Publication Information: Publication Title: This Is My Own. Rockwell Kent - author. Publisher: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Place of Publication: New York. Page Number: 329. Publication Year: 1940.

THINGS had happened in Puerto Rico since my brief visit there in 1936 to gather atmosphere and data for my Puerto Rican mural. The general misery and the consequent discontent with the alien rule of the United States and the economic domination of our industrialists--which in 1936 only a blind man could have overlooked--had so consistently contributed to the growth of nationalist sentiment that even Washington in 1937 was to hear of it. "A rabble," Governor Blanton Winship, speaking to me in '36, had termed the Nationalist Party. And with this attitude his acts and the general policy of the administration had been consistent. Had the assassins of a worthy and very popular American official been accorded the relentless justice which was their right and due, the administration would have had for that the full support of the Puerto Rican people. Instead, we shot them without trial; and thereby made them martyrs. The people were consequently more observant and critical of the subsequent trial of the Nationalist leader, Albizu Campos, than they would otherwise have been, inclining to view his extreme revolutionary doctrine as having to some extent been vindicated by the shooting of his followers.

It was on the day preceding the conclusion of the first trial that I arrived for the first time in Puerto Rico. And it was on the following day that, at the invitation of the genial Governor, I attended a cocktail party on the terrace of his mansion and heard of the framing of the second trial's jury. It was one thing to hear a prosecuting attorney for the state assert that for a trial not yet scheduled he had already picked the jury; it was another and more serious matter to learn, as I subsequently did, that the jury actually did include at least some of the names that I had heard. Quite regardless of the merits of the case, the second trial obviously was not fair. I put my evidence of this in affidavit form and sent it, for interment as it proved, to Washington. There in some filing cabinet it abides. And in the filing cabinet which is Atlanta's Federal prison, numbered and fingerprinted for reference, abides, and will abide for sixteen more years, Albizu Campos.

This is no place, this book, to tell the story of the Spanish-American War, of our subsequent occupation of Puerto Rico in the name of freedom; of our repression in the name of freedom of the liberties which Spain had already--formally at least --granted; of our demoralization of their long-established culture and their farm economy; of our exploitation of their resources and the lives of their people. Puerto Rico is not "my own"; it isn't our own. It is the Puerto Ricans' native land. Nor are the principles by which we justify our tenure of it ours--not ours as Americans, as believers in democracy and freedom, in the right of "self-determination." That we may need Puerto Rico for the protection of our shores is another matter. It is doubtless essential to our security and the wellbeing of our sugar barons. We needed a chunk of Mexico: we went to war and got it. We needed the Panama Canal: we set up the Republic of Panama and got it. We need more land down there for self-defense: we've got or soon will get it. The U.S.S.R. needed the Karelian isthmus to protect Leningrad: they got it. Germany, to prosecute a war, needed Denmark and Norway and Holland and Belgium: she got them. England, to protect herself, needed the Faroe Islands: she got them as she has always got what she wanted. We're great go-getters, all of us. Maybe we ought to be: I don't know. But let us not be mealy-mouthed, moralizing hypocrites about it, nor, having got and kept, descend to Nazi inhumanity in our treatment of the conquered. What is ours, now, in Puerto Rico, is full responsibility for all that happens there. And for the tragic event at Ponce on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, we Americans in general and our island administration in particular are to blame.

Of the strong movement for self-determination for Puerto Rico the Nationalist Party, of which the imprisoned Albizu Campos was the leader, was the most uncompromising and verbally intemperate faction. "Rabble" though Governor Winship termed them, they were largely recruited from the better educated classes and included many university students. Albizu Campos is himself a Harvard graduate in law. Some of the younger Nationalists, in the soldiering spirit of boy scouts, had organized what they termed the Army of Liberation, though their self-designation as an army seems to have been as unrelated to the actual bearing of arms as that of the Salvationists. But still they wear a kind of uniform--white pants, black shirt, and jaunty little caps; they drill; and on parade they carry sticks, like guns. Their girl friends, dressed in white, make up a nurses' corps. And what they all want, fervently, is Puerto Rico free.

