The "Tobacco Trust" in Puerto Rico: From Cigarette Manufacturing To Agribusiness, 1899-1911

The “Tobacco Trust” in Puerto Rico:
From Cigarette Manufacturing to

Agribusiness, 1899–1911
JUAN JOSÉ BALDRICH
This article examines the transition of the Puerto Rican operations of the
“Tobacco Trust” from a cigarette manufacturing operation in 1899 to an
agribusiness by 1911. The Porto Rican American Tobacco Company
(PRATCO) created monopolistic conditions by absorbing the two major do-
mestic cigarette factories and their former owners as shareholders. When the
American Tobacco Company (ATC) entered the US cigar trade in 1902 in
earnest, the PRATCO initiated an enormous expansion. While the trust never
became a leaf grower save in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Porto Rican Leaf
Tobacco Company (PRLTC) developed sizable plantations of shadegrown to-
bacco for cigar wrappers. When the US Supreme Court mandated the parti-
tion of the ATC in 1911, the PRATCO emerged as a large US cigar
manufacturer with a near monopoly of local cigarettes, and the PRLTC
proved to be the major leaf grower.
IN 1910 ALL 1,979 RESIDENTS OF Barrio Toíta of Cayey, Puerto Rico, were na-
tive born save for three Spaniards and two US citizens. All five men worked
in agriculture, as most of those gainfully employed. While the Spaniards
worked on diversified farms, the other two were employed by a subsidiary of
the American Tobacco Company (ATC), the trust, which had extensive plan-
JUAN JOSÉ BALDRICH, a PhD in sociology from Yale University, is a professor at

the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. His book Sembraron la no Siembra examines
a social movement, similar to the Black Patch Tobacco War, that Puerto Rican tobacco
growers waged against the major leaf-buying firms during 1931–1932. Having done re-
search on Puerto Rican populism, democracy in Jamaica, and the artist Jack Delano, his
articles focus on the social and economic history of tobacco growing and manufacture
in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
© the Agricultural History Society, 2015

DOI: 10.3098/ah.2015.089.1.34
34
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2015 “Tobacco Trust” in Puerto Rico
tations that specialized in shadegrown tobacco. George T. Bullock was a farm

foreman who lived alongside the Carretera Central, by La Plata Valley, in
quarters he shared with George N. Lewis who was the sole farm manager liv-
ing in the barrio. Both were married but their wives were not living with them.1
Bullock and his brother, Walter, were born in Williamsboro, North Car-
olina. Both entered the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic
Arts in 1891 with Walter earning an agricultural degree in 1895, and George
dropping out due to an extended illness. Upon graduation, Walter worked for
a big farming concern in Decatur County, Georgia, where shade tobacco grow-
ing was expanding. George joined Walter in Decatur in 1906, and they at-
tempted to grow tobacco on their own, but lack of working capital forced them
to seek alternate employment. Both, then, worked for the trust from 1909 to
1917 with Walter residing in Aibonito, Puerto Rico, and George in Cayey.
Seemingly, the college training in a major tobacco-growing state served them
well in southwestern Georgia where the brothers must have picked up the tech-
niques of shade growing that they, subsequently, carried to La Plata. The mi-
crocosm the Bullock brothers and the anonymous men and women toiling in
distant tobacco plantations connected to 111 Fifth Avenue in New York City
linking those in Puerto Rico to the head office in the United States.2
US investments in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century were mainly
oriented to export agriculture, financing, services, transportation, and com-
merce. “It has been impossible . . . to verify a single investment by an Amer-
ican company in a manufacturing plant in the entire Caribbean before 1898.”
The scenario changed radically when John Blackwell Cobb, a Tar Heel to-
bacco man and a major figure in the ATC, traveled to Puerto Rico to take ad-
vantage of the window of opportunity opened by the Spanish-American War.
He arrived in San Juan where the partnership of Rucabado y Portela manu-
factured cigarettes in a modern machine-driven plant. La Colectiva, as the
plant was known, was the result of forward integration by Rucabado y Cía., a
merchant partnership that had integrated backward into tobacco growing.3
Together with a group of men connected to his employer, Cobb incorpo-
rated the Porto Rican American Tobacco Company (PRATCO) in Newark,
New Jersey, on September 22, 1899. On October 9 the PRATCO bought La
Colectiva from Rucabado y Portela. By the end of 1899, the ATC held $99,100
of the $166,000 worth of the PRATCO, while Rucabado y Portela owned the
balance. The machine operatives, however, were not satisfied with the deal.
In October 1899 they went on the first of many strikes, denouncing changes
35
Agricultural History Winter
in factory personnel and Rucabado y Portela for the sale that denied them a
reasonable salary increase.4
Within months, in May 1900, the PRATCO bought La Internacional, in-
cluding the factories of Toro y Cía. in Ponce, Puerto Rico, for $153,716.40
on terms similar to those reached with Rucabado y Portela. Toro employed
some five hundred workers in its cigar manufactory in Ponce proper and in
their combined cigar and cigarette operation by Playa de Ponce. The firm had
a yearly production of six million cigars and seventy-five million cigarettes.5
The addition of the two firms to the newly organized PRATCO followed
the ATC’s well-traveled path of acquisitions. The board of directors and the
incorporators included men from the trust with a presence in the island, such
as Cobb and William T. Townes, who went on to become the PRATCO’s first
president in 1899. Townes managed the integration of the plants into the struc-
ture of the ATC. George M. Gales, another Tar Heel tobacco man with ample
experience in the trade, was also an incorporator and member of the first board
of directors. The “rich financial people,” in the words of James B. Duke, while
largely absent from the PRATCO’s board of directors, were all board members
of the ATC, the primary company of the trust in 1904. Duke was the only
member of the six men in control of the trust to join the board of both compa-
nies. These men did not need representation on the board of any subsidiary
company because the ownership structure allowed them full control of the
parent company and, through it, of all others. From 1899 to 1901 only two
ATC directors, Duke and Cobb, appeared as directors of the local company.
Four men, who had been involved in the acquired plants, became directors
between 1899 and 1901. José Portela and Fausto, and Mateo Rucabado were
partners of Rucabado y Portela. Luis Toro had been the managing partner of
Toro y Cía., owner of La Internacional and, in 1901, assumed the presidency
for over thirty years.6
The ATC did not integrate the new company fully into its management
structure possibly because it could not provide the subsidiary’s leaf input from
its own buying department nor could its marketing department sell locally
manufactured cigarettes such as Colectiva and Toro. The PRATCO employed
dark tobacco from the island’s highlands, whereas the ATC relied on flue-
cured bright leaf from the tobacco belt of Virginia and the Carolinas. Similarly,
the PRATCO’s market was Puerto Rico whereas the ATC’s was the United
States. The end result was that the ATC provided the legal and organizational
structure to control a cigarette-manufacturing firm that could not be merged
36
with the US-based cigarette-manufacturing plants.7

