The Filipino-American War: 1902-1906; The American Occupation

T H E R O O T S O F T H E F I L I P I N O N A T I O N by Onofre D. Corpuz

Chapter 21

The FilipinoAmerican War:19021906; The American Occupation

[The Filipino people] should preserve and perpetuate their Occidental way of life which they can only do through continued association and cooperation with America and the western world. Geographically, we Filipinos are Orientals and will forever be so. Spiritually, that is to say, because of our culture and Christian civilization, we are of the west. The great destiny of the Filipino people, as I conceive it, is to play the role as the connecting link between Orient and Occident. Manuel L. Quezon to Franklin D. Roosevelt (1943)

A middling crowd gathered in the small plaza in front of the Ayuntamiento or city hall of Manila on 4 July 1901. There were not more than a thousand or so Filipinos. There were some US Army officers and soldiers plus a few American civilian employees of the military administration. Wooden planks set on a few stone building blocks served for a makeshift grandstand. It was a hot morning, and the huge man on the stage who was to be the first American civil governor of the Philippines was perspiring. The occasion was the turnover of civil executive authority in the occupied provinces from the US military governor to a civilian governor. The army men were sarcastic about the affair, and an eyewitness report says that the Filipinos “should have been enthusiastically hopeful but [were] merely apathetic.”

For several years after 1901 the American administration of the new colony was as makeshift as the grandstand on which it was inaugurated. It was not truly a civilian regime. The ruler of the Philippines was the President of the United States acting in his capacity as commanderinchief of the Army. He governed through the War department and the regime in Manila reported to the War department's bureau of insular affairs. Under US Public Law No. 235, approved on 1 July 1902, the bureau was to be headed by an army officer on detail with the rank of a colonel. Under the

FilipinoAmerican War: 19021906; American Occupation 1


same law the American President's authority became civilian, exercised by authority of the US Congress, although the regime in Manila continued to the end to report through the bureau.

When William H. Taft, the first civil governor, was Secretary of War he acknowledged (1907) “the somewhat anomalous creation of the Philippine Commission, as a civil legislature in a purely military government” and that there were not only differences but “considerable friction” between the Commission and the military.

Even after the Philippine Assembly was organized in 1907, the authority of the civilian administration was complete only in the Christian provinces. The Assembly did not have authority over the provinces of Agusan, Nueva Vizcaya, and Mountain. These remained under the Commission's authority. In the Muslim provinces US Army officers were the governors. These provinces or districts made up one huge province officially called the Moro Province. It was administered by the Military Governor, a general of the Army. It had a legislative council made up of the military governor and some assistants. They prepared all legislation for the Province. The military administration of the Muslim region ended only in 1914, when its supervision was transferred to the Department of Mindanao and Sulu.

In the Christian provinces the Commission exercised not only legislative but also executive authority. It was the upper house, acting en banc, of the colonial legislature. The governorgeneral as chairman and four other members made up the cabinet and were the executive power. But the early differences with the military authorities constrained the Commission to create its own military force, the Philippine Constabulary.

The reason for the incomplete and quasicivilian government was that the Christian Filipino resistance was continuing, and there was a war going on in the southern islands. Section 6 of US Public Law No. 235, which defined the temporary administration of civil affairs in the colony, provided that “whenever the existing insurrection in the Philippine Islands shall have ceased and a condition of general and complete peace shall have been established therein...,” the Commission was to certify the same to the American President. The latter (Theodore Roosevelt) proclaimed a general amnesty on 4 July 1902, presumably due to the surrender recently of



Generals Lukban and Malvar. The guerrilla leaders in Cebu (Generals Juan Climaco and Arcadio Maxilom) and Bohol (Samson) were reported to have surrendered in November and December 1902. After the presidential proclamation of general amnesty the Commission certified, on 8 September 1902, that “the recently existing insurrection in the Philippine Islands had ceased and a condition of general and complete peace has been established herein,” although the Commission made it clear that its certification did not cover the Lake Lanao region in Mindanao.

The November 1902 report of the Commission was categorical. It said that: “The insurrection as an organized attempt to subvert the authority of the United States in these islands is entirely at an end, and the whole Christian population, with the exception of a few thousand of persons who have settled in the Moro country in isolated towns, are enjoying civil government under the beneficent provisions of recent Congressional legislation concerning the Philippines.”

However, the Commission report to the Secretary of War in 1903 was not so sure. That year it could only say: “The conditions of the islands as to tranquility are quite equal, so far as peace and good order are concerned, to what they were at any time during the Spanish regime.”

We know now that the Americans, with more than 70,000 troops fighting the Filipinos in 1900, had refused from the very outset to admit that there was a war. If there was no war they could not declare that a war was over. Their solution was to declare that they had “established” peace. This selfdeception continued for years and did not end until 1907 when Taft, as Secretary of War, came back for the inauguration rites of the Philippine Assembly. The ceremonies took place in the morning of 16 October at the Grand Opera House on Plaza Cervantes, Santa Cruz, in Manila. In the course of explaining the difficulties that faced the regime in the early years Taft finally stated, without qualification or elaboration, that there had been a war after all:

The civil government was inaugurated in 1901 before the close of a war between the forces of the United States and the controlling elements of the Philippine people. It had sufficient popular support to over awe many of those whose disposition was friendly to the Americans. In various provinces the war was continued intermittently



for a year after the appointment of a civil governor in July, 1901.

The truth in 1902 was that the war was waning, but it was not over. The war that the Americans called an insurrection did not end that year or in 1903 or 1904. There were still actions to be fought in the field. Among many Filipinos the weariness of six years of war had not stilled the yearning for freedom.

The occupation regime that claimed to be a civilian government and pretended that it no longer had an insurrection on its hands used forces of war and military methods against the continuing Christian Filipino resistance until 1906. The force most commonly employed by the regime against the resistance was the Philippine Constabulary. If it were true that there was general and complete peace then the police forces of the towns would have been enough to maintain peace and order. But the regime's decision was shaped in 1901, when it received the report that: “The presidentes and councilors of the towns, however, are all Filipinos, many of them exinsurrectos.” The Commission also claimed that the people were being “terrorized and often forced into an attitude of hostility which they did not feel.....” So it created the Philippine Constabulary that year. The organization was made up of native recruits and American army officers. The regime already had the Philippine Scouts, a purely military organization composed of companies of native soldiers in the US Army. However, the civilian Commission and the US military in the islands did not agree on how to deal with the “insurrection” during this period, and the former felt that it could not count on the Army's cooperation. As the resistance continued and when the “disturbances” assumed really serious proportions, the civilian and military authorities were forced to cooperate closely; both the Scouts and Constabulary together, and sometimes regular US Army units of company to battalion strength, were used.

In 1902 peace had not reached the people in the provinces of Rizal, Batangas, and Cavite, Tayabas and Albay, Samar and Leyte, Negros and Cebu, Surigao and Misamis. These provinces (counting both in Negros) had a total population of 3,013,884 in 1903; this was the area of the active resistance. Indeed as late as 1905 the Cavite provincial governor reported that: “The civil Commission must have been mistaken as to the actual conditions of the province at the time the civil government was



established.”1

This chapter tells the story of the Filipinos during the early years of the American occupation. We begin with an account of how the FilipinoAmerican War really ended.

Patriots, Ladrones, Pulahanes

The men who played noteworthy roles in the closing stages of the War were a diverse lot. There were the irreconciliables. Many of them lived in Manila, men of status, surrendered officers of the Revolution, men who had to take the oath of allegiance to the regime but were still committed to the ideals of the Revolution, even though each year the goal of independence was farther and farther away. They gave moral and financial support to those who continued to fight as soldiers against the regime. But they worked in secret, and so we know only that they were there, and their individual identities remain unknown.

Then there were the officers and soldiers of the scattered Filipino army, “lost commands” or new groups made up of men from disbanded units. There was one general still active in the field after Gen. Malvar's surrender in 1902. As a group the Filipino generals, whatever their social origins, showed in their actions the discipline of patriotism and of the public wellbeing.

The persona of the lower ranks who figure in our story is less clear. None was above the rank of major. We read from the reports of the regime that two of them promoted themselves to the rank of lieutenantgeneral. Some almost surely did not make the difficult adjustment from life in the field to life in an occupied pueblo. Others are said to have become outlaws, but the regime at this time indiscriminately denigrated every Filipino leader against it, and usually called every resistance leader a bandit or robber or brigand. Besides, provincial guerrilla leaders often enjoyed popular homage and the aura of the folk hero.

Another class of men in this part of our story can easily be seen as count erparts of characters during the Spanish era. Some in this class were men



who were driven outside the pale of the law during the past regime, and they remained outside the law now. Others were the children of native folk belief, Hispanic Christian religiosity, and social upheaval: men who were sincere, and others who were apparently opportunistic religious leaders who, with their adherents, were regarded askance by society and who reciprocated at times with provoked or unprovoked violence.

And so we will meet with various kinds of men, produced by the complexity of the troubled times. Many of them could honestly say that their actions in 1902 and in the years that followed were those of soldiers. To the regime, however, everybody owed allegiance and obedience to its law and all who refused and resisted were criminals and marauders and bandits. It did not matter that there were patriots, robbers, restless men, religious cultists, and opportunists. The regime treated all of them either as ladrones or pulahanes (also "pulajanes"), the latter described only as "a band of religious fanatics in the mountains".

Luciano San Miguel was a colonel in 1899, commanding in San Juan del Monte where the Americans fired the shots that began the war. He was in Malolos that Black Saturday. We lose track of him during those first months when the war ground along the railroad from Caloocan to Malolos and from there fanned out to the east, then west, and farther north to Pangasinan and the Ilocos. He would have had his share of defeats, retreats, and lack of rifles and bullets. He was relieved from field command in October 1899, but the great enemy offensive launched late that month led to his reactivation in November. In December he was commanding general in Zambales and operating also in Pangasinan.

He revived the Katipunan in his command at this time; he felt that, had not the Katipunan been abolished, victory would have been won. He deduced that as a result of the dissolution of the Society, the people of the pueblos had not been made an integral part of the military effort; this was because, in the absence of the Katipunan, resistance was seen as the role of the army alone.

Like his fellow generals, San Miguel had a high and possibly an extremist view of the role of the military leadership. They believed that it was the generals alone who had the right and the duty to protect the nation.



Thus, civilians who treated with the enemy on the vital matter of the nation's fate were “meddling in affairs which do not concern them.” This act of civilians was, to San Miguel, “that deceit commonly called politics”. This was why the generals despised and hated the leaders of the Federal Party as traitors.

San Miguel was under heavy attack in Zambales and Pangasinan during midDecember 1899 to early January 1900. He was not taken, nor did he surrender. Then we lose track of him once more, until a report of the American civil governor states that in November 1902 there were “marauding bands” operating in Bulacan and Rizal. The governor's report described these in 1903:

They are essentially robber bands, thieves, murderers, and kidnappers for ransom, determined to live on their neighbors and willing to sacrifice any number of Filipinos to the enjoyment of an outlaw life. They masquerade at times as "revolucionarios" in order to win the assistance just mentioned [from supporters in Manila], but they are nothing but ladrones and should be punished only as violators of the law.

The Americans were learning fast. When a Filipino was persecuted by the Spanish friars the law could not give him redress because the law made him a filibustero. When he lost the family lands to landgrabbers he could not recover them through the law because the law declared him a tulisan or outlaw. Then the Americans' law made the Filipino soldiers rebels or insurrectos, and amnestied them as such under the proclamation of 1902.

But San Miguel decided not to surrender and take the oath of allegiance to the United States. Under the law of the Americans he, therefore, ceased to be a misguided insurrecto. That law made him a marauding outlaw, although he was the same man in 1902 that he was in 1901. The Americans did not understand; or perhaps they refused to understand. They adjudged San Miguel as the leader of “wellknown ladrones, thieves, and other criminals.” In fact, San Miguel was representing the Hongkong junta, which did not support outlaws. Nor was he a robber. The ilustrado Pedro A. Paterno has a note of how San Miguel presented him in 1897 to the latter's young bride, a lady “full of virginal sweetness and grace, wellknown mestiza daughter of the wealthy Chinese Ong Capin.”



San Miguel's continuing fight was partly sustained by backers in Manila. These men were patriots. The regime referred to them more elaborately as “irreconcilable persons of responsibility.” Mrs. Taft, who later wrote a book about this era, recalled that the irreconcilables were men “posing in everyday life as loyal citizens.” They continued to work in the cause of independence; they were caught by the Americans' declaration of peace but could not be reconciled to the occupation regime.

The irreconcilables organized the Partido Nacionalista in 1901. For purposes of registration with the Philippine Commission they declared that the party would work within the law, but would seek early autonomy and in time independence under United States protectorateship. The party's avowed methods were peaceful, as exemplified by one of its declared activities: “To inculcate in the Filipino people a love of instruction, a desire to work, the necessity of economy, and the spirit of association.” The words were reminiscent of the old Katipunan. At first the party had two presidents: Santiago Alvarez and Pascual H. Poblete. The vicepresident was Andres Villanueva. There were sixteen secretaries, including: Macario Sakay, Pantaleon Torres, Lope K. Santos, Jose Palma, Aurelio Tolentino, Aguedo del Rosario, Francisco Carreon.

The next year the Katipunan was again revived, and it is not unexpected that Luciano San Miguel was the head (it continued to be a secret society). It must be noted that at this time Gregorio Aglipay had organized the schismatic Filipino Independent Church and Isabelo de los Reyes had founded the Unión Obrera Democrática de Filipinas. The Partido Nacionalista (now headed by Dominador Gomez), the Katipunan, the Aglipay church, and the labor movement all bespoke a clear and continuing nationalist sentiment.

It is within this context, not that of petty ladronism, that San Miguel's struggle must be appreciated. And it is only within this context that we can understand why he sought, at this point, counsel and guidance from a man whose ethics and uprightness no honorable person could question: Apolinario Mabini.

Some days after Mabini arrived in Manila (26 February 1903) from his exile in Guam (since January 1901) he received a letter from San Miguel



greeting him and requesting advice. There is no trace of this letter, but we will know what San Miguel needed to have advice about, from Mabini's letterreply. Mabini could not give an answer immediately; he had not had time enough to assess conditions. So he scribbled a message on a calling card, thanking San Miguel for his words of welcome and saying that he would send a proper answer shortly. This was brought to San Miguel.

On 27 March Mabini wrote his reply. He addressed his letter to “General Luciano San Miguel.” He wrote of liberty; the goal of independence through resumption of the war; the Filipinos' lack of arms; the possibility that arms assistance might be had from a foreign power, but that this same power might later wish to annex the Philippines; the additional destruction and losses that war would entail; the path of independence via peaceful means; the opinion of the majority of the people. In this connection he made the suggestion: “Let us conform to the opinion of the majority, although we may recognize that by this method we do not obtain our desires.” He also suggested that a public meeting might be held to discuss the situation and the options available. If San Miguel agreed, he said, he could use Mabini's services to convey his terms (on such matters as safeconduct, for instance) to the authorities. Mabini was personally inclined to peace at the time, but he wrote that: “I believe that as long as the Filipinos do not endeavor to liberate themselves from their bonds the period of their liberty will not arrive.” Such a letter is not one that a leader of outlaws solicits from a man like Mabini, nor would Mabini write such a letter to a leader of ladrones.

San Miguel's messenger picked up the letter the same morning of 27 March 1903. San Miguel did not get it. The messenger went back to Mabini the next day to report that he delivered it to San Miguel's second in command. San Miguel and his forces had been engaged in two recent actions, one with the Philippine Constabulary and the other with a joint force of the Constabulary and the Philippine Scouts. The second encounter was fought in PugadBabuy (“Wild Pigs Lair”) in the hilly country of eastern Rizal; San Miguel's force lost heavily and he was killed. Paterno, although often said to be proregime, wrote in 1910 that San Miguel "died gloriously under the fire of the American guns." On San Miguel's body was found Mabini's calling card. The Filipinos' last general fell in battle.2

Outside of Rizal and Bulacan there were unstable conditions caused by



what the American governor Taft described as “criminal malcontents” and “lawless elements” in Surigao and Misamis. In Surigao, the American captain of the Constabulary was killed, government rifles were seized, and the capital town was held by “the lawless band." Relief forces from Iligan and Leyte had to be called in. Taft stubbornly refused to admit that the peace was not complete, but we know the true condition of the province from his own words: “I concluded to turn over the province to the military.”

