But why would Americans let in, as a state, the same kind of people who just killed their President? The same issues that prevent Puerto Rico from becoming a state today still existed back then - difference in culture, ethnicity, etc, the rest of US wouldn't see any clear benefit to admitting a poor state.
Well, let's systematically examine policy options in cold blood, shall we?
Puerto Rico was a US Territory whose residents had been granted blanket US citizenship by Congressional law in the 1910s.
I don't know what the legal consequences of attempting to rescind that by another such act in 1950 would be. Even bearing in mind the Supreme Court in this era made some pretty blunt political calls (infamously the Chief Justice flatly refused to countenance any appeals of the Rosenberg case for instance; less famous was a sweeping ruling granting the executive branch carte blanche to shut down information from being presented in courts on "national security" grounds without providing any sort of Security Court as an alternative; the FISA Court came later--this emerged from a case involving the B-50 bomber, in which wives of men lost in flights attempted to sue Department of Defense for negligence, and the Air Force sought (successfully) to assert national security concerns prevented testimony from being allowed, leaving the women no recourse) I would think some basic principles of justice would enable at least some Puerto Ricans to assert continued citizenship on special grounds. But I am no lawyer; the real barrier to rescinding PR residents' citizenship would be political--not that Puerto Ricans would enjoy a tremendous lobby in their own favor, but the implications of Congress being able to declare any category "uncitizens" would be pretty tremendous, and it could well be that even courts reluctant to impede the will of the people in this matter would still be compelled to rule US citizenship once granted irrevocable except for reasons persons would be individually liable for under the Constitution, and throw out any such legislation therefore.
So probably in whatever status PR winds up in, all Puerto Ricans remain US citizens no matter what, unless Congress grants them independence.
But, left wing populist anti-imperialist pinko-greenish moonbeam though I may be, even I would not suggest that giving Puerto Rico independence in the wake of a successful assassination of a President by Puerto Rican independence militants would have the ghost of a political chance. Doing so would appear to signal that anyone disgruntled with any aspect of US policy whatsoever has open season on whoever holds the office and can expect to gain their goals by sheer intimidation, and that simply would not fly among anyone at all patriotic, regardless of any divisions or dissents. OTL granting PR independence has always been an option; here it is removed from the table for some unspecified but long period, and one likely consensus point among both American publics and the inner circle of high level policy wonks would be probably to close that option off irrevocably. At any rate, independence will not be granted any time real soon, certainly not within a decade. (For the record, as a left wing populist anti-imperialist pinko-greenish Social Justice Warrior, my opinion is that Puerto Ricans would not be well served by independence anyway, certainly not on the dubious terms we have granted it to various Pacific former territories; perhaps in this early generation, it would be a cleaner break than it would be now, but now so many millions of persons with Puerto Rican ties live in the 50 states that it would be traumatic to sever them from those who happen to choose to remain in residence. Properly speaking I think this question belongs to Puerto Ricans and not random other US citizens, and I would defer to their judgement, but I think full statehood for PR ASAP and as retroactively as possible is simple justice. Unfortunately aside from the opinions and divisions of non-Puerto Rican USAians, the PR people themselves are deeply divided today and pretty much always since this post-WWII era on the question of remaining under the US flag or not, so I don't look to a solution that makes everyone happy no matter what happens). Quite aside from questions of legality and questions of political facts on the ground, the USA holding PR is a military-strategic asset, particularly for the US Navy, and turning it loose would be seen as a setback for US security in almost any circumstances (except perhaps PR turning into such a nightmare to hold against popular resistance that the costs of letting it go, probably under such circumstances to ally immediately with the USA's most formidable foes, are less than the costs of trying to hang on longer--and generally such costs have to be so ridiculously high even die hards either cannot deny the cost is too high, or are removed from influence over the decision by larger publics determined to get out. Whether PR is capable, in any era, of posing such a severe toothache for the USA as to force such a decision is not a question I really want to explore--let's just assume the leadership of the USA in the 1950s is smart enough for foresee and avoid such a severe juncture). So it is just not very expedient for the USA to turn PR loose, and so I think with the circumstances of the POD it would be consensus even between rivals for supreme executive and Congressional power that Puerto Rico must remain under US control, and making it irrevocable would be seen as a feature not a bug.
