. public with their newly acquired territories. Scant news arrived from either Puerto Rico or the Philippines until the very beginning of the war. After the war, journalists were joined by several other groups in writing about the newly acquired colonial possessions. War veterans became active in publishing their anecdotes about the "splendid little war."' Travel writers, businessmen, scholars, missionaries, and many others also joined the task of interpreting, presenting, and masking the new imperial reality to the U.S. public. Many of the authors writing about Puerto Rico during the first decades of the twentieth century were eyewitnesses of sorts: war correspondents, photographers, war veterans, ex-military or civil service officials, academics, and missionaries. Another set of writers had more ephemeral contact with the island's reality, as they were "professional" travel writers, writers of children's books, or prominent writers who took advantage of the post-1898 interest in the former Spanish colonies. The first group of books published about Puerto Rico and about Cuba and the Philippines—at the war's end were, for the most part, the work of journalists and military men. Numerous journalists covered the war for different newspapers and magazines and proceeded to shape the first impressions of the islands to their fellow Americans." Many of the books published between 1897 and 1914 were actually re-collections of the articles written by these journalists during the course and the aftermath of the war. The rush for news coverage about the Cuban independence struggle and the potential war with Spain was such that some journalists were dispatched prior to the conflict and their hooks came out almost concurrently with the war. This was the case of A. D. Hall's Cuba: Its Past, Present and Future (1898), which acknowledges in its concluding chapter that: "It is unnecessary to refer except in a brief man- ner to the Spanish-American war, as the struggle is at the present time of writing only in its inception."'" Hall had no problems, however, predicting the future U.S. victory in the war. Perhaps the best known of the war correspondents of the Spanish-American-Cuban War was Richard Harding Davis. Davis was a prolific and very successful newspaper reporter, mag- azine editor, and fiction writer. He had been involved in the Cuban insurrection as early as 1896, covering the atrocities committed by the Spaniards against the Cuban rebels. Harding Davis later witnessed the military campaigns in Santiago de Cuba and in Puerto Rico. Some argue that it was Harding Davis who professionalized and created the "war correspondent" genre, one in which "the gentleman reporter [went] in search of action and adventure, establishing the world as his heat.' In one of his early books which included vignettes of the Spanish-American- Cuban War, the Greek-Turkish War, and the South African War Davis included a chapter enti- tled "A War Correspondent's Kit."' After the 1898 conflict Harding Davis published The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns 11898), based on his war coverage.' The book became, and has remained, one of most celebrated and quoted hooks regarding the war. Other journalists who covered the war were Stephen Crane, Trumbull White, William Dinwiddic, and Albert Gardner Robinson. Crane, a renowned writer and author of the classic The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was dispatched by the New York Journal to cover the war.'4 Crane became very upset at the media attention received by the celebrities fighting in the war, such as Teddy Roosevelt and some of his Ivy League–educated Rough Riders. Crane's dis- patches and subsequent fiction championed the bravery of the regular army soldier. :\lbert Gardner Robinson was the correspondent for The Evening Post in Puerto Rico. His Porto Rico

34 of Today (1899) is based on the letters Robison wrote as a war correspondent between August and October 1898.' 5 It is of interest to note that on the back cover of Robinson's Porto Rico of Today, there is an advertisement for two commercial guides to Cuba and the Philippines and of two memoirs of the 1898 conflict. Trumbull White was another prolific war correspondent. Upon returning from covering the war in Cuba and Puerto Rico, he quickly published Our New Possessions (1898) and United States in War with Spain and the History of Cuba (1898). White's preface to the United States in War outlines the reasons why U.S. journalists and photographers ventured into the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean: Demand always creates supply, even if material is scant. When the war began, the people of the United States wanted to know something of the people who were striving for their freedom, of their characteristics, their conditions and their personality. Moreover, it was an immediate necessity to know the geography of Cuba, its history, its natural conditions, its material resources, and a host of things that unite to make a comprehensive knowledge of any country:6 White continues in his preface to laud the journalists covering the Spanish-American-Cuban War for their personal and professional heroism. These journalists have been, according to White, "the real historians of Cuba." White concludes his preface to United States in War by explaining the value of the journalists' work for U.S. military expansionism: They are the ones who have gathered the most exhaustive information on the whole subject of Cuban affairs. They have been able by virtue of their intimate knowledge of Cuba and the Cubans to be of invaluable assistance to the commanders of army and navy alike, not only in advice as to the forming of plans, but in executing them.'

What White wrote about Cuba applied to Puerto Rico as wel l. White maintained an interest in Caribbean affairs after the war. He published Puerto Rico and Its People in 1938, after almost forty years of gathering materials for the book.' Some journalists also wrote about Puerto Rico, but decades after the war. Many of these journalists writing between the 1910s and 1920s were interested in documenting the progress, or lack thereof, of the island since the U.S. invasion. Others, less concerned with the particularities of Puerto Rico, wanted to explore the general conditions of all U.S. colonial dependencies. One such journalist, who combined the talents of both a travel article writer and a newspaper publisher, was William D. Boyce. Boyce was the publisher of many Chicago-area- based newspapers, such as The Saturday Blade, The Chicago Ledger, The Farming Business; and the Indiana Daily Times.' 9 He wrote The Hawaiian Islands & Porto Rico (1914) and included some of the same materials in his United States Colonies and Dependencies (1914). Another set of "first impressions" about Puerto Rico was provided in short books written by 1898 veterans. Many of these short books combined the photographs taken by the veterans with their anecdotes, which had patriotic overtones. Perhaps the most prominent example of this kind of writing was Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders (1900), a memoir of the experiences of this unit during the Cuban campaign. Yet memoir writing about the war was not the exclu- sive privilege of officers and prominent Americans. Some accounts, such as Burr Macintosh's The Little I Saw of Cuba (1899) provide a sense of the heroic expectations and subsequent disillusionment of many of the volunteers who joined the war effort.' It seems that the warfare in Cuba, which lasted longer than the Puerto Rican campaign, motivated more veterans to write about their experiences in that island. Still, several veterans wrote about their impressions of the Puerto Rican campaign: Henry F. Keenan, The Conflict with Spain: A History of the War based Upon Official Reports & Descriptions of an Eye Witness (Philadelphia, 1898); Anthony Fiala, Troop "C" in Service: An Account of the Part Played by Troop "C" of the New York Volunteer Cavalry in the Spanish-American War of 1898 (New York: 1899); Frank E. Edwards, The '98 Campaign of the 6th Massachusetts (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1899); Karl Stephen Herrman, From Yauco to Las Marias, Being a Story of the Recent Campaign in Western Puerto Rico by the Independent Regular Brigade, Under Command of Brigadier-