Taft blamed the troubles in Misamis on the people misunderstanding the purpose of the census then being conducted. He said that they rose because they thought that the census was going to be the basis for taxation. But in the end, he said, “all the lawless elements were captured or killed and the living are now in Bilibid” [the penitentiary]. Taft enjoys the reputation of being a good man; after his service in the Philippines he became United States Secretary of War, President, and Chief justice of their Supreme Court. But Taft's credibility may be questioned from the evidence of an American judge who was assigned to Misamis and who worked there from May to September 1903, trying the cases of the “lawless elements” in court. The judge, James F. Blount, contradicted Taft; he declared that the men were “genuine insurrectos,” not outlaws. Blount wrote that:3

They were by no means unmitigated cutthroats. I have often wondered how they managed to be so respectable at that late date. They did not steal, as did most of the outlaws of 1903. Their avowed purpose was to subvert the existing government.

The reports of the Commission and the governor during these years treat all the disturbances as problems of “tranquility” or “peace and order.” Well, the most critical disturbance during 1903 was not a simple peace and order problem. It was the serious resistance in Albay. Its abaca, better known as Manila hemp, made Albay the richest of the provinces at the time. The leaders of the insurrection were Simeon Ola of the town of Guinobatan, with Agustin Saria and Lazaro Toledo, both from Cavite. All three were majors in Gen. Vito Belarmino's command. Belarmino surrendered in July 1901; Ola and Toledo were with him but soon returned to the hills; Saria never turned himself in.

They conducted, according to Taft, a “reign of terror” throughout the province. But Taft's report also suggests that they were Robin Hoods and



that they enjoyed popular sympathy in the pueblos. Taft tells an unlikely tale about Ola fighting not so much the regime as he was against the wealthy abaca growers.

Unable to make any headway in the campaign against Ola, the regime remembered the method that Gen. Bell had used successfully against Malvar. The latter had surrendered when the people of Batangas and Laguna had been forced into concentration camps. And so it came the turn of the people of Albay to be herded like prisoners into the camps, although it had now been almost a year since the “insurrection” was said to have been over.

The towns of Albay were like most other pueblos, bisected by the highway which served as the main street. The tribunal or town hall, like the church, stood in the center of the población. In 1903 the concentration camp or “zone of protection” in each Albay town was defined by a square with sides approximately 2,000 yards (1,830 meters) long. Two sides ran 1,000 yards from and parallel to the main road, the other two sides 1,000 yards from the town hall. The defined area was less than 3.5 square kilometers. Into this square the people of the barrios and outlying districts of the municipality were herded together with the residents of the población. The provincial governor's report for 1903 stated:

Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons in such a limited area was disease and suffering for want of food and ordinary living accommodations.

The leading men of the province formed a committee to raise funds for feeding the poor. They also collected contributions to support the townsmen who "volunteered" to help the Constabulary and Scouts go thrashing into the hills after the ladrones. The concentration lasted from March to October 1903. Then, Taft says, “the people were allowed to return to their homes.” But Taft did not tell all. He knew that the concentration method required that all houses outside the camps be burned or otherwise destroyed; and so there were no homes for many of the people to return to.

The provincial governor's report was actually restrained. He (R.F. Santos, formerly colonel in Gen. Belarmino's command) had to make the necessary condemnation of the ladrones. He also wrote that “through it all



the pacific and obedient nature of the people demonstrated itself, and the political situation was never in danger from any of the effects of this reconcentration on the masses of the people.” But Taft absolutely avoided the word. He would only report that the Commission authorized the governor of Albay and the Constabulary “to bring the people from the outlying barrios, where they were exposed to the invasion of ladrones, nearer to the populated portions of their respective towns.”

The regime was really touchy about the business of concentration. Taft took care to stress that “the people thus brought in were [to be] properly fed and not subjected to unnecessary privations.” In the same solicitous tone the commander of the Constabulary in the Bicol region described the concentration in Albay as nominal. It was, he reported in 1903:

without any pitiless shooting down of defenseless women and children and such other attendant horrors as are generally associated with the word reconcentration. There was no starvation, as all the people were given sufficient food for their needs provided they performed some work, and in case they were sick or helpless, the food was furnished gratuitously.... The object of the reconcentration was not to punish the people indiscriminately, but to deprive the ladrones of the means of subsistence in the interior, and enable the troops to operate freely without fear of injuring innocent people.

The socalled civil government had good cause to treat the issue gingerly. The President of the United States had declared that peace had been established in America's new colony; it would not be nice for the colonial regime to be caught using barbaric war tactics such as herding noncombatants and innocents into concentration camps. Worse, the concentration in Albay and the Reconcentration Statute enacted by the Commission (1903) ran smack against U.S. Public Act No. 235, the governing law of the regime since 1 July 1902. This law provided in part:

deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law....

The concentration in Albay lasted eight months. It yielded the expected results. Ola and hundreds of other men were captured or surrendered. They were brought to court. Again, Judge Blount was assigned to the province to assist in the trials. And, again, he reported that the matter was not an outlaw disturbance but an insurrection. But it was not this issue that



concerned him. What profoundly disturbed Blount was two lists, one containing fiftyseven names, the second sixtythree, of men who were kept in the Albay provincial jail. They were all officially reported to have died between 20 May and 3 December 1903 (with one exception). The most he would say about the matter was that “in the Albay jail in 1903 we had a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Calcutta, on a small scale.”4

The Commission also reported in 1904 that the Hongkong Junta was showing renewed life. The irreconcilables in Manila sponsored agitation for immediate independence in the hope that this would influence the American presidential elections. Artemio Ricarte secretly returned in December. He had been brought with Mabini to Manila from Guam in February the past year but had been shipped off to Hongkong because he refused to take the oath of loyalty. He and Aurelio Tolentino collaborated in nationalist activities.

The Commission had dismissed Isabelo de los Reyes, founder of the Unión Obrera Democrática, as “a crackbrained insurrecto agitator.” Now the Commission called Tolentino “a crackbrained playwright.” This was a slur. Tolentino was among the signatories to the independence proclamation and later president of the junta de Amigos that was active in 1900 in Manila, with authority from President Aguinaldo to organize guerrilla groups. He was one of the secretaries of the Partido Nacionalista. As a playwright he wrote Tagalog plays which were vehicles for the party's goals. He was not in the least crackbrained. Anyway, Ricarte also went to northern Luzon; there he met with a corporal of the Constabulary who had served under him in the field; the man seized the Constabulary barracks in Vigan, Ilocos Sur.5

The war returned to Cavite in 19041905. The Commission named Cornelio Felizardo, Julian Montalon, Lucio de Vega, a man named Oruga, Macario Sakay, and Fructuoso Vito as the ladrón leaders. All were former officers in the Filipino army and the Commission conceded that political aims were “at least a factor” in their activities. It referred to Sakay as a former barber in Manila, much like the Spanish governorgeneral Anda y Salazar reporting to his king that Diego Silang and Juan de la Cruz Palaris, the leaders of the two great rebellions of the 1760s, were cocheros (rig drivers) in Manila. The governorgeneral's 1907 report said that Sakay had



tried to revive the Katipunan in 1902, and he was tried and convicted of sedition. Then he was amnestied and took the oath of allegiance. But his activities displeased the authorities, and he fled to the hills and set up his organization. In time, he became head of the diverse groups of Montalon, Felizardo, and other chiefs, although most of the assaults were conducted under the direct responsibility of the latter and not by him.

These groups conducted raids on the towns of San Pedro Tunasan in Laguna, Paranaque near Manila, and Taal in Batangas between November 1904 and January 1905. The attackers were able to kill a few Americans and to capture arms and ammunition. The townsfolk, as usual, withheld cooperation from the regime. Batangas and Cavite at this point were said to be overrun with ladrones.

While the authorities were organizing for a major campaign the town of San Francisco de Malabon, home of former Gen. Mariano Trias, the then provincial governor, was attacked on 24 January. The garrison was made up of the Constabulary and a few Scouts. The town treasury was emptied, rifles and ammunition were carried off, and Trias' wife and their two young children were taken by the attackers. This led the regime to drop all pretense of peace. Cavite was virtually occupied by one battalion of the US Army Second Cavalry, another battalion of the Second Infantry, and yet another of the Philippine Scouts. The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus was suspended. But the Commission reported that this resulted in no real progress. It explained that there were “numberless blind trails” in the two provinces, and the people sympathized with the ladrones, and it was easy for the latter to melt into the peaceful population.

It was the guerrilla war all over again, and the regime herded the people into concentration camps anew. The Commission assured its superiors by taking pains to point out that:

The people were allowed, of course, to take with them their food supplies of every sort, together with their cattle and household property, and proper provision was made for their comfort by building temporary houses fully as good as those they ordinarily occupied.

W. Cameron Forbes, a Commission member from 1904 and governorgeneral from 1909 to 1913, has a similarly benign picture of the



concentration in Batangas and Cavite. He says that concentration under the Spaniards “involved a great deal of suffering,” but in this case the families:

were escorted, with such valuables as they could carry, to the reconcentration camp in which they were required to reside. They were allowed much freedom of movement provided they did not return to their barrios. The camps were under the direction of the presidents of the towns. The American officials were careful about the treatment of every one in such camps and complaints received prompt attention. The principal hardship of reconcentration lay in the fact that the farmers could not care for their crops. This, however, had the important effect of inducing the bandits to surrender when they saw that their continuance in the field was going to prove injurious to the interest of their friends.

With the towns battened down and sealed, the military went after the ladrón groups. The Commission reported that by July, only Felizardo, Montalon, and De Vega remained of the noteworthy leaders. Concentration was apparently ended in July, although in August 1905 the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus had not been restored in either Batangas or Cavite. The Commission stated that Felizardo was killed. It ended its report with the apparent non sequitur that more land was under cultivation in Batangas and Cavite than at any time since 1896.

In its 1906 report the Commission confessed that Felizardo was not really killed in 1905 as it had reported, but that he was truly dead this year. Felizardo had served as a lieutenant under Gen. Juan Cailles, commanding in Laguna; Cailles, now governor of the province, was among the witnesses who identified Felizardo's body. Sakay was now the only notable leader of the “ladrones.” He is said to have claimed the title of president of the Filipino Republic. He had a vicepresident, Francisco Carreon; he had a lieutenantgeneral, Leon Villafuerte. Julian Montalon also styled himself “LieutenantGeneral of the Army of Liberation.” They were described by the Commission as among “the most wicked and desperate men ever at large in the Philippine Islands.”

The ending of the disturbances in Cavite and Batangas was anticlimactic. One of the Indios Bravos in Europe, Dominador Gomez, returned from Spain after the declaration of peace. He was a medical doctor, but soon became a leading figure in political affairs as well as in the labor movement. He is reported in 1903 as having proposed to the regime that the ladrones



be guaranteed immunity from prosecution as well as food and employment for one year in exchange for their surrender and return to the law. This offer was not accepted then. In May 1906, he offered to get Sakay and his men to surrender; this time his services were welcome. He was as good as his word. The hunted men came forth and gave themselves up.

Sakay, Montalon, Villafuerte, and De Vega were brought to trial in September. They were charged and convicted of the crime of bandolerismo. This crime was invented by the Commission. It was always difficult to prove in court that a man committed the usual criminal acts, or that he was present when these acts were committed. So the Commission enacted the Bandolerismo Statute in November 1902. Under this law it was enough to show, by inference and circumstantial evidence, that the man was a member of a group defined by the law as a criminal band. The Commission chairman would later be the US Supreme Court Chief Justice. The first two sections of the Bandolerismo law read:

Section 1. Whenever three or more persons, conspiring together, shall form a band of robbers for the purpose of stealing carabao or other personal property by means of force and violence, and shall go out upon the highway or roam over the country armed with deadly weapons for this purpose, they shall be deemed highway robbers or brigands, and every person engaged in the original formation of the band, or joining it thereafter, shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by death, or imprisonment for not less than twenty years, in the discretion of the court.

Section 2. To prove the crime described in the previous section, it shall not be necessary to adduce evidence that any member of the band has in fact committed robbery or theft, but it shall be sufficient to justify conviction thereunder if, from the circumstances, it can be inferred beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is a member of such an armed band as that described in said section.

The accused were found guilty and sentenced to death under these astonishing rules of evidence. The sentences on Montalon and Villafuerte were later commuted to life imprisonment.

The 1905 concentration in Batangas and Cavite broke the spirit of the resistance in this region. The area's rich lands and mild climate had attracted foreigners for centuries. Because the law often supported the



landgrabbers the people became wary, easy to stir, and inclined to revolt. But the people of Batangas had been under concentration as recently as 1902, and the Batanguenos and Cavitenos had been in war almost without respite since 1896.

The Bandolerismo statute partly launched the political career of a young Tayabas lawyer. Manuel L. Quezon was a lieutenant in the Bataan sector during the retreat of the Filipino forces. He surrendered in April 1901, finished his law studies in Manila, and went home. His record of the era says that, as a result of the law:

In the latter part of 1903, and even of the first half of 1904, every provincial jail in the Philippines was filled with socalled bandits. Innocent Filipinos living in faraway villages who were put in jail on mere suspicion or on woefully deficient evidence, were innumerable.

Quezon says that he took on the defense for every man who had no lawyer and won acquittal in every case.6

We will next take notice of three other cases of disturbance and resistance during this time. We see them in widely separated areas: north central Luzon, NegrosCebu, and SamarLeyte.

The regime's scanty reports on these cases stressed what was exotic and often bizarre, urging us to see the people involved as sociological curiosities. It is not easy now to get away from the images created by the reports: rural sects and their leaders with long hair claiming to be prophets and assuming titles of “Pope,” and followers said to be no more than superstitious and ignorant members of fanatical religious movements. Some of this was surely true; we must realize that the sects and movements had historical precedents. But religion and superstition were not the whole of the matter. Our account presents the cases as both disturbance of the peace and resistance to the regime.

The movements were manifestations of a familiar phenomenon in old Filipinas: cultism that was closely related to both religion and alienation from the authorities. We came across an early and famous example of this phenomenon in the Cofradia de San Jose of Apolinario de la Cruz (supra, Chapter 11) during the 1840s.



The cultist sects and brotherhoods were generally quiet, their leaders more or less avoiding the interest of the authorities. But the folk would be stirred during unusual times, their anxieties agitated by social upheaval and disaster. Thus flared the disturbances in Samar in 1884, fruit of the 18821883 cholera epidemic (supra, Chapter 15). Social turmoil and the overthrow of the familiar order of things during the Revolution and the war were even more jarring, pushing a host of religionrelated groups in the highland and rural areas to the surface. The Katipunan ng San Cristobal (Brotherhood of San Cristobal) that was active in Batangas, Laguna, and Tayabas in 1898 was clearly an echo of the De la Cruz movement.

The regime regarded the cultist sects and brotherhoods only in their religious aspect. The Constabulary report of 1903 provided a list of what its officers described as “religious and fanatical movements,” saying that they were all organized around the belief in “a church militant in its highest form”:

DiosDios, Pulajans, Colorados, CruzCruz, San[ta] Iglesia, Cazadores, Colorums, Santo Ninos, Guardia[s] de Honor, Soldados Militantes de la Iglesia, and Hermanos del Tercero Orden.

But if it is not possible to segregate the element of resistance in the movements, it cannot be ignored either, especially since the Americans represented to the folk a heretical faith, a false religion. In fact the Commission noted that all of the movements engaged in raids for the purpose of capturing rifles.

The Constabulary report of 1903 also noted the fall of three “popes” during the year: Faustino Ablena of Samar (who signed his letters as “Senor Jesus y Maria”); Fernandez of Laguna; and Rios of Tayabas. There were two other popes still at large: Papa Isio of Negros and “King” Apo of Pampanga and Nueva Ecija.