During its first three years, the PRATCO increased its shipment of cigars
to the United States through channels independent of the trust. Once the Or-
ganic Act of 1900 (unofficially known as the Foraker Act for its sponsor
Joseph B. Foraker) allowed the duty-free entrance of Puerto Rican cigars in
the United States and the firm had acquired La Internacional—also in 1900—
the firm contracted Julius Becker to distribute El Toro cigars from the Ponce
plant. The trust still lacked an adequate sales structure to market cigars. In
1900 it shipped 133,147 cigars to New York in time for the Christmas season.
A year later, it manufactured 2,955,481 units, all of them exported to the
United States. The exported merchandise in 1901 amounted to 10.2 percent
of the 29,064,000 cigars exported. The local subsidiary maintained a formi-
dable presence in the manufacture of cigarettes for the domestic market. Its
cigarette output for 1900 was 117,455,950 units, and for 1901 it amounted to
143,454,415. In 1900 the PRATCO announced the construction of a three-
story cement, brick, and mortar plant to match its projected growth. During
the same year, the company partially financed the new plant by increasing its
capital from $166,000 to $300,000 by issuing more shares. Opened in 1901,
La Marina factory in Old San Juan accommodated between four and five hun-
dred workers, but by 1903 it employed close to 1,200 in several departments
that included the old stemming and cigarette departments from Rucabado y
Portela and a new cigar-making one.8
When organized in 1890, the ATC manufactured 88.1 percent of the United
States’ cigarette production, which subsequently increased to 93.0 percent in
1899. Consequently, its specialty in cigarettes dictated its manufacturing pol-
icy abroad. With fourteen factories either bought or established outside the
United States by 1901, it entered a price-slashing war and business takeovers
against British interests over worldwide control of cigarette markets. The “To-
bacco War” was settled advantageously to the ATC in 1902. Thus, the buyouts
of La Colectiva in 1899 and La Internacional, a combined cigar and cigarette
factory in Ponce, in 1900, were trendsetting in the Caribbean but were part
of the expansion of the ATC’s cigarette business around the world.9
By 1899 the trust had achieved extraordinary market shares over nearly all
major tobacco products, which included cigarettes, snuff, and smoking to-
bacco in the United States. It also had just emerged with 60.6 percent of chew-
ing tobacco production after the “Plug War” of 1895–1898. However, the trust
was a minor player in the most important tobacco business in the United
37
States, the cigar. In 1904 the value of cigars was more than 50 percent greater
than the combined value of all other tobacco products, but cigar manufacturing
in the United States, in contrast to cigarettes and plug before the trust takeover,
was highly fragmented. During the 1890s the ATC gained a limited participa-
tion in the cigar business with the purchase of P. Whitlock with branches in
Richmond and Baltimore in 1891, Banner from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and
M. S. Pacholder & Co. also from Baltimore, both in 1899. The trust also
bought the United States Cigar Machine and Manufacturing Company in 1899.
Not all of its purchase attempts succeeded; in late 1899 it failed to buy the re-
cently consolidated Kerbs, Wertheim & Schiffer, and Straiton & Storm Com-
pany, one of the largest cigar manufacturers in the United States, which
accounted for approximately 2.5 percent of cigars manufactured in 1896. Its
successful purchases, however, gained it 4.8 percent of the US cigar business
by 1900. Three factories, a cigar machine company, and the purchase of La
Internacional, with its cigar-making department, were the beginnings of the
trust’s attempt to control the manufacture and market for cigars. Preparations
continued with increased cigar production in established plants, a new factory
in Cincinnati, and experimental work in a small New York workshop.10
The primary trust companies transferred the brands and factories of most
of the recently acquired cigar businesses to the ATC’s new subsidiary, the
American Cigar Company. The companies that became the ATC in 1890 soon
lost their idiosyncrasies and separate legal structures. At the inception of the
American Cigar Company, for example, what remained of the P. Whitlock
Company was a plant with the firm’s name, a valuable brand, and the owner,
Philip Whitlock, converted to an employee, who joined the board of directors.
Similarly, with the purchase of Banner Cheroot, the ATC incorporated a new
company of the same name with the trust as the sole owner in 1899, transferred
it to the American Cigar Company in 1901, and changed its name in 1907 to
the Federal Cigar Company. Both cigar companies lost their commercial and
legal identities as the original companies of the trust had lost theirs.11
Rucabado y Portela and La Internacional lost their legal personae to the
PRATCO. Other than the brand names of their cigarettes, what remained of
Rucabado y Portela was the name La Colectiva, which the public transferred
to the new company. However, the ATC did not merge the PRATCO into the
American Cigar Company. The PRATCO retained a separate corporate struc-
ture with its own directors and stockholders. The conservation of a separate
corporate identity corresponded with the types of cigars that then characterized
38
the US market. By 1906 the ATC organized stogies, usually manufactured in

West Virginia and Pennsylvania with short (chopped) filler, into the American
Stogie Company. The American Cigar Company manufactured inexpensive
cigars named cheroots, nickel cigars from US tobacco, and the blended “Seed
and Havana” from Cuban and US tobacco; the Havana-American Company
handcrafted “Clear Havanas” for cigars manufactured in the United States
from imported Cuban leaf; the Havana Tobacco Company for those crafted in
Cuba itself; and finally the PRATCO for the cigars known in the trade as
“Porto Rico.” The American Cigar Company controlled the four companies
where, in turn, many of these firms had their own specialized subsidiaries.12
When the ATC sold one half of its stock in the PRATCO to the American
Cigar Company in 1904, the local subsidiary had already started a two-prong
expansion. The PRATCO expanded the marginal cigar-making department
that came with La Internacional in Ponce and developed a new one with the
1901 opening of La Marina factory where the combined output of the two
plants amounted to 2,955,431 units. Within five years, exports grew by leaps
and bounds to 61,364,075 cigars for a 43 percent share of exports in 1906, to
117,500,000 units for a 69.5 percent by 1912.13
The decision to expand the PRATCO involved careful consideration of the
strong public trade union and legal opposition that the ATC’s monopolistic
practices provoked in the United States. Thus, the trust created a number of
seemingly independent firms. In 1903 a group of men close to the trust and
the PRATCO organized and managed the Industrial Company of Porto Rico.
It was smaller than the PRATCO with capital stock in 1907 of $83,000 com-
pared to $1,999,400. In 1906 the PRATCO’s output of cigars added 54.8 mil-
lion whereas the Industrial Company manufactured 6.6 million. Since it was
based in Ponce, its assets were most likely those of La Internacional.14
Managers and officials probably sought to convey an image of independ-
ence from the trust. The subsidiary manufactured “El Timonel” whose litho-
graph identified the Compañía Industrial as its current owner with no reference
to the PRATCO whatsoever. As another sign of independence, in 1903, the
Industrial Company had storage and marketing facilities at 135 Front Street
in lower Manhattan close to many independent cigar firms and away from the
PRATCO’s offices.15
The trust’s venture into cigars and Puerto Rican manufacture throve. In
1902 Tobacco, a US-based trade journal, stated that, “One of the marked de-
velopments in the cigar trade during the past few months has been the steadily
39
growing demand for Porto Rico cigars. At the present time, the demand is far
in excess of the supply, and it seems likely to continue so for some time to
come.” La Marina and the Ponce factories evidently failed to satisfy this grow-
ing appetite. Around 1903 the trust established a branch in a rented two-story
house by Bayamón, Puerto Rico’s, town square that, within a few years,
moved to a new four-story plant in the same town. By 1906 La Marina and
Bayamón branches employed 1,726 workers. Map 1 shows the geographical
spread of the trust from its initial factories in San Juan and Ponce.16
Following the Bayamón expansion, the PRATCO established a new branch
when it bought the former provincial jail from the city of San Juan in 1906.
As on earlier occasions, the board of directors partially financed the expansion
by increasing the capital stock to two million dollars. Soon after, the Puerta
de Tierra factory opened to become the largest cigar factory on the island, a
distinction that it maintained for decades. Together with the Bayamón branch,
the working-class culture that developed around the factories became a hotbed
for socialist and anarchist ideas and organizations.17
As production increased, the PRATCO opened a fifth plant with steam-dri-
ven machinery to manufacture cigar boxes and shipping cartons. The factory
was conveniently located in a San Juan suburb by the tracks of the American
Railroad Company that connected it to the Puerta de Tierra factory and further
down the line, to the docks. Nevertheless, the PRLTC sought government au-
thorization to build a road through the mangroves to the San Juan estuary. The
factory started operation sometime between 1907, when the PRLTC bought
the land parcel, and 1916 when it first appeared reported.18
The PRATCO experienced an unabated expansion from inception to early
1907. During the following years, expansion continued, but at a slower pace.
The company established no more branches until 1911, seemingly satisfied
with increasing production from the five in operation. In 1912 it started the
construction of a branch in Manatí and an overhaul of the Ponce plant.19
Such an increase in cigar production needed a swift articulation to a wide-
ranging distribution and marketing network. Julius Becker, an independent
jobber who briefly distributed the PRATCO’s cigars and cigarettes, had a small
radius of operations that did not extend far beyond Manhattan. In 1901, as the
trust attempted to monopolize the cigar trade, it incorporated the United Cigar
Stores Company to distribute mainly its own cigars and some other tobacco
products in retail outlets throughout the United States.20
The United Cigar Stores prominently displayed the products of the Amer-
40
2015
Map 1. Tobacco Conglomerate’s Landholdings by 1917 and Factories and Warehouses by 1912.
41
“Tobacco Trust” in Puerto Rico