35 General Schwan (Boston: R.G. Badger & Company, 1900); and, Carl Sandburg, Always the Young Strangers (New York, 1953)." Another veteran of the war, Jose de Olivares, a California-horn Mexican-American, authored one of the most monumental of all the 1898- related books, Our Islands and Their People.' This book was not so much an account of the war as a photographic and narrative inventory of the territories acquired by the U.S. as a result. The U.S. public, particularly businessmen and government officials, needed detailed information about the island. This was not the information found in travel guides and photographic books. As a result, many academics ventured to write and to initiate research about Puerto Rico. Several intellectuals, like Leo S. Rowe and William F. Willoughby, wrote academic books as a result of their direct involvement with the civil government of the island during the First decades of U.S. control. Several of these authors participated in prestigious U.S. forums, such as the Friends of the Indians and Dependent Peoples Conferences in Lake Mohonk, New York, where the fate of territories like Puerto Rico was bein g compared with the experiences of Native and African Americans.' Other academics were either solo researchers contracted by U.S. government and military agencies or part of large research teams funded by the metropolitan government or independent foundations. A third group of writers were the tawyers and political scientists who were writing about how to classify Puerto Rico's status within the U.S. constitutional and legal framework." This was part of a larger debate that also included doubts about the future of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam. One of the earliest academic works published about Puerto Rico was Robert T. Hill's Cuba and Porto Rico, with the Other Islands of the West Indies (1898). Hill was a Cornell-trained geologist who worked ibr the U.S. Geolo gical Survey from 1886 until 1903.2' Among the many accomplishments of geological career was having been the first person to explore the canyons of the Rio Grande. Although Hill's book on Cuba and Puerto Rico was a combi- nation of scientific survey, tourist guide, and general history, Hill wrote several exclusively scientific reports for the U.S. Geological Survey, such as "Mineral Resources of Porto Rico" ( I 899)." A sizable group of authors writing in the U.S. about Puerto Rico were previously connected either to the civil and military governments on the island or to travel, government work, or research in the Caribbean and Latin America. One author who had a direct association with the civil government on the island was Leo S. Rowe, author of The United States and Porto Rico (1904). Rowe had a Ph.D. in finance and was a lawyer who taught political science cours- es at the University of Pennsylvania from 1895-1917. I ie had clear connections with Puerto Rico, having served on the Commission to Revise and Compile the Laws of Porto Rico (1900-1902) and on the Insular Code Commission (1902). 2' Upon his return from Puerto Rico and after resuming his teaching duties, Rowe was elected president of the American Academy of Political Science. Rowe left the academy to serve in various diplomatic and government positions, all of them closely associated with Latin America and the Caribbean. He served as a chairman of the U.S. delegation at the Pan-American Union (1908), as assistant secretary of the treasury (1916), and as assistant secretary of state (1919) in charge of Latin American affairs. Rowe's connection to Puerto Rico and to the literature about the island produced in the U.S. continued after the publication of his book. He was, for example, vice-president of the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution in 1930, when Victor Clark's famous report, Porto Rico and Its Problems (1930), was commissioned.'" General interest in ornithology, pre-Columbian cultures, and the West Indies drew Frederick A. Ober into writing about Puerto Rico. Ober, author of Puerto Rico and Its Resources (1899), was a self-taught taxidermist who worked for the noted Harvard biologist Alexander Agassiz.'" At Harvard, Ober collected and classified New England avifauna. He left New England in 1871 and proceeded to collect birds in Florida and the Lesser Antilles between 1872 and 1880. 31 The results of his trips, including the discovery of twenty-two new bird species in the West Indies, were published by the Smithsonian Institution, where Ober had con- tacts. On one of his Caribbean trips, he stayed with Carib descendants in Dominica for two months, sparking his interest in indigenous cultures in the Antilles. In 1880 Ober visited Puerto Rico for the first time in his role as U.S. commissioner for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.'' He used the knowledge from his trips to the Caribbean and Latin America to pub- lish several travel, adventure, and historically-based storybooks.

36 There was also a surge of interest in Puerto Rico's archaeological past after the 1898 conflict. One of the leading scholars associated with this research was Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes. A Harvard-trained ethnologist, Fewkes focused his early academic career on studying the music of several Native American groups, particularly of the Hopi Snake dancers. 33 Fewkes began a long collaboration with the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1895, doing archaeological work in Arizona. Fewkes did extensive research on Puerto Rican and West Indian archaeology during the 1900s. Several publications resulted from his trips and research: "Prehistoric Porto Rico (1902); "Prehistoric Porto Rican Pictographs" (1903); "Porto Rican Stone Collars and Tripointed Idols" (1904); and "The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands " (1907)." Fewkes has often been credited for bringing "a scientific approach to archaeological research in the West Indies.' Fewkes was also an influential academic in the U.S. during the first decades of the twentieth century. He was president of the Anthropological Association (1912-13) and vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1905, 1912-13). There were, of course, other U.S. scholars who wrote about Puerto Rico besides Hill, Rowe, and Fewkes. Many of them like those who participated in the New York Academy of Sciences' Scientific Survey of Porto Rico (1913-17) were commissioned by U.S. or local agencies to conduct specific studies. Once those studies were completed, most of the scholars never wrote about Puerto Rico again. The examples I provided before were selected either because these scholars continued their academic connections to Puerto Rico or because their work was instrumental in the development of subsequent research in and about the island. Although the setting for these books was not always Puerto Rico specifically, the Spanish- American-Cuban War generated a sizable literature of books for children and adolescents. In many of these works, children or adolescents took the roles of investigative reporters, private detectives, travelers, or volunteers in the militia." Perhaps one of the most prolific authors of these "young boys and girls- novels of the period was Edward L. Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer, who also wrote under some thirty-odd pseudonyms, wrote several stories with an 1898 background setting, including Young Hunters in Puerto Rico; or, The Search for a Lost Treasure (1900)." Many of his 1898-inspired works appeared in collections such as the "Old Glory" series (A Young Volunteer in Cuba; or, Fighting for the Sin g le Star [1898], published by Lee & Shepard); the "Pan-American" series (The Young Volcano Explorers; or, American Boys in the West Indies [1902], published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard); and the "Flag of Freedom" series (When Santiago Fell; or, The War Adventures of Two Chums [1899], published by Mershon)." Stratemeyer's success as a writer led to the creation of the Stratemeyer syndicate, which produced stories for the young. There were other authors besides Stratemeyer using the 1898 juncture as the background for their _juvenile books. Oscar Phelps Austin wrote several such books, one of which had Puerto Rico and Cuba as its setting. In Uncle Sam's Soldiers, the hero of this and several other of Austin's novels, Dan Patterson, is a member of the army signal corps during the campaigns in Puerto Rico and Cuba.'" Patterson, a West Virginia farmer when not troubleshooting inter- nationally, joined the volunteer army to fight in the war against Spain. Austin was an eclectic character. He had fought in the "Indian Wars" after moving to Nebraska in 1859.4 ( When he was not writing .j ven 1e books, he served as a speechwriter and a statistician for the Republican Party in Washington D.C. where he moved in 1881. In 1898 he was appointed chief of the Bureau of Statistics in the Treasury Department, and between 1903 and 1914 he taught commerce and statistics at George Washington University. His writing was not limited to fiction, as Austin authored several studies such as Steps in the Expansion of Our Territory (l 903).' It is interesting to note that on the back advertisement pages of Austin's Uncle Sam's Children (1906), there are several announcements for R. A. Van Middeldyk's A History of Puerto Rico; Cyrus Townsend Brady's The Conquest of the Southwest; Frederick A. Ober's Crusoe's Island and The Storied West Indies; an announcement for juvenile books by Hezekiah Butterworth (who would write about Puerto Rico in another volume); and advertisements for several of Austin's other novels and for a series titled "The Story of the West Indies." The theme of 1898, whether in juvenile books, travel narratives, or historical texts, was indeed a growth industry in the U.S. during the early decades of the twentieth century.

