America's Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs (review)

This is the second edition of William Boyer's book America's Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs, first published in 1971. The book covers the whole history of the region from Christopher Columbus to the present, but places emphasis on the American period, from 1917 onward. This second edition contains, in addition to the original 1971 text, a brief 41-pages-long update section, under the title "Persisting Problems: 1980-2010" (2010: 389-430). The book is eloquently written, and includes abundant statistical evidence and quotations from innumerable historical documents, evidencing a monumental archival research.

This text is the most comprehensive and in-depth history of the region so far written. It is the result of an explicitly stated objective of the author, which was to write the "definite" history of the Virgin Islands for the period covered. In our view, Boyer achieves that objective. It makes company to other less comprehensive or more superficial histories written for the region, including the also excellent A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States (1974), by Isaac Dookhan; the more text-book like The Umbilical Cord: The History of the United States Virgin Islands from Pre-Columbia Era to the Present (1995), by Harold W.L. Willocks; the much earlier The Virgin Islands from Naval Base to New Deal (1945), by Luther H. Evans; and the Danish-period-focused The Danish West Indies Under Company Rule, 1671-1754 (1917), by Waldemar Westergaard; among others.

The emphasis of Boyer's book, as the title already suggests, is on human rights and "wrongs," with an understandable emphasis on the latter, for the list of "wrongs" is extensive. The inhabitants of the islands were denied U.S. citizenship in 1917 (the year the islands were purchased by the U.S. from Denmark), in spite of the fact that the 1917 purchase treaty explicitly stated that the U.S. would do so. A U.S. federal court established in 1921 that the signed treaty speaks of citizenship "in" the U.S. rather than "of" the U.S. "Thus," says Boyer, "for the want of a two letter word… Virgin Islanders were denied American citizenship" (p. 141). Citizenship was finally granted in 1932, but rights to selfgovernment were not granted until 1970. Virgin Islanders are still not allowed to vote for the U.S. president. Being disenfranchised, and as Ronald Fernandez (1994) has also stated, Virgin Islanders are the only American citizens in the history of the U.S. ever to have been taxed (in the form of import duties on rum exported to mainland U.S.) without being granted political representation, during the period 1917-1954. Boyer estimated import duties on Virgin Islands rum in about $64 million throughout the years, that is, "a total in excess of the money spent by the U.S. government on the Islands since 1917" (p. 232). In fact, the practice of "taxation without representation" continues up to this date in the form of excise tax on gasoline refined in St. Croix's Hovensa oil refinery, which Boyer estimates at $70 million a year. All efforts by local government to have this tax returned to the islands, as is now done with the rum tax, have been unsuccessful. Moreover, there is also the practice of dividing residential neighborhoods along racial lines, a practice that Hazel McFerson has defined as "de facto apartheid" (as cited in p. 315). The most extreme case of this practice was the rental of a governmentowned two-miles long island, Water Island, to a group of 65 white families, creating thus an "all-white enclave for the sixty-five white property owners" (McFerson, cited in p. 315).

The list of human "wrongs" is indeed extensive, and Boyer provides ample evidence to support his claim that "the Constitution did not follow the American flag to the Virgin Islands" (p. 126). This being the...