"Go Home Adam!"

At 1 a.m. one day last week, prowlers crept up to the $45,000 summer home recently built by Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem Congressman, whose second wife is a pretty Puerto Rican who has been on the Government payroll as his secretary. Powell was off in Washington. Inside the villa, 25 miles from San Juan, Wife Ivette was home alone with six-week-old Adam Diago and a maid. Suddenly there were cries of "Viva free Puerto Rico!", and a barrage of rocks hit the house. For an hour the men banged at the front door before giving up.

Mrs. Powell could not identify the intruders, but police had a good idea who they were: members of the small but fanatic lunatic fringe of Puerto Rico's Nationalist movement, which agitates for violent revolt to win independence for the tiny U.S. island commonwealth. A few weeks ago, Congressman Powell roused their anger by speeches in Puerto Rico favoring statehood for the island, and by advocating the wider use of English in Puerto Rican public schools, which are supported in part by U.S. funds and are taught in Spanish. The day before the rock attack, about a hundred nationalists picketed Powell's house with signs saying "Go Home Adam!"

Puerto Rico's nationalists may be few, but they mean to be obstreperous. Back in 1950, two of them tried to assassinate President Harry Truman at Blair House in Washington, and in the foray one nationalist and a Washington policeman were killed. At the same time, Nationalist Leader Pedro Albizu Campos led a revolt on the island itself that ended with 33 dead. Four years later, nationalists shot up the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five Congressmen. Harvard-educated Albizu Campos and his chief lieutenants are serving long jail terms, and their movement now seems in decline.

Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap, under the able leadership of Governor Luis Munoz Marin, has convinced most Puerto Ricans that they have more to gain than to lose by their loose association with the U.S. It is estimated that there are fewer than 400 nationalist agitators among the island's 2,350,000 population. Some have gone over to Fidel Castro's Cuba; Campos' wife Laura, and one of his aides, Juan Juarbe, serve as members of Castro's delegation to the U.N., where they picture Puerto Rico as "the slave state of the Americas." The rest sit around dreaming up ways to make a noise far out of proportion to their numbers.

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