37 I have noted authors who wrote several hooks or articles about Puerto Rico, and others who wrote a single essay regarding the island but also wrote about Cuba and/or the Philippines. There were also a good many authors whose only relationship to Puerto Rico was writing one book or article. Many of these authors wrote professional travel books or hooks aimed at children or adolescents. Some were missionaries or academics. They all shared a desire to write about a place that had captivated the U.S. imagination and interest. They were taking advantage of the surge in publishing related to the new U.S. possessions in the Caribbean and Asia or to the particular interests of their specific audiences— Protestant missionaries or Temperance League members, for example back in the U.S. One such author was TV1argherita Arl ina Hamm, the Canadian-born journalist and poet. She was a well-known and respected journalist who traveled around the world to conduct important interviews or to prepare public lectures on themes of contemporary interest. 43 Her poetry was also published in leading literary journals. Hamm published two books describing the Puerto Rican situation: Porto Rico and the West Indies (1899) and America's New Possessions and Spheres of Influence (1899)." Two distinctive features of Hamm's writing were her sym- pathetic insights regarding Puerto Rican women and her desire to capture aspects of the quo- tidian experience of peasant and working-class women.' Two other prolific authors who wrote, at least once, about Puerto Rico were Hezekiah Butterworth and Harry A. Franck. Butterworth was a well-known juvenile book author. One of the series he developed—the "Zigzag" hooks combining travel and education—reached a cir- culation of nearly 500,000 copies in the late 1880s.' lie was also a contributor to both the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. His article about Puerto Rico was included in Traveller Tales of the Pan-American Countries (1902)." Ilarry A. Franck also was a well-established travel writer, whose candid narrative was enjoyed by a faithful following. Franck, who did postgrad- uate work in modern languages at Columbia and Harvard, wrote about his travels through Europe, China, Mexico, South and Central America, and the Caribbean." In one of his Caribbean hooks, Roaming Through the West Indies, he dedicated several chapters to "Our Porto Rico," as he referred to the island.'" There were still other authors, some better known than others, who wrote an occasional piece on Puerto Rico. Some of them include Edgar Watson Howe, The Trip to the West Indies (1910); Howard Benjamin Grose, Advance in the Antilles: The New Era in Cuba and Porto Rico (1910); and George Waldo Browne, The New America and the Far East: A Picturesque and Historic Description of These Lands & Peoples (1907). All these authors seemed to have shared the enthusiasm the U.S. public had for news about the Caribbean.

The Agenda(s) That there were so many authors, working in diverse literary genres, who wrote about Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century begs two questions: Why did they focus on the island and what was the content and purpose of their writing. Clearly, some of the reasons behind the writing of these books are connected to the overall objectives the U.S. government had for invading and keeping the island. The U.S. was interested in securing the strategic and military advantages provided by Puerto Rico's location; guaranteeing access to tropical staples mostly sugar needed in times or war or crisis; securing a larger market for U.S. products; and following the Monroe Doctrine by continuing to push foreign European powers away from the Caribbean. These texts also showed some of the key elements necessary for the U.S. to justify and rationalize its presence in Puerto Rico. The books written about Puerto Rico document the consequences that the U.S. faced as a result of the Spanish-American-Cuban War: debates about colonialism, expansionism. statehood, citizenship, and race.' In the last two decades, numerous scholars onany of them coming from postcolonial, cul- tural_ or subaltern studies—have written about the ways in which the West has constructed -others.' These scholars have analyzed the discursive and historical strategies that western writers (mostly from Britain, France, and the United States) have used to describe, represent, shape, and transcribe the cultures and societies that their colonial or imperial relationships put them in contact and conflict with. They have also shown how colonialism shaped events and ideology back in the metropolis.

