TERRITORIES: Flag of the West

"This is the day of America. Fate itself wished to make a symbol of it, even in the calendar."

So said Luis Muñoz Marin, Puerto Rico's most extraordinary politician, in his Fourth of July speech in San Juan. Of all the great mass of oratory on the Fourth—the sincere, the deeply-felt, the mechanical—his was perhaps the most imaginative. For Muñoz Marin, around again after his illness (TIME, March 31), did not merely spout the old phrases or wave the old words. He appealed for a united celebration of all the independence days of the Western Hemisphere (Cuba's May 20, Argentina's...