So dismissing the option of independence, the remaining choices before Congress and the new President and the nation as opinionated and voting publics would be:
1) Continue the territorial status quo of PR. This means its people, if they were to individually relocate to the 48 states, being citizens would gain the right to vote in their new state, and otherwise enjoy the same rights as citizens born in the states. Attempting to create some new legal distinction would be plain violations of clear Constitutional provisions and highly unlikely to survive the slightest judicial review. Meanwhile living in their birth home (or someone born in the states taking up permanent residence there) they have only whatever institutions as Congress and/or the Executive branch sees expedient to grant them--they have full protection of the basic civil rights principles of our Constitutional common law as any citizen has, but this does not include the right to any kind of representative government. It would fly in the face of US precedent to rescind autonomy once granted, but would be quite legally possible to do I would think. So it is a question of
a) continue status quo with minimal revision, pursuing a hard line of repression of independence activism within the constraints of basic citizen rights, but continuing to grant Puerto Ricans the autonomous institutions already granted, but perhaps with judicious expedient revisions here or there; or
b) "go ape" and crack down on the Puerto Rican people more sweepingly, rescinding some or all of their granted autonomous institutions, perhaps placing the islands under some appointed Governor or even martial law, by the Navy is what that would probably boil down to in practice.
2) OTL Harry Truman purported to have found some third way whereby PR would be associated with the USA as a "Commonwealth;" it is my understanding that while Truman and Puerto Ricans generally believed and accepted this as a new status superior to mere Territorial subjugation to Congress, later US administrations have denied Truman could create any such thing and in reality PR is in fact still a plain old Territory as above, with "Commonwealth" being pretty words describing a particular form of Congress choosing to grant revokable autonomy at its own pleasure. Again I am no legally trained mind and cannot really judge if this is a reasonably defensible position or not, versus Truman and Congress in his day having created a new thing that has legal standing some people have just tried to get away with violating. Well, Harry Truman is dead now ITTL and presumably the special deal he cooked up is off the table.
3) Grant PR statehood. Note that this would hardly mean the people of PR are suddenly shielded from Federal police investigation and prosecution of secessionists for whatever crimes apply--perhaps Constitutionally defined treason would not, but certainly other severe ones would. This is the McCarthy era and the FBI was given quite sweeping powers in the USA generally. PR forming a suitably recognized "republican" form of state government would not stop the G-men.
What it would do, however is:
a) bind PR to the USA irrevocably, per the precedent of Lincoln not accepting the secession of the Southern states. Independence goes from being a controversial and disliked in some circles political position to either treason or something close to it (Really gotta reread the Constitutional definition of Treason, which is pretty strict). Shut up about Puerto Rican independence, is what admission to the Union as a state says.
b) empower that faction of Puerto Ricans who did in fact favor statehood as the resolution to their status. If this was a minority, it was a very large one, I believe the plurality view among persons actively participating in PR Territorial autonomous politics. These people are actively against PR independence themselves, and are authentic native born Puerto Ricans. They can in fact be trusted to oppose PR independence at least as passionately and diligently as any
Yanqui.
c) simplify a lot of
ad hoc resolved rulings regarding taxes and government program benefits and all that by simply applying the same standards applied to other states across the board.
d) per point a, the US military (again, mostly the Navy here) can operate with the same authority it has in acquiring control of land and other resources it has in the other 48 states; any investment in ports and so forth is certain to remain US controlled as long as the USA as a whole lasts. No pettifogging treaties and agreements, beyond whatever is normal for military relations with state governments, come into play and never will.
What is the downside to option 3? Assuming that common law justice would not be suspended and the USA enter a plainly police state situation across the board, Puerto Ricans gain no new rights to enter the 48 states and become voting citizens there. They do gain 2 Senators, probably 5 Representatives, and thus 7 Electoral votes for the President, but that is hardly liable to be seen as tipping the balance politically in Congress nor transforming the situation for election of the President. In fact I think both major parties would have every reason to hope they might gain more than their opponent from these additions. (Assuming Congress continues to hold the House at 435 Representatives, some states will lose Representatives in the next Census reapportionment, either 1950 meaning change by 1952 or 1960 meaning effective by 1962, depending on how fast PR statehood moves. But there is nothing stopping Congress from minimizing that impact by raising the House size to 441--to keep an odd total, they would actually throw in an extra seat up for grabs per the workings of the Huntington-Hill form of proportional assignment long ago adopted as standard. Either way it is pretty much business as usual, some states gaining and some losing seats in every Census anyway) In terms of partisan control of the 7 or so seats, in this era either party could reasonably expect some support from some PR voters and both could hope to gain the greater share of it. Whereas the recent experience of Federal Congressional and Presidential elections was not generally to expect finely balanced control of either house of Congress or the Presidency--votes tended to lean to one party or the other quite distinctly and the expected balance of control of the House of Representatives would be a lot more than 5 seats, and the balance in the Senate more than 2. Introducing one new state would not be expected to be a political coup for either party then, and therefore it is not reasonable to expect either to be opposed in a solid bloc.