Parades on Palm Sunday are customary in Puerto Rico. And this Palm Sunday in Ponce, the island's second city, was to be no exception. It was a fine day for a parade: it was spring, and the sky was blue; so people--men, women, and children dressed in their Sunday best--began, as the mid-afternoon hour of parade approached, to gather at that intersection of two streets which was to be the starting point. And the "soldiers" by ones and twos began assembling there. They were proud of their cause, proud of their uniforms; and their white duck pants and the white uniforms and caps of the nurses were newly washed and pressed. The police were there too; lots of them; uniformed, cartridge-belted, and heavily armed with revolvers, carbines, rifles, tear-gas bombs, and submachine guns. They're big men, the police of Puerto Rico; and in the photographs there taken on that day they appear of giant stature. The police were stationed at the intersection and in the four arms of the cross of streets that formed it. They were there, of course, to preserve order; and, it later appeared, to warn non-nationalists away from the scene.
And now came three o'clock. "Fall in!" The young cadets, numbering about eighty, formed in a line of three abreast (the Ponce streets are narrow). Behind them were the nurses. Behind the whole line, and in front of it, two squads of the police now took their places. The band--a little five-piece band-struck up the Puerto Rican hymn, "La Boriqueña." They finished it: the people cheered.
It must be admitted that there had been some confusion over the permit to parade. Although no permit was required, one had been sought, and granted by the mayor. Then, a few hours before the parade was to start, the permit was revoked.
In pursuance of what were actually their rights in Ponce, and of their plans made in accordance with the permit granted them, the cadets refused to call their celebration off. So there they stood: the band had played, the crowd had cheered. "Forward, march!" came the commander's order.
They never marched. Those who, dead or wounded, didn't fall in their tracks ran. The people ran, those able to. Lots of them got away. Eighteen were killed; one hundred and fifty to two hundred were wounded. It was as unprovoked, cold-blooded, and filthy a butchery as any in the all-time list of human cruelties.

One fallen man reached out and touched a wall. He wrote on it: "Viva la República"--"Down with the Assassins." Then he died.

To determine the causes of the unfortunate affair the Civil Liberties Union promptly instituted an investigation. It was conducted, in Ponce, by that distinguished and fair-minded defender of civil liberties, Arthur Garfield Hays. The report of the investigation concludes:

"The facts show that the affair of March 21st in Ponce was a 'massacre."
"Civil liberties have been repeatedly denied during the last nine months by order of Governor Blanton Winship. He has failed to recognize the right of free speech and assemblage. Force has been threatened toward those who would exercise these rights.
"The Ponce Massacre was due to the denial by the police of the civil rights of citizens to parade and assemble. This denial was ordered by the Governor of Puerto Rico."
As the Civil Liberties Union had been prompt to act for civil liberties, so was the Government prompt to act for their suppressors. Eighteen civilians killed, perhaps two hundred wounded. And of the police, less exposed to the fury of stampeding Nationalists than to their own crossfire, two killed. Charged with the murder of one of them, twelve young men, members of the Nationalist Party, were put on trial.

We are all believers in the theory of American justice; from 1920 to 1927, in the course of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and the fruitless agitation that followed it, we and the whole world became increasingly distressed and outraged by its perversion in practice. We watched a simple issue of fact be so stretched and distorted over a period of seven years as to involve at last the religion, morals, and political faith of half the people of the Western world, to end in the crucifixion through the most ignorant and brutal prejudice of a simple hearted fish peddler and a poor shoemaker. And now, in 1937, down in Puerto Rico, an isolated, remote, and little-visited outpost of the American empire, an administration alien to the inhabitants, dictatorial in Its control of them and absolute in Its control of the channels of news to our continent, was to begin the prosecution in Its court, before Its judge, by Its attorneys, of twelve of Its outspoken enemies charged with murderous affront to Its own majesty.

"I'll be judge, I'll be jury,"
Said cunning old Fury:
"I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."

As in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the true issue at Ponce was purely one of fact. And as in that case, the prosecution, lacking completely all direct evidence against the defendants, confronted on the other hand with the most damning eyewitness and photographic evidence of official provocation and murder, resorted to the establishing of such political prejudice in the minds of the jurymen as might sway them to convict. It was therefore open to the defense, and expedient for them, to introduce against the prosecution whatever testimony to official prejudice and injustice the court would admit. Of that nature, and fully as relevant to the case as much of the atmosphere which the prosecution had introduced, was my knowledge of the framing of the Albizu Campos jury. I was asked by the defense counsel to go to Puerto Rico and testify. Having already planned a plane trip to Brazil that would take me en route to Puerto Rico, and at just the time that I was wanted there, I promptly accepted.

