Foraker Act, April 12, 1900

On April 12, 1900 Congress replaced military government with a civil organic statute, the Foraker Act, 31 Stat. 77. The law created a governor appointed by the President, an Executive Council, and a House of Delegates elected on the island. It also created the resident commissioner in the United States House, a seat that could speak and could not vote on final passage. That office is lesson 04. This lesson is the civil framework itself.

Foraker did not make the people of Puerto Rico citizens of the United States. It recognized them as citizens of Puerto Rico. That is not a poetic distinction. It is statutory. A person could be born on the island, live under United States authority, and still lack the citizenship that a person born in a state takes from the Fourteenth Amendment. United States citizenship arrives in 1917, by Jones-Shafroth, and even then it is statutory. Do not read Foraker as a naturalization law.

The law also set a tariff and a civil government that answered to Congress. The courts were reorganized. Federal law applied as Congress said it applied. The island was inside the customs and sovereignty map of the United States and outside the set of states. Downes v. Bidwell, the next lesson, will name that condition. Foraker is the statute the Court had to read.

Terms: "organic act" is the basic civil statute of a territory. "Puerto Rican citizenship" is the local civic status that Foraker used, and it did not equal United States citizenship. Those glosses are here so that the later Jones-Shafroth lesson does not get compressed into this one.

The honesty line is the date and the statute number. April 12, 1900. Thirty-one Statutes at Large, page 77. Civil government, yes. Representation of some kind, yes. United States citizenship, no. Whoever dates the island's citizenship to 1898, or to the treaty, skips the organic law that actually wrote the rule. Lesson 05 is the citizenship statute. This one is the civil government that came first.

The numbered finding stays with the public law, the citation, or the scrutiny. This lesson invents no percentage, no headcount, and no date that the sources of this page do not support. The English terms are glossed in the text so the statute reads without a manifesto.

Sources: Ley Foraker, 31 Stat. 77; Ensayo de historia de la Cámara sobre Puerto Rico y Foraker. Freeze 2026-08-22.