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| 1918, June 2 |
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| The war, thus far rather distant, was suddenly brought home to the Puerto Ricans when a German submarine sank the Carolina on its voyage from San Juan to New York. | 1 |
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| 1924, March |
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| A delegation, including Gov. Horace Towner, came to the U.S. with the request that Puerto Rico be granted the rights of statehood without representation in Congress. | 2 |
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| 1928 |
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| The Puerto Rican legislature petitioned President Coolidge for the grant of autonomy without statehood. Autonomy was desired to provide homesteads for the peasantry, to free the island from U.S. tariff restrictions, and to deal with the problem of absentee landlordism. During the same year Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos founded the Nationalist Party, a small but militant proindependence organization. | 3 |
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| 1930 |
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| Gov. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was forced to appeal to Congress and to private philanthropy to aid the depressed population, of whom 60 percent were without employment. By this point the Puerto Rican economy had been radically transformed by the arrival of the Americans. Coffee, once the island's predominant crop, was supplanted by sugar, which was grown on nearly 50 percent of the island's cultivable land by 1930. American industrialists as well were increasingly exploiting the labor of the island in harsh, low-paying sweatshops. | 4 |
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| 1933 |
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| The Democratic administration in the United States took a greater interest in the Puerto Rican situation. Unemployment on the island was massive, and conditions in general were much worse than on the mainland. The government used measures resembling those employed in the U.S. to deal with the crisis, but relief measures in Puerto Rico were very limited and ineffective. Meanwhile, ever stronger demands for redefinition of status developed in the island. Apart from widespread prostatehood sentiment, a growing and militant nationalist movement aimed at independence. | 5 |
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| 1936 |
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| After the assassination of American police captain Francis Riggs (who a year earlier had been involved in the deaths of the Nationalist Party's labor secretary and several students), Dr. Albizu Campos (who was a great supporter of Franco's Spain and was accused of being a Fascist sympathizer) and the rest of the Nationalist Party leadership were arrested and charged with attempting to overthrow the government. During the ensuing trials and protests that accompanied it, sympathy for the nationalist cause continued to grow. | 6 |
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| 1937, March 21 |
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| During a rally protesting the imprisonment of Dr. Albizu Campos and his leadership, U.S. troops opened fire, killing 20 and wounding many more. In the aftermath, over 2,000 supporters of the Nationalist Party were jailed. | 7 |
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| 1939 |
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| LUIS MUÑOZ MARÍN founded the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), a populist reform party more moderate than the Nationalist Party. The PPD, led by U.S.-educated professionals and intellectuals, and supported by elements of the labor movement, moved away from direct demands for independence and focused its energies on economic and social reform. | 8 |
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| June 4 |
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| A committee of the legislature brought forth a demand for statehood and in the interval “demanded” an elective governor with power to appoint officials. | 9 |
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