Leave New York in the evening; tilt back your chair, stretch out your legs, and sleep. And in the gray dawn wake up in Miami. Shall we ever get accustomed to the wonder of it? Prompt to greet me in the Pan-American waiting room was an acquaintance of my earlier Puerto Rican visit, the marshal of the United States Federal Court in Puerto Rico. Good fellow; I liked him, and still do. And he was glad to see me again, and glad we'd be together on the long day's trip to the island. We found a seat together on the plane and settled ourselves in comfort. They removed the gangplank, closed the hatch; the propellers roared, the ship moved from the wharf and taxied down the wind; it came about. There was a moment's pause, and for all of us an expectant tension like that of runners at the starting line. Then with a renewed and deafening roar of the propellers and a tearing of the sea against our sides we leapt ahead. Faster and louder, pounding on the wave crests, and the bow wave mounting high against the windowpanes; then almost suddenly the wave dropped down, the tearing sound subsided, the pounding stopped; smoothly upon our motionless wings we soared away.
"And here we are!" said the marshal, clapping me genially upon the knee. "Both bound to Puerto Rico, and you going on to Brazil. I don't see why you stop off at all. I wouldn't. Great trip, that down to Rio. Why do you stop? I tell you, sir, I wouldn't. No, sir! Not I; not if I could help it. You're not going to Ponce by any chance? Holy smoke! keep away from there. Now listen, Mr. Kent; I'm going to tell you some things as a friend. Don't misunderstand me; it's none of my business, of course, but I don't want anything to happen to you. Here, let's have a drink!" The marshal, God bless him, had a pint. We drank.

It was a beautiful morning, and the purple shadows of the scattered clouds spotted the light green of the shallow sunlit sea. It was nice to look out of the window, and it was nice to chat with my good friend, the marshal. "Yes, sir," said the marshal. "I'm going to talk to you as a friend. I like you; liked you the minute I first saw you. And I'm not going to let you get into any trouble. Now listen: Don't leave the plane at Puerto Rico. If you do, your life will be in danger the minute you set foot on land."
The marshal was a most entertaining companion, and, with his pint, a generous one. He told me a lot about the villainy of the Nationalists, their murderous lawlessness. He told me of having worn a bullet-proof vest when he conducted Albizu Campos from the court to prison. "If you go to Ponce," he said, "it will precipitate another massacre. Mark my words: Don't go to Ponce. Listen," he said, "you got in with the wrong crowd down here. I'll steer you right. I'll tell you what! Let me put you up at the Condado Hotel with me. I'll look out for you. We'll have a good time, you and I. Here, let's have another drink."

The marshal's arguments against the Nationalists and the men on trial at Ponce were unfortunately wasted upon me. I didn't know much about the Nationalists, and I cared less. I knew little then about the case of the defendants at Ponce, and its merits would not qualify my giving evidence against a Federal prosecutor. Why hadn't someone superior to him in authority seen to it long ago that I was called as a witness against him? Why did only the Nationalists want the truth? "And look here: just who is it that's going to kill me? Not the Nationalists, for I'm their witness. You don't mean to tell me that the police, or the government forces, or the angelic, peace loving 'best people' of Puerto Rico would do it? Just who are these gangsters who would kill a witness against the state?" What was the marshal's own motive? He was unquestionably too good a man to lend himself to the intimidation of a witness. Yet either it was that, or--quite unthinkable--knowing Puerto Rico, he really thought the partisans of those in power would murder me. Dear marshal, take your choice.
"At any rate," said the marshal as we taxied toward the float in San Juan, "stick close to me as we go ashore. See! Look at that crowd. I tell you, stick with me."
I looked at the crowd and it was quite a big one. I turned to the marshal, reached out, and felt his ribs. "No, no," I said, "if you'd had that bullet-proof vest on it would be different. But as it is, I couldn't let you risk your life."
I've an obsession to be the first to get on and first to get off: first on a train, first off it; first up the station platform, first in the taxi line. It's silly, but I can't help it. I was the first down the gangplank, and the first by fifty feet up the long ramp, brushing the noses of the crowd massed along its rail, and into the customs house. And when the marshal arrived at my side my bag was already being examined.
"A telegram for you, sir," said an inspector, handing me a yellow envelope. I tore it open, glanced at it, and seeing that it was in Spanish, started to hand it to the marshal to translate for me, when three words caught my eye. I knew those words. I folded the message and put it into my pocket. There, for the time being, let it lie.

The inspector stamped my bag. I shut it, picked it up, patted the good marshal on the back, strode to the waiting room door, opened it, walked through, and let it shut behind me--and found myself confronted, and in a moment surrounded, by a clapping, cheering crowd. And when five minutes later, the crowd again clapping and cheering at the conclusion of one of the several addresses of welcome that were made to me, the door behind me opened to admit the marshal, he took one hasty look around, and like a kitten that had strayed into a pack of terriers, scurried for the friendly cover of the great outdoors. "So long!" I waved to him.