Felipe Salvador came to the Commission's attention in 1903. He was portrayed as a quasireligious leader, the stock prophet with long hair. He was considered an outlaw. The Commission reports do not involve him in raids or attacks of note before 1906. Indeed they state that he was quiescent: “for a considerable time he has been hiding in the swamps” of Bulacan and Nueva Ecija or in the forest of Mt. Arayat. In other words, the



Commission expected him to make trouble. Salvador was the leader of Santa Iglesia ("Holy Church"). In April 1906 his adherents attacked the Constabulary barracks in Malolos and seized some guns. But they lost heavily in a subsequent engagement in the nearby town of Hagonoy, and the Commission said this year that Salvador was negotiating for surrender and that his followers in Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Tarlac, Pampanga, and Pangasinan were peaceful and quiet. The Commission bombastically asserted in its 1906 report that, as far as Luzon was concerned: “Never before within the history of modern times has this great island been in so peaceful and orderly a condition as now.”7

Our second case is that of the NegrosCebu region. In Cebu in 1903 the pulahanes were a serious problem. They raided towns and battered a Constabulary force, killing two officers. The Commission also noted ladrón disturbances in Iloilo and Capiz.

In Negros the leaders had adhered to the Revolution in 1898 but as easily declared submission to the Americans in March 1899. Those leaders were sugar hacenderos. The socioeconomic extremes of Filipino society were probably most starkly reflected in the Negros of that era, specifically in plantation society. The hub and heart of this society was the hacienda; the hacendero was lord of all. His house was like the convento in the población; it was the manor house, the center of the community. The sway of the hacienda over the people is pictured in a contemporary account:

The oxen, carabao, and horses to be seen in the fields or on the roads belonged to the hacendero; the broad acres of sugarcane and rice, the milch goats that fed beside the hedgeless roads, the long galvanized iron shed that housed the milling machinery, the paraos and lorchas [water craft] that loaded grasssacks of crude sugar at the landing on the river, the bamboo and nipa huts of the laborers all were his. Even the laborers, men, women, and children, tanned to darkest bronze by toil in the paddies and fields, might be said to belong to the hacendero, for they were usually so deeply in his debt for clothing and food advanced that escape was wellnigh impossible.

All of the common people in the hacienda and most of the masses outside in the pueblos and mountains were unschooled and poor. The resistance passed into their hands when the hacendero class submitted to the Americans. As in Luzon and SamarLeyte the organization of the poor folk



was featured by superstition and religion. So the “outlaws” of Negros were called “babaylan”. We see the religious element in the term, for the babaylan was the preSpanish priest or priestess. John R. White, a young American Constabulary officer who is the source of the quotation above, simply adopted his superiors' notion of the babaylans and called them “fanatical outlaws.”

The best known leader of the Negros babaylans was Dionisio Papa, commonly known as Papa Isio it could have been a play on words, for “Papa” was a common enough surname, and it also meant “Pope.” But Papa Isio was probably not a mere babaylan; in early March 1899 he had written Aguinaldo to inform him of his command. He and his followers eluded the Constabulary for months. His base was located on Mt. Mansalanao, 1,830 meters up on the ridge that leads north to Mt. Kanlaon. This base was finally captured by the Constabulary in late May 1902. Papa Isio went into hiding and the resistance in Negros ended in late October this same year when Dalmacio the Negrito, who ranked next to Papa Isio and was the babaylan leader in the north of the island, was captured.8

We now turn to our third case. In 1904 the regime noted that ladrones bands “seem always to have existed to some extent among the Filipinos...,” although it also said that there was no longer a single organized band of them in Luzon and the Visayas except in Samar. Here the pulahan leader was Papa Bulan; the name is the telltale link with a cultist and rural movement. His base was in the headwaters area of the Gandara River. The Constabulary in Samar with the Constabulary and Scouts of other provinces are reported to have broken up the pulahanes into small groups.

Over 19031904 the occupation regime had been qualifying its preceding reports to the effect that general and complete peace existed in the islands. In 1905 it admitted that there were more pulahanes than ever. There were actions in Samar in the towns of Orás and Dolores; here the pulahanes practically annihilated two detachments of the US Army 38th Company of Philippine Scouts and captured 59 carbines and six revolvers. But the regime in Manila reported that it took strong measures, and concluded that it had no doubt that the pulahanes would thenceforth be lawabiding.

The next year it reported that it was wrong. After elaborate



arrangements the regime was able to get the pulahanes to agree to surrender; a day in March 1906 was set for the surrender and the district of Magtaon in the mountainous heart of Samar was chosen as the venue for the ceremonies. But when the pulahanes were in formation for the surrender they fired on signal at the Constabulary and a hand to hand fight ensued. The Commission concluded its report saying lamely that much of the province was “in an orderly condition.”

Across the narrow strait from Samar pulahan activity surged anew in Leyte. The pulahanes, who wore red in their dress or in their headbands (and thus "pula," or red) were still known to the regime basically as highland people. In June 1906 they attacked the town of Burauen; they killed some policemen and seized some rifles. The Constabulary reported that the mother (Maria Lipayon) of “two pulajanes or outlaws” was in the town jail; the two sons (Juan and Basilio Cabero) wished to free her and take revenge on the justice of the peace and other officials of the town; and the pulahanes “undoubtedly” resented the new land assessments and the land tax. This last is unbelievable. If, as the regime claimed, the pulahanes were mountain people, then there could be no land assessments and land taxes because there were no surveys of mountain lands; even for most of the lowlands in Luzon at this time the system of registration of land titles was not yet working.

So there was something fishy about the Commission report. And it became fishier and fishier when the Commission reported that five US Army battalions took to the field to help “restore order” in Leyte. The final inconsistency was the Commission's assurance that the governorgeneral went to Leyte and held conferences with the majorgeneral who was the highest ranking US Army officer in the Philippines, and also with the brigadiergeneral commanding the US Army department of the Visayas, the colonel commanding all US Army forces in Leyte, the colonel who was Constabulary chief for the district, the governor of Leyte, and all the town presidentes of the province. We are asked to believe that those worthy officials were in conference because two members of a band of outlaw mountain folk succeeded in rescuing their mother from jail and because they were against the land tax.

The bungling in the reports of the occupation regime over the years was



due to its resolve to shore up the crumbling structure of deceits and misrepresentations about the Philippines that had first been built up in 18981899 to mislead the American public. The fault of the Commission, of Taft (to the end of 1903), and his successors was that they did not know when to end the farce.

The last word in this part of our story will have to be that of an English lady, resident with her husband from December 1904 to August 1905 in Iloilo. The lady, Mrs. Campbell Dauncey, had a lively interest in current affairs, and along with her tales of trials setting up house and hiring local help she has left notes and comment about the period, mostly on the regime's policies and pronouncements and their consistency with practice. She recorded a Manila Times item on the arrival of bloodhounds from the United States to be used in the campaigns in Samar and Cavite. She wrote that Samar was under martial law in 1905:

owing to the patriotism and enterprise of certain jolly fellows, called Pulajanes, going about with big curved bolos, and old Spanish flintlocks, and in fact anything they can catch hold of.

These persons are really patriots of a most irreconcilable type, but it suits the programme of the Government to label them ladrones (robbers), and to refer to their own hard fights with them as “cleaning up the province.” On the strength of this nickname, the Americans cut down these patriots freely (when the Pulajanes do not do the cutting down first), and if they catch them alive the poor devils are hanged like common criminals.

If Mrs. Dauncey was correct, not all the pulahanes and sects were outlaws or simple religious fanatics after all.

The five US Army battalions that were sent to Leyte in 1906 ended the active Christian Filipino resistance to the occupation regime. The war was over at last. None of the irreconcilables and officers of the Filipino army and none of the pulahan and “outlaw bands” would be active after this year. Felipe Salvador broke off his negotiations for surrender in 1906 when he heard of the death sentence and execution of Macario Sakay. He remained at large but was captured in 1910. Otoy, the last important pulahan chief, died in Samar the same year.9

There was one more conflict that had to be fought before the Americans



could complete their conquest of the archipelago. It was different and apart from the Christian FilipinoAmerican War.

The Moro Wars: 18991912

The Muslim Filipino was called "Moro" by the Spaniards. The term was not common usage among the masses of Filipinos in Luzon. This was because of the isolation imposed by the doctrina and the nature of the friar schools, although there was the onceayear exception: the annual presentation of the moromoro play during the pueblo fiesta. It was during the American occupation that the term became part of the Filipino vocabulary. The Americans simply adopted the Spanish usage and it became widespread through better communications, books, and the new school system.

The Americans' respect for the Muslims as fierce and brave warriors, and their denigratory view of Muslim Filipino culture, imparted to the word “Moro” a combination of fear and distrust and a feeling of cultural superiority toward the Muslims. In this part of our story we will often use the old term in order to preserve the spirit of the era, mindful that the secessionist Moro National Liberation Front since the 1970s revived the old usage much as the Indios Bravos during the 1880s adopted the Spaniards' term of derogation, not in shame but in pride.

We have to review the background of the new war so that we can appreciate the significance of its historic outcome. We will remember that when the war began, the Christian and Muslim Filipinos were as far apart and divided as they had been since before the era of white colonialism and thenceforth throughout the long Spanish occupation. The Malolos Congress was unable to appreciate Aguinaldo's concept of a federation with the Muslims, and his own letter to the Sultan of Sulu was unanswered.

The peace protocol of 12 August 1898 between Spain and the United States gave the latter provisional occupation and possession of “the city, bay, and harbor” of Manila. It was provisional because the final determination of the control, disposition, and government of “the Philippines” (not necessarily “archipelago”) was left to the treaty of peace.

By the time the treaty negotiators were parleying in Paris there was no



longer any vestige of Spanish control, possession, or government in Filipinas (that is to say, the Christian part of the archipelago). And Spain never had control, government, nor possession of the Moro territory. It did not have any “suspended sovereignty” because its sovereignty had been terminated. And so when the United States offered to pay $20,000,000 for the cession of the archipelago in November 1898, Spain accepted.

During the Moro wars since the sixteenth century the Moros would win some, and the Spaniards would win some. When the Moros won they always withdrew with the captured prize of war; they never took territory. If the Spaniards won they would sometimes enter into a treaty with the losing sultan. But the Spaniards would never be able to occupy what they thought they had won. All such treaties were good only until the enemy expedition or fleet sailed away. This Muslim view was the fruit of experience with foreigners who kept bothering them. In 1851 after their victory over Jolo the Spaniards unilaterally incorporated Sulu as part of Spanish territory. In 1860 they wrote out another document constituting Mindanao, Basilan, and the Sulu and TawiTawi island groups into a politicomilitary province of Filipinas.

But these Spanish documents were merely pieces of paper. In 1870, for instance, which was a full ten years after the province of Mindanao was created, the Spanish regime could do no more than estimate the total population at 157,591! Those documents were conceived by the Manila officials to impress Madrid and expressed the Spaniards fancy and imagination. They reflected neither the reality or Spanish capability.

The Spaniards had to fight the Sultan of Sulu again in 1876, and then the Maranaos in the 1890s. Well, what they did not accomplish in three hundred years they did not achieve in two decades. During the 1880s1890s the Spaniards could not govern their “province” and suffered costly losses to the Maranaos, Maguindanaos, and Taosugs.10

The Spaniards had just failed, yet another time, to conquer the Maranaos when the Revolution broke out. They abandoned their presidios in the southern islands as the troops were sent north to fight Aguinaldo's forces. They did not fight the Americans. Throughout Luzon (except only in Manila) they surrendered to the Filipinos; their token forces in Cebu and



Iloilo capitulated without a fight. The remaining depleted garrisons in Jolo and Zamboanga no longer held bastions of Spain; the sites were merely evacuation bases for Spanish troops who could escape surrender or capture, preparatory to the final voyage of retreat from the archipelago.

And so, in Paris in 1898, when Spain and the new imperialist United States were selling and buying a country and people, Spain sold something it did not own or possess. What it sold was paper: pieces of paper that said that Sulu was part of the Spanish Crown and that Mindanao and Basilan and Sulu and TawiTawi were a province of Filipinas.

Now the United States had paid for a bill of goods. Its Senate consented to the treaty in February. The Congress appropriated the purchase price in March. The ratifications were exchanged in April. The money was paid in May. That they had paid for paper was not a bother to the Americans. That they could not get their money back from Spain was not a problem either. The Americans would collect what they paid for, by themselves and by force. And this was how the Americans bought themselves a war with the Moros.

The first American probe into the Moro territory was in the south, in Jolo; in May 1899 a US Army detachment relieved the Spanish garrison there. The Zamboanga presidio was occupied in December the same year. The Philippine Commission, which assumed office in 1900, had no important reports on the Moro situation then because the Moro territory was under the US military. In time the military achieved a presence, outside of Zamboanga and Jolo, also in Lanao, Cotabato, and Davao. From this exposure the Americans inevitably learned that the major Moro groupings were those of the Taosugs, the Maranaos, and the Maguindanaos. The regime's policy during this early period was merely to occupy the abandoned Spanish outposts.

MoroAmerican relations during these initial years were therefore characterized by noninterference. The Americans were loathe to plunge into relations with a nonChristian people about whom they knew almost nothing except that they were brave and fierce warriors. The US War Department published a gazetteer of the Philippines in 1902. This simply noted that the people of the Sulu archipelago were “Moro” in race. As for population, we read the following simple entry: “14,415 men for war.” In



1901 the Philippine Commission reported “the friendliest relations” with the people of Zamboanga, Sulu, Cotabato, and Davao. But it noted that the Maranaos “have long been reputed the fiercest and most uncompromising members of this tribe” – that is, the Moros.

The Commission had the slightest change of tone in its 1902 report. A school had been opened in Zamboanga and another in Jolo, “but at present the Moros are not manifesting any considerable eagerness to be taught by Americans.” The Commission attributed this to the Moros' belief that they were invincible, and it concluded that they had best be awakened to their “feebleness as contrasted with the powers of a civilized nation.”

The waning of the war in Luzon and the Visayas was followed by a more pronounced US Army presence in the Moro region. And so the two peoples became more exposed to each other. The Moros did not document their views of the newcomers, and so we rely mostly on the American material. Ethnocentricity was unavoidable. The first governor of the Moro Province, General Leonard Wood, wrote of the Taosugs that: “They are nothing more or less than an unimportant collection of pirates and highwaymen, living under laws which are intolerable...” Of the Moros in general, Wood reported in 1904:

Such laws as they have are many of them revolting and practically all of them utterly and absolutely undesirable from any standpoint of decency and good government. The Moros are, in a way, religious and moral degenerates.

Wood's deputy for the district of Sulu echoed his superior:

In many things they are inferior to the American Indians, and I know of no trait in which they are superior.... They are all pirates, expirates, or descendants of pirates.

We have a mixed impression of the Taosug country and people from an American constabulary officer. He saw the isles against:

a sea of sparkling blue rarely lashed by storms; islands so lovely that they seemed destined for a race of fairies; and a people in general so unlovely in appearance and disposition that they were as satyrs in the garden of paradise.

For their part, the Moros generally kept their distance from the



Americans. The latter were baffled or flabbergasted when they learned of the datus appropriating or “stealing” slaves or livestock from each other, which was also common among their men, and all had scores of ways of evading paying debts. There was piracy and kidnapping of persons for sale. It was a way of life and each loss or setback was carefully measured by the Taosugs according to whether or not it merited armed and violent solution, which everybody avoided because each one waited for the day when he could perpetrate the same oneupmanship on the other. The Moros took all this in stride. "Insha' Allah" as God wills. And when the Americans said that they would settle disputes “according to law” they might be asked to settle such cases as, for instance:

The Moro Tangoa of Pandukan borrowed a gong from a Chino called Batu of Tullai (Jolo) while the latter was staying at Pandukan. Before he returned the gong the Chino left Pandukan.

Then the Moro Lisang of Pandukan claimed the gong and wanted to take it away from Tangoa, saying that it was his gong and that he had pawned it to a Chino.