SOURCE: The acreage comes from Real Estate Used For Agriculture, 40–47. The base map is a modification of “Cartographic Boundary
Files—States,” 1990 Census, Geography, US Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_state.html (accessed Feb.
13, 2014).
ican Cigar Company while carrying merchandise from other manufacturers.

Within six years, the chain had opened 392 stores giving priority to large cities.
The outlets had elaborate window displays some of which were appealing
enough to not only entice the passerby, but to become newsworthy. For in-
stance, Tobacco reported that the PRATCO’s “Porto Ricans are this week dis-
played in attractive fashion at the Flatiron of the United Cigar Stores Co.” on
the corner of 23rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. The trust supplemented
this retail-outlet strategy with a less expensive concept, which assured a deeper
market penetration. The National Cigar Stands Company, founded in 1905,
sold its products to participating pharmacies at a discount and provided spe-
cially designed cases to exhibit the merchandise. By 1907 it had contracts with
2,062 pharmacies.21
When the trust purchased leaf for cigarettes, snuff, smoking tobacco, and
plug in the United States, it did not acquire tobacco land suitable for these
products. The ATC participated in the hogshead and loose-leaf auction and,
in time, developed its own purchasing department, a change that provoked
considerable turmoil among many growers. Its expansion into the cigar trade
necessitated a large and stable leaf supply. The company typically bought
binder and filler leaf in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New York under
the country sales system where the farmer contracted his crop with the buyer
during the growing or curing season. Wrapper marketing varied as the buyer,
usually a packer or dealer, partnered with the farmer to further process the
leaf. Many US dealers and large manufacturers also bought Sumatra and Java
wrapper at yearly auctions held in Rotterdam and Frascati in Amsterdam.22
However, the policy changed when it came to leaf for Havana and Porto
Rico cigars, and the change was intimately related to a modification in the
ways that cigars appealed to the smoker during the last third of the nineteenth
century. Smokers began associating mildness in a cigar with light-colored
wrappers, which led to enormous demand for a leaf in short supply. From
about 1863 until the Second World War, the Dutch organized and managed a
system of plantations in some sectors of Sumatra that set the standard for light-
colored wrappers. The sun-grown leaf was thin, elastic, light in color, and
finely veined with excellent combustivity and a pleasing aroma. While cigar
manufacturers paid premium prices for the commodity, growers elsewhere ex-
perimented with different leaf strains, planting, cultivating, and harvesting
methods to imitate, if not surpass, the coveted wrapper.23
Various attempts were made to emulate the Sumatra leaf. During the 1880s
42
Francisco B. Cruz, a Cuban agronomist, noticed that, during a rainy winter,

tobacco leaves approximated the Sumatra standard. Consequently, planters
started to irrigate the crops destined for wrappers. Irrigation became a power-
ful complement to cheesecloth-shaded tobacco because shade reduced evap-
oration. Luis Marx was the first Cuban grower to plant tobacco under
cheesecloth in 1901 in his farms in Alquízar, Cuba, followed by Calixto López
in 1902 in Vuelta-Abajo, Cuba. When F. A. Schroeder traveled to Cuba he
saw wrapper leaf intercropped with trees for shade. Back in Gadsden County,
Florida, in 1896 he had half an acre planted with tobacco shaded by evenly
placed slats, which soon gave way to “cloth tenting” by the Owl Commercial
Company. In 1901 growers planted a thousand acres of shaded tobacco, which
was the beginning of a commercial success. The ATC’s incursion in the man-
ufacture of cigars took place when the cloth-tenting technique had reached
Cuba and the Connecticut Valley.24
The incorporation of the American Cigar Company in 1901 took place in
the midst of the diffusion of shadegrown tobacco. In 1902, hoping to bring
the price down by growing its own wrapper leaf, the ATC expressed an interest
in one hundred fifty acres of shade tobacco in Suffield, Connecticut, but seem-
ingly lost interest when the 1902 and 1903 crops were described as the “Suma-
tra fiasco.” As of 1902 the trust had been unable to obtain its own sources of
light-colored wrappers whereas Kerbs, Wertheim & Schiffer, and Straiton &
Storm Company, its main competitor, had them.25
In 1902 the American Cigar Company, possibly encouraged by the ongoing
ventures with shade tobacco, incorporated the Cuban Land and Leaf Tobacco
Company in New Jersey to grow, buy, and handle leaf principally to supply
its manufacturing branches. By 1906 it controlled about 210,000 acres, much
of it forested, in western Cuba and had some eight thousand employees. The
same year, the American Cigar Company and the PRATCO organized the
PRLTC with the same ends and an authorized capital stock of $150,000. How-
ever, the trust’s incursion into shade tobacco growing in Puerto Rico was not
as surefooted as the Cuban one. In 1901 a tobacco planter, most likely Rafael
María González, offered the Department of Agriculture suitable land in La
Plata Valley with manpower, gear, and implements for experimental purposes.
Months later, in early 1902, under González’s supervision, workers prepared
seedbeds and transplanted the seedlings to a cheesecloth-covered field that
yielded large and bug-free leaves deemed to be satisfactory for wrappers.
Then, Johannes van Leenhoff, a Dutch tobacco expert with a position at the
43
Agricultural Experiment Station in Mayagüez, evaluated the benefits of sev-

