Bridge of Hemispheric Command, Helmsman of the Caribbean: New York City, 1890s–1920s

Kelvin Santiago-Valles

	Figure 1: The USS Arizona in the East River, New York City, 1916; Source: U.S. Navy, Library of Congress.

     Similar to any important port city within historical capitalism, turn-of-the-century New York was a spatial meeting point between one of the world's core countries and the global periphery, as well as a forge shaping relations between those opposite poles of the planet: a critical terrain where people, commodities, and ideas intersected and transmuted. My main objective in this article is to illustrate the importance of not separating two concrete realities. On the one hand, New York City was a regional business center and global commercial hub. On the other hand, there was the city's role as a launching pad for an economic and naval imperialism initially concentrated in the Caribbean Basin and the broader Atlantic. Those operations were vital to the emerging geopolitical strategies known as "the influence of sea power" and "the New Navalism." ¹ Significantly, the area-wide and world-scale operations of that city's port and broader waterfront were a fundamental nexus that pulled together both features of this city. However, to maintain the focus of this article I have had to abstract all those corporate and military operations from the otherwise significant labor and subaltern resistances to such machinations.

The world-trade port of New York and its canal-railroad network

     Since the mid-nineteenth century, port cities increasingly went from being regional trade centers to becoming global sites of traffic, transport, and unequal exchange. New York Harbor is a prime example of this process. The city is located where the Hudson River and the East River salt water tidal strait empty into New York Bay, forming one of the world's largest natural harbors (430 square miles (1,113.7 square km) of water). The city's port is a composite spanning (on the New York side) the waterfronts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The entire complex once featured 1,800 docks, piers, and wharves, as well as more than thirty shipyards.²

     By the 1850s–1860s New York City "sat like a spider in the web of the American economy, drawing resources into the metropolis, transforming them and sending them to places near and far."³ And, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, "the city had become the economic capital of the United States."⁴ In a very real sense, this was the beginning of how the port city of New York became what it is today: namely, the corporate-financial center of the United States and eventually of the entire world market, thus foreshadowing the now famous 1976 Saul Steinberg cover of the New Yorker Magazine.⁵ According to Janet Abu-Lughod, "canals and railroads [partly] explain New York's dominance over its interior hinterland" during this period. But, she says, "the real key to the city's hegemony remained her international role via the port on which converged the canal and rail lines and from which radiated the Atlantic ocean trade."⁶ Although steam railways also expanded in places less geographically favored, the rise of the New York Central Railroad and Hudson River Railroad in the second half of the nineteenth century ensured the commercial predominance of the port of New York. Under the corporate aegis of Cornelius Vanderbilt, this lattice of iron and steel not only connected that city to the world market, but also coupled the rest of New York State to the Upper-Midwest of the United States via the Great Lakes, and connected Long Island Sound to coastal New England.⁷

The Birth of Greater New York City: Transfiguration and social polarization

     The emergent prominence of New York as a port city cannot be separated from that city's expansive reorganization, nor is it detached from the transformation of its economic morphology and internal demography. As Manhattan's population grew and this island's economic activity increased locally, three massive bridges were constructed during 1870–1909 joining Manhattan to Brooklyn and from there to Long Island. Heavy industrial activity (e.g., refineries, petrochemicals, foundries) in Manhattan relocated towards the outlying villages at the time (e.g., Bushwick, Greenpoint, Maspeth), as well towards New Jersey, thus literally laying the groundwork for the unification of Greater New York's five boroughs formalized in 1898.⁸ This was a city experiencing major local transitions and shifts, partly informed by the broader circumstances of a burgeoning (albeit, highly contested) U. S. domination and leadership in a highly unstable Caribbean and turbulent global stage. Thus, the year 1898 not only marked the consolidation of all the five boroughs into "Greater New York City," with Manhattan and Brooklyn having the highest population densities, but also marked the rise of U.S. expansionism into the Caribbean. That concentration process was not simply an administrative consolidation, operating under the mayoral system and the borough presidents, and supplemented by the "machine politics" of special districts and local authorities. It was also, from the 1880s to the 1920s, a consolidation and metamorphosis of physical space with a shift from elevated-street railways to the subway system and the monumental inter-connecting bridges mentioned above.