38 A substantial part of the agenda of the books published about Puerto Rico in the U.S. was precisely an attempt at constructing and representing Puerto Rican "otherness" to U.S. audiences. In analyzing the ways in which this literature tried to accomplish this goal, I will rely on the work of critics, particularly Mary Louise Pratt and David Spurr, who have analyzed how travel writers, businessmen, journalists, academics, and colonial administrators, among others, have portrayed the colonial reality to their metropolitan audiences.' Others, like Amy Kaplan, have studied how the discursive practices in U.S. literature particularly novels and short fiction helped to justify and internalize U.S. expansionist and imperialist practices." Most of these scholars also show the influence that social Darwinism and racial theories had in the economic, political, and military late-nineteenth-century ideology emerging from Europe and the United States. Although many of the rhetorical strategies employed by Western colonial writers were used by those writing about Puerto Rico in the U.S. early in the twentieth century, I want to focus my attention in this paper on one of the main contributions of Pratt to colonial discourse analysis. Pratt, who sets out to study how European travel literature went about creating "the other" or "the rest of the world," in particular Africa and Latin America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has developed the concept of the "capitalist vanguard." The term refers to European traveler-writers in Latin America after the wars of independence who were seeking to help and inform British, French, and German investors in the region." Their writings, full of an economistic and efficiency-driven rhetoric, were destined for European audiences increasingly more interested in Latin American affairs. Pratt characterizes the writings of the capitalist vanguard in this way: The bottom line in the discourse . . . was clear: [Latin] America must be transformed into a scene of industry and efficiency; its colonial population must be transformed from an indolent, undifferentiated, uncleanly mass lacking appetite, hierarchy, taste, and cash, into wage labor and a market for metropolitan consumer goods.s'

Although the historical conjuncture is different U.S. writers were visiting Puerto Rico almost a half- century later the motivation and the premises of Pratt's European capitalist vanguard apply to U.S. authors. Pratt describes the general thrust of the writing done by the capitalist vanguard as being goal- and results-oriented and loaded with a rhetoric of conquest and achievement." These writers measured success by the efficiency and end-results of their efforts, which served both to justify intervention and to engage in a self-congratulatory campaign. There is no better example of this mode of writing than the books describing the events of the Spanish-American- Cuban War. In this war all the logistical and strategic failures of the U.S. Army and Navy were quickly brushed aside—after a few brief critical commentaries in the press to then initiate a campaign that would characterize the war as an impressive victory based on the superior tacti- cal, organizational, strategic, and technological skills of the U.S. armed forces." Take, for example, Trumbull White's description of the frustration reigning among U.S. soldiers in Puerto Rico, upon hearing the news of the peace treaty with Spain: [The plans of the commanders of the invading army] had been perfectly formed and were almost executed. The simultaneous advance of the four divisions toward San Juan was interrupted in the very midst of the successful movement. . . . General Miles felt this and regretted that he was not permitted to complete the masterly military movement so carefully begun and so successfully carried forward. The occupation of Puerto Rico was made with a loss to the Americans of two killed and thirty- seven wounded.5`)

White is clearly excessive (and inaccurate) in his praise for the military plans. He also uses an accounting-based rationale to define success, pointing to the small number of battle casual- ties." A similar emphasis on efficient planning and execution can be found in Richard Harding Davis's account of the Puerto Rican campaign:

39 The army in Porto Rico advanced with the precision of a set of chessman: its moves ‘vere carefully considered and followed to success; its generals, acting independent- ly and yet along routes reconnoitered by General Roy Stone and Major Flager, and selected by General Miles, never missed a point nor needlessly lost a man.' The coverage of the war could not have been more flattering. It was, according to the Whites and Davises of journalism, a brilliant rendition of military planning and execution, combined with the most noble and humanitarian of accomplished objectives. It is unfortunate, however, that this tainted vision still permeates current historical writing on the war.' Another of the tropes that Pratt has identified in her analysis of colonial writing is the pre- sentation of an "industrial reverie.' Here the gaze of the writer reconstructs the image of a fixed space alluding to the modernizing and economic opportunities it will provide under the proper management of the colonial government. This narrative technique- which, in a more general usage, David Spurr has called "surveillance"—aims at organizing and classifying, from the writer's point of view, the observed landscape in terms of its promise for future development and exploitation.m This trope is found among many of the early writings about Puerto Rico. An example can he found in Frederick Ober's Puerto Rico and Its Resources: Let us glance at those natural features of the island which make it not only a valuable property for us as a national entity, but a potentially lucrative investment individual- ly,65 and, There is another Puerto Rico to arise from the ashes of the old that is, American energy and capital will evoke wonders from the soil and convert the climate into an. ally instead of an enemy. Hotels, sanatoriums, paradisiacal winter resorts, will rise in the hills, and along the coast the lands will blossom with the products of every clime.'

Ober clearly had an eye for the economic possibilities he was one of the first writers to assess the island's potential for U.S. investment that Puerto Rico offered. Another example of the industrial reverie can be found in the work of A. D. Hall. Hall has an ambitious agenda for the new U.S. territory:

Although the island is certainly well developed agriculturally, it certainly admits of considerable expansion in this direction. Under a different political system, . Porto Rico will certainly become far more productive and prosperous even than it is now. . . . But agriculture in the near future will certainly not be the main industry in the island. For there are known to be gold. copper, iron, zinc and coal mines, which have never been developed." 67

The agents of capitalism and expansion had developed a distinctive blueprint when discussing Puerto Rico's potential contributions to the U.S. economy. One more aspect of the capitalist vanguard rhetoric regarding Puerto Rico's economic potential to the U.S. was the portrayal of the island as an experimental site for U.S. capital. The big prize for these authors was not the island itself, but the larger South and Central American countries. These countries were seen not only as steady suppliers of crucial raw materials, but as potentially lucrative consumer markets. As a result of this vision, Puerto Rico began to be constantly referred to as a "bridge" or "laboratory" between the U.S. and Latin America. The image of Puerto Rico as a bridge or a test case of U.S.–Latin American relations rendered with extraordinary power from the 1940s to the 1 960s under the local leadership of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) and recently resuscitated in a more Pan-Caribbean version—was created during the early decades of the twentieth century." For some authors, Puerto Rico's value to the U.S. excluding, perhaps, military consider- ations—rested on what the U.S. could learn about dealing with Latin Americans (or Spanish Americans, as some called them) and their culture rather than on the potential economic ben- efits of the island's tropical staples or purchasing market. Puerto Rico was an exploratory site where the U.S. could see how its political and social institutions could be adapted to the for-

40 eign political traditions and the supposedly inferior races "south of the border." The best example of this kind of writing is the work of Leo S. Rowe, whom I mentioned earlier in this paper. Rowe is clear about the intentions of his book. "The main purpose of this work," he wrote, "is to discuss the problems arising out of our contact with the Spanish-American civilization."" He was not interested in discussing how or why the U.S. became involved in the Caribbean. Rowe was convinced that both U.S. control over the region, and Caribbean economic and political gravitation toward the U.S., were inevitable and mutually beneficial. What was surprising or challenging to Rowe was that, as opposed to having acquired one of the British colonies in the Caribbean—which would have been more historically and culturally connected with the U.S. the U.S. ended up acquiring a Spanish territory: Puerto In Rowe's mind, Puerto Rico was a laboratory of how U.S. expansion not just economic, but also political would fare in South America. In his opinion, although the problem of government in these islands does not present great territorial importance, it involves all those political lessons which we must learn in order to meet our political duties and obligations as the leading nation of the Western Hemisphere. The real significance of the extension of American dominion in the West Indies lies not so much in the fact of territorial aggrandizement as in the adaptation of our political ideas and standards which this expansion involves. It is this new necessity for adaptation that marks the real turning-point in our history.'