eral growing and cultivating methods in the local context during 1903–1904.
These experiments, carried out in various locations on the island—among
them Jayuya and Aibonito—concluded that, “it may safely be said that shading
increases the yield, quality, and percentage of wrappers sufficiently to make
shading a profitable business.” The trust harvested the first fruits because com-
pany employees carried out the Aibonito experiments. Luis Toro, the PRLTC’s
president, announced that, as of 1904, the shade tobacco “experiment” covered
one hundred fifteen acres between Cayey and Aibonito and the plans to extend
the “experiment” to Juncos.26
During those years, a number of Southerners like the Bullock brothers and
Lewis, joined the company to manage and supervise the shade tobacco plan-
tations. They used the cheesecloth techniques from the Georgia and Florida
border and the appropriate harvesting methods. Priming, which consists of re-
moving individual leaves as they ripen without affecting the stalk, was com-
mon in the harvesting of Sumatra wrappers, dominant in flue-cured tobacco
for cigarettes and indispensable for shadegrown tobacco. The high cost of
wooden posts, wire, and cheesecloth to cover the field as well as the heavier
use of fertilizers—which in La Plata ranged from seven hundred to a thousand
pounds per acre—discouraged small- and medium-scale farmers from planting
shade tobacco. Labor became more intensive as a result of priming instead of
stalk cutting and the additional care needed in the drying barns. Consequently,
shade tobacco became the province of corporations such as the PRLTC or
large growers like Baltasar Mendoza.27
As of 1906 the PRATCO held 11.9 percent of the common stock and the
American Cigar Company held 50.7 percent with the balance owned by others.
As in earlier expansions, the PRATCO partially financed its participation in
the PRLTC by increasing its outstanding capital in 1902 to four hundred thou-
sand dollars by issuing additional stock. The composition of its directors and
officers followed the model that the ATC used with other subsidiaries. Duke
was the only member of the group of six largest shareholders of the trust to
appear as a director, and he and Cobb were the only members of the primary
trust companies to sit on the board of the local company. However, three local
men with knowledge of the tobacco trade became directors: Toro became pres-
ident; H. C. Fritze was a principal in a partnership with a strong economic
participation in Toro y Cía.; and Manuel Otero Varela had been a partner to
Rucabado y Portela and an independent tobacco grower.28
44
When the trust entered into tobacco growing it did not buy established firms
with formidable market shares as was the case when the PRATCO purchased
La Colectiva and La Internacional. In comparison, the development of a large-
scale tobacco-growing operation proved more difficult. While Puerto Rico al-
ready produced cigar-quality leaf, it lacked a major vertically integrated
agro-industrial enterprise. The PRLTC started from a base where thousands
of farmers grew tobacco but few had achieved any vertical integration. As
documented below, it developed an infrastructure to prepare seedbeds, plant,
cultivate, harvest, and cure tobacco from purchased and leased farms. It built
a network to finance tobacco growing among independent planters. The com-
pany also built warehouses and stemmeries and contracted thousands to stem,
classify, ferment, and transport leaf.29
The PRLTC secured leaf for the PRATCO and the American Cigar Com-
pany through diverse mechanisms. It bought, administered, rented, and mort-
gaged land and financed crops. One such transaction presents the painful and
complicated process of building up a large estate and a web of business rela-
tions. In 1893 Sobrinos de Ezquiaga owned two wooden houses in Cayey, one
of which had a coffee mill with a steam-driven engine to dry, shell, and fan
the beans. This firm opened a twenty-five-thousand-pesos credit line and lent
the properties to Modesto Munitiz Aguirre, a Spaniard, to run the mill on a
profit-sharing arrangement. However, de Ezquiaga took Munitiz to court in
1904 for breach of contract and claimed an accumulated debt of $80,199.40
to be satisfied by an embargo of the defendant’s properties. On appeal, the
Puerto Rico Supreme Court lifted the embargo, and Munitiz gained time to
salvage his dire financial situation.30
In his predicament, he entered into economic arrangements with Cobb who
acted on behalf of the PRLTC. In 1906, on the same day that the court lifted
the embargo, Munitiz mortgaged twenty-five properties for $29,900. He also
sold several mortgages in his favor for five thousand dollars. Munitiz con-
tracted to plant sixty-five cuerdas of tobacco on his property named Lucía and
sell the leaf to the company. He also sold his ox teams and their respective
carts for ten thousand dollars, while contracting the transport of the company’s
leaf from Aibonito to San Juan for additional fees. Munitiz received a reprieve
from his down-spiraling situation, while Cobb negotiated from a position of
strength. The PRLTC held mortgages to the land of Munitiz and others, which
opened possibilities for acquiring them through purchase or embargo. Com-
pared to draft horses and mules, oxen were a slow means of transportation,
45
especially over open roads like the Carretera Central. Nevertheless, the
PRLTC acquired them and their respective carts to transport tobacco and im-
portantly entered into a contract for the tobacco to be grown on Lucía.31
Munitiz seems to have survived his financial straits. The treasury depart-
ment identified him as the owner of six properties in Cayey—excluding Cidra
where he also had properties—for the 1910–1911 tax year. One of the farms
was Lucía, presumably now with a tobacco plantation. A second property was
a seventy-one-cuerda farm in Barrio Montellano valued at $3,990, with three
or more houses valued at $6,000 and an unidentified movable property valued
at $5,770 that could have well been the coffee mill which gave rise to the busi-
ness relation with de Ezquiaga.32
The trust’s investment in tobacco agriculture was a work in progress. By
1906 it had some two hundred fifty acres of shadegrown tobacco, and the
PRLTC reported a workforce of two thousand men and women. It was busy
establishing a network of growers to supply the trust’s factories with farmers
like Munitiz. As the company expanded its radius of action and gained a
deeper penetration in the tobacco-growing areas of the eastern highlands, the
directors increased its capital from three hundred thousand dollars to two mil-
lion dollars of which five hundred thousand dollars was actually paid for by
1907.33
Cobb and others continued laying the groundwork for an expanding PRLTC
with seemingly simpler transactions. In 1880 Bartolomé Borrás owned the
Santa Catalina, a 1,400-cuerda sugar-producing estate with an installed steam
engine. As of 1901 Celestino Solá leased the hacienda, located in Caguas,
from the heirs of Borrás. However, by 1905 the Santa Catalina had run its
course as a sugar manufacturer on account of the partition of the hacienda and
the lack of capital to modernize its operations. Subsequently, in 1907 Fran-
cisco Ramis Borrás, a grandson, sold his part of the estate—174 cuerdas—to
Cobb and Luis Toro Passarell, to grow tobacco.34
Most of the individuals that entered into business with the PRLTC were
not wealthy and lacked the social and legal resources available to Ramis or