     Running parallel to the physical transfiguration that was taking place in the financial fulcrum of the U.S. economy—that was, in turn, becoming an emergent world city—was the enormous socio-economic and ethno-racial polarization within the city itself. The city came to densely house a massive multiethnic workforce. As leading-sector heavy industries (e.g., iron foundries) were increasingly displaced to the suburbs and outer boroughs, the void was filled by relatively small individual firms employing at most a dozen or so workers. These smaller firms were mostly light-manufacture sweatshops (e.g., garment, printing, furniture, cigar making), transportation (in particular the dockyards, significantly), petty commerce, but also low-end personal and business services (e.g., domestic and janitorial work, hotels, the food industry). Already by the 1880s and into the 1920s, "more than half of the city's working population was foreign-born, providing New York with the largest immigrant labor force on earth."⁹ In the words of Matthew Frye Jacobson, until the early-1920s much of that laboring mass had been classified as "inconclusively white," i.e., Southern and Eastern Europeans (Catholic, Jewish, and Greek-Orthodox).¹⁰ This "hodge-podge of nationalities"¹¹ represented the full spectrum of cheap labor. During the 1890s–1910s that labor pool was joined by dispossessed and overwhelmingly non-white laborers originating in the Hispanic Caribbean: especially of Puerto Rican origin but also arriving from Cuba, as a result of the Spanish-[Cuban-Filipino-]American War[s]. Workers associated with similar populations from the rest of the Antilles also appeared alongside the growing number of African Americans migrating from the U.S. South. By the 1910s this monumental influx of Black and Brown low-wage workers was spurred by the U.S. labor shortages and Caribbean subsistence crises accompanying the First World War. Corporations often had business recruiters travel directly to the home territories of these racially subordinate peoples to enlist both Caribbean and African American laborers: e.g., in 1919 the American Manufacturing Co. started bringing over Puerto Rican women to work in this company's Brooklyn string manufactures.¹²

     On the other hand, the flight of heavy industry from Manhattan also left in its wake local business enterprises that became the headquarters of huge conglomerates. Occupationally, the latter transformation explains why New York City during 1898–1945 also "contained the largest concentration of architects, bankers, lawyers, consulting engineers, industrial designers and corporate officials in the continent" and by 1892 had "30 percent of the extreme wealth holders in the [entire] United States,"¹³ virtually all of European descent. These income-related and ethno-racial shifts are additional factors that cannot be separated from the continental and global rise of the port city of New York.

Maritime trade and "the capital of capitalism"

     The rise of New York as a premier port went hand in hand with how that city became a global business center in general and the seat of international banking in particular. Both characteristics materialized within the late-nineteenth century context of Great Britain's Belle Époque as hegemon within the capitalist world-system.¹⁴ Between the decade following the Civil War and the end of the First World War, the United States made major inroads regarding the industrial and military aspects of a British global hegemony already showing signs of protracted decline by the 1880s–1890s.¹⁵ This is evident in the momentum of U.S. manufacturing among leading sectors of global industrial production, as well as the trend-setting role of the North American colossus in corporate forms of entrepreneurial organization and in the industrialization of war. The most significant advances in this regard unfolded in the financial realm, when the United States was able to pay off its foreign debt with Great Britain by 1918. Simultaneously benefitting at that time from its preeminent role in controlling the world's gold reserves, U.S. banking was able to surpass the UK in foreign loans to other countries.¹⁶ After the First World War, New York City became the very heart and brain of the U.S. corporate body and most especially of its principal financiers.¹⁷ But that city, to paraphrase Kenneth Jackson, had not simply become "the capital of [U.S. finance] capitalism."¹⁸ When the 1929 crash precipitated the Great Depression, Wall Street's relatively swift recuperation denoted "the beginning of New York's leadership of the world."¹⁹ This was how New York emerged as the leading city of one of the two major contenders for global hegemony within the entire capitalist world-economy, Germany being the other one.

     That leadership was inextricably connected to New York City's predominant role in a global commerce that then was pivoting on maritime trade. The new steam-driven nautical technology was one of the building blocks of New York as a world-class banking center, transnational business hub, and emergent world city. By the 1880s–1890s most U.S. raw materials and agricultural goods exported to Western Europe and most European manufactured goods entering the United States, along with most of the migrant labor from Europe and the Caribbean, passed through the port complex of New York City.²⁰ Then again, the steady rise of the port of New York had been evident throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, such that at the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, two-thirds of U.S. imports and one-third of its exports were already circulating through New York City.²¹ By 1910, New York had consolidated its position as the busiest port in the entire world.²² This market leadership further solidified in 1921 with the creation of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. According to Janet Abu-Lughod, "Throughout the 1920s, an average of twenty-five million long tons of bulk and general foreign trade goods per year had passed through those ports, which accounted for more than a quarter of all such tonnage through American ports."²³