Either the statehood strategy gets consensus and a solid majority in both Houses, either on a bipartisan basis with both parties divided into pro-statehood majorities and dissenting anti-statehood minorities, or with one party strongly favoring it with little to no dissent and the other having enough aisle crossing support to give statehood the majority it needs. I don't recall without looking it up whether statehood for a territory even requires any input from the territory's own people, but I expect at least a small majority to vote in favor if so, and if an honest election shows little support beyond any Constitutional minimum required, that disquieting dissent will be ignored in the circumstances and the FBI simply has its work cut out for it. In these circumstances I would expect the President to be quite on board too.
Bing bang boom, Puerto Rico is a state, and the dynamic of cracking down on secessionists becomes carrot and stick, Good Cop Versus Bad Cop. The pressure will be on in PR, before statehood is accomplished, for people formerly known as Independence minded to roll over--to at least fall silent and probably be passed over in silence but be at risk of being among those scapegoated as dangerous subversives, or roll over completely and accept statehood as the done deal and make the most of it and by affirming they now fully support permanent US citizenship, gain carte blanche immunity for any prior positions to the contrary. If J Edgar Hoover is very politic, the Federales will be known in PR to be lenient and tolerant of anyone who pretends not to be either Red or Independicia. The general US public can be more than gratified if a relative few of the most hotheaded independence firebrands who will not recant are singled out as the culprits and identified with Communist subversion, thus feeding back into the more general and more crucial Red crackdown in CONUS.
It would of course be illegal and in deep violation of the American republican notions for the police to interfere in free democratic elections of course, and in fact PR can expect no more such interference in domestic democracy than US citizens historically suffered OTL. Which is to say, quite a lot really. COINTELPRO operated in the 48 and eventually 50 states OTL, so discredit and remove left wing challengers to the status quo, and similarly diehard Independencia activism in Puerto Rico can expect a rough and rocky road, Bill of Rights be damned. By the time some ATL version of the Church Committee exposes and temporarily discourages such Red Squad shenanigans (more like, forces the FBI to make some apologies and pledges to have changed their ways, even as they simply relabel and reshuffle such things to be more obscure and eventually renormalized again) Puerto Rico will have been a state for the better part of 30 years, and acceptance of its status both by the English-speaking vast majority of states and Puerto Ricans themselves will be pretty well rooted; in the post-Watergate thaw (assuming such a thing is likely to happen some time or other ATL) openly Independence parties might even organize and win votes and seats in PR legislatures or even Congress--just as in Alaska there have been openly declared Alaska Independence candidates permitted to run. As in CONUS, the major preoccupation will be to discredit and repress left wing "agitation," and PR independence might even acquire a cachet of support outside Puerto Rican circles. But it will not come close to prevailing, mooting issues of Constitutionality completely.
So to review
the same kind of people who just killed their President?
Holding all Puerto Ricans to be cut from one mold like that is of course simplistic and racist on the face of it. Obviously in this age, a lot of voters might be feared to be just that, and forthrightly so, but it would be a very ugly look on anyone with pretensions of major level national leadership to hold such a sweeping position. US-patriotic Puerto Ricans could be found ready to hand, at least provided there is no extensive application of 1b above, draconian indiscriminate criminalization of all Puerto Ricans on mere suspicion by language and ethnicity.
difference in culture, ethnicity,
A red herring today, I think, and while perhaps more salient then I think on this matter of PR statehood at least as generous hopes as pro-PR statehood people have today could be found among the "Anglo" people of the 48 states, at least those outside the Southwest without large numbers of Latino immigrants in general. The admission of a Spanish speaking state would be scary among bigots from Texas to California, of course. But these states hardly made up the bulk of US population, the growth of the "Sunbelt" (and the spread of Latino immigrants to become significant in the majority of states) would be phenomena of future generations. Puerto Rico is a big island and some small ones on the far end of the Greater Antilles; Puerto Ricans coming to the 48 states would be no more an issue and possibly less of one than OTL, and in the English speaking states Puerto Ricans would of course generally learn English and expect to see legal and political business conducted in English, while the practice of legislation and jurisprudence and executive power in Spanish way out in Puerto Rico would not need to bother anyone who stays put and doesn't visit. Surely English speakers would be in a strong position in PR to demand translation as a basic civil right, and it would be forthcoming, perhaps at some Federal expense footing part or most of the bill for hiring official translators. To quite a lot of Americans, Puerto Rican Catholicism would be suspect, but by 1950 another "Rum Romanism and Rebellion" speech would be worth the political life of any politician foolish enough to attack Catholics across the board like that, outside of some large but minority venues anyway. American Roman Catholics had already achieved the plurality of largest single Christian denomination in the USA generally, and that understates their great strength in some strongholds. Adding a Connecticut worth of more nominal Catholics would hardly be a major upset. The major issue is not going to really be religion, which few but the worst religious bigots would even bring up, nor language though I daresay that would be a major plausible deniability cover for many obstructionists...no, it would be simple racism. Puerto Ricans are perceived as "brown people" and as such a whole state of them would seem scary indeed to some.