Munitiz. One such case was Cecilia Toledo Vicente, a single and childless
thirty-year-old white woman who, in 1910, lived in a straw hut, probably sim-
ilar to the ones in Figure 1, on a nineteen-cuerda farm planted with mixed
crops in Barrio Toíta of Cayey. The Department of the Treasury valued the
hut at $10 and the farm at $1,490. Ceferina Vicente Díaz, who was her eighty-
year-old widowed mother, and Práxedes Santos González, a single forty-year-
46
old white man, also lived in the hut. According to the census, Ceferina farmed
the property, Cecilia tended the house, and Práxedes worked as a farm laborer.
All were illiterate. The two closest neighbors were probably relatives because
they were widows of men with the Vicente surname. Both lived on rented
properties. In 1911 Toledo sold thirteen of her nineteen cuerdas to the
PRATCO for $1,344. Ten years later, the Department of the Treasury did not
identify any property under her name in Toíta but she owned a house valued
at one hundred forty dollars on a forty-square-meter lot valued at forty dollars
in Nicolás Jiménez Street in Cayey.35
Another major way the trust procured leaf was through the crop lien, locally
known as refacción. The PRLTC extended credit to a grower to plant tobacco
on a specified acreage, where the crop itself served as collateral for the loan.
The company provided the credit in steps according to the state of the crop.
For instance, Juan Ortiz and his children made a contract with the PRLTC,
represented by Toro, to prepare, plant, and cultivate 60 cuerdas of tobacco on
their 136-cuerda farm. Ortiz gave the PRLTC a lien on the crop and obligated
himself and his children to deliver the tobacco exclusively to the company.36
While tobacco growing on its own farms allowed the PRLTC a greater con-
trol over several of the qualities of leaf such as combustivity, aroma, and color,
the importance of crop liens cannot be overstated. It was an effective method
to manage leaf production in three ways. The lien helped bring down fixed
costs in leaf growing and processing. The trust did not have to buy land, con-
struct and maintain curing barns, keep yokes of oxen, plant seedbeds, and the
like. Second, Miguel Meléndez Muñoz, a keen observer, argued that corpora-
tions used the crop lien as a strategy to saturate the market and bring down
leaf prices. Third, the lien was an economic arrangement familiar to local
growers and men from the trust. The PRLTC directors who were Southerners,
such John Blackwell Cobb, Patrick H. Gorman, Moses A. Walker, and Henry
W. Cobb, should have been conversant with the lien since it was a standard
and well-known practice in their region of origin. Finally, locally, the refacción
was a practice of longstanding.37
Independently of tobacco-growing arrangements—be it on its own farms,
on leased land, or through crop liens—air-cured tobacco underwent several
steps before being ready for manufacture. Company employees packed leaf
in bales and moved them to warehouses where graders unpacked them to clas-
sify the leaf according to quality and intended use. Operatives then carefully
placed the leaf in stacks to ferment under controlled conditions, to be shipped
47
in barrels or bales tied in burlap. The company had its own stemming opera-
tions but frequently the PRATCO or American Cigar Company did their own
stemming.38
At the same time that the PRLTC was acquiring land and financing tobacco
growers, it started to establish the facilities to handle leaf. The company built
them close to the tobacco-growing centers as shown in Map 1. A few years
after the construction of the Bayamón cigar factory, the company built two
concrete buildings to grade and store leaf. In time, over a thousand women
worked at the plants. By 1907 the firm also had warehouses in Comerío and
La Plata.39
The remaining warehouses left little or no paper trail, but a good indicator
of their early presence is the company’s phone system. The PRLTC built what
was, by 1907, an infrastructure with the greatest number of phones and the
longest length of all private systems with a switchboard to ten phones in Jun-
cos, another switchboard to six phones in Caguas, and a switchboard to seven
phones in La Plata. The Juncos and Caguas warehouses must have been in op-
eration by 1907. Finally, the firm might have built a warehouse beside the
cigar-box factory in the Miramar district of San Juan sometime after 1907.
The concentration of men and women in the stemming and grading depart-
ments of the warehouses proved to be a fertile environment for the spread of
working-class ideologies and trade unions.40
Trust activities extended from San Juan in the north to Cayey in the south
and from Juncos in the east to as far as Ponce and Manatí in the west. Although
the excellent macadam road traversing the island provided an outlet for much
the trust’s leaf, cigars, and cigarettes, its hinterland, nevertheless, comprised
a wide area over which a combination of roads and vehicles were necessary.
Ox carts, like those of Munitiz, and pack trains over terrain unsuitable for
carts loaded with tobacco were not an efficient means of transportation (see
cover image). Thus, necessity forced the trust to expand and consolidate the
transportation network. With large plantations in La Plata Valley, the trust built
a three-kilometer road to connect them to the Carretera Central in 1907. Ad-
ditionally, the government appropriated funds to connect the public road to
the trust’s private one in the municipality of Comerío.41
The trust launched an ambitious transportation project to construct a one-
meter gauge railway from Caguas through Carolina and Río Piedras to a point
adjoining a station of the American Railroad Company in San Juan. The
PRATCO sought to transport leaf from its hinterland in Juncos, Cayey, and
48
Aibonito to a central location in Caguas and thence by rail where it could reach
the Bayamón, Miramar, and San Juan factories and the piers. In 1906 it incor-
porated the San Juan and Caguas Railway Company in New Jersey with three
hundred thousand dollars in capital. After negotiations with the American Rail-
road Company, however, the trust withdrew its franchise application. Never-
theless, it assisted the railroad company in raising funds in exchange for
satisfactory tobacco transportation. Despite efforts, the deal fizzled out, and a
competitor, the Porto Rico Railway Company, constructed the line from
Caguas to Río Piedras.42
The reaction of independent tobacco firms to the trust’s interest in a railroad
was consistent with widely held opinions of the trust’s tactics. Independent
tobacco firms, notably the Cayey-Caguas Tobacco Company, reacted to the
incursion with alarm. Tobacco reported that the railroad project “alarmed” the
independents because the railroad “would have been used to crush out com-
petitors.” Independents became “jubilant” when two companies—J. G. White
and the American Railroad Company—won franchises, unaware of the nego-
tiations between the trust and the latter company. Nevertheless, Tobacco,
which would not accept trust advertising, called for continual diligence as the
trust might still arrive at an understanding with the rail company.43
The expressions of the Cayey-Caguas Tobacco Company and others against
the trust’s railroad must be seen in the context of the widespread exposure to
media coverage of the government’s upcoming antitrust case against the ATC,
its subsidiaries, and large shareholders. In 1905 a grand jury of the Circuit