	Figure 2: Sands Street entrance to Brooklyn Navy Yard, 1905 (glitter-coveredpostcard); Source: Souvenir Post Card Co., New York.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard from the "Spanish-American" War to the First World War

     In view of the inter-imperial rivalries leading up to The Great War, the new strategies associated with the use and construction of battleships became increasingly more important for securing U.S. regional and global supremacy in the realm of international trade, corporate investments, and political influence. As part of "the New Navalism," the deployment of in-ship heavy cannons allowed the most industrialized war fleets to depend less on port-based heavy artillery and in this way redrew the map of the world. In the case of the United States this shift enabled a combat strategy that transcended mere coastal defense and made it possible to defeat of the Spanish navy in two oceans.²⁴

     One of New York City's main shipyards at this time was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which contained the third oldest dry-dock in the United States and came to span more than 200 acres (0.81 km²) at the height of its warship production. In 1907–1909 the yard built the USS Connecticut which became the flagship of the Great White Fleet of twenty-six vessels that circumnavigated the globe on a two-year tour, marking the inauguration of the United States as a global power. In 1915, the Brooklyn Navy Yard also launched the USS Arizona, then the largest ship in the entire U.S. armada.²⁵ New York's contribution to U.S. naval ascendency and corporate domination was also reflected in the city's relationship to the Caribbean Basin at the turn of the century. That was how New York City became a transshipment point for materiel and financial ventures sent to guarantee the socio-economic transformation of a zone that soon would come to be called the "American Mediterranean" as established in the lead-up to the Spanish[-Cuban-Filipino-]American War and in its immediate aftermath.

     In 1889, the USS Maine was launched in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the very same battleship whose explosion in La Habana harbor provided a rationale for the United States declaration of war on Spain. Camp Black, on Long Island's Hempstead Plains, was established in March of 1898 to support U.S. military campaigns against Spanish forces. Troops "A" and "C" of the New York Volunteer Cavalry were among those mustered at this camp and later shipped to Puerto Rico, participating in the U.S. invasion and occupation of that island. In April-1898 the warship USS Harvard departed from New York harbor and did several tours that year, transporting reinforcements and provisions to U.S. troops in Cuba, eventually being decommissioned in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The recently created Northern Patrol Squadron was in charge of protecting the wartime East Coast of the United States from Maine to Delaware, aided by the naval militia of the Auxiliary Naval Force headquartered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.²⁶

Financing the economic overhaul of the Caribbean

     After 1898 New York City's banking and investment firms became fundamental to the socio-economic transformation of the Antilles. Playing a major role with regard to Puerto Rico in 1900–1914 were New York City firms such as Muller, Schall, & Co., Mutual Life Insurance Co., and prominent Boston financiers like Kidder, Peabody, & Co. By the 1920s, much of this activity had been consolidated under the command of the National City Bank of New York and the Morgan Guaranty Trust. ²⁷ Muller, Schall, & Co, which in 1900 established the South Porto Rico²⁸ Sugar Company, also co-founded in 1899 the American Colonial Bank of Porto Rico. Since its arrival, this bank was the depository of both all federal funds transferred to the island and of all the operating reserves of the colonial government.²⁹ Having the second largest number of financial holdings on this island by 1901, the American Colonial Bank in 1910 became the premier banking institution in Puerto Rico.³⁰ More generally, amassing banking operations in the hands of U.S. corporations greatly limited the options of local entrepreneurs, especially those who were not North Americans:

Businessmen in the Island understand full well, for example, that mainland funds are indispensable if they are to operate effectively. As a result they call on local banks regularly to "put them in funds" in New York City. Or, as it is often the case, they carry bank accounts directly with New York and other mainland institutions. Local banks know all this and are very conscious of the fact that if they are to remain directly effective instruments in the economic life of the Island, they have no alternative other than to link themselves up in one way or another with mainland institutions, especially in New York City, which is Puerto Rico's principal trading partner, in order to have "dollar exchange" available when needed…"³¹

     All of these financial corporations were instrumental in the concentration and centralization of property in Puerto Rico, as well as in the rest of the Caribbean Basin, by steering the consolidation of regional sugar-cane and tobacco sectors into the hands of U.S. businesses.³² Moreover, this same concentration and centralization of property contributed considerably to the colossal expropriation of the rural poor in those islands, driving large numbers of them to migrate at this time to the United States and New York City in particular. Such was the case of the entire U.S. sugar industry.