Kim, the father of Tangoa, said that they could not give up the gong, as Tangoa had borrowed it from the Chino Batu; that they must inform the latter and that Lisang should come back after three days. Kim sent a messenger to the Chino Batu, who returned with Batu's answer, that if Tangoa gave up the gong he would have to pay him, Batu, 100 pesos. Then Lisang came and tried to take the gong by force. In order to avoid a fight, Kim said: “I shall take the gong to your (Lisang's) house tonight.”

Kim then went to Nakib Hajim and laid the case before him; the nakib said: “This is not just; I shall see Lisang about it.” But Lisang would not obey the nakib, and said that Kim had agreed to give up the gong to him, Lisang. Kim and Tangoa left Pandukan that same night for Tullai and returned the gong to the Chino Batu. The next day Lisang burnt the house of Kim in Pandukan. Kim and Tangoa say that they are afraid to return to Pandukan because Lisang has said that he would kill them.

When the Moros could not avoid direct dealing with the Americans the former would often seem to be wheedling, even fawning, or dissembling and haggling. The Sultan of Sulu wrote a letter in May 1901 with the following address: “This letter from your son, His Highness the Sultan Hadji



Mohamad Jamalul Kiram, to my father, Major Sweet, governor of Jolo.”

But this humble conduct was ritual, and was good only until it came to a fight. The Moro culture produced many juramentados, individual men who went through cleansing and purifying religious rites before they ran amuck to kill unbelievers, often Americans, till they themselves were killed. Aside from the juramentados there were the sabilallahs (“sanctified warriors”) and the jihad (collective sabilallah action in a "holy war"). In the ordinary sense of “fighting” the usual Moro way of attack was by ambush. For a fight against an enemy in force the Moros lay it all out in the open. A datu and his people, or a number of datus and their people together, numbering several hundreds or a few thousands of warriors with their women and children, would make a last stand; all would retire to their fort or cotta, often atop a hill, where they would be incomparable in handtohand fighting but would be slaughtered by American artillery, guns, and assault

forces.11

True to their reputation, the Maranaos had made it plain that they did not welcome Americans in their territory. In 1902 they attacked a US cavalry detachment exploring the route from Parang (near Cotabato) to the lake; several troopers were killed. In retaliation two American columns went after the Maranaos, from the south in Parang and another from the north in Iligan. There was, reported the Commission, “fierce resistance” in both cases. The star in the Lanao campaign was a young American captain, John J. Pershing, who earned a reputation that won him an unorthodox promotion from the American President straight from captain to brigadier general.

The Commission report for 1903 stated that organized Maranao resistance was suppressed and that military operations were suspended for a year. Zamboanga and Maguindanao were said to have been pacified, but “in Jolo we have a condition that needs thorough and drastic treatment.”

Outside of juramentados, killings of unwary soldiers, and attacks on small army columns, the Taosugs had been relatively peaceful since 1899. The reason for this was the KiramBates Agreement. This was signed on 20 August 1899 by the American general John C. Bates for the regime; and by the Sultan, the Raja Muda (the Sultan's eldest brother and heir apparent),



Datu Atik (the Sultan's youngest brother), Datu Kalbi of Tandu, and Datu Joakanain (Julkarnain). The agreement was intended by the regime to serve as a modus vivendi with the Taosugs. In effect the Sultan was recognized as the ruler of his people. A measure of how the Americans did not wish to upset the Taosugs was Article X of the agreement: it recognized slavery by implication since it provided only that a slave might buy his freedom by paying “the usual market price.” At this time the Americans did not actively pursue their usual position that the Treaty of Paris gave them sovereignty over the archipelago. Article I of the KiramBates agreement did declare American sovereignty, but Article III provided that: “The rights and dignities of the Sultan and his Datus shall be fully respected.....”12

The policy of noninterference produced only aggravation for the Americans. The Philippine Commission conceded that until 1903 “nothing of importance was done toward bringing the inhabitants of the Moro province under American control.” The military governor of the district of Sulu complained that: “After four years of occupation,” the Americans were no better off than the Spaniards, since “the Americans cannot be permitted to go out of the gate of the walled city of Jolo without arms [and] beyond the outposts without an armed escort.” Wright, Taft's successor as governorgeneral, declared in 1904 that during the life of the KiramBates agreement Americans were attacked whenever they moved “a step beyond the protection of the garrison,” armed or unarmed. The same situation obtained in Lanao and Cotabato.

In 1903 the regime decided to organize for direct administration. It created the Moro Province. In coverage the province was much like the old Spanish province of Mindanao. It consisted of the TawiTawi and Sulu archipelagoes, Basilan, and the entire island of Mindanao including its adjacent islands, but excepting Misamis and Surigao which the Commission had earlier organized as Christian provinces. The basic law was Act No. 787, passed on the first of June 1903.

The new province was under a governor. For this job the regime recruited Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood from his reputedly successful tour as military governor of Cuba. At the same time he was made commanding general of the US Army department of Mindanao and Sulu. He was assisted by five district governors. The districts were Zamboanga, Lanao, Cotabato,



Davao, and Jolo. The Province had its own legislature called the Legislative Council composed of the governor and his assistants: the provincial secretary, the provincial attorney, provincial engineer, provincial schools superintendent, and provincial treasurer. The Council was like a Philippine Commission for the Moro Province. It could pass laws; create municipal governments and a school system; prescribe the organization and procedure of district courts to decide civil and criminal cases under Moro law; it could regulate the licensing, construction, and use of Moro boats displacing less than ten tons in the coastal trade, and so on. At this time the American regime was thinking of a separate body of laws each for the Christians and the Moros. There was also a Moro constabulary.

The direct intrusion of the American government into their affairs, which soon included the imposition of the c6dula tax that the Spaniards never succeeded in collecting, had the natural and inevitable results:

The Moros did not take kindly to the new order of things, which are distasteful to them in every respect. They resented any interference with their customs or habits of life and regarded the appearance of the white man in their villages as an unwarranted and offensive intrusion. This was generally true of all the Moros and especially so of those inhabiting the Lanao district.

In 1903 the Panglima Hassan, leader of Look and prominent ally of the Sultan, led 1,000 armed followers into Jolo in order, according to Wood, to massacre the garrison. In October a US Army topographical survey team in Sulu was attacked.

Hassan was called in by the district governor to account for the team after it had not returned by the scheduled time. Hassan went to Jolo with some 4,000 warriors. Wood left the Cotabato campaign and brought reenforcements to Jolo. Hassan refused to surrender and withdrew to make camp at Lake Siit. Wood led the American attack. Vic Hurley, writing on the Moro wars, reports that the campaign covered some eighty kilometers of fighting and ended with more than 500 Moros killed. Hassan was taken on 14 November 1903 but was rescued by his followers inside Jolo. The war spilled over into 1904. Both sides took the offensive by turns until March when Hassan, with only two followers left, was killed. The Commission reported that in 1904 there was peace in Sulu after the Americans decided



“to bring matters to an end.” The troops marched across the island against heavy resistance. The KiramBates agreement was abrogated this same

month.13

As early as 1903 the Commission reported that the Moros of the Lake Lanao region “have been subdued” and that organized resistance had ended. Its 1904 report, however, said that Wood “took the offensive” against the Maranaos, and closed by saying that there were no longer “overt acts of Moro hostility.” This means that the war did not really end.

The bloodiest campaign of these early years was in Cotabato, the Magindanao country. Here the dominant leader was Datu Ali; he was the Raja Buayan, first cousin and successor of Datu Utu. He bitterly resented the interference in datu affairs by the government of the Moro Province and in May 1904 he ambushed a company of the Seventeenth Infantry and killed two officers and seventeen soldiers. It took more than a year's campaigning to pin him down. At one time a fortyman company of soldiers was tracking him:

It was a bloody little affair, typifying the difficulty of campaigning against hostile Moros in that part of Mindanao.... Mile after mile the trail led through the high tigbao grass, impassably interlaced on either side and often overhead, while underfoot was the vicious black mud of a churnedup trail with occasional holes where the men sank to their waists. Then there was a sudden spurt of rifle fire from ahead, from either side, from an invisible enemy secure behind the maddening wall of matted, canelike grass. The men in Advance fell dead and dying in the stinking mud.

The officers pressed forward, and, in like manner, were mown down without seeing the foe. The remnant of the expedition withdrew in disorder while the victorious Moros with vicious kris (Moro dagger or sword, with serpentine cutting edges) and barong (Moro bolo) completed their work by beheading and disemboweling the dead and dying Americans. Yet even then Datu Ali showed some spark of chivalrous warfare. Two captured American soldiers were cared for and later returned to Cotabato.

Ali's base was Kudarangan in the upper Cotabato valley. Wood describes Ali's cotta with almost certainly some exaggeration and has a note on Ali's following:



It was larger than 20 of the largest cottas of the lake region of Sulu, and would have easily held a garrison of 4,000 or 5,000 men. It was well located, well built, well armed, and amply supplied with ammunition. There were embrasures for 120 pieces of artillery. Eightyfive pieces were captured, among them many large cannon of from 3 to 51/2 inches caliber. The other pieces in the work, small lantakas [bronze culverins], were carried off or thrown into the river.

Ali is at present at large with an armed following of 50 or 60 men, and a miscellaneous following of a hundred or two [hundred] people, who accompany him under compulsion from place to place, carrying food, etc., and whose personnel is frequently changed. As the hereditary dato of the upper valley the people at heart sympathize with him, but not to the extent of openly taking up arms in large numbers.

The cotta was taken but Ali escaped, only to be killed in October 1905.

Another last stand at this time was that of Datu Usap at his cotta in Laksamana, Sulu. The Americans bombarded the fort with artillery, then closed in with rapidfiring Gatling guns and rifles. Wood's report for 1905

has Usap with 400 men in the cotta, of whom only seven surrendered.14

The slaughter in Laksamana was a prelude to the massacre in Bud Dajo. Mt. Dajo is a hill about 640 meters high situated some nineandahalf kilometers from the población of Jolo. Its top is the crater of an extinct volcano. In March 1906 there were six hundred Taosug men, women, and children gathered at the crater. They were families who had abandoned their homes because they refused to live under American (or any other foreign) rule; they refused to pay the cédula. They went down the hill to till their small fields in the daytime. They became openly defiant against the Americans.

The latter decided on a military solution. The force that was mobilized for the attack on Bud Dajo numbered 790 officers and men from infantry, cavalry, artillery, and constabulary units plus sailors of the gunboat PAMPANGA. The Taosugs did not have a chance. Their position was first bombarded by mountain artillery and naval gunboat shelling. Then three columns went up the hill by three different lines. The action began just after daybreak of 6 March 1906. There was a trench line twothirds up the hill, within rifle range of the earthworks at the lip of the crater. The shooting began at this line. The artillery batteries kept up the shelling, answered by



occasional lantaka fire from the cotta. The lantaka shot off “slugs, stones, and old junk.” Nightfall, the quiet broken by sentry fire, brass gongs beating, and war chants from the cotta.

The next morning the attack resumed in earnest. The pounding from the bombardment had softened the Moros; the main defenses of the beleaguered Taosugs were taken that morning. There was a cotta in the crater, but the defenders had only a few muskets and fought against the American Krag rifles with kris, kampilan, and spear. Most of the Taosugs were riddled with bullets before they could get at the enemy.

One of our sources on this action has 1,000 Moro defenders and six survivors. Another has “over six hundred Moro men, women, and children killed while resisting to the last.” The Commission acknowledged the killing of the women and children but maintained that it was unavoidable and the criticism “without warrant.” The Commission concluded that: “The extermination of these outlaws afforded the greatest relief to the Moros of the surrounding country, who rejoiced that their plunderers were no longer able to continue their depredations.”

One of the assessments of the Bud Dajo slaughter was that although the loss of life was to be regretted, the forcing of the Taosugs into a last stand averted what would have been a long drawn out strife that would have cost more lives. This did not prove right. The conflict continued into the first years of the next decade. Whether they were in garrison, on offduty strolls, or on scouting and mapmaking surveys, American detachments of up to company strength would be attacked by juramentados or ambush parties. An occasional American logger or farmer would be killed.

The 1908 report of the Philippine Commission referred to the Lanao Moros as “the most intractable, the least reliable, and the most difficult to deal with” among all the Muslims of the Moro Province. The next year an expedition was sent against them, in what is called the Buldong country between the Lake and the Cotabato Valley. Meanwhile, the most famous “bandit” in Sulu from mid1907 to mid1909 was the Samal, Jikiri. He is said to have been born on the islet of Pata south of Jolo – although, since he was a Samal, he would have been born on a boat. The Commission only said that in 1908 he was the leader of “a few outlaws making trouble.” The



regime set a price of 4,000 pesos for his capture, dead or alive, and even the formal Muslim leaders of Jolo were as anxious as the regime to see his capture. The Commission reported his death in 1909 in “a very sharp encounter between the pirates and the officers and men of the Sixth Cavalry, assisted by the Navy.” Actually, Jikiri, who had attacked Constabulary barracks and pearling boats, and even captured a squad of Borneo Muslims sent after him by the British government, was tired and took refuge in a volcano crater cave on the island of Patian near Jolo and had decided to fight a classic last stand with his remaining warriors and their women. There they were annihilated on 4 July 1909.

There was another action in Bud Dajo in 1911, although on a much smaller scale.15

The last great battle in the Moro wars was the battle of Bud Bagsak in 1912. The year before, an order was issued prohibiting all persons in the Moro Province from carrying or possessing guns or bladed weapons, except only bladed working tools. This order was issued as a response to the unprecedented outbreaks of juramentado attacks and in view of the defiance and tension building up, especially in Jolo. Gen. Pershing, new governor of the Moro Province, estimated that there were three hundred loose firearms outside of the guns of the military in Jolo and that these were in Bud Bagsak, another hill near the town. In the first months of 1912 families (the American sources say “outlaws”) had been seen gathering at the peak. Here there was a stone cotta. Its defenses were reenforced by five satellite cottas disposed around and below it. There were the unmistakable signs of Taosugs digging in for another last stand, if the Americans forced one. There were five hundred men, women, and children in the stone cotta of Bud Bagsak.

The attack was directed personally by Pershing. It began on 11 June, Wednesday, at daybreak. There were the usual mountain guns, the infantry, Constabulary, and Scouts. The artillery shelling was deadly, and three of the secondary cottas were captured, with some handtohand fighting, at the end of the day. Thursday. There was continuous artillery bombardment and rifle fire on the two remaining secondary cottas. The Taosugs would rush out from their shelter across over twentyfive meters of open ground to engage the attackers; they would be cut down. But the two



cottas held. Friday, the Muslim holy day. Orders were issued to take the two cottas. Again the shelling and sniper fire from American sharpshooters, then a fivehour close action. The two cottas were taken. The mountain guns were hauled uphill and emplaced near one of the captured cottas. Now the stone cotta of Bud Bagsak could be shelled. Saturday. The mountain guns pounded Bud Bagsak. The assault forces dug in about 550 meters from the cotta.

Sunday morning. Bagsak cotta absorbed a twohour artillery bombardment. The American foot soldiers moved up the ridge to within sight of the Moro trenches. The mountain guns raked the trenches and the sharpshooters picked off the Moros. After an hour of fighting the attackers got to within seventy meters of the stone cotta. It was 10 A.M. The quick shot, the volley, the counterfire, each rush of Moro warriors mowed down. Gen. Pershing joined the firing line. The fighting continued past the noon sun into midafternoon and beyond. Every ten meters of the last seventy required an hour to take. Just before 5 P.M. the Moros could be seen atop the stone walls; they were out of bullets and were flinging their barongs or bolos and krises at the attackers. One last assault, the walls were scaled, and the cotta fell. Almost every warrior, woman, and child in the cotta

died.16

The Americans were quite right to claim decisive victories in Kudarangan, Laksamana, Bud Dajo, and Bud Bagsak. But the Moros had not gathered their warriors and women and children and food and weapons in the cottas to win a battle victory. The had merely retired to be alone. They did not want to pay the invader's tax or be subject to his laws, and they did not know or believe that the Americans would respect their religion. They wanted to keep their way of life. If they had been left alone they would have remained in grudging, perhaps sullen and suspicious, peace. They fought because they were attacked, and they were prepared to die.