But this is not the era to state that openly. In some ways, it would be much politically safer to say it today, than in 1950. I think the Cold War optics of it would be quite enough to quash such objections. Again, PR is pretty far away, and "white" people who just can't abide the vapors of a bunch of people of color getting up to pretending to equality and running their own state can just refuse to go visit. It will be scary and disturbing to see "colored" Members of Congress again, but in 1950 it is still in living memory the last time various states, Southern ones in fact, elected African American Representatives.
Certainly some prominent figures, in both major parties, will voice bitter dissent, and not a few will even play the "all these Puerto Ricans are disloyal subversives unworthy of our Anglo-Saxon heritage!" card, on both sides of the Mason Dixon line and out west too. But the dominant leadership of both parties will decide I think that giving loyalist Puerto Ricans a solid stake in the US game and something to lose will tip the balance in PR to pro-union patriotic law and order, and be of assistance in rooting out the real subversives, and look very good on the world stage as a plain demonstration of American broad-minded, post-racist leadership of world liberalism. And they will get adequate if often grudging compliance from the rank and file of elected officials and solid support in enough publics to sell it as national consensus. Jim Crow Dixiecrats and Western bigots worried about Mexicans and others getting ideas about bilingualism and practical equal rights will be persuaded, to the sufficient degree, that Hoover and other law enforcement are on the case and will not let the new Puerto Rican Congressional delegation get out of hand spreading racial and multicultural subversion.
If perchance the Democrats until Ike inevitably (unless preempted by some tenacious Republican Speaker elected in to that office in 1951 and taking over from Barkley after that before November 1952, and I think that is unlikely) takes office in early '53 fumble the ball, PR statehood as the solution, in part to bad blood in PR due to the Democratic administration's heavy handedness in panicked vengefulness, would be part of the Republican platform and in the '53-55 session the Republicans I believe held a trifecta of both Houses of Congress and the Presidency and would ram through PR statehood, with the likely support of a great many Democrats, including Southern ones respectful of Eisenhower's assurances subversion of their "way of life" would not get out of hand as a result. Eisenhower after all was mindful of the bad optics of American military forces being segregated in the conquest of Hitler's Reich, and selectively integrated key US forces. He made sure that American film crews documented the conditions of Hitler's concentration camps and that their footage would be publicized to quell all doubt that the Reich had gone far beyond the moral event horizon, and if he finds a Democratic lame duck administration is treating US citizens as occupied peoples, he is probably going to do something about it, if only for the optics of the USA claiming leadership of the Free World.
So in that case the Democrats would have handed the Republicans a club to beat them over the head with, and whether Barkley might have been stupid enough to do this, I think others running his party would be wise enough to foresee this and sit on him. They will not be preempted so badly by the GOP, and so I think PR statehood would come quite early and with a major bipartisan drive, neither party conceding the leadership in the matter to the other. Conservative backlash in both parties might later pour bitter vitriol all over it, but by then Puerto Rican Senators and Representatives will be in Congress to answer them back and demonstrate their US patriotism, and these whines will be judged for the bigotry they are. Which is to say later generations might include large numbers hailing these dissenters as far sighted heroes of their neo-bigotry.
The alternative is to hold PR in bondage as a territory under collective suspicion, and tie down hundreds of thousands of US fighting men much wanted for other fronts of the Cold War, and probably subvert and demoralize many of these in their ugly insurgency-suppression duties, and set before the world a stark example of US imperialism plainly demonstrating racism and flouting all our purported values in favor of naked greed and expedience, and petty vengefulness indiscriminately poured on the few guilty and many innocent alike.
Far far better to cut the Gordian knot with statehood, rigging elections as necessary to guarantee a suitably patriotic PR state government and Congressional delegation, but that would probably be quite judicious whereas whatever degree of manipulation necessary would still be far less drastic and costly than turning PR into one massive witchhunt regime starkly under the power of alien occupiers. Someday in the future the full story of the strings attached sock-puppeting the shaky first few sessions of Puerto Rican statehood might be a gross scandal, but probably quite failing to stand out among a great many others which would shock the public briefly then go down the memory hole again.
By which point PR will have been a state for a full generation and the USA without it would be as unthinkable as the USA without Alaska, Hawaii or California or Texas for that matter.