The U.S. "Sugar Kingdom's" New York Throne

     At the end of the Civil War sugar refining was one of New York City's leading industries and through the late-nineteenth century sugar-related enterprises occupied a significant place in this city.³³ In 1872, "59 percent of the raw sugar imported from abroad was processed in New York," while in 1887, "New York refined 68 percent of the sugar consumed in the United States."³⁴ The American Sugar Refining Company became the leading corporation in sugar refining and by 1907, along with the other half of the U.S. Sugar Trust, the National Refining Company, controlled or owned ninety-eight percent of the sugar processing capacity in the whole United States.³⁵ Most of this processing occurred in only three refineries, the largest of which, the Mollenhauer Sugar Refining Company, was built in Brooklyn in 1892.³⁶ The Mollenhauer Corporation was not simply a key executive-board link within the U.S. Sugar Trust. Through the New York City bankers B. H. Howell, Son & Co. (which had financed the Brooklyn Refining Company), the Mollenhauer firm handled the largest purchases of raw sugar from the Caribbean and the corollary sales of refined sugar.³⁷

     More importantly, after 1898 the business group managing the Mollenhauer refineries and B.H. Howell, Son & Co. established a strong grip on the largest sugar enterprises in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic into the 1930s.³⁸ Between 1914 and 1920 Thomas A. Howell, Director of B. H. Howell, Son & Co., was simultaneously Vice-President and Director of the National Sugar Refining Company, Director of the Aguirre Sugar Co. of Porto Rico, Vice-President and Director of the Cuban American Sugar Company, and Director of the Fajardo Sugar Company of Porto Rico. Throughout those years Frederick S. Armstrong, Lorenzo D. Armstrong, and James Bliss Coombs (attorneys at the Wall Street law firm L. W. & P. Armstrong) were top board members at the Fajardo Sugar Co. of Porto Rico and at the West India Sugar Finance Corporation—titleholder of more than a few plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba—where Lorenzo and Frederick Armstrong were also associated with Thomas A. Howell.³⁹

Robber barons and imperial bureaucrats

     In the course of these decades a number of other renowned businessmen connected to this sugar monopoly, to maritime commerce more broadly, and/or to New York City came to perform equally important functions pertaining to U.S. expansionism in the Caribbean Basin. For example, the prominent New York corporate lawyer, Elihu Root, played a major role in the creation of the U.S. Sugar Trust under the aegis of the Havemeyers during 1887–1891.⁴⁰ While, as Secretary of War under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root became the chief architect of U.S. imperial strategies in the Caribbean and the Pacific in the aftermath of the War of 1898. James Howell Post, on the other hand, was senior partner at B. H. Howell, Son & Co., becoming "the most influential U.S. investor in sugar plantations after 1898" and "an important linchpin in the machinery of the American sugar empire" in the Hispanic Antilles.⁴¹ Post pursued some of these operations through his board membership in the American Colonial Bank of Porto Rico and as one of the directors of both the Aguirre Sugar Co. of Porto Rico and of the Fajardo Sugar Company of Puerto Rico, as well as Vice-President and Treasurer of the Cuban American Sugar Company; by 1905 he was the presiding officer of the National Sugar Refining Company.⁴²

     But an even clearer example of such connections was Charles H. Allen, another close associate of the Wall Street magnate and international financier, J.P. Morgan. From 1898 to 1900, Allen was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and during 1900–1901 he was appointed by the President of the United States to be the first civilian colonial governor of Puerto Rico "during the period when the largest U.S. sugar companies first established themselves there."⁴³ Throughout his tenure as colonial governor, crucial legislation was introduced enhancing the massive dispossession of the local peasantry, thus significantly increasing the pool of destitute "native" labor available to the sugar companies and other U.S. corporate interests in Puerto Rico, in North America and in New York City in particular, while accelerating the incorporation of that island into the production circuits of the United States.⁴⁴