The banquet that was tendered me that night was not at the fashionable Condado Hotel. And the marshal was not at the banquet. Neither, for that matter, was Governor Winship, nor any administration official, nor a single representative of the great Puerto Rican sugar interests. Not one of these was there --except by proxy. By proxy all were there.
Proxy No. 1: An editorial printed in English and Spanish and covering a full page of the evening newspaper, El País. It called me every kind of thug and gangster, and was so quaintly adolescent in its style and choice of invective that, knowing El País to be the mouthpiece of the Governor and the administration, one had the ghastly thought that we had consigned the life of a people to the rule of mental defectives.
Proxy No. 2: An open letter, printed and widely distributed, so rash and intemperate in its denunciation as to be unquestionably libelous. (What fun we could have had if Puerto Rico had not been so far from home!) The letter was signed by thirteen gentlemen "and others." None of us knew who the "others" were, but the thirteen, to a man, were big plantation owners.
Proxy No. 3: For this I had to dig in my own pocket and bring out the yellow envelope with its telegram. Here it is: O JUSTICE!
Haciendo eco del pueblo de Puerto Rico, declaramosle persona non grata.
"This is to inform you in the name of the people of Puerto Rico that you are persona non grata." And who, what sort of man, had written this? Well--guess. We have had, in Proxy No. 1, the Governor and the American administration; in Proxy No. 2, the plantation owners. And in Proxy No. 3 we have a political ally of that senator, Martinez Nadal, who, we may recall, was one of the first Puerto Ricans to attack my mural.

These well-met guests by proxy at my banquet! Life sometimes really is just like a book.
Our arrival next day at Ponce, by motor car, was given startling and unexpected publicity. We had entered the little city and driven through its narrow old-world streets to that intersection which had been the scene, and still bore the gruesome marks, of the massacre. There, just as we slowed down to stop, our driver touched the horn to warn some children playing at the curb. And the horn stuck. It was a good horn, a good loud horn. Its noise was wild and deafening. The driver thumped and pounded it; he shook the wheel; he kicked, he cursed. The thing roared on. People appeared at their windows, came running down the streets; a crowd began to form. The horn kept on. At last the driver, having got his pliers, disconnected it. But we'd arrived: all Ponce knew it now.

A few miles from Ponce, high in the mountains, was the coffee estate of that fine liberal, Don Andreas, who was to be our host. Up narrow, steep, and tortuous roads we drove there, to find ourselves at last in a scene as utterly remote from that unhappy world whose troubles were the occasion of my visit as though an ocean or a thousand miles of wilderness were in between. Why any more than I should Don Andreas be involved in what went on below? And what had all his cultured guests of that week end to do with it--men of various occupations and interests and of all the insular political parties? They had met there, and were as one, as all good men will meet as one when they're confronted by a common enemy. That common enemy was then injustice. That the power behind it was the American administration, and that the same power had been behind other acts of injustice which had brought good Puerto Ricans together, may suggest to us why so many Puerto Ricans, loving justice, desire to be free.

The spirit of independence that is alive in Puerto Rico today is no mushroom growth engendered by the people's recent sufferings. It was born many generations ago of just such grievances against their kings who governed them from overseas as had brought the American colonists to sever their allegiance to King George. The Puerto Ricans, too, had won. Shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Luis Muñoz Rivera, frequently termed the George Washington of Puerto Rico, returned from Spain with a royal charter granting self-government to the island. The charter we, by force, could nullify; and did. The spirit that had fought for it lived on.

The will to freedom and the faith in it which had actuated Muñoz Rivera lived on, that week end in the mountains above Ponce, in the heart and mind of his son, Luis Muñoz Marin, and in the hearts and minds of all who were assembled there. United though they all were in the defense of the Nationalists on trial, the majority, including Muñoz Marin, were far more temperate than the fire-eating Nationalists--more temperate, one was reminded, than the fathers of our own country had shown themselves to be against much smaller grievances. I was reminded of our Revolutionary fathers by the high character of the men and the patriotic fervor of their discussion of the problems of their unhappy country. So must it have been, I thought, in our pre-Revolutionary days. And here and there in America, wherever representatives of the maligned and hunted patriotic minorities are gathered together, so is it now; I know, for I have sat with them. And if the grievances of millions of Americans today (and who will deny them!) are neither foreign nor to be personified in a king, the need of their redress through more democracy is as deeply felt as in the period of our country's birth. Thank God for that!

