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Shoot-Out on Pennsylvania

Thanks to the actions of themen assigned to protect him, President Harry S. Truman survived a harrowing attempt on his life by two Puerto Rican nationalists.

By Elbert B. Smith

At 7:30 p.m. on October 31, 1950, two dapper gentlemen arrived at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and walked to the nearby Hotel Harris, where they registered separately, as though they were strangers. The front-desk clerk, noting their new suits and dark hats, surmised that the one with the steel-rimmed glasses and kindly face was a divinity student. Actually, the two polite guests were Puerto Rican terrorists who had come to Washington to kill President Harry S. Truman, and with wiser planning and better luck, they might have succeeded.

The would-be assassins were members of the small, volatile Puerto Rican Nationalist Party headed by Pedro Albizu Campos, a Harvard graduate whose exposure to racism in the American Army during World War I had left him an embittered advocate of the Caribbean island’s independence through violent revolution. Although the Nationalist Party had failed miserably at the polls and fielded no candidates after 1932, its members had remained convinced that their cause would triumph.

While most Puerto Ricans rejected Albizu Campos’s extremist policies, many shared his feelings toward the United States. For years a wide gulf had existed between the poor majority of the island’s population and the wealthy minority. Successful American efforts to eradicate various diseases had spurred a population explosion that often erased economic gains as fast as they occurred. Simultaneously, because the United States had granted the island no real self-government until the 1940s, Washington could be held at least partly responsible for difficulties within Puerto Rico. American missionaries, teachers, and physicians worked unselfishly to aid Puerto Rican citizens, but they could not solve all the problems, and the goodwill they created was often offset by unfortunate incidents.

One such episode occurred when a young American doctor named Cornelius Rhoads, who was conducting research in the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan, wrote an ill-advised letter that a technician found and gave to Albizu Campos. The island, the doctor had written, needed “not improved health but . . . something to exterminate the entire population . . . .” Rhoads insisted that he was being facetious, and an investigation proved that none of his patients had been mistreated. Nonetheless, Albizu Campos and the Nationalists bitterly resented the United States for its refusal to punish the physician for his comments.

Although the Nationalists were weakened after 1932 by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts to help the Puerto Rican people, Albizu Campos announced a new government on the island with himself at its head and organized a black-shirted army of liberation. During the next two decades the party’s tactics included bombings, assassinations, and pitched battles with the police. Its violent methods did not win it popular support but did intensify the dedication of the faithful. Ironically, the Nationalists received financial aid from several wealthy Puerto Rican landowners who were chafing under the reforms of the New Deal.

Among the Nationalist Party’s true believers in 1950 was 36-year-old Oscar Collazo. In 1932, at the age of 18, Collazo had traveled to his native Puerto Rico after several unhappy months working at the Army and Navy Club in New York City. Soon after hearing an impassioned speech by Albizu Campos and learning of Dr. Rhoads’ insulting letter, Collazo dedicated his life to the Nationalist Party. He returned to New York, where he married Rosa Mercado, a divorcée with two daughters, who was herself a devoted nationalist.

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