Court for the Southern District of New York started a behind-closed-doors in-
vestigation of the ATC for possible violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
With considerable publicity, in June 1906 the grand jury indicted two trust
subsidiaries and their presidents for engaging in the restraint of the trade of
licorice, which was a crucial component of tobacco plug. The jury selection
began at the criminal branch of the US Circuit Court in December 1906; the
trial itself began the following July. For years, the detractors of the trust, such
as the Cayey-Caguas Tobacco Company, had been pointing out its predatory
practices. Six years after the start of the investigation, they must have felt vin-
dicated when the government prevailed in the Supreme Court decision of
1911.44
The Supreme Court directed the Circuit Court to hear the parties and devise
a plan that dissolved the monopoly and eliminated the restraints to trade. The
lower court partitioned the trust into fourteen independent corporations. Three
49
of the successor companies manufactured cigars other than stogies. The P. Lo-
rillard Company took over the factories, brands, and other assets of the Federal
Cigar Company. The ATC retained the American Cigar Company including
all Cuban operations. While sharing the PRLTC with the American Cigar
Company, the PRATCO became the smallest of the successor companies.
Lastly, the United Cigar Stores, which did not engage in manufacture since it
was the trust’s chain store, also became an independent firm.45
While the PRATCO and its subsidiaries remained untouched, their position
within the United States suffered a major reorientation. The trust had been the
largest firm in the highly fragmented US cigar market with a 13.36 percent
market share by 1910. In sharp contrast, the PRATCO garnered 69.5 percent
of the local cigar output in 1912, which, however, contrasted poorly with its
1.67 percent share of the US market. When compared to all US manufacturers,
it ranked sixth, following Siedenberg & Co., well behind the leading manu-
facturer, the Federal Cigar Company, which controlled 5.2 percent of the mar-
ket. Thus, the government’s trust-busting, perhaps, went unnoticed in the
island but cast the company in a completely different light in the United
States.46
Besides the downsizing, two factors affected the PRATCO in the post-par-
tition era. Even though the cigar was the most common way to consume to-
bacco, it was not the major source of the ATC’s earnings. From its founding
in 1899, the PRATCO benefitted financially from the inordinate profits from
the trust’s cigarette and plug divisions. Another important loss was the unfet-
tered access to the United Cigar Stores chain. In the new era, the PRATCO
had to negotiate the terms under which the store chain carried El Toro, Portina,
and Ricoro brands.
However, there were gains. From its inception, the manufacture of cigars
in the United States had been the province of the American Cigar Company.
Upon the dissolution, such restraint disappeared, with the PRATCO establish-
ing factories in Florida and New Jersey within the next few years. United
States–based manufacturers allowed the firm to diversify its production be-
yond the “Porto Rico” cigars and into the “Clear Havana” and “Seed and Ha-
vana” types. Furthermore, the relations between management and labor had
been historically tense and turned more so as tobacco workers’ unions agitated
for a general strike to uniform pay scales across the island. Manufacturing fa-
cilities in the United States provided a getaway from local labor.47
By 1917 the former trust subsidiaries had amassed 6,879 acres for agricul-
50
tural purposes. The PRLTC remained the PRATCO’s major leaf provider and
a significant one for the ATC until the 1920s. The PRATCO did not enter the
post-partition solely as a cigarette manufacturing, but as the largest local to-
bacco agribusiness. It was the dominant tobacco enterprise and rivaled, in
scope and wealth, some of the major sugar firms. Although not as profitable
as during its first few years, it entered the post-partition era paying dividends
with a 14.0 percent return on capital in 1911 and a 16.0 percent the following
year.48
NOTES
1. The author acknowledges the advice and suggestions of Bob Ingalls, Jean Stubbs, Hum-
berto García Muñiz, Jorge L. Giovannetti, three anonymous referees, and the assistance of
Miriam Lugo Colón, César E. Concepción, and Ada Isabel Díaz. The Department of Sociology
and Anthropology and the Fondo Institucional para la Investigación of the University of
Puerto Rico funded this work.
Bullock’s information can be found in the census records through Ancestry.com.
2. Guide to the Walter Austin Bullock and George Tarry Bullock letters, 1891–1894, MS
00188, North Carolina State University Libraries, Digital Repository, http://www.lib.ncsu.edu
/findingaids/mss00188 (accessed Mar. 19, 2014); Judith B. Nisbet to author, Sept. 3, 1998.
3. Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad
from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 153. The Havana
Commercial Company, incorporated in New Jersey in 1899 was the first major US manufac-
turing plant in the Caribbean. In 1902 the Tobacco Trust acquired its cigar and cigarette fac-
tories and other assets. See, Juan José Baldrich, “Cigars and Cigarettes in Nineteenth Century
Cuba,” Revista/Review Interamericana 24:1–4 (1994): 27–28; Baldrich, “From Handcrafted
Tobacco Rolls to Machine-Made Cigarettes: The Transformation and Americanization of
Puerto Rican Tobacco, 1847–1903,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies
17 (Fall 2005): 156–58; George M. Gales, “Declaración jurada de John B. Cobb,” May 10,
1901, pp. 37–38, document 3, case 58, Archivo Inactivo, Tribunal Supremo, Civil, Centro Ju-
dicial de San Juan, Puerto Rico.
4. US Bureau of Corporations, “Porto Rican American Tobacco Company,” Aug. 29, 1906,
p. 1, report 385, file 3825-10-10, box 237, Records of the Federal Trade Commission, RG
122, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter NARA); US
Bureau of Corporations, Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Tobacco Industry,
Part 1: Position of the Tobacco Combination in the Industry (Washington, DC: GPO, 1909),
82; Igualdad Iglesias de Pagán, El Obrerismo en Puerto Rico: Época de Santiago Iglesias,
1896–1905 (Palencia de Castilla: Ediciones Juan Ponce de León, 1973), 57–58.
5. Baldrich, “From Handcrafted Tobacco Rolls,” 146, 159–60.
6. US Bureau of Corporations, “Porto Rican American Tobacco Company,” 119, 132–33;
US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 119, 132–33, 315; “George
M. Gales, Liggett’s Ex-Head,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1954, 21; Nannie M. Tilley, The R.
J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 100–
51
101; Robert F. Durden, The Dukes of Durham, 1865–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press,
1975), 69; Baldrich, “From the Origins of Industrial Capitalism in Puerto Rico to its Subor-
dination to the US Tobacco Trust: Rucabado and Company, 1865–1901,” Revista Mexicana
del Caribe 3:5 (1998): 85–86, 98–99; Baldrich, “From Handcrafted Tobacco Rolls,” 159–60.
7. Richard B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry: A Study in Economic Analysis
and Public Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 44–45.
8. “The New Line of Porto Rico Cigars,” Tobacco (New York), Oct. 12, 1900, 1; US Bu-
reau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 429; US Bureau of Corporations,