"If you go to Ponce there will be another massacre," the marshal had warned me. I thought of this as we approached the courthouse, for the preparations for a second auto-da-fé were as complete as a well-organized and -equipped police could make them. It would be hard to say whether the show of force that had been staged would more provoke the masses or intimidate them. Or whether fear--well justified!--or just plain peacefulness and self-restraint prevented someone, somewhere, somehow starting something. But no disturbance--any time throughout the trial--occurred.

We were halted at the door of the courthouse by the police guard stationed there, and while our names were recorded in their guest book we were searched for hidden arms. "Frisked" is the expression, I believe; and in some usage the word means, if the dictionary is correct, "to move sportively, gambol." That, with their fingers, they somewhat offensively did. So that when they'd lingered quite long enough about one part of me, I was moved to remark: "That, gentlemen, is an instrument for the creation of life, not for its destruction." Finished with the police, we mounted a long flight of stairs and entered the courtroom; and--if a buzz of excited interest and eager friendly looks from everyone mean what they should--found ourselves in the midst of an entirely sympathetic populace. After being presented to the twelve defendants I took the place assigned to me among the lawyers for the defense. The jury filed in and got seated. And then, after the perfunctory "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" by the clerk, the door again opened, and--God save us all!--in stalked the very living incarnation of a Daumier judge. Defendants, cross yourselves!

After a few preliminaries I was put upon the stand, in which elevated position I was to remain for three long hours while counsel fought about my presence there. Seduction, slander, and intimidation: the government's repertory of tricks for the obstruction of justice was far from exhausted. Naïvely enough, it was permitted to be published in the press that the prosecuting attorney in the Ponce trial had been in hours-long conference the night before with the very Federal prosecutor of San Juan against whom I had come to testify. They had decided, the press announced, that I would not be allowed to speak. (They have a way, it seems, of settling such things in advance.) I wasn't. With such an outcome all arranged, it seemed unnecessary to spread the additional report that if I did testify I would immediately be put under arrest. I have no doubt they had the warrant all prepared. But no sooner had the defense stated the general purport of my evidence than, upon objection to it by the prosecutor, the jury was sent from the room. Now let the histrionic fun begin. If the proceedings had not been in Spanish, I might have enjoyed them more.

I may not doubt that many brilliant and delightful things were said. That the prosecutor didn't like me and wanted nobody in the court to like me, or God, for that matter, to have any mercy on me now or on my soul hereafter, I concluded from the ferocity of his mien and the extreme unpleasantness of his impassioned features as now and again he'd thrust them in my grinning teeth. I had to grin. When it is not unutterably boring, there is nothing more ludicrous than the pump-handle style of oratory. Nor is there anything more disconcerting to an angry fool than laughter in his face. Even at that, I did get bored; and I happily found some solace in watching four young fellows at athletic exercises in a field adjacent to the court and clearly visible to me on my exalted throne.

Do only poets really know that it is not romantic fantasy that finds a closeness of relationship between the good and the beautiful?
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Don't we find truth as well as beauty in those lines, that we have come to love them so? And isn't it a common experience that one can speak most movingly of what one feels to be most true? The voice of conscience, is it loud? At any rate, the ranting, cheap, bad oratory of the prosecutor did seem to me appropriate to an evil cause and in harmony with those methods for the advancement of that cause which I had come to know without equivocation to be villainous. And when out of the blessed silence that succeeded one full hour of histrionic noise I heard the gentle, modulated tones of the young Negro attorney for the defense, I felt--though I still couldn't understand--that I was listening to the truth. Still--as I write this-I recall that voice as for an hour at least I heard it in that breathless court. In cadences that were responsive to his thought, with a fervor that was heightened by his quiet utterance, he touched through sound alone the full gamut of my own emotions. His countrymen who packed the court, who heard and understood his words and felt with him his cause, sat spellbound. Only the judge--I watched that irreproachable, judicial mask--showed nothing. And at the solemn conclusion of the address, at a moment when it would have been emotionally appropriate for a cathedral organ to play a great recessional and for all--the people, lawyers, judge, and prisoners--hand in hand to file out to freedom, he merely, in a voice like the crackling of paper at a quiet moment of a symphony concert, denied the defense. That settled that. Except that another of the defense counsel proceeded in a most businesslike and efficient way to put my whole testimony, as I had previously given it to him, upon the record and into the cars of the people of Puerto Rico.
After weeks more the trial ended in a disagreement of the jury. The retrial was a quick affair and ended in the full acquittal of the twelve defendants.