Puerto Rico was, then, in Rowe's mind, a perfect laboratory to test this U.S. capacity for adaptation. The capitalist vanguard also organized its descriptions and analysis around economic metaphors and language. Quantification, efficiency, and cost-benefit analysis provide a power- ful bottom line for these writers. Even Trumbull White's account of the war, so full of humanitarian and libertarian overtones, takes a dollars-and-cents approach to the conflict: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Caroline islands are to be liberated, four colonies of Spain instead of one, and the direct and indirect profit, looked at from a purely commercial basis, will be far more than enough to compensate the United States for the cost of the war." The capitalist vanguard had a double duty in its narrative. It had to convince its U.S. audi- ence of the dormant potential that Puerto Rico offered to the interested investor, and it had to explain why those resources had remained virgin for so long. The solution was to portray Spain as decadent, economically and politically backward, and incompetent. Given the anti-Spanish sentiment dominant before and after the 1898 conflict, this characterization was easily accept- ed. "Like all Spanish colonies," explained A.D. Hall, "Porto Rico has been woefully misman- aged.' Others were more direct in their indictment of Spanish governance in Puerto Rico. War correspondent Trumbull White considered Spain: ...the Turk of the West. Spain is an obsolete nation. Living in the past, and lacking cause of pride to-day, she gloats over her glorious explorations and her intellectual prowess of the middle ages when much of Europe was in darkness. . . But her pride was based on achievements, many of which, to the people of any other nation, would have been the disgrace of its history."

Spanish influence and power in the Caribbean had come to an end with the 1898 war. In the economic and political negotiations taking place between the U.S. and Puerto Rico in highly uneven terms, of course—Spain was to be the culprit of all that was backward, corrupt, and underdeveloped on the island. The mismanagement of Puerto Rican affairs by Spain, according to most U.S. writers, provided a rationale for U.S. intervention. In his hook about the 1898-1940s period, Kelvin Santiago-Valles explains: "[T]he order embodied by the North American republic also demand- ed a new chaos in need of reorganization.'" 5 This chaos which would be almost invariably

41 connected (especially in the writing immediately followin g the 1898 war) with Spain's deca- dence and obsoleteness as a imperial power—would justify U.S. hegemony over the island's affairs. The examples of chaos in need of order are numerous in the t ...S. literature about Puerto Rico. The references to chaos include a broad spectrum of images: racial mixture; filth and insalubrity; unruly traffic; incapacity for self- government; civic and administrative corruption; banditry; and illiteracy, among others. Notice, for example, Frederick Ober's description of San Juan:

Together with the emanations from the sinks and sewage, the filthy streets, and crowded dwellings, have hitherto made of San Juan what nature never intended it should he . . . a possible plague centre for the breeding of tropical diseases' In many cases the description of what is wrong or chaotic on the island, is immediately followed by the U.S.-prescribed remedy. In Our islands & Their People one finds the following passage:

The people were not only imprisoned on trivial charges, or none at all, but they were taxed for many things that they did not get, and every conceivable form of taxation was invented to force money out of them for the enrichment of those who were in power. Reforms in this respect were quickly instituted by the Americans."

Another journalist, William D. Boyce (writin g in 1914), explains what he thought the U.S. did for the island after 1 898:

The first thing the United States did when it took over Porto Rico was to begin the work of improving conditions so that nearly a million of dirty people crowded on the island at the time could live longer, and that our white American officials might escape death in doing their duty.'" U.S. writers often made reference to the general desire by Puerto Ricans of U.S.-initiated changes in political and economic matters.' Racial stereotypes in the U.S. also reinforced the vision that the Puerto Ricans were an intellectually inferior people given the hi gh incidence of "mestizaje." U.S. writers and government officials constructed a perfect justification for colonialism: a disorder in need of intervention, an able United States willing to serve as problem solver, and an anxious Puerto Rican people striving to improve under U.S. guidance. One final element in the writings of the capitalist vanguard was to create a sense of ahis- toricity for Puerto Rico. Many of these writings accentuated the shortage of written histories of the island a factually true statement to create the sense of a lack of Puerto Rican culture and self-identity. An effective mechanism to convince audiences back in the U.S. of the cor- rectness of the colonial expansion into Puerto Rico was to show the lack of any real or deep sense of history or culture on the island. If Puerto Rico could be portrayed as a "tabula rasa," not only would the U.S. intervention be seen as less intrusive, but also as less risky. Certainly an ahistorical country would be more susceptible to acculturation and chan ge than a country with a deeply rooted sense of self and identity. It was not unusual, then, to find many authors writing about Puerto Rico dismissin g any sense of history and culture. One finds one such example in the preface of Joseph Seabury's Porto Rico: The Land of the Rich Port (1903). Seabury, writing for a young people's series called "The World and Its People," tells his readers in the preface that "Porto Rico has no pro- longed or varied history, no exciting historical periods. For this reason but little space is given in this hook to the annals of the past."'" Needless to say, an ahistorical people made better potential colonial subjects. Moreover, the U.S. agenda for the island was future-oriented. One should not be surprised to see Seahury comment in his preface that "the writer's aim has been to picture the island as it is to-day, with its face turned toward the future."' Without an y deeply rooted sense of identity, U.S. expansionists considered the Puerto Ricans easy prey for the changes that they envisioned for the island.