     Moreover, Allen was the first colonial governor to oversee a U.S. Congressional statute—namely, the Foraker Act (whose intellectual author was Elihu Root)—that among other things obliged all maritime trade between the United States and Puerto Rico to be carried by U.S. shipping lines,⁴⁵ a commerce where the port of New York played a significant role. "Following its passage, the prices of imported goods [in Puerto Rico] rose, because the U.S. merchant fleet was more expensive than that of other countries," despite the fact that "incomes were substantially lower in Puerto Rico than in any state in the United States."⁴⁶ Such measures further catalyzed the pauperization of the laboring poor majorities on this island and stuffed the coffers of U.S. shipping companies, some of them linked to New York business firms. Allen's notoriously corrupt administration favored U.S. enterprises in additional ways: he plundered this island's treasury, channeling those funds to finance the top salaries for U.S. colonial bureaucrats, as well as to secure no-bid contracts for U.S. businesses and railroad subsidies for U.S. sugar plantations.⁴⁷ That circle was closed when, upon leaving Puerto Rico, Allen became Vice-President of both the Guaranty Trust Company of New York and of the Morgan Guaranty Trust. Not later than 1910 he was also treasurer of the American Sugar Refining Company, which he later presided over during 1912–1915.⁴⁸

     More generally, the loan policies of New York banks contributed immensely to the expansionism of the United States around the Caribbean Basin—in relation to military activities (naval, in particular) and economic interests—by saddling U.S. neo-colonial dependencies there with impossible debt burdens by way of currency manipulations. The resulting precariousness and corruption was repositioned to justify U.S. gunboat diplomacy, purportedly to stabilize the local political situation and investment climate. That was the 1908 case of the Speyer and Company's loans to Cuba, the 1913 National City Bank of New York's loans to the Dominican Republic, as well as the 1922–1923 New York bank loans to Nicaragua and again to the Dominican Republic.⁴⁹

Conclusion

     To a greater extent than the major port cities of other world powers, New York at this time not only catalyzed global commodity trade. More importantly, New York City in general and the Brooklyn Navy Yard in particular expedited the industrialization of war: from the mass production of battleships to the introduction of long-distance networks enabling the transport of troops and supplies. Closely tied to Wall Street banking, to the Sugar Trust, and to other corporate driving forces, this was how U.S. "Big Stick" policies were imposed on the Caribbean Basin, by this means safeguarding U.S. loans and investments in the region.

     Likewise, this was how port cities like New York took the lead in that era's globalization processes. New York in particular turned into a pivotal military node and socioeconomic intermediary between, on the one hand, the Caribbean colonial and neo-colonial hinterlands of the United States and, on the other hand, the rest of the imperial metropole. All told, New York City guided the process whereby both regions would be substantially restructured and even more indissolubly bound to the rest of the capitalist world-economy under a budding U.S. hegemony.

Kelvin Santiago-Valles is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University-SUNY. His first book was "Subject People" and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947 (1994); has recently completed book manuscript, titled Rethinking Race, Labor, and Empire: Global-Racial Regimes and "Primitive" Accumulation in the Historical Long-Term. Latest book chapters appeared in: Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, and America's Decline (2012), Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (2009), Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean (2008), and La régulation sociale entre l'acteur et l'institution. Pour une problématique historique de l'interaction (2005). He can be contacted at stgokel@binghamton.edu.

¹ Rolf Hobson, Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 71–82, 154–177, 303.

² Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1939); Richard McKay, South Street: A Maritime History of New York (New York: Haskel House Publishers, 1934).

³ Sven Beckett, "The Making of New York City's Bourgeoisie, 1850–1886," Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1995, 30.

⁴ Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment (University of Illinois Press, 1982), 178.

⁵ See: http://mapdesign.icaci.org/2014/10/mapcarte-296365-view-of-the-world-from-9th-avenue-by-saul-steinberg-1976/ ; http://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/

⁶ Janet Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 37.

⁷ T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 382–416, 433–436; http://ethw.org/Grand_Central_Terminal, viewed December 5, 2013.

⁸ Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, 71, 77–81.

⁹ Kenneth T. Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism: The New York Metropolitan Region, 1890–1940," in Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 323.

¹⁰ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of Another Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

¹¹ Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism," 323.

¹² Cited in History Task Force, Sources for the Study of Puerto Rican Migration–1879–1930, (New York City: Hunter College-CUNY, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 1982), 144.

¹³ Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism," 321–322.

¹⁴ Beverly Silver and Giovanni Arrighi, "Polanyi's 'Double Movement': The Belle Époques of British and U.S. Hegemony Compared," Politics and Society, 31, no.2 (June, 2003), 331–334.