“Porto Rican American Tobacco Company”; Arturo Bird Carmona, Parejeros y Desafiantes;
La Comunidad Tabaquera de Puerta de Tierra a Principios del Siglo XX (San Juan: Ediciones
Huracán, 2008), 91–93.
9. US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 329, 180–93;
Howard Cox, “Growth and Ownership in the International Tobacco Industry: BAT 1902–27,”
Business History 31 (Jan. 1989): 45; Howard Cox, The Global Cigarette: Origins and Evo-
lution of British American Tobacco, 1880–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
66–77; Baldrich, “From Handcrafted Tobacco Rolls,” 160.
10. “Cigar Making Firms Unite,” New York Times, June 16, 1897, 12; US Bureau of Cor-
porations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 150–51, 416, 84–85, 418–19; Malcolm R.
Burns, “Outside Intervention in Monopolistic Price Warfare: The Case of the ‘Plug War’ and
the Union Tobacco Company,” Business History Review 56 (Spring 1982): 53.
11. US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 83; United States
v. American Tobacco Company, 221 US 106 (1911), 158.
12. Carl Avery Werner, Tobaccoland (New York: Tobacco Leaf, 1922), 243–46; Patricia
A. Cooper, Once a Cigarmaker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories,
1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 15–19; US Bureau of Corporations,
Position of the Tobacco Combination, 150.
13. Reavis Cox, Competition in the American Tobacco Industry, 1911–1932 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1933), 87; US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco
Combination, 156; Government of Puerto Rico, Annual Book on Statistics of Puerto Rico,
Fiscal Year 1934–35 (San Juan: np, 1935), 140, 142.
14. Industrial Company of Porto Rico, “Certificate of Incorporation,” Dec. 8, 1903; In-
dustrial Company of Porto Rico, “Annual Report,” July 29, 1907, box 5, file 88; Porto Rican
American Tobacco Company, “Informe Anual,” 1907, box 2, file 37, Departamento de Estado,
Corporaciones foráneas con fines de lucro, Archivo General de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto
Rico (hereafter AGPR); US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination,
429.
15. Cigar Box Label, “El Timonel,” Winterthur Digital Collections, http://content.win-
terthur.org:2011/cdm/ref/collection/grossman/id/272 (accessed Mar. 24, 2014); “Gossiper’s
Notebook: At Their New,” Tobacco Leaf (New York), May 6, 1903, 3.
16. “The Demand for Porto Rico Cigars,” Tobacco, Jan. 17, 1902, 4; “Current Comment,”
Tobacco, Feb. 7, 1902, 5; Epifanio Fiz Jiménez, Bayamón y su Gente: datos del Bayamón de
Ayer y de Hoy: Estampos Datos Biograficos (Barcelona: Ediciones Rumbos, 1960), 123; US
Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 293.
52
17. Roberto H. Todd, “La Antigua Cárcel,” El Mundo (San Juan), Aug. 6, 1939, 12; US
Bureau of Corporations, “Porto Rican American Tobacco Company”; Bird Carmona, Pare-
jeros y Desafiantes.
18. Governor of Porto Rico, Annual Report, 1907 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1907), 27; An-
tonio Blanco Fernández, España y Puerto Rico, 1820–1930 (San Juan: Cantero Fernández,
1930), 310; Ramón S. Corrada del Río, “The Historical-Geographical Development of San-
turce, 1582–1930” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995), 77; John Moody, Moody’s
Analyses of Investments: Part II, Public Utilities and Industrials (New York: Moody’s In-
vestors Service, 1918), 1146.
19. “Las Grandes Industrias de Puerto Rico: Una Visita á la Fábrica que Posee en Puerta
de Tierra la ‘Porto Rican American Tobacco Company,’” Puerto Rico Ilustrado, Mar. 9, 1912,
unnumbered.
20. “New Line of Porto Rico Cigars,” 1; US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the To-
bacco Combination, 88–90.
21. “Porto Ricans at Flat Iron Store,” Tobacco, Oct. 9, 1913, 11; US Bureau of Corpora-
tions, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 312–16.
22. Charles E. Gage, American Tobacco Types, Uses, and Markets (Washington, DC: GPO,
1942), 73–74; J. R. K., “Holland and Her Tobacco Inscriptions,” Tobacco World 30 (July 15,
1910): 18–19.
23. Russell H. Mack, The Cigar Manufacturing Industry: Factors of Instability Affecting
Production and Employment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933), 19; Mil-
ton Whitney, Tobacco Soils of the United States: A Preliminary Report upon the Soils of the
Principle Tobacco Districts (Washington, DC: GPO, 1898), 11; B. C. Akehurst, Tobacco (New
York: Humanities, 1968), 269; Emile Mulder, Cultivation of Tobacco in Sumatra (Washington,
DC: GPO, 1898), 29.
24. Leida Fernández Prieto, Cuba Agrícola: Mito y Tradición, 1878–1920 (Madrid: Con-
sejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005), 227–48; E. A. Schroeder, “The Origin of
Shade-Grown Tobacco,” Tobacco World 22 (Jan. 15, 1902): 16; “How Florida Tobacco has
Become a Factor,” Tobacco World 35 (Feb. 1, 1905): 3; Jean Stubbs, “El Habano and the
World it has Shaped: Cuba, Connecticut, and Indonesia,” Cuban Studies 41 (2010): 50; “To-
bacco in Connecticut,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 1902, 9.
25. American Cultivator, “Eastern Tobacco Reports: Connecticut Valley,” Tobacco World
22 (Mar. 12, 1902): 27–28; “Blame Government For Losses on Shade-Grown,” Tobacco World
25 (Jan. 25, 1905): 30. The Straiton and Storm firm owned the Owl Commercial Company,
which was also known as the Owl Cigar Company, with shade tobacco plantations in Florida.
Pamela Chase Hain, A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2005), 214; Schroeder, “Origin of Shade-Grown,” Tobacco
World 22 (Jan. 15, 1902): 16. In 1897 Straiton and Storm merged into the Kerbs, Wertheim
& Schiffer, and Straiton & Storm Company. “Cigar Making Firms Unite,” 12.
26. US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 298, 30; Rafael
María González to USDA, Almont Barnes trans., June 29, 1901, file 4707/48, box 304,
Records of the Federal Trade Commission, RG 122, NARA; J. H. McPike, “Porto Rico as
Seen by a Cigar Jobber II: Porto Rico Tobacco,” Tobacco, Apr. 4, 1902, 1. The experimental
53
harvest had yet to be cured, stemmed, and fermented to establish its aroma and combustivity.
J. van Leenhoff Jr., Tobacco Investigations in Porto Rico during 1903–4 (Washington, DC:
GPO, 1905), 17; Caspar van den Berg to author, May 5, 2012; Leenhoff, “Possibilities of
Porto Rico Tobacco,” Tobacco World 25 (Sept. 6, 1905): 29; Porto Rican-American Tobacco
Co., Sketches: Porto Rico (np: PRATCO, 1904).
27. Wightman W. Garner, The Production of Tobacco (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1951),
151; Mulder, Cultivation of Tobacco, 29; Tennant, American Cigarette Industry, 180. The
local dominant technique was stalk cutting. Baldrich, “From Handcrafted Tobacco Rolls,”
149–50; Porto Rican-American Tobacco Co., Sketches; “Cayey-Caguas Co. Gets Good
Order,” Tobacco, June 6, 1907, 7; Luis Muñoz Morales, “Siembra de Tabaco con Refacción
y Garantía (Escritura 61),” 1913, box 760, fol. 540, Protocolos Notariales, Siglo XX, San
Juan, AGPR; Real Estate Used For Agriculture in Porto Rico, 65th Cong., 2nd sess., S. Doc.
165 (1918), 24–25.
28. US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 155, 217; US Bu-
reau of Corporations, “Porto Rican American Tobacco Company”; US Bureau of Corpora-
tions, “Porto Rican Leaf Tobacco Corporation,” Aug. 29, 1906, report 388, file 3825-10-10,
box 237, Records of the Federal Trade Commission, RG 122, NARA; Real Estate Used For
Agriculture, 40–45, 47; Baldrich, “From Handcrafted Tobacco Rolls,” 159.