42 Conclusions In this essay, I have explored several aspects of the relationship between the authors of books, articles, and reports written in the U.S. about Puerto Rico during the first decades of the twentieth century and the images and representations of the island they created for U.S. audiences. Given that there had been few and far-between instances of U.S. attention to Puerto Rico prior to the 1898 war, it is clear that the authors discussed in this essay were shaping or, more properly, inventing the perceptions of U.S. citizens regarding the island and its "people." Although many other books and articles about Puerto Rico have been written in the U.S. since, most of the perceptions created right after 1898 remain ingrained in the U.S. views of the island. A similar situation has been observed by historian Louis Perez regarding the writing in the U.S. about the Spanish-American-Cuban War." The centennial of the 1898 conflict has caused a revision of Puerto Rico's historiography at the turn of the century. Among the most innovative and creative work has come from those exploring the ruptures and continuities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the perspectives of cultural, postcolonial, and subaltern studies.' The rethinking, of course, predates the activities connected to the 1898 centennial. Also feeding the innovation, according to historian Francisco Scarano, is the "disillusionment with nationalistic debates that, in assessing the creation and development of political movements, failed to properly weigh the significance of the power divides structured by boundaries other than the national.'"4 A similar shift in thematic and paradigmatic perspectives also seems to be occurring in the 1898 historiography of Cuba, Spain, and the Philippines. In the United States, on the other hand, historians have not been engaged in any system- atic retrospective review of their historiography as a result of the 1898 centennial. It is truly unfortunate that the writing about Puerto Rico produced in the U.S. in the early decades of the twentieth century, for example, remains virtually unknown and understudied by U.S. historians. One can think of many important debates that would benefit from looking at this literature. One is the cyclical debate on whether the Americas have a common history, popularized by the Bolton thesis in the U.S. in the 1920s. Is it connected (and in which ways) to the post- expansion experience of the U.S.'?" What role did the "incorporation" of Puerto Rico (and other parts of the Caribbean) play in U.S. historiography? Or, what do we learn about the ten- sions between so-called professional historians and writers-travelers during the formative years of the U.S. historical profession at the turn of the century from the Puerto Rico literature? And what would we learn about U.S. cultural history (taking, for example, the process by which New York City— and Boston—based publishing houses and newspapers covered post-1898 affairs), or institutional history (thinking now of connecting the growth of information/scientific agencies like the Smithsonian or the U.S. Geological Survey with their extensive research presence in Puerto Rico) from looking at the early twentieth century books written about the Island? Clearly, the possibilities for engaging and innovative scholarship are many. Perhaps new directions of scholarly writing will help us explore how the literature about Puerto Rico written in the U.S. also helped to construct and reinvent "their" continent and its people.

43 Notes

1 Versions of this essay were presented at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians and the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston in 1995. 'See, among others, William J. Pomeroy, American Neo-Colonialism: Its Emergence in the Philippines and. Asia (New York: International Publishers, 1970). 3 The nineteenth century travel literature in Cuba is extensive. For a comprehensive listing and analysis see Louis A. Perez, Jr., ed., Slaves, Sugar & Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899 (Wilmington. DE: Scholarly Resources Inc.. 1992). 4Some of these studies include Lanny Thompson, Nuestra isla y su genic: La construcciOn del "otro" puertorriclueno en "Our Islands and Their People" (San Juan: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales y Departamento de Historia de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995); Consuelo Naranjo et al., eds. La naciOn soriada: Cuba, Puerto Rico., y las Filipinas ante el '98, (Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles, 1996); Luis E. Gonzalez Vales, ed.. 1898: Enfoques y per- spectivas (San Juan: Academia Puertorriquefia de la Historia, 1997); Silvia Alvarez Curbelo et al., eds., Los arcos de la memories: El '98 de los pueblos puertorriquefios (San Juan: Oficina del Presidente de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, AsociaciOn Puertorriquetia de Historiadores & Editorial Postdata, 1998); Fernando PicO, "La revoluciOn puertorriquena de 1898: La necesi- dad de un nuevo paradigma para entender el '98 puertorriquerio," Historia y Sociedad, no.10 (1998): 7-22; Javier Murillo, "Looking for Empire in the U.S. Colonial Archive, Photos and Texts," Historia y Sociedad, no.10 (1998): 23-48; Maria E. Estades Font, "Las conferencias de Lake Mohonk, 1883 1916: Las propuestas para la americanizaciOn de indios norteamericanos y puertorriquerlos," Revista Mexicana del Caribe 3:5 ( 1 998): 110-122; and the essays included in a special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review 78:4 (November 1998) regarding fin de siècle Puerto Rico and Cuba. 5 This listing, which is by no means a comprehensive one, is organized chronologically by year of publication: Arthur D. Hall. Porto Rico: Its History, Products and Possibilities (New York: Street & Smith Publishers, 1898); Robert Thomas Hill. Cuba and Porto Rico, with the Other Islands of the West Indies (New York: The Century Co., 1898); James D. Dewell, Down in Porto Rico With a Kodak (New Haven: The Record Publishing Co., 1898); Charles H. Rector, The Story of Beautiful Porto Rico (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1898); Trumbull White, Our New Possessions (Boston: J. Q. Adams & Co.. 1898); U.S. Adjustant-General's Office, Military Arts in Porto Rico (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1898); Picturesque Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines (Springfield. OH: Mask, Crowell, & Kirkpatrick, 1989); Henry K. Carroll, Report on the Island of Porto Rico: Its Population, Civil Government, Commerce, Industries, Productions, Roads, Tariff, and Currency (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899); Jose de Olivares, Our Islands & Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil (St. Louis: N.D. Thompson Publishing Co., 1899); Albert G. Robinson, The Porto Rico of To-Day: Pen Pictures of the People & the Country (New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1899); William Dinwiddie, Puerto Rico: Its Conditions and Possibilities (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1899); Frederick A. Ober, Puerto Rico and Its Resources (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1899); Margherita Arlina Hamm, Porto Rico and the West Indies (Hudson, NY: F.T. Neely, 1899); Charles Morris. Our island Empire:A hand-book of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands (Philadelphia: J.P. I .ippincott Co.. 1899); The Commercial Guide & Business Directory of Porto Rico (New York: Fe Platt, 1899); Oscar P. Austin, Uncle Sam's Soldiers (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1899); Henry Garrett. A Gazetteer of Porto Rico (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901); Marian M. George, A Little Journey to Cuba and Porto Rico: for Intermediate & Upper-Grades (Chicago: A. Flanagan Sr. Co., 1901); Hezekiah Butterworth, Traveller tales of the Pan-American Countries (Boston: D. Ests & Co., 1902); Edward Stratemeyer, The Young Volcano Explorers: American Boys in the West Indies (Boston: Lee & Skpard, 1902); .loseph B. Seabury, Porto Rico: The Land of the Rich Port (New York: Silver, Burdett & Co., 1903); A. J. D. Wedemeyer, Our Saphire Seas, or, Cruisin g in the Tropics (New York: E. Hart Printing