Bud Bagsak was the last great Moro defiance in this sense. “Modern times” and “progress” that would have bypassed the Moros now marched across the Moro country. The Department of Mindanao and Sulu replaced the Moro Province in 1914. The new department also marked the end of military administration. In 1916 the Moro territory was made part of the



twelfth senatorial district for purposes of election to the Philippine Senate, although the law (U.S. Public Law No. 240, enacted 29 August 1916) vested discretionary authority in the governorgeneral of the Philippines to appoint senators for districts that were not within the territory represented in the Philippine Assembly. The first Moro senator was appointed; he was Hadji Butu, prime minister of the Sultan of Sulu when the Americans first arrived in 1899.

In 1920 the Philippine Legislature abolished the Department of Mindanao and Sulu and placed the region under the Bureau of NonChristian Tribes in the Department of Interior. In effect this last arrangement placed administration of the region in the hands mostly of Christian Filipinos; it may be presumed to have been a mistake, or at least a step backwards. To rectify this, in 1936 there was created a Commissioner for Mindanao and Sulu with authority direct from the President of the Commonwealth.

In retrospect, the great outcome of the MoroAmerican War was the political incorporation of the Muslim territory into the government of the Philippine Islands which in time developed into the Filipino State. This system embodied two historic elements. The first was the freedom of the Muslim Filipinos in their religion, a legacy that they fought for and deservedly won. They were the only Filipinos to achieve this.

The second was the bringing of the Muslim and Christian Filipinos into a common civil and criminal law system. This historic decision is not well documented. We will recall that the Philippine Commission's Act No. 787 had vested the government of the Moro Province with the power and function of eventually developing a law system based on Moro law. The Act provided that the Moro Province government was to enact laws that:

shall collect and codify the customary laws of the Moros as they now obtain and are enforced in the various parts of the Moro Province among the Moros, modifying such laws as the legislative council think best and amending them, ... and to provide for the printing of such codification, when completed, in English, Arabic, or the local Moro dialects as may be deemed wise. The Moro customary laws thus amended and codified shall apply in all civil and criminal actions arising between Moros....



There was no serious effort to do the complex job. Perhaps it was due to the military exigencies of 19031904. Certainly it was due in large part to Gen. Wood, whose views on the Moros' usages and customs we already know. His 1904 report recommended against codification. So in 1904, just over a year since it passed Act No. 787, the Commission concluded that the Moros had “no general system of laws” and that each community had its own usages and unwritten custom law, “all so full of incongruous and absurd provisions as to make them worthless as a basis upon which to build.”17

It was not until the first years of the 1980s, after years of dealing with the Muslim secessionist rebellion, that the government of the Republic undertook the beginnings of studying the Muslim Filipino custom laws and applying the Shari'a (Islamic law) and the Kitab (book of Muslim law) in court cases involving Muslims, but a great deal remained to be done.

Peace came, finally, to the archipelago. This was due to the superior arms and apparently inexhaustible resources of the United States, and to the exhaustion and weariness of the people from the years of revolution and war. We will now turn to the conditions of life during the first decade of the occupation.

The Aftermath

The stable peace that normal communities enjoy is different from the sad, heavy, and blighted peace that descends upon people in the wake of a war. McKinley's “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines was a malevolent thing. It devastated the Filipinos and their land for years. But even long after McKinley's death by assassination in his home country his war left permanent scars on the Filipinos. Their free Republic was wiped out from the face of the earth. Another final scar was the irrecoverable population loss. We will see the extent of this loss in the table next page.

A few brief notes will be necessary. The Moro Province is not included because by 1903, the year of the last census, it had not been affected by the Revolution and the war as were Luzon and the Visayas. We did not use the Spanish population figures later than the 1887 census; if we used the



Spanish estimates for, say, 1894 or 1898, we would have an aggregate population loss by 1903. The 1887 figures are from the only census during the Spanish regime; it tried another in 1896 but this was aborted by the Revolution. The Appendix to Volume I explains why the post1887 estimates are defective. The 1887 figures in the Table however, do not cover the population growth over the nineyear period 18871896. This means that the arrested population growth as well as the actual population losses incurred over 18961903 are understated in the Table.

It is necessary to point out that there were some boundary changes between 1887 and 1903. There are no 1887 numbers for the two provinces of Misamis and Surigao; they were part of the huge province of Mindanao. Rizal province was created in 1901 from the pueblos of the old district of Morong and some pueblos of the old province of Manila. But the boundary changes do not affect the overall picture. We may also presume some population transfers between provinces or islands in the course of the two wars, but it is not possible to establish any magnitudes. Finally, because of the conditions in many Luzon and Visayan provinces at the time of the 1903 Census, that year's enumeration could not have been exhaustive, so that the underestimation effect of using the 1887 census numbers would be offset to some degree:

We may now consider the numbers. The total of the provincial populations in 1903 (discounting the numbers for Misamis and Surigao) was 6,389,033 against a total of 5,662,459 in 1887. Thus the 1903 figure exceeds the 1887 number by only 726,574 over the period of sixteen years. In the simplest terms,

Provincial Populations (Except the Moro Province), 1887 and 1903

Province 1887 Census 1903 CensusCebu 518,032 653,727Pangasinan 302,178 439,135Iloilo 433,462 403,932Leyte 270,491 388,922*Negros Occidental 231,512 303,660Bohol 260,000 269,223Samar 195,386 265,549Batangas 311,180 257,715Albay 228,139 239,434



Ambos Camarines 194,022 233,472Capiz 224,000 225,092Bulacan 239,221 223,327Pampanga 223,922 222,656Ilocos Sur 215,792 211,623Tayabas 109,782 201,936Negros Oriental 140,498 184,889Ilocos Norte 163,349 176,785Sorsogon 98,650 164,129Laguna 169,983 148,606Rizal 188,677 148,502Cagayan 96,367 142,825*Misamis 135,473Cavite 134,569 134,779Tarlac 89,339 133,513Nueva Ecija 156,610 132,999Antique 115,434 131,245La Union 110,164 127789Surigao 0 99,298*Isabela 48,302 68,793Zambales 87,295 56,762Romblon 55,329 52,848Bataan 50,761 45,166

*Three municipalities in Leyte, one in Cagayan, another in Surigao not included.

this indicates an average annual growth of some 45,410 a year, an excessively low increase when compared to the 258,542 increase over the oneyear period 18751876. The 18911894 increase according to the Spanish data was 659,077; this averaged to an annual increase of 219,692.

Of the thirty provinces (again without Misamis and Surigao) eleven show a population loss by 1903. Nine of these are Luzon provinces; this confirms that the fighting during the two wars was concentrated in Luzon although the loss of 29,530 in Iloilo was the fourth biggest loss overall. That Cebu shows a population gain confirms that the fighting there was relatively minor and of shorter duration compared to Luzon and to IIoilo. The only other Visayan province showing a loss is Romblon; there are no explanatory data for this and it is not improbable that part of the loss was due to outmigration during the period.

The third highest population loss was suffered in Zambales, at 30,533. In



percentage terms, at almost 35 per cent, this was the highest loss. Zambales and nearby Bataan were small provinces in population terms; there was heavy fighting in this sector in 1899 and 1900. The area of the new Rizal province adjacent to Manila was the site of continued guerrilla actions until early 1903. Its pueblos suffered the second highest loss, at 40,175.

Not surprisingly, the biggest loss was in Batangas, at 53,465. This was 17 per cent of its 1887 population. Although the main fighting in 1899 and 1900 was in the north of Manila the Batangas population suffered greatly from the concentration in late 1901 until 1902. The people of Batangas had a bleak life in 1903. That year it was the only province in the country where the rice crop did not increase. In 1905 the Batanguenos would again be placed in the regime's concentration camps.

The other provinces with significant losses in either absolute or percentage terms were Nueva Ecija, Laguna, and Bulacan. Minor losses are indicated in Pampanga and Ilocos Sur. It must always be borne in mind that all the indicated losses are understated and would be larger if 1896 data are available.

In addition to the provinces that suffered clear losses there were those where population growth was virtually stationary on the basis of the 1887 and 1903 data. These were: Bohol, Capiz, Albay, Ilocos Norte, and Cavite. If reliable data were available for 1896 these provinces would almost certainly be in the loss category. And it is certain that the indicated minimal growth in Cavite would be wiped out as its people would be forced into the concentration camps, like Batangas, in 1905.

It was surmised in the Report of Census of 1903 that the Filipino population level of that year had already been reached in the mid1890s. This is an indication that any actual growth over 18961903 was completely wiped out during the period of the two wars. Since the fighting during the FilipinoAmerican War was more violent and lasted longer than during the Revolution, it is clear that the major part of that loss must be attributed to this war. However, the 1903 Census Report maintained otherwise; it claimed, without evidence, that the greater part of the loss was due to epidemics.18

In any case, it would take some time for the population to recover its



energy and grow. The people were doomed to suffering throughout the first decade after 1900. The difficulties during this period were part of the continuing cost of the wars. Aside from communities and families having to locate themselves anew, the hardships directly due to the wars were worsened by disasters and epidemics, dislocation of agriculture, and shortage of food.

The area cultivated to rice and other food crops was greatly reduced. Le Roy estimated a drop of 303,509 hectares in the area under tillage between 1896 and 1903. At a low average yearly production of 35 cavans per hectare this represented a production loss of 10,662,815 cavans a year. The major causes of the loss of hectarage were: the dislocation of farmers and their having to go to the wars, and, more dramatically, the death and destruction of from 75 per cent to 90 per cent of the carabao stock (the carabao or water buffalo was virtually the Filipinos' only draft animal in rice agriculture).

Taft spoke of “gaunt famine” in one or more provinces in 1901. The next year the Commission reported soaring prices for rice and carabaos. The governor reported that “now these islands are compelled to spend about $15,000,000 gold (or two times $15,000,000 Mexican, as the peso was then called) to buy food upon which to live.” The Commission was constrained to appropriate 2,000,000 pesos for the government to buy and resell rice. Rice imports in 1901 were 20 per cent of all imports; in 1902 they were still a high 18 per cent. In 1903 the regime had to undertake the distribution of rice in the provinces. The volume involved was some 25,098,975 pounds as reported, or 11,384,820 kilograms. Of this, 4,971,916 kilograms were sold to those who could pay. The number of families that could not pay was large; to this group 6,387,519 kilograms were distributed; they worked off the rice that they received through labor in road improvement and other civil works, and in the killing of locusts. In addition to the rice imports and the rice distribution program a law of late 1902 called upon all town presidentes throughout the archipelago to convene their townspeople “to notify them of the impending danger of famine” and to urge them to plant quickgrowing crops such as camotes, corn, and other food plants.

The price of carabaos had gone up from 20 to 200 pesos. An inoculation program for carabaos against rinderpest and a complex transaction for importation of carabaos from China was implemented beginning in 1903.



The greatly reduced carabao stock limited the 1902 rice crop to only 25 per cent of the normal crop level. But even this small crop was threatened by locusts. This pest ravaged the Visayan provinces in 1901 and swept the Luzon fields in 1902. In August 1903 a law was passed establishing a “locust board” in each province. This law subjected every ablebodied resident in each town to impressment in local programs to fight the locusts; noncompliance was a misdemeanor punishable by fine or imprisonment or both.

These crushing problems were not enough. Taft acknowledged that there was “much suffering” in the provinces of Batangas, Iloilo, and Ambos Camarines due to the shortage of food. However, he said that no cases of actual starvation had been brought to the regime's attention. He ought to have recognized that severe malnutrition was enervating the people; instead he said that “the people have always found enough camotes or tubers and other food roots to avoid starvation.” Then he added that diseases and not enough food “carried off many” because the camotes and tubers and other food roots were “indigestible and unhealthy” when not properly cooked. He blamed people for dying because he thought they did not know how to cook food plants that were part of their culture.

Malnutrition lowered the people's resistance to disease. A cholera epidemic broke out in 1902. The regime predicted a loss of 100,000 lives in the archipelago, and reported some villages entirely depopulated. Mabini came home from Guam in late February 1903 to die from the cholera in Manila in May. Registered total cholera cases by September 1903 were 157,036 and total deaths reached 102,109. However, these numbers were believed to be only twothirds of the actual cases and deaths.19

The prostrate country could hardly cope with the combination of food crises and disasters. In January 1903 the United States war secretary had to recommend to his government that $3,000,000 in emergency relief funds were needed to relieve “distress in the Philippine Islands.” The Congress voted the amount that year.

Not all the calamitous conditions would be solved in the short term. Some would abate by the middle of the decade. The dense brush and cogon growth that had taken over the neglected fields would be cleared; the last cholera case of this era was reported in April 1904. Some problems would



appear to wane and recur. The rinderpest seemed to abate by middecade but again became marked in 1909; it gathered renewed strength in 1911, afflicting the animals in 81 towns, but the situation seemed to have improved in 1912.

The locust problem was chronic. From the Visayas provinces in 1901 to the Luzon provinces in 1902, the locust plague devastated 23 of the 30 provinces in 1903. Only small or sparsely populated or nonrice provinces escaped: Bataan, Benguet, Bohol, Masbate, Cebu, Paragua (Palawan), and Sorsogon. Partial reports from the provincial locust boards showed more than 8,501 tons of locusts destroyed from August to September. Negros Occidental appears to have been the hardest hit, with 3,444 tons destroyed. In 1905 onefourth of the provinces invaded by locusts reported 648 tons of the pest destroyed, compared to the total 5,184 tons destroyed in 1904. But the locusts made a comeback in 1909 and again in 1912.

The rice problem stayed beyond the decade. There had not been a single year since 1901 when the rice crop had sufficed to meet annual needs. Rice imports were from Siam and China in the early years of the decade, but in the second half of the period French IndoChina became the principal if not sole supplier. Imports for the year ending June 1902 were valued at more than $10,000,000 gold. This gradually went down as a result of the production campaign and of the easing of the resistance.

In 1908 the figure was at $5,861,256; the next year it was $4,250,223. But there was another crop failure in 1910; it worsened in 1911 and the situation was again near crisis proportions in 1912. This year the schools were mobilized in a campaign to get rice eaters to shift to eating corn.20

The Purchase of the Friar Lands

There were 1,124 friars in the Philippines in 1896 and 1,013 in 1898. Those who had most contact with Filipinos were of course those who ran the doctrinas or parishes and missions. There were 967 friars assigned to these in 1898. We will note the drop in numbers since 1896. After the outbreak of the Revolution in 1896 and during its second phase in 1898 40 friars were killed and 403 taken prisoner. Virtually all of the latter were released later on by the government of the Republic. In 1900 only 472 remained in the Philippines, the others having died or gone back to Spain or moved to China



and other countries.

These numbers indicate how the Spanish friars (Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Augustinian Recollects) were unwanted by the Filipinos. The latter, however, treated the relatively few Jesuits, Capuchins, and Bepedictines differently; they were not working in parishes but were chiefly engaged in running schools. The Philippine Commission reported in 1900 that they “do not seem to have been assaulted or imprisoned for any length of time.” At this point the American regime pushed the process of expulsion of the Spanish friars. In 1902 the United States war secretary wrote to Taft that the friars driven from the parishes and “collected” in Manila entertained the “vain hope” of returning. But they “cannot be restored to their positions except by forcible intervention on the part of the civil government, which the principles of our government forbid.” Accordingly, Taft went on record in 1903: “This Government deprecated and still deprecates the return of the friars to their parishes....” In 1902 there were only 380 Spanish friars left in the Philippines, and in 1903 only 246.

When it took testimony on the friar question in 1900, the Commission took note of “the statement of the bishops and friars that the mass of the people in these islands, except only a few of the leading men of each town and the native clergy, are friendly to them.” But it concluded that this was not so because:

All the evidence derived from every source, but the friars themselves, shows clearly that the feeling of hatred for the friars is wellnigh universal.

It is a depressing story, this plight of the friars at this time. In short, the Commission decided that if the friars were to be allowed to return to the parishes, there would result “lawless violence and murder.”

One of the root causes of the Revolution was the grievance of the Filipinos that the friar haciendas had been built up from the unlawful usurpation or grabbing of their lands. The uprisings in the Tagalog provinces during the 1740s (supra, Chapter 7) were directed against usurpation of the people's ancestral lands, often in collusion with crooked government clerks and surveyors. This grievance lay deep in the people's minds; they saw and felt that the law did not protect them and that the



government sided with their oppressors.

