Nelson A. Miles Quotes
Our purpose is not to interfere with the laws and customs which are beneficial to your people.
Nelson A. Miles, 1835-1925, General and Commander in Chief of the U. S. Army, Proclamation to Puerto Ricans upon landing at Guanica in the Spanish American War, July 25, 1898
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Sulu was an autonomous island province of the Philippines and at the time, the Philippines were governed by the United States.
McKinley was then Secretary of War and Taft was Chairman of the Commission on the Philippines.
In 1937 the U. S. Treasury Department commissioned a pair of large murals to decorate the lobby or the Ariel Rios Federal Building in Washington DC. On the mural was depicted a U. S. Mail Service from Alaska to Puerto Rico. It showed four Puerto Rican women reading a letter in the Inuit dialect presumably delivered from Alaska. The authorities loved the mural until they discovered the translation of the Inuit letter. This was a direct reference to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Independence Movement. That year 18 Puerto Rican Nationalists were killed and over 100 wounded when police fired into a crowd of demonstrators on March 21. Kent, a famous artist, planted a newspaper story with the translation and soon media all over the company were drawing attention to the Puerto Rican movement, just as Kent had intended.
This was passed in 1787 before the Constitution had become operative, but was then ratified by Congress in 1789. It was one of the first acts of our new nation, and one of the most frequently violated throughout our history.
Nelson Appleton Miles was an American military general who served in the American Civil War, the American Indian Wars, and the Spanish–American War. From 1895 to 1903, he served as the last Commanding General of the United States Army before the office was abolished.
