Citizenship on the eve of the draft

In March 1917, Congress granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. Weeks later, the United States entered the First World War and began drafting the island's newly minted citizens for that fight. No one involved called that coincidence of dates a coincidence, and it is hard to blame them.

The Jones-Shafroth Act, officially "An Act to provide a civil government for Porto Rico," also known as the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1917, was passed by Congress on December 5, 1916 and signed by President Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917, replacing the seventeen-year-old Foraker Act as the island's governing framework.

It replaced the Foraker Act with a broader civil government: a 19-member Senate and a 39-member House of Representatives, both freely elected, although the U.S. president still appointed the executive power and the heads of six major departments, leaving real executive power out of the island voters' hands.

The citizenship it granted came with a real catch, not just a technicality. It made Puerto Rico an "organized but unincorporated" territory, which meant the citizenship did not come packaged with full constitutional rights, including the right to vote for the U.S. president or full representation in Congress.

Reaction on the island was genuinely divided, not uniformly grateful. The Unionist Party had actually opposed extending citizenship as early as 1912 unless statehood came with it, fearing that citizenship without statehood would be used to permanently close any future path to independence, a fear that shaped island politics for decades.

The Act also made English the official language of Puerto Rico's courts, government, and public school system, a policy that would take decades to undo. And because citizenship meant conscription could legally reach the island, about 20,000 Puerto Rican soldiers were serving in the U.S. Army within months of the law's passage. The Jones-Shafroth Act would remain Puerto Rico's principal organic law until the island's own constitution finally replaced it in 1952.

Sources: Ley Jones-Shafroth; Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.