There were three notable Filipino “agrarian reform” concepts before 1900. The first was the rudimentary and fateful request to the regime by the residents of Calamba, Laguna for the sale or conveyance of the land in the Dominican hacienda to those who had “labored to make the land tillable, to those who had poured their substance, toil, and sweat in the land” (supra, Chapter 15). The second was embodied in Aguinaldo's June 1897 proclamation (supra, Chapter 17) which called for the restitution to the pueblo or original owners of all the friar lands and, in case of failure to locate the owners, government auction of the lands in small lots, at prices within the reach of all and payable within four years. The third was the takeover of the friar lands by the people in 1896 (notably in Cavite). The friars had fled and the people paid no rents. The Revolutionary Government in time assessed low rates on the people.

The recovery of the lands was legitimized in the Additional Article of the Malolos Constitution, declaring the restitution to the Filipino State of all the lands, buildings, and other properties of the religious orders in Filipinas. The procedure for the titling and registration of lands under the Filipino Republic was prescribed on 27 February 1899 as “Regulations for the Adjudication of Uncultivated Lands, Which Have Not Yet Passed Into Private Ownership, or Cultivated Lands The Ownership of Which It is Desired to Acquire.”21

The American occupation reversed all that had happened since 1896. In the course of the purchase of the friar lands the regime in effect restored all property rights in the lands to the friar orders. It set aside for naught the people's hopes of recovering rights to properties that they believed to have been usurped or stolen from their forefathers.

We will recall that during most of the Spanish regime the colonial laws disposed that the Filipinos held the lands but did not own them as property (supra, Chapter 10). This was because under the colonial laws all the land belonged to the Spanish king and the native subjects held land only in usufruct. It was not until after a long time before they could buy land. Until well into the nineteenth century, moreover, there were no cadastral or land surveys of the crown lands or public domain (if the people did not own the



land, it was in the public domain), and the land registration system was a mess. Only the influential and the rich could benefit. The masses of the people learned to distrust and stay aloof from the government and its systems. As the Philippine Commission found out in 1900, the public lands had not been surveyed and that: “Owing to irregularities, frauds, and delays in the Spanish system,” the Filipinos did not register and get titles to the lands they held, but only “contented themselves with remaining on the land as simple squatters;” at any moment in danger of eviction. As in times past, the Filipinos relied on the conviction, which counted for little or nothing in court, that they owned the lands they held by ancestral rights.

Then, during the Revolution and the war, all land records in the Philippines were destroyed except in three or four provinces. Since the American regime ruled that all untitled land was public land and no claim based on prescription could lie against the government, all claims to land could only be validated by titling under the new laws. A campaign was conducted to encourage land titling and registration under the Public Land Act of 1903, but in 1911 only 9,000 out of a total of 2,250,000 parcels had been duly registered.

But the Dominicans, Augustinians, and Recollects (the Franciscans under their own rules generally could not own land) knew the advantage of having titles. In 1900 they claimed somewhat more than 164,594 hectares of haciendas, of which 49,268 hectares were located in the province of Cavite. The Philippine Commission stated that the Recollects owned 37,649 hectares, the Dominicans 65,538 hectares, and the Augustinians 61,406 hectares. The Commission decided that it could solve “the burning political question” posed by the friars if the “insular government,” as the new government was often called, purchased the friar haciendas for resale in small lots to the people.22

The reports of the Commission tell the long story of the friar lands purchase, supported by voluminous exhibits. Taft went to Rome in 1902. He reported that the Pope, Leo XIII, agreed to the sale of the lands. The regime was momentarily taken aback by the discovery that the religious orders had conveyed ownership to the haciendas to other parties. The Dominicans conveyed all but a small portion of their holdings to an Englishman who organized the Philippine Sugar Estates Development Co., Limited, to which



he then sold the properties. The Augustinians conveyed their properties to a group called La Sociedad Agricola de Ultramar. The Recollects retained their Mindoro hacienda in their own name, but conveyed the rest of their holdings to the British Manila Estates Co., Limited.

One cannot resist the suspicion that these parties were no more than dummies. Taft's impression on this matter was that the interests of the friar orders “had been made as ambiguous and doubtful as possible.” The Commission observed that: “The friars seem to remain the real owners.”

From 1901 to 1903 a Filipino surveyor, Juan Villegas, was engaged by the Commission to do the survey work, classify the lands, and estimate their values. In 1903 the representatives of the landowners estimated the value of the properties at “between thirteen and fourteen millions of dollars gold.” Villegas' estimate, based on his surveys and taking into consideration the then depressed state of agriculture, the lack of carabaos, the threat of agrarian disputes, and other factors relevant to pricing, was $6,043,000 (or 12,086,438.11 pesos). On 5 July 1903 Taft adopted this latter figure as his offering price. This was rejected by the vendors; negotiations and the unfavorable political situation drove them to a lower valuation of $10,000,000 and later on to an informal $8,500,000. As for Taft, he moved up to $7,543,000 and then stood pat.

In his July 1903 letter to the apostolic delegate who was sent to Manila by the Pope to negotiate the purchases, Taft might have made a subtle threat in suggesting that agrarian disputes would result if the friars or their agents would attempt to take possession of the haciendas: “What the Government proposes,” he wrote, “is to buy a lawsuit, and something more than a lawsuit, an agrarian dispute.” This was, presumably, why Taft moved up from his original offer of $6,043,000. Paying $1.5 million more than Villegas' estimate was thought worthwhile by Taft, who reported that the regime “is knowingly paying a considerable sum of money merely for the purpose of ridding the administration of the government in the islands of an issue dangerous to the peace and prosperity of the people of the islands.”

Although the purchase of the friar lands was received well at the time and was probably motivated by good intentions, the way the matter was handled sacrificed the Filipinos' interests.



McKinley's Instructions to the Commission in 1900 charged the latter to thoroughly investigate the matter of the rights to the extensive friar estates, as well as the claims or complaints against them, and to settle the issues justly. In its discharge of this duty the Commission was enjoined by the Instructions “to have regard for substantial rights and equity, disregarding technicalities so far as substantial right permits.” This was surely a “propeople” rule. But the Instructions next required the Commission to protect all rights of property in the islands. This was a “proproperty” rule, and would be preserved in the letter, rather than appreciated in the spirit, of the law. This was made clear by the injunction in the Instructions that: the prohibition against “the taking of private property without due process of law shall not be violated.” To cap it all, the people's welfare was made secondary to property rights in the legalistic formula that: “the welfare of the people of the islands, which should be a paramount consideration, shall be attained consistently with this rule of property right....” (Emphasis supplied) All the words about the people's welfare was just verbiage.

In the event, the purchase was effected without any showing that the Filipinos' “substantial rights and equity” were heard or considered. This was already evident in Taft's offering letter of 5 July 1903 letter to the apostolic delegate; it explicitly said that the lands “at one time owned” by the three religious orders were “now owned by,” and then followed the name of the company or corporation in the case of the particular hacienda or estate. Taft prejudged the question of ownership. He knew all along that he was buying the estates in order to avoid the agrarian troubles that would arise if the friar orders attempted to take possession of the properties. He knew that the root of these troubles was the people's opposition to the friar orders' claim of ownership. Taft knew that the Filipinos fought the Revolution in large part because of the friar haciendas, and that they had taken over the properties and did not pay rents to the friar orders, and later on paid the rents to the Revolutionary Government and then to the Republic (supra, Chapter 20).

Taft did not faithfully comply with an important provision in the Instructions that charged him:

to make a thorough investigation into the titles to the large tracts of lands held or claimed by individuals or religious orders;



into the justice of the claims and complaints made against such landholders by the people of the island[s] or any part of the people....

Taft had decided on his own, in July 1903, that the friar orders or their agents or successors had good titles.

The Commission engaged the services of a Manila law firm to examine the titles to the friar estates preparatory to consummating the purchase. This firm was Del Pan, Ortigas y Fisher, which duly submitted, on 20 October 1904, reports on its examination of the titles in the cases of the following haciendas:

La Sociedad Agricola de Ultramar (Augustinians):

Haciendas LocationBanilad Talamban Cebu Talisay Cebu Minglanilla Cebu San Francisco de Malabon Cavite

Tala Rizal Muntinlupa Rizal Piedad RizalMalinta Bulacan Dampol Bulacan Binagbag Bulacan Isabela Isabela

Parcels

San Marcos BulacanMatamo BulacanBarihan BulacanDaguila BulacanCalaylayan or Anibong BulacanAlangIlang BulacanMalapad BulacanRecoleto Bulacan



British Manila Estates Co., Limited (Recollects):

Hacienda of San Juan de Imus, situated in the pueblos of Cavite Viejo, Imus, Bacoor, and Dasmarinas Cavite

Recollects:

Hacienda of San Jose Mindoro

Philippine Sugar Estates Development Co., Limited (Dominicans):

Haciendas

Binan Laguna Calamba or San Juan

de Bautista LagunaSanta Rosa LagunaLolomboy Bulacan Toro Field Bulacan Santa Maria de Pandi BulacanNaic Cavite Santa Cruz de Malabon Cavite Oriong Bataan

Del Pan, Ortigas y Fisher did a good job, for the times. The lawyers worked with old deeds where available, originals often gone, papers old, ink faded, the writing in obsolete characters, some in the old native script; property boundary changes; vague settlements of diverse classes of encumbrances; complex cases of inheritance; relevant intermediate transactions or depositions made in foreign cities, and so on. The examination was by all legal standards a good “paper chase.” But the lawyers relied only on the paper when they came to the question: “Who owned the lands and was the ownership lawful?”

For instance, about the case of the hacienda of San Juan de Bautista or Calamba, which was the center of a scandalous dispute between the Calamba townspeople and the Dominicans from 1887 to the early 1890s, Del Pan, Ortigas y Fisher reported absolutely nothing. This is unusual because this case was the origin of the notorious persecution of the Rizal family.



The law firm simply concluded that the Dominicans (and the Philippine Sugar Estates Development Co., Limited) held good title to the property. This was not all. The lawyers reported that the Dominicans by their own good selves had declared during the registration of the property that it consisted of an area of “more than 7,000 hectares.” But then, without explanation, the lawyers proceeded on the basis of the Dominicans owning 16,424 hectares because “the last survey credited” the religious order with that area, and it was that area that appeared in the preliminary contract of sale to the government. This area was said to have been adjusted subsequently to 13,673 hectares.

Another glaring case of legal technicalities drowning out substantive right and equity was the lawyers' treatment of the protest of the people of Talisay and Minglanilla, Cebu, charging illegality of the title deeds submitted by the Sociedad Agricola (and the Augustinians). The people charged that the collection of rents from them was an abuse and that they as tenants paid under protest. Del Pan, Ortigas y Fisher made legal short shrift of the tenants' case, due simply to the fact that they did not present or claim to have any title deed.23

But how could the people show any title deeds when they did not have any? And how could they have title deeds when the Spanish regime had given the deeds to the contested properties to the Augustinians? The lawyers knew that there had been the Revolution and the Malolos Constitution. They knew that the United States had fought both the Filipinos and the Spaniards. In the event they chose to give weight to the law of the Spanish regime rather than to the law of the Filipino Republic, a choice which derived from their discretion and not from law, and their report did not lay the basis for this choice. This point would have been the appropriate question to settle on the basis of substantive right and equity. We can only surmise that, since Taft, their principal client, had already stated (prematurely) in 1903 that the friar orders had good title, and since their report was submitted in 1904, they had prudently decided to be guided by Taft's earlier known position.

Taft's purchase of the friar lands was a success. It was a success because the friar orders got good money. They unloaded vast haciendas on the insular government, properties they had not held since 1896. Taft returned



things to the status quo ante bellum. It was as if the Revolution and the Republic had never happened at all. Taft also avoided bloody agrarian troubles. This made the occupation regime happy.

Taft was in a hurry. He was to leave the Philippines in late 1903 to become the United States secretary of war. He had no time for a thorough study of the Filipinos' claims and rights. In his inaugural speech as civil governor in 1901 he had announced that it was his “high and sacred obligation to give protection for property,” among others. Property, property: but Taft treated the fruits of usurpation as property, and dismissed the substantive and equity rights of the Filipinos to their forefathers' lands.

And Taft made the Filipino people pay for it all. He paid $1,500,000 more than his own expert's estimate. The friar lands purchase was to be financed by the insular government floating bonds. Taft incurred indebtedness for the Filipino people without their consent. And, finally, the haciendas bought by Taft would be sold to the Filipinos. So the Filipinos ended up paying for the lands twice.

Elite Politics, Independence Without Nationalism

We will note three strands in this part of our story: modernization, elite politics, and the evaporation of the substance of nationalism in the national leadership. Modernization was such a pervasive development during the occupation period that histories later on hardly remarked it as a leading feature of the era. This period would also be viewed later on as marked by the Americans' “introducing democracy” to the Filipinos, when in fact what they did was to implant elite politics. Lastly, the colorful personalities involved in the Independence campaign distracted attention from the fact that the independence issue was often primarily the vehicle for personal political ambitions and that the supposed nationalist leaders were creations of the American occupation culture who could not jeopardize their rise to elite status that began when they took the oath of loyalty to the United States.

The doors of modernization opened to the Filipinos with the twentieth century. Back in the 1890s the people's industry and the fruit of their land had provided the solid base of a growing foreign trade for Asian and western trading ships. Their country enjoyed a good location for regional trade and



was close to the China market which the western nations coveted. Its sugar, abaca (Manila hemp), tobacco and cigars, and copra commanded a growing demand in world trade. The Revolutionary government demonstrated its capacity to deal correctly with foreign business interests as shown, for instance, in its relations with the British firms. The Filipinos could look forward to the challenges of independence under their own leaders. They had enough educated men, including many educated in Europe, for provincial governors, a legislature, and national administration.

In any case, progress and modernization in Filipino society were almost certain after obscurantism and feudalistic politics would have passed away with the friardominated Spanish regime. The regime's judicial system was corrupt. In addition, instead of using the people's taxes and local funds for education and other social services, it stole and misapplied them for such things as allowances for the Duke of Veragua (heir of Christopher Columbus) and other Spanish grandees, and for covering the costs of Spain's legations in the Far East and some of its island possessions such as Fernando Po off the west coast of Africa.

During the 1880s some Filipinos would offer to set up schools at no cost to the regime we will recall in this connection the school project of the girls of Malolos and the importance given to similar projects in the Noli me tangere and El Filibusterismo of Rizal., In life and in fiction they were disapproved. Aguinaldo accused the regime of keeping the people in ignorance and denying them enlightenment in his 31 October 1896 manifesto. His 23 June 1898 proclamation promised to combat the “inveterate vices of the Spanish bureaucracy, ... cumbrous and slow in its movements.”

In fact modernization was assisted by the new American regime. The people lived through the aftermath of the wars and adjusted to the new conditions. Under the new regime there was an openness that would have been horrifying to the old. At the same time its policies encouraged business, especially American business, which brought in American business methods. More directly, it planned or undertook ambitious programs in public sanitation and popular education as well as in road building and other transport and communications. In the public sector administrative efficiency was effected through a modern civil service.



Finally, the regime almost immediately managed limited but free and lively electoral politics at the town level. A progressing and modernizing society over 19071941, contrasting sharply with the old Spanish colonial society, was conspicuous and visible and must be considered as an important factor in the cooptation of the new generation of Filipino leaders.24

The notional view that the most important contribution of the occupation regime was the introduction of democracy is not based on the evidence. Democracy was not an official concern during the period and most certainly not during the critical early years of the Republican Party administrations. In fact the Manila regime never used the word. The Secretary of War, to whom the regime in Manila reported, had other social concerns. A typical American concern was stressed in the Secretary's cable of 15 January 1901:

TAFT, Manila

Cable answer following questions. What is present condition Manila as to use of intoxicating liquors, drunkenness, and disorder? How does it compare with principal American cities? Do natives frequent American saloons, or drink American liquors? How much drunkenness among American soldiers? Are houses of prostitution licensed, protected, or in any way encouraged by authorities ?