¹⁵ "The first phase [of the transition from British to U.S. hegemony] corresponds to the crisis of British hegemony under the impact of the Great Depression of 1873–96. In the course of the depression, great-power rivalries intensified, military-industrial complexes too powerful for Britain to control through its traditional balance-of-power policy emerged, and a systemwide financial expansion centered on Britain took off. These tendencies came to a head with the outbreak of the First World War, which marks the beginning of the second phase of the transition," namely complete hegemonic breakdown. However, "the breakdown of the old hegemonic order did not translate immediately into the emergence of a new order. The U.S.-centered world order only emerged in the third and concluding phase of the transition," which came about as a result of "the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the consolidation of the Soviet Empire in Eurasia." Giovanni Arrighi, Po-keung Hui, Krishnendu Ray, and Thomas Reifer, "Geopolitics and High Finance," in Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver, Chaos and Governance in the World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 64, 66.

¹⁶ Ibid., , 69, 72–74, 78

¹⁷ Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, 71.

¹⁸ Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism."

¹⁹ Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th –18^th Century: vol.III: The Perspective of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 272, emphasis in original.

²⁰ http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/research_collections/research/history/hisportofnewyork.html, viewed December 5, 2013; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_York_City_transportation, viewed December 6, 2013.

²¹ Jaher, The Urban Establishment, 177.

²² Floyd S. Corbin, "Water Frontage Around New York," The New York Times, April 3, 1910, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50814F63F5417738DDDAA0894DC405B808DF1, viewed January 10, 2014.

²³ Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, 188–189.

²⁴ Hobson, Imperialism at Sea.

²⁵ "Inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard," 2009, http://www.thirteen.org/thecityconcealed/2009/01/26/inside-the-brooklyn-navy-yard/, viewed January 2, 2014.

²⁶ New York [State] Adjutant General's Office, New York in the Spanish-American War, 1898, vol.I (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company Printers, 1902), 253–254, 271, 275, 337; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Harvard_(1888), viewed November 28, 2013; https://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/spanAm/NYNM/spanAm_NYNMIndex.htm, viewed November 28, 2013; Spence Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 665.

²⁷ Kelvin Santiago-Valles, "Subject People" and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 39 and passim.

²⁸ As a result of the War of 1898 and the concomitant imperial hubris, official U.S. government documents, corporate trademarks, and mass media publications, tended to refer to this island as "Porto Rico," albeit the name change was by no means consistent.

²⁹ Annual Register of Porto Rico-1901 (San Juan: Press of the San Juan News, 1901), 143; Angel Sanz, Reseña histórica de la banca en Puerto Rico (Río Piedras, PR: Departamento de Instrucción Pública, 1969), 9; César Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 115–116.

³⁰ Annual Register of Porto Rico-1901, 144; Annual Register of Porto Rico-1910 (San Juan: Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1910), 270–271.

³¹ Biagio Di Venuti, Money and Banking in Puerto Rico (Río Piedras: University of Puerto Rico Press, 1950), 25–26.

³² Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 82–116.

³³ Alfred S. Eichner, The Emergence of Oligopoly: Sugar Refining as a Case Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 42–43.

³⁴ Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 29.

³⁵ Havemeyers & Elder Filter, Pan & Finishing House, later known as the American Sugar Refining Company and the Domino Sugar Refinery 292–314 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn. Built 1881–84; Theodore Havemeyer and others, architect (New York: Landmarks Preservation Commission, September 25, 2007; Designation List 936 LP-2268), 10.

³⁶ Jack S. Mullins, "The Sugar Trust: Henry O. Havemeyer and the American Sugar Refining Company," Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1964, 95–96.

³⁷ Eichner, Emergence of Oligopoly, 209.

³⁸ Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 41, 112–115.

³⁹ R.L. Polk & Co.'s Trow New York Copartnership and Corporation Directory, Boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx (New York: Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1914), 49, 308, 1035; Directory of Directors in the City of New York (New York: Directory of Directors Company, 1915), 17, 331, 869, 884; Robert LeC. Hovey, The Manual of Statistics: Stock Exchange Hand-book (New York: Commercial Newspaper Company, 1920), 170–171, 198–199.

⁴⁰ Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind the Rise of Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 237.

⁴¹ Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 41.

⁴² File record no. 34, Fondo del Departamento de Estado, Serie Corporaciones con fines de lucro, Archivo General de Historia, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Eichner, The Emergence of Oligopoly, 209–210, 222–226; Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 109, 114–115.

⁴³ Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 46.

⁴⁴ Santiago-Valles, "Subject People" and Colonial Discourses, 59.

⁴⁵ James Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 89,

⁴⁶ Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico, 90.

⁴⁷ Thomas Aitken, Jr., Luis Muñoz Marín: A Poet in the Fortress (Signet Books, 1965), 60–61.

⁴⁸ Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom, 45.

⁴⁹ Lester Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898–1934 (Scholarly Resources, revised edition, 2002), 39, 116, 165, 177.