44 Co., 1903); Leo S. Rowe, The United States and Porto Rico with Special Reference to the Problems Arising out of our Contact with the Spanish—American Civilization (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1904); Frederick A. Ober, Our West Indian Neighbors: The Islands of the Caribbean Sea (New York: J. Pott & Co., 1904); William F. Willoughby, Territories and Dependencies of the United States: Their Government & Administration (New York: The Century Co., 1905); C. H. Forbes—Lindsay, The Great Antilles: Cuba, Porto Rico, Haiti & Jamaica (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1906); George Waldo Browne, The New America and the Far East: A Picturesque and Historic Description of These Lands & Peoples (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1907); J. Hampton Moore, With Speaker Cannon through the Tropics (Philadelphia: The Book Print, 1907); Howard Benjamin Grose, Advance in the Antilles: The New Era in Cuba and Porto Rico (New York: Young People's Missionary Movement of the U.S. & Canada, 1910); Edgar Watson Howe, The Trip to the West Indies (Topeka, KS: Crate & Co., 1910); Marion Blythe, An American Bride in Porto Rico (New York: Revell, 1911); Alphers Hyatt Verrill, Porto Rico, Past & Present & Santo Domingo of To—Day (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1914); William D. Boyce, The Hawaiian Islands & Porto Rico (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1914); William D. Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies: The Travels & Investigations of a Chicago Publisher in the Colonial Possessions and Dependencies of the US (New York: Rand McNally & Co., 1914); Fred K. Fleagle, Social Problems in Porto Rico (Washington, DC: Heath & Co., 1917); Alphers Hyatt Verrill, The Book of the West Indies (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1917); Janie Prichard Duggan, Child of the Sea: A Chronicle of Porto Rico (Philadelphia: The Judson Press, 1920); Philip Sanford Marden, Sailing South (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1921); Knowlton Mixer, Porto Rico, History & Conditions, Social, Economic & Political (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1926); Arthur James, Thirty Years in Porto Rico; A Record of the Progress Since the American Occupation (San Juan: Porto Rico Progress, 1927); Victor Clark, Porto Rico and Its Problems (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1930); Bailey W. & Justine W. Diffie, Porto Rico: A Broken Pledge (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1931), Richard J. & Elizabeth K. Van Deusen, Porto Rico: A Caribbean Isle (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1931); Trumbull White, Puerto Rico and Its People (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1938), and John Edward Jennings, Our American Tropics (New York: T.Y. Crowell Co., 1938). 6 Examples of this growing postcolonial literature include: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1 978) and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Routledge, 1986); David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991); and Amy Kaplan, "Nation, Region, and Empire," in The Columbia History of the American Novel, Emory Elliot, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 246-266. 7 0n the journalistic coverage of the war, see Charles H. Brown, The Correspondents' War: Journalist in the Spanish—American War (New York: Scribners, 1967); G. J. A. O'Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic 1898 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984), 73-83; and Louis A. Perez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 72-80. 8 The U.S. ambassador in London coined the term. See O'Toole, The Spanish, 17-18. 9 0n the reporting on Puerto Rico's campaign, see Fernando PicO, 1898: La Guerra despues de la guerra (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracdn, 1987), 65-73. 10 A. D. Hall, Cuba: Its Past, Present and Future (New York: Street & Smith Publishers, 1898), 1 70. In the following paragraph Hall predicted: "The result is not problematical. It is assured. The United States will be victorious in the end." 11 For a short biographical sketch of Davis, see his entry in Joseph P. McKerns, ed..

45 Biographical Dictionary ofAmerican Journalism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989), 168-69. 12 Richard Harding Davis, The Notes of a War Correspondent (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910), 237-63. Another chapter is titled "The Japanese–Russian War—Battles I Did Not See," 213-36. 13 Richard Harding Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Presses, 1970 [1898]). 14 O'Toole, The Spanish, 78-79, and Fernando Pia), Cada Guaraguao ... Galeria de los oficiales norteamericanos en Puerto Rico (I 898 1 899) (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracan, 1 998), 29-32. ' 5Albert Gardner Robison, The Porto Rico of Today (New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1899), preface. I Trumbull White, United States in War with Spain and the History of Cuba (Chicago: International Publishing Co., 1898), 14. I 7 White, United States, 14-15. 18 Trumbull White, Puerto Rico and Its People (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1938). In the preface, White tells the story of how the book took tbrty years to write. 19 William D. Boyce, The Hawaiian Islands & Porto Rico (New York: Rand McNally & Co., 1914) and United States Colonies and Dependencies (New York: Rand McNally & Co., 1914). 211 Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Riders (New York: Putnam. 1990). For a listing of the accounts written by veterans of the 1898 conflict, see Perez, The War of 1898,160-62. 21 Burr Macintosh, The Little I Saw of Cuba (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1899). 22 Sandburg was a private. For brief references to some of these books, see PicO, 1898: La Guerra, 42,48,57,71. 23 See Thompson, Nuestra isia, 9-10, for the biographical details of de Olivares. In his analysis of the book, Thompson does not address how de Olivares's "call forn io" background affect- ed his perception of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Ricans. 24 Estades Font, "Las conferencias de Lake Mohonk," 110-22. 25 See, for example, Efren Rivera Ramos, "The Legal Construction of American Colonialism: The Insular Cases (1901-1922)," Revista Juridica de la Universidad de Puerto Rico 65:2 (1996): 225-328. 26 For his biographical information, see The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1967), XL: 159. 27 R. T. Hill, "Mineral Resources of Porto Rico," U.S. Geological Survey, Annual Report for 1898-99, no.20: 771-78. 28 For details on Rowe's academic and political career, see his entry in National Cyclopedia XVIII: 316-17. 29 Although Clark's preface does not mention Rowe's involvement in the project either as a consultant or as a reader, it seems likely that given Rowe's connection to the island, he would have provided some input. It is interesting to note that another of the authors who wrote about Puerto Rico during this era, William F. Willoughby, served in the institute's Advisory Council at the Hine of the project and is acknowledged in the preface as having commented on the man- uscript. See Clark, Porto Rico, vii viii. "Peter Hulme, "El encuentro con Anacaona: Frederick Albion Ober y el Caribe A utOctono, creadores de historia y progreso," Op. Cit: Revista del Centro de lnvestigaciones HistOricas, no.9 (1997): 107. 31 For details on Ober's biography, see the National Cyclopedia, XLIV: 606; and also, Hulme, "El encuentro con Anacaona," 75-108.