ROOT, Secretary War.

The Commission dutifully cabled reassuring answers on the 17th, so that Root was able to report to the US President that Manila with a population of 400,000 had fewer saloons than any of twelve listed American cities with similar or higher populations.

The earliest statement of the kind of politics and government that the new regime wished established was from the Commission's “General Theory In Formation of the Government,” contained in its 1901 report. It was not a theory of democracy. It was at best a theory of enlightened tutelary government, in which the Americans thought they would teach the Filipinos how to govern themselves. We have the testimony of a person who saw the theory developing and at work in 19041905. This witness is none other than our Mrs. Campbell Dauncey, who noted in 1904 that the:

American scheme out here is to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself



according to American methods; but at the same time they have ready plenty of soldiers to knock him in the head, if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before Americans think he is fit for it. A quaint scheme, and one full of the goahead originality of America.

And Mrs. Dauncey was absolutely correct, even if she happened to be an Englishwoman in whose eyes the Americans were heretically violating the holy rules of British colonial administration. The Commission spelled out its theory in its first sentence:

The theory upon which the commission is proceeding is that the only possible method of instructing the Filipino people in methods of free institutions and selfgovernment is to make a government partly of Americans and partly of Filipinos, giving the Americans the ultimate control for some time to come. In our last report we pointed out that the great body of the people were ignorant, superstitious, and at present incapable of understanding any government but that of absolutism.

Surely this meant that Filipino participation in the colonial regime, the Filipinos who would receive instruction in the art of government by the selfappointed teachers, would be restricted to the elite of Filipino society. This was ensured by the statement that: “In this condition of affairs we have thought that we ought first to reduce the electorate to those who would be considered intelligent....”

Out of this decision came the Commission's adoption in essence of the former Military Government's General Order No. 40, which had governed voting in the occupied pueblos. The suffrage could be exercised only by those who were: male; 23 years old or older; and either had served in pueblo offices under the Spanish regime (in other words a member of the principalia), or spoke, read, and wrote Spanish or English, or owned real property valued at least 500 pesos or paid at least 30 pesos of the established taxes.

This was not all. The Commission report did not state the most important qualification of all: that in order to qualify for the suffrage one must have taken the oath of loyalty to the United States. Politics was limited to the proAmerican elite.

Since the war was not yet over in 1901 and there were members of the upper class who were fighting the US Army, the loyalty requirement meant



that the political system that would be allowed to develop would include only those who had joined or were openly in sympathy with the Federal Party. This party was founded on 23 December 1900. It issued a manifesto upon its founding, saying:

So we call ourselves the Federal Party, since under American sovereignty, the highest and unanimous aspirations of the Filipino people will be to become part of the its federation, constituting a free and sovereign state in the form now enjoyed by the states of the Union.

Aware that its requirements for suffrage resulted in a very small electorate, the Commission anticipated that: “Many of the common people will be brought within these qualifications in one generation by the widespread system of education which is being inaugurated, and then gradually the electorate will be enlarged.”

Meanwhile, the Commission would organize town and provincial governments. A Filipino provincial governor would, in the words of the Commission, be “associated” with Americans. This was due to the fact that the provincial board or rulemaking body for the province was composed of the governor and two Americans, so that an American majority was ensured. The Commission went on:

As the government proceeds this association in actual government will certainly form a nucleus of Filipinos, earnest, intelligent, patriotic, who will become familiar with practical free government and civil liberty. This saving remnant will grow as the years go on and in it will be the hope of this people.

There was one more question to be covered by the theory. “How long,” the Commission asked, “before real results will be accomplished?” And it answered its own question:

Of course it is impossible to tell. Certainly a generation perhaps two generations will be needed, though a thorough system of public education, the introduction of railways and the intercommunication of all sorts, and the rapid material development of the country, which is quite possible, would greatly assist in this instruction.

At this point the Commission theory dealt only with municipal and provincial governments. These had been covered in McKinley's “Instructions



to the Philippine Commission” of 7 April 1900. The Instructions were also silent on the central administration. This was why the theory was vague and openended as to the time when the Filipinos would be judged to have attained the capacity for complete selfgovernment. In any case the war was still going on. Then the Federal Party was founded in December. It attracted many adherents. It assisted the regime in the peace campaign, many of its members going on sorties to the provincial capitals. Because the guerrilla war in the pueblos was at its height at this time, the regime rewarded the party's members with positions. Three of its leaders were appointed to the Commission in September 1901: Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, Benito Legarda, and Jose Luzuriaga. In no way, of course, did they represent the people.25

The record was reviewed in 1907 by Taft, who was now Secretary of War and was in Manila for the inauguration of the Philippine Assembly. Taft explained in his speech that the United States was engaged in a “great experiment.” This was quite correct in a way. Unlike every colonial power of the time the United States did not even have a corps of colonial administrators. It was still new in the imperialist game. This enabled it to approach colonial administration with somewhat new attitudes and methods. This enabled its leaders to formulate the untraditional line that they were preparing the Filipinos for selfgovernment; it is probable also that they were forced to do so by political criticism in the United States and by the fact that the war was turning out to be unexpectedly expensive.

But the fact that the Americans were venturing into something new did not automatically make an “experiment” of what they were doing. Imperialism is imperialism. The colonial subjects do not decide their fate. It is the experimenter who decides when he has had enough. Even if tutelary, imperialism means that the colonial subjects who are being taught can never be the judge of when, or whether or not, they have been taught enough or learned enough to be capable of selfgovernment. After his visit Taft made a report to his government. This report contained, among others, the same view of politics and government that the Commission had defined in 1901 (he was then its chairman) and that he reviewed in the course of his speech before the Assembly, although the speech was addressed to the Filipinos and the report to the Americans, so that emphasis appears in one that might not be in the other.



In his report Taft said that the regime in Manila did not have the funds for supporting universal popular schooling, so that it would take “longer than a generation to attain this.” Moreover, the decision as to the Filipino people's political capacity for independence was to be made by the US Congress. This was because the islands were a possession of the United States and because: “The judgment of a people as to their own political capacity is not an unerring guide.”'

Indeed in his 16 October 1907 speech Taft warned the delegates to the Philippine Assembly that if the majority merely aimed to “hold up the government to execration, to win away the sympathy of the people in order to promote disturbance and violence,” he would conclude that the “Assembly was a mistake and that Congress must abolish it.”

Finally, in his report to the President, who transmitted it to the Congress, he said that: “Any attempt to fix the time in which complete selfgovernment may be conferred upon the Filipinos in their own interest, is I think most unwise.” Taft's report ended with four recommendations. None dealt with the Filipinos' immediate political concerns. Two dealt with protection for American trade and agricultural interests (tobacco and sugar) and one with removing restrictions on the acquisition of mining claims and the holding of lands by corporations.

The American President Roosevelt transmitted the report to the US Congress endorsing approval of the recommendations Regarding the political future of the islands, he said that:26

[The Filipino people] have yet a long way to travel before they will be fit for complete selfgovernment, and for deciding, as it will then be their duty to do so, whether this selfgovernment shall be accompanied by complete independence. It will probably be a generation, it may even be longer, before this point is reached.... We desire that it be reached at as early a date as possible for the sake of the Filipinos and for our own sake. But improperly to endeavor to hurry the time will probably mean that the goal will not be attained at all.

What evolved out of the politics and governmental system under the regime became the lasting foundations of Filipino politics. These foundations were firmly rooted by the close of the first decade of the new century. The fate of the nationalism that began with the Revolution and



sustained the new nation during the years of war with the Americans was resolved during the same period. The decisions of the Americans were crucial to this development, but the key factor was the nature of the Filipino participation in the occupation regime.

There were two levels and mixed tendencies of participation from 1900 to, say, 1903. The war was still going on. In the town occupied by the US Army the military government had cautiously allowed local elections; in any event there was the army garrison at watch. Here the elected town presidents, vice presidents, and members of the municipal councils had either turned proAmerican or remained loyal to the nationalist Revolution. They were voted in by the restricted suffrage, so that both those elected as well as those who elected them were members of the local elite. They had all taken the required oath of loyalty, the nationalists only as a matter of expediency. During this period and until mid1902, however, all were dominated by the local Katipunan chapter.

The other level of participation was very clearly proregime It began in 1901 as soon as provincial governments were organized by the Commission. The Provincial Government Act provided that the first governors were to be appointed but their terms were to end in February 1902, after which the new governors were to be elected. Thus the first governors were chosen by the regime from among those who had taken the oath of loyalty and, preferably, were Federal Party members. How the provinces were organized was important. The Commission members and Federal Party leaders, in many cases accompanied by their wives, went on provincial sorties and met with the local leaders; these tended to be Federalistas, members of the Federal Party, or their sympathizers. The “popular consultations” took place in the provincial capitals and lasted for three halfday sessions. The province was declared organized and the appointees announced and sworn in after the last session. There were no Katipunan chapters at the provincial level.

Starting in 1902 most of the Filipino governors were elected by the vice presidentes and members of the municipal councils who had been elected in the towns of the province. These officials met as a body in convention and voted for the governor.



In 1903, outside the Moro Province, there were 37 governors. Not all were Filipinos because some provinces were “unpacified,” and a few of the Filipino governors were appointed by the regime, for the same reason. There were 27 Filipino governors altogether, appointed and elected; the rest were American army officers. Of the Filipinos Simplicio Jugo Vidal of Capiz and Julio Llorente of Samar had been among the expatriates in Europe; Pablo Tecson of Bulacan, Juan Climaco of Cebu, Martin Delgado of Iloilo, and Juan Cailles of Laguna were officers of the Filipino army during the war; and another, Arturo Dancel of Rizal, was a delegate to the Malolos Congress and founding member of the Federal Party.

In 1904 there were two more provincial governors who came from the ilustrado generation in Europe; Gregorio Aguilera Solis of Batangas and Raymundo Melliza of Iloilo. The governor of Antique was former general Leandro Fullon and former colonel R.F. Santos was governor of Albay. Joaquin Luna was governor in La Union. In 1906 Albay had an American governor. This year Teodoro Sandico, active in the Propaganda, the Hongkong Junta, and the war against the Americans was governor of Bulacan. Isabelo Artacho was the governor of Pangasinan; he was in the BiaknaBato government and later filed suit in Hongkong to divide the money that Aguinaldo had deposited in the banks. Two new governors in 1906 dominated Filipino national politics until World War II: Sergio Osmeña of Cebu and Manuel L. Quezon of Tayabas. There were still seven US Army officers serving as governor in 1907.

The former military officers who fought in the war had been amnestied. We cannot say whether they all remained nationalists in spirit or whether they embraced the new regime. The same may be said of the former propagandists save in the case of Llorente, who was proAmerican as early as 1899. It is even more difficult to say how the voters now saw these former leaders, but it is not impossible that the latter were regarded at least partly in terms of their old leadership roles.

At about the same level of participation as the governors were the judges and fiscals (prosecuting attorneys) of the courts. All were appointed officials. Taft records that “substantially all” appointed officials were Federal Party members. All secretaries of the provincial governments were appointed and the majority on the provincial boards was American. Then in 1906 the



governors conference, the first ever to be held, recommended that governors be elected not by the town councils but by direct vote, and that the majority on the board be likewise elective. This was passed into law, and so in 1907 the board had a Filipino majority; aside from the governor and the treasurer (the latter was an American) there was a “third member” called tercer vocal. His compensation was fixed at not less than five or more than fifteen pesos per actual session attended.

The regime's avowed theory was clearly that of an open elite. The easiest way for members of nonelite families to be listed in the electorate was of course through the public schools in order to gain literacy in English (the medium of instruction). Besides getting them into the electorate, schooling would enable the best of them to compete in the examinations for clerkships in the civil service. These important prizes for schooling, unavailable during the Spanish regime, promised the nonelite class decent salaries and a status their fathers could never attain, and are the reason why the pursuit of school certificates and diplomas is almost a mania among Filipinos.

But of course it would take a long time, more than just one or two generations, for the common folk to have real participation in electoral politics. Since 1900 the elite families in the towns not only dominated but monopolized political activity. The rest of the people were followers or spectators and had no advocates. Politics was the contest among the local elite families for the positions of influence and prestige, much as the families during the Spanish regime vied for the post of hermano mayor. Politics began and ended with the families that owned the land, that had the money and connections for business and enterprise, and that sent their sons on to higher education.

Until 1907 the only elections were local, up to the provincial level. The national cause that had united the people from various provinces, from Luzon and the Visayas, during the Revolution, was suppressed and could not be advocated. If, as the regime's theory allowed, more and more of the common people would be brought into the electorate in the course of time, would the elite system that was being entrenched year after year be affected? How fast would the common people enter the electorate and would their entry mean a difference? We will return to these questions after the 1907 elections.27



Aside from the limited suffrage there was another factor that affected the Filipino participation in government. This was the existence of the Irreconcilables, the Intransigentes or intransigents. Their only concern was immediate or early independence, and there was no way they could legally come forth and advocate it as a political goal. There were no national elections. They saw the Federalistas become judges, and wondered how these could judge fairly in cases under the Bandolerismo statute. They were dismayed by the case of Cayetano S. Arellano. Aguinaldo had named him secretary of foreign affairs in 1898; he declined to serve. He did not go to Malolos. He had entertained “the idea of union with the United States” as early as June. He was a founder of the Federal Party and in 1900 the regime rewarded him with the post of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Irreconcilables could not participate in politics actively.

There were still nationalists even after the death of General San Miguel in early 1903. We will have recourse to Mrs. Dauncey's testimony one last time. She has a detailed account of the visit to Iloilo in 1905 of Taft and his large party. In this charming Visayan town Taft had declared a formula in 1903 that soon became famous and touted as unprecedented by those who did not know that Aguinaido had said it on 12 June 1899 in Tarlac. Taft's remarks were made when he was still governorgeneral and were published in the Iloilo paper El Nuevo Heraldo. Mrs. Dauncey records the key sentence:

These Philippine islands are going to be governed for the Filipinos, and no one but the Filipinos, and any stranger or American who does not like it can get out.

This Taft formulation has to be explained. When Aguinaldo said that “Filipinas is for the Filipinos” we know that what he meant was that Filipinas “should be governed by the sons of this land.” What Taft said had nothing to do with the Filipinos. When he took over the leadership of the civilian regime he inherited a host of Americans in the colonial service from the military regime. Most were exmilitary who knew that the guerrilla war was not over and therefore did not sympathize with the civilian administration. They were critical of the Commission and Taft, and his speech in Iloilo was simply a message for them to get out.

The Taft party in 1905 was large, larger if he had his way. He had asked



the Commission to pay for the transportation costs of as many members of the United States Congress as wished to join. The Commission obliged and sent invitations to seventy: luckily, only seven senators and twentyfour congressmen accepted. They arrived in Manila on 5 August and in Iloilo on the 15th.

Mrs. Dauncey records that the junketing party was greeted by crowds and brass bands and a long procession that wound toward the Gobierno or government house. We will omit the description of the procession except to say that Mrs. Dauncey unerringly noted the absence of priests and that some of the streamers strung on the parade floats proclaimed the Filipinos' aspiration "to govern ourselves our own way." The visitors and their hosts proceeded to the court room, which soon filled with Americans and Filipinos, all in white suits. Melliza was the town presidente and gave the welcome speech. Several speeches followed; the Filipino orations were "marvelous," full of "fiery patriotism," but were in Spanish and were "toned down in the English rendering." Taft was cornered by the Filipinos on the independence issue, and he replied:

I am not come to give you your Independence, but to study your welfare. You will have your Independence when you are ready for it, which will not be in this generation no, nor in the next, nor perhaps for a hundred years or more.

The Filipinos were “staggered” at this answer from their “Patron Saint” and “sat quite still and immovable.”

The account then deals with the disastrous banquet that was held for Taft in the evening of 16 August at the Santa Cecilia Club. The Filipinos were hosting. The Americans applauded at their countrymen's speeches as they were delivered; the Filipinos were quiet at the translation. The latter roared with applause at their own countrymen's speeches; the Americans were mute at the English translation. Taft repeated essentially his message of the morning when it came his turn; it was followed by an embarrassing silence on the part of the Filipinos, except for “two or three hisses.” Not all the tables were filled. Mrs. Dauncey checked her guest list against the table placings and noted that the seats that were unoccupied were all assigned to Filipinos. The absent hosts had been deeply frustrated by Taft's remarks in the morning at the Gobierno.



