Rule by a general

For a year and a half after the Treaty of Paris, Puerto Rico had no legislature and no elected governor. It had a chain of American generals answering to the War Department in Washington, and what they decided for the island simply went into effect, with no local body empowered to object or amend.

Some changes were everyday administration with a political edge. The island's official English name became "Porto Rico," a spelling that stayed in federal usage until Congress changed it back to "Puerto Rico" in 1932. The currency also changed: the peso gave way to the U.S. dollar, a transition formally sealed by 1900 that reordered daily transactions on the island almost overnight.

Other changes went deep, and some were genuinely progressive for the era. The military government decreed freedom of assembly, speech, press, and religion, and set an eight-hour workday for government employees, a labor standard ahead of many U.S. states of the time. It began a public school system, extended the U.S. Postal Service to the island, and expanded roads and bridges over rivers, works that touched daily life more closely than any political debate in Washington.

Some reforms had more to do with controlling public life than with building it. The government lottery was abolished and cockfighting was banned outright, although it would be legalized again in 1933, a turn that points to how much of this early social policy was improvised and not settled.

Politics did not wait for elections to return. Two parties formed almost immediately under military government: the Republican Party, led by José Celso Barbosa, and the American Federal Party, led by Luis Muñoz Rivera. Both, notably, favored annexation or eventual statehood and not independence, which says something about where island political opinion actually stood at the start of this new era.

Military government ended on April 2, 1900, when Congress passed the Foraker Act, effective May 1. Charles Herbert Allen took office that same day as the first appointed civilian governor, a title that sounds like progress and, in a limited sense, was. His appointment still did not come with an election; Puerto Ricans had no say over who held the office.

Even so, it is worth naming what this period actually was: real infrastructure and real reforms, delivered by a government Puerto Ricans had not chosen, in place of the self-government they had barely won from Spain months earlier. Progress and colonialism, for a year and a half, occupied the same office.

Sources: Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.