46 32-Ober, Puerto Rico, v. 330n Fewkes's biography, see National Cyclopedia, XV: 32-33. 34 -Prehistoric . . ." Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 51 (394, 1902): 94-109; "Prehistoric . . . Pictographs," American Anthropolo gists 5(3) (1903): 441-67; "Porto Rican Stone . " Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 47 (October 1904): 163-87; and "The Aborigines ... " Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 25:1 (1907): 1-220. 35 Ricardo Alegria, Ball Courts and Ceremonial Plazas in the West Indies (New Haven: Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 1983), 61. 36 This survey had an interdisciplinary group of scholars led by the Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas. See Antonio Lauria-Perricelli, A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology: The Making of the "The People of Puerto Rico" (Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1989), 30-31. 37 For a general description of children's books between 1880 and 1920, see Cornelia Meigs, ed., A Critical History of Children's Literature (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1969 [1953]), 275-392. 38 He wrote this book under the pseudonym Captain Ralph Bonehill. It was published by Donohue Brother (1900). The information comes from Anne Commire, ed., Something about the Author: Facts and Pictures about Contemporary Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People (Detroit: Gale Research, 1971), 1: 208. 39 Each of these series consisted of about four to seven books. Most of the titles are connected to 1898 or Pan-American themes. Commire, Something about, I: 208-09. 411 Oscar P. Austin, Uncle Sam's Soldiers (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1899). Dan Patterson was the protagonist of at least two other Austin novels: Uncle Sam's Secrets (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1897) and Uncle Sam's Children ( New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1906). Dan's lifestyle was described as "following the plow, but devoting his evenings and rainy days to his books and newspapers, which enabled him to keep well in touch with the affairs of the busy world" (pp. 2-3). 41 For a brief biographical sketch of Austin, see The National Cyclopedia, XXIV: 157-58. 42 Oscar P. Austin, Steps in the Expansion of Our Territory (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1903). This book is in the same "Expansion of the Republic" series that included R. A. Van Middeldyk's The History of Puerto Rico (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1898). 43 See The National Cyclopedia, IX: 155-56. 44 Margherita Arlina Hamm, Porto Rico and the West Indies (Hudson, NY: F. T. Neely, 1899) and America's New Possessions and Spheres of Influence (Hudson. NY: F. T. Neely, 1899). 45 For an analysis of Hamm's views on Puerto Rican women see Libia M. Gonzalez, "La ilusiOn del paraiso: fotograflas y relatos de viajeros sobre Puerto Rico, 1898-1900," in Alvarez Curbelo et al., eds., Los arcos de la memoria, 282-85. 46 Consult The National Cyclopedia, 11: I 47 Hezekiah Butterworth, Traveler Tales of the Pan-American Countries (Boston: D. Ests & Co., 1902). 48 For a brief biographical sketch, see The National Cyclopedia, LIT: 404. 49 Harry A. Franck, Roaming Through the West Indies (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1920): 256-303. 50 For a general discussion of why the U.S. was attracted to Puerto Rico, see Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, "Subject People" and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico. 1898-1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press,

47 1994) and Maria E. Estades Font, La presencia militar de Estados Unidos en Puerto Rico 1898-1918: Intereses estrategicos y dominacion colonial (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracdn, 1988): 23-104. 51 For some of the these debates, see Santiago—Valles, "Subject People," and Truman R. Clark, Puerto Rico and the United States, 1917-1933 (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh: 1975 52 See the works cited in note 6. 53 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 54 Kaplan, "Nation, Region," 246-266. 55 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 147-155. 56 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 155. 57 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 148. 58 PicO, 1898,65-73. 59 White, United States in War, 509. "For a critical contemporary assessment of all the military plans for Puerto Rico's invasion, see Robison, The Puerto Rico, 11-25 61 Davis, The Cuban, 303. '2 See, for example, O'Toole's (1984) introduction, where he writes (amon g other things): "God seemed to have taken our side . .." and "as wars go this was a cheap one." See his The Spanish War, 17. 63 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 150. 64 Spurr, The Rhetoric. 15-19. 65 0ber, Puerto Rico, 6-7. 66 0ber, Puerto Rico, 238. 67 Hall, Porto Rico, 47. 68 For a brief discussion of the historical roots of the "bridge" metaphor, see Raymond C. Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (New York: Vintage Books, 19841: 316-19.

6`) The United States, vii. 7t) Rowe, The United States, xi—xii. 71 Rowe, The United States, 18. 72 White, United States in War, 28. 73 Hall, Porto Rico, 8. 74 White, United States in Wa r, 34. '7 Santiago--Valles, "Subject People," 20. 76 Ober, Puerto Rico, 122. 77 Bryan. Our Islands, 1:382. 78 Boyce, United States Colonies, 431. 79 0ne must also remember that prior to the critiques and commentaries of U.S. writers, there were a small number of creole reformers who had argued for change and progress under

48 Spanish colonialism. See, for example, Pia), revoluciem puertorriquefia," 7-20. For example of a pre-1898 discourse regarding the need for intervention and reform of Spanish colonial society from a gender perspective, see Ivette Rodriguez Santana, "Las mujeres y is higiene: la construcciem de `lo social' en San Juan, 1880-1929," in Mario R. Cancel, ed. Ilistoria y genera: Violas y relatos de mujeres en el Caribe (San Juan: AsociaciOn Puertorriquena de Historiadores & Editorial Postdata, 1997), 80-96. 80'Joseph B. Seabury, Porto Rico: The Land of the Rich Port (New York: Silver, Burdett & Co., 1903): 6. 81 Seabury, Porto Rico, 6. 82 Perez, Jr., The War of 1898. 83 See footnote 4 for examples of these kinds of works. 84 Scarano, "Liberal Pacts", 588-89. 85 For a description of this thesis and the subsequent debate it generated, see Lewis Hanke, ed., Do the Americas Have a Common History? (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1964). 86 Ricardo Alegria, Ball Courts, 63. Note on the work in 1915 of Herman K. Haeberlin, an archaeologist in the anthropology section of the Scientific Survey of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands commissioned by the New York Academy of Sciences under the direction of Franz Boas. Other work commissioned by the Smithsonian included the research of Mason, Fewkes, and Ober.