29. Baldrich, “From the Origins of Industrial Capitalism,” 87–89.
30. “Sobrinos de Ezquiaga v. Munitiz,” Decisiones de Puerto Rico 8 (1905): 429–38.
31. A cuerda is 0.393 hectare or 0.971 acre. Herminio Díaz Navarro, “Escritura de prés-
tamo con garantía hipotecaria, de cesión de hipotecas y de venta con pacto de retro otorgada
por Don Modesto Munitiz a favor de Porto Rican Leaf Tobacco Co. (escritura 173),” Dec.
14, 1906, box 287, Protocolos Notariales, Siglo XX; Porto Rican American Tobacco Com-
pany, “Informe Anual,” 1906, box 2, file 37, Departamento de Estado, Corporaciones foráneas
con fines de lucro, AGPR; Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Indus-
trial America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 28–30.
32. Hacienda, Registro de Tasación de la Propiedad, 1920–1921, receipts 657–62, Cayey,
AGPR.
33. US Bureau of Corporations, Position of the Tobacco Combination, 298–99; Porto
Rican Leaf Tobacco Co., “Annual Report,” July 30, 1907, box 3, file 65, Departamento de
Estado, Corporaciones foráneas con fines de lucro, AGPR; US Bureau of Corporations, “Porto
Rican Leaf Tobacco Corporation.”
34. Rosa E. Carrasquillo, Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas,
Puerto Rico, 1880–1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); José O. Solá, “Colo-
nialism, Planters, Sugarcane, and the Agrarian Economy of Caguas, Puerto Rico, between the
1890s and 1930,” Agricultural History 85 (Summer 2011): 349–72. Solá kindly forwarded
the author the following reference: Herminio Díaz Navarro, “Escritura de Venta de la Ha-
cienda ‘Santa Catalina,’ Otorgada por Don Francisco Ramis y Borrás á favor de Mr. J. B.
Cobb,” Aug. 27, 1907, box 289, fol. 1372, Protocolos Notariales, Siglo XX, San Juan, AGPR.
35. Hacienda, Registro de Tasación de la Propiedad, 1910–1911, receipt 1188, Cayey,
AGPR; US Bureau of the Census, “Thirteenth Census: Porto Rico,” vol. 15, Barrio Toíta,
Cayey, 1910, p. 329, lines 24–26, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/thirteenthcen-
54
sus1763usce#page/n0/mode/2up (accessed July 15, 2014). It was a common trust practice to
have all four subsidiaries with operations in Puerto Rico buy farmland. Hacienda, Registro
de Tasación de la Propiedad, 1920–1921, receipt 2156, Cayey; Luis Muñoz Morales, “Com-
praventa (escritura 63),” July 8, 1911, box 756, fols. 472–76, Protocolos Notariales, Siglo
XX, San Juan, AGPR.
36. Muñoz, “Desarrollo del Crédito en Puerto Rico,” in Obras Completas, 3 vols. (San
Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1963), 3:314–22; Luis Muñoz Morales, “Siembra
de Tabaco y Refacción (escritura 89),” Oct. 1, 1910, box 755, fols. 228–39, Protocolos No-
tariales, Siglo XX, AGPR.
37. Miguel Meléndez Muñoz, “La Crisis Tabacalera IV. Otras Causas de su Origen,” El
Mundo, July 18, 1931, 6; Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia,
1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 160–61; Eldred E. Prince
and Robert R. Simpson, Long Green: The Rise and Fall of Tobacco in South Carolina (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2000), 39–40; Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social
Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1988), 34–35; María Isabel Bonnin, “Los Contratos de Refacción y
el Decaimiento de la Hacienda Tradicional en Ponce: 1865–1880,” Op. Cit. 3 (1987–1988):
123–50; Baldrich, Sembraron la no Siembra: Los Cosecheros de Tabaco Puertorriqueñ o s
Frente a las Corporaciones Tabacaleras, 1920–1934 (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1988),
45–46.
38. Charles E. Gage, The Tobacco Industry in Puerto Rico (Washington, DC: USDA,
1939), 23–29.
39. Fiz Jiménez, Bayamón y su Gente, 124; Wilson Torres-Rosario, Juana Colón: Com-
batiente en el Tabacal Puertorriqueño (Comerío: np, 2011), 17; Governor of Porto Rico, An-
nual Report, 1907, 317.
40. US Bureau of the Census, Electrical Industries of Porto Rico, 1907 (Washington, DC:
GPO, 1909), 21–22; Corrada del Río, “Historical-Geographical Development of Santurce,”
77; Ivette Marie Rivera-Giusti, “Gender, Labor, and Working-Class Activism in the Puerto
Rican Tobacco Industry, 1898–1924” (PhD diss., Binghamton University, 2003).
41. Governor of Porto Rico, Annual Report, 1907, 317.
42. Porto Rican Leaf Tobacco Company, “Consejo Ejecutivo de Puerto Rico,” May 1906,
box 233, file 4328, Fortaleza, Brazil, AGPR; US Bureau of the Census, Electrical Industries
of Porto Rico, 26; Gregory P. Marchildon, Profits and Politics: Beaverbrook and the Gilded
Age of Canadian Finance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 58–61, 92–96; An-
tonio Santamaría García, “Los Ferrocarriles de Servico Público de Puerto Rico (1870–1990),”
Revista Complutense de Historia de América 20 (1994): 218–19.
43. “Organization needed in Porto Rico,” Tobacco, Aug. 9, 1906, 6; “Trust Defeat in Porto
Rico,” Tobacco, Aug. 2, 1906, 1.
44. “Tobacco Trust Secrets Under Secret Inquiry,” New York Times, May 6, 1905, 1; “Fed-
eral Jury Indicts Tobacco Trust Men,” New York Times, June 19, 1906, 16; “Tobacco Trust
Trial Begins,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 1906, 1; “War On Trusts Will Open To-Day,” New
York Times, July 10, 1907, 1; United States v. American Tobacco Company, 221 US 106
(1911), 105–43.
55
45. United States v. American Tobacco Company, 221 US 106 (1911), 107–108; United
States v. American Tobacco Co. et al., 191 F. 371 (Nov. 15, 1911) 421–22, 424, 429.
46. Cox, Competition in the American Tobacco Industry, 87; Government of Puerto Rico,
Annual Book on Statistics, 140, 142; Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United
States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1975), 690. Since most US cigar man-
ufacturing statistics did not identify production from Philippine or Puerto Rican firms, the
ranking is an interpolation of the PRATCO’s statistics with those of US-based manufacturers.
See, Willis N. Baer, The Economic Development of the Cigar Industry in the United States
(Lancaster: Art, 1933), 257.
47. “Toro and Davis,” Tobacco Leaf, May 19, 1921, 3; Moody’s Manual of Railroads and
Corporation Securities: Volume III . . . Industrial Section (New York: Moody Manual, 1918),
1294.
48. Poor’s and Moody’s Manual Consolidated: 1922, Industrial Section, Vol. II—K–Z
(New York: Poor’s, 1922), 279; Baldrich, “Gender and the Decomposition of the Cigar-Mak-
ing Craft in Puerto Rico, 1899–1931,” in Puerto Rican Women's History: New Perspectives,
ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and Linda C. Delgado (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 118–20;
“Manifestación del Señor Toro,” La Correspondencia, Mar. 23, 1914, 1; “Información Gen-
eral,” La Correspondencia, June 1, 1914, 8.
56
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The “Tobacco Trust” in Puerto Rico:

From Cigarette Manufacturing to

JUAN JOSÉ BALDRICH

JUAN JOSÉ BALDRICH, a PhD in sociology from Yale University, is a professor at

© the Agricultural History Society, 2015

tations that specialized in shadegrown tobacco. George T. Bullock was a farm

with the US-based cigarette-manufacturing plants.7

the US market. By 1906 the ATC organized stogies, usually manufactured in

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ican Cigar Company while carrying merchandise from other manufacturers.

Francisco B. Cruz, a Cuban agronomist, noticed that, during a rainy winter,

Agricultural Experiment Station in Mayagüez, evaluated the benefits of sev-

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