The reason we cite Mrs. Dauncey's account of the Taft visit is her entry for 22 August:28

The papers from Manila with the account of our festivities have arrived, and I never read such brazen lying in my life; in fact, the reports are so cooked that they leave off being annoying and begin to be funny. The wild scenes of popular enthusiasm, the crowded banquet, the frantic love of the people of Panay for their idol, and so on, and so on.

And as to sheer reporting, Mr Taft's speech (which the Manila people are informed are greeted by the natives with thunderous applause) is given at great length but the impassioned utterances of the patriot ... are dismissed in a few mild words. No mention, too, of the ominous banners in the procession ... and not the faintest hint of the one or two hisses which greeted the sentiments of the Secwar himself.

So much for the local papers. And if that is the way they dally with truth out here, one can only faintly wonder what impression of this trip is being disseminated amongst the intelligent voters in the faroff U.S.A.

But if the nationalists of Iloilo were sulking in 1905, that year they had encouraging news. On 28 March the governorgeneral (Luke E. Wright) proclaimed that, pursuant to U.S. Public Law No. 235, the Census (1903) had been published that year, and that if two years thereafter (1907) general and complete peace continued, outside of the Moro Province and the areas of the nonChristian tribes, then the Commission would call for elections to a Philippine Assembly. The effect of this proclamation was to trigger off preparations for the expression of the electorate's sentiments, for the first time, on a national issue, that of independence.

Meantime, there was another sector of Filipino participation in government. This was the civil service. This was a genuine and valuable contribution of the occupation regime. The civil service was important to the Filipinos because to be admitted into the service was proof of achievement. The civil service covered the insular (national) and provincial levels as well as the city of Manila (administered centrally like Washington, D.C., which was administered by the US Congress). Admission was proof of achievement because entry into the classified branch was strictly based on competitive examinations either in Spanish or English.

The data on examinations for entry or original appointment are



interesting. During the oneyear period from October 1901 there were, in Manila, 1,192 examinees in English for the various jobs open; there were 1,560 examinees in Spanish. In the English tests 62 per cent passed and 43 per cent of the examinees in Spanish passed. In the examinations held in the provinces there were only 75 examinees in English, of whom 50 or 66 per cent passed; while there were 504 examinees in Spanish, of whom 240 or 47.6 per cent were successful.

The language and educational trends are reflected in the 1907 data on examinees. For original appointment, the cumulative total of examinees in English by that year was 14,237 and in Spanish 14,920. However, for the year 1907 the examinees in English were at 3,347 while there were now only 1,534 examinees in Spanish. In six or seven years the public school finishers had outnumbered those who had Spanish schooling or who came from Spanishspeaking families. This trend became permanent and irreversible.

The distribution of civil service posts between Filipinos and Americans in 1907 was 3,902 to 2,616; however, most of the technical, scientific, and professional and higher ranking positions were filled by Americans, besides the fact that a number of them were recruited in the United States. On the other hand, appointment of Americans was steadily diminishing due to the attraction of employment in Cuba and Panama as well as in the United States. This was reenforced by the loss of American employees to the lure of higher salaries in private firms.

Entry into the civil service was also covered by the loyalty oath requirement.29

On 28 March 1907 the Commission adopted a resolution declaring that the great mass of the people had been peaceful, lawabiding, and loyal to the United States since 1905. It noted the “minor” disturbances by Felizardo and Montalon in Cavite and Batangas and the pulahanes in Samar and Leyte, but said that the overwhelming majority of the people in the four provinces did not take part in the disturbances. The same day it telegraphed the resolution to Washington and the next day an executive order arrived directing it to call for elections to the Philippine Assembly.

The elections were held on 30 July. The 1907 elections may be regarded



in three ways. First, the elections signaled the origin of a party system in action, with the parties already reflecting some features of political party behavior into the 1980s. Second, they showed how small the electorate was. And third, the results indicated that the Filipino leadership would neither be assertive nor militant under the regime.

An American official's comment of 1907 anticipated much later opinions on Filipino electoral politics: “Political parties based on opposing principles of government have not yet crystallized, so that politics and the personality of the politicians are indistinguishable.” The personal and family interests invested by Filipinos in elections are so high and intense that perhaps it was inevitable that the struggle among these interests pervaded even the theoretically nonpolitical phase of the elections: the registration of voters. A report on the registration in Capiz Province stated:

In Capiz politics constitute the only thriving industry and the maneuvers of two rival factions to possess themselves of the municipal and provincial offices constitute Capiz politics. The competition between these two factions is so intense that it was not unnatural that the one which controlled the municipal council of any town should avail itself of its power ... to appoint its own partisans as inspectors.

As a result, the people applying to be included in the voters list in Capiz were treated on a case to case basis according to the factional loyalty of the inspectors. There were two towns in the northern island of Batanes; there it was reported that “there were no political parties, only the partisans of rival cattle dealers.” This report for Batanes stated that the people would have approved if no elections forms were sent to the island so that no elections would be held. Fortunately, the 30 July elections were conducted in a fairly satisfactory manner. The Filipinos had demonstrated their skills in evading, while not violating, the election law. But they had not yet begun to buy votes openly or kill each other in the course of the campaign.

The electorate was small, something that could not be helped because of the legal requirements for suffrage. According to the 1903 census there was a civilized population of 6,623,804 in the election provinces. Only 143,965 were qualified voters. Of these only 104,966 registered. Only 98,251 or 1.48 per cent voted. The voters did not represent the masses of Filipinos but only



the educated and propertyowning class, so that the results could not reflect the people's opinions, much less their values and needs.

It may also be noted that 131,013 had voted in the preceding municipal elections, showing a greater interest in local than in national polls. The higher turnout in local elections meant that the factions that appealed to the voters in the contest for the local offices were not as active in mobilizing the voters for the selection of the leaders who would be working in Manila at the national level.30

Nevertheless, the 1907 elections were more representative than the numbers indicated. Filipino participation in government until this time had been dominated at the provincial and higher levels by Federal Party members. The announcement that an Assembly would be established meant not only that more jobs would be open, but also that the Filipinos elected would have lawmaking authority equal to that of the American Commission. That would give the Filipinos a voice and role in the national administration. These opportunities called for a serious organization of effort and opinion.

What happened was that three major blocs of opinion surfaced. The heyday of the Federal Party, dominant from 1900 to 1903, came to an end. Taft's partisanship closed the doors of appointment to many able men outside the party, but his successors did not limit their appointments to Federalistas. Besides, the Federal Party's statehood goal, owned Taft, “did not awaken enthusiasm anywhere.” The party, hoping to overcome its image, changed into the Partido Nacional Progresista, dropped its statehood platform, and adopted a cautious stand for independence. But that goal had already been preempted by the opposition.

Various "independist" and nationalist organizations had been forming since 1901, only to be frustrated by a negative attitude and refusal of recognition by the regime. Then the proclamation of March 1905 removed the legal obstacles, provided the organizations committed themselves to legal political methods. The only problem left was how the groups could be united. Some groups were for immediate, others for “most urgent,” independence, or some other shade of independence with nationalism. Accommodations took place in 1905, and in 1906 the various groups were



reduced to two major independence parties: the Partido Independista and Partido Union Nacionalista. For the Assembly election campaign they fused into the Partido Nacionalista in March 1907. Among the leaders in the unification work were Francisco Liongson, Galicano Apacible, and Teodoro Sandico of the colony in Europe, as well as Alberto Barretto, who had served on the peace commission that negotiated with the Americans in May 1899. Two young governors, Osmeña and Quezon, were elected to the party council. It must be noted that the party kept the name of the old group of the Irreconcilables, founded in 1901. It advocated immediate independence. There were also a few nationalists who did not join the Nacionalistas, but campaigned as independents, Indepentistas, and Inmediatistas.

The Independents, the third major grouping, showed strength in the balloting but did not have the advantage of a party identity; the accounts do not show them campaigning as a party with a clear or specific position. They were presumably men who inclined to either Progresista or Nacionalista views but preferred not to be identified with either organization.

Finally, there were the Roman Catholic and Philippine Independent Church (Aglipayan) factions. The Aglipayans contested only in Ilocos Norte. The Catholics campaigned in Cebu, Manila, Rizal, and Pangasinan. They were swamped. In Manila; they won 59 votes while the Nacionalistas got 5,671 and the Progresistas 1,361. Of the total votes cast they won only 1,192, but their candidate in Pangasinan managed to place among the province's five delegates.

The Nacionalistas received 34,277 votes and won 31 seats. The Progresistas got 24,234 votes and 16 seats. The Independents had only 22,878 votes, but beat the Progresistas by gaining 20 seats. In addition there were 13,305 votes and 12 seats won by the other nationalist proindependence candidates. Of the elected delegates 49 were listed as Nacionalistas and one as an independent Nacionalista, which indicates that there were Nacionalistas outside the party.

On 15 October 1907 there was a welcome for Taft at the Ayuntamiento building in the Intramuros. Felix Roxas, the chatty young student who arrived in Barcelona in 1881, was mayor of Manila. He delivered the welcome address, likening Taft to Michelangelo. The inaugural ceremonies



for the Assembly were originally scheduled to be held the next day at the same place, but inadequate space forced a move to the Grand Opera House. After Taft finished with his speech he questionably took over the chair, declared the Assembly open for business, and took it upon himself to accept a motion to adjourn until the afternoon for the session at the marble hall of the Ayuntamiento. 31

In retrospect, the formal leadership of the Nacionalista party began to show signs of a lukewarmness to nationalism as soon as it was in power. There were two candidates for the speakership of the Nacionalistadominated Philippine Assembly when it met for its organizational session. Pedro Paterno had declared early. He was a son of one of the 1872 exiles. He was an early ilustrado. He was the famous intermediary for the truce of BiaknaBato; chairman of the consultative assembly of Filipinos in the last days of the Spanish regime; president of the Malolos Congress; premier in the Aguinaldo cabinet in 1899; founding member of the Federal Party in 1900 but a recent convert to the Nacionalistas. He was a delegate for Laguna. His politics was clearly slippery, probably opportunistic.

The other candidate, albeit a quiet one, was Sergio Osmeña. He was young, not quite 29 years old. He was not in the Revolution and was only at the periphery of the recent war. Notwithstanding the fact that his biographer refers to his mother as “Dona” Juana Osmeña y Suico, the Osmeña family was obviously not Society. For some reason or another the biographer (Albano Pacis) omits or has no data about the father. But Osmeña was an able man and of more quality than many of higher status. He earned his way up through education and service under the new regime. He served first as fiscal and then elected governor of Cebu; when he succeeded Gen. Juan Climaco in 1906 it was just one of the many events that were happening in many places where the men of the nationalist Revolution were giving way to the new men, creations of the occupation regime. Osmeña was certainly respected by his fellow governors; they elected him chairman in their first conference in 1906.

Paterno's joining the Federal Party in 1900 was already ages ago, while Osmeña's presidency of the governors conference was as fresh as yesterday. When the Assembly met in the afternoon, back at the Ayuntamiento, the youngest delegate, Nicolas Jalandoni of Iloilo, nominated Osmeña;



Dominador Gomez, Paterno's campaign manager, moved to elect by acclamation, announcing that Paterno had withdrawn from the contest.

Osmeña's speech mentioned patriotism and how fortunate it was that the Assembly included some who had been in “the struggle for the liberty of the people.” He asked that all act “as good, just and consequential men,” conscious of “our responsibility and all the force of our patriotic convictions,” because in that lay “the greatest,the most meritorious service for the country, for our beloved Philippines.” A month later, at an official banquet for the overstaying Taft, Osmeña spelled out his idea of the role of the Philippine Assembly:

Just as we have not defrauded the hopes of the authors of the Municipal Code and the Provincial Act, we shall not defraud those of the persons who convoked the Assembly. The Assembly will not constitute an impediment nor be a source of systematic and unreasonable opposition to the work of the Government, but by sound criticism and hearty cooperation it will contribute to the successful administration of the country.

Instead of a drag, it will be a propelling power which will accelerate the fulfillment of the promise of the United States to the Philippines until that time when we shall have attained our ideals.

Whatever those ideals were, Osmeña had said all that needed to be said. Within the decade just passed his people had fought a revolution and a war against colonial powers. His words as their leader in the colonial government, however, almost suggested that the struggle was over. The regime had promised that independence, in some form, at some uncertain future, would be granted. For Osmeña that promise was good. One only had to wait and the fruit would ripen and fall. If everybody behaved, selfgovernment would come. For Osmeña political change, the goal for which his people fought the Revolution, would be won by correct administration in cooperation with the colonial regime.

The Nacionalistadominated Philippine Assembly, whose majority ran on a plank of immediate independence, was to be no less and no more than a loyal opposition. It would not be a drag. It would not rock the boat. If the regime was American, so be it. Osmeña had pledged that the Assembly would give it “sound criticism and hearty cooperation.” It was as if the pro



regime Progresistas had won the elections.

Section 8 of US Public Law No. 235 provided that the Assembly and the Commission would vote for two resident commissioners to the United States. The functions of the commissioners were not spelled out in the law. The office evolved into the Filipino representation in the United States Congress during the campaign for independence. The Nacionalista Assembly nominated a member of the Commission, Benito Legarda, and Nacionalista, Pablo Ocampo. The Commission agreed. Of Legarda we know enough. Taft assured the American President in 1908 that Ocampo was an organizer of the Partido Nacionalista but that he left the party because he objected to the word "inmediatista" in the party name. The resident commissioners were in way officials of the United States government; it paid their salaries; the House of Representatives assigned rooms for them in its building and gave them the right of floor debate although not that of voting.

With these men in Washington and Osmeña in Manila the Filipino independence campaign would be a wellmannered affair and would not be waged as a militant struggle. The Assembly's first act in the new Philippine Legislature was passed on 16 October 1907. It was a joint resolution and was also passed in the Commission the same day. It read:32

Conveying to the President of the United States and through him to the Congress and the people of the United States the gratitude of the people of the Philippine Islands and the Philippine Assembly and their high appreciation of the privilege conceded to them of participating directly in the making of the laws which shall govern them.

The characteristics of the Filipino political elite would be seen in the delegates of the 1907 Assembly. The eighty delegates were classified as to “profession, avocation, or pursuit.” There were nine classes: lawyer, professor, physician, pharmacist (this was still a man's profession and stayed so until the 1940s), property owner, journalist, agriculturist, merchant, and merchantagriculturist; and a lone delegate was listed as a justice of the peace. There were fortyfive lawyers, and the five professors were most likely professors of law. The class of agriculturist, which included thirteen delegates, was a euphemism for plantation or large estate owner; to the thirteen must be added the four merchantagriculturists. None of the



delegates had worked with his hands or at a mechanical trade for a living.

Besides, being a legislator in those days was unaffordable by the common folk, even if they had been electors and voted in one of their kind. If a man was a provincial family breadwinner he could not afford to go to Manila and serve in the legislature. He would have been paid for this roundtrip transportation and subsistence expenses between his home and Manila, only once per session actually held and attended, and the twenty pesos a day of actual attendance. This was considered, in 1907, “probably the highest per diem paid to any body of legislators in the world.” Even so, the man would not be able to afford leaving his family and field and nets and tools or foregoing his wages, to serve in the legislature in Manila.

In the 1909 elections 37 delegates sought reelection; only 19 were returned. This did not indicate sociopolitical volatility, since no new classes of men were involved. What it meant was that provincial factional rivalry among the elite families was close. This characteristic of Filipino electoral politics was shown as early as the 1907 provincial elections, which were held after the Assembly polls. The large provinces of Pampanga, Tayabas, Laguna, and Rizal had allNacionalista delegates. In Negros Occidental only one of the three delegates, and in Iloilo only one of the four, was Progresista. In the Philippines the provincial governor and whoever is the province's representative in Manila are automatically rivals; they are threats to each other's dominance in the province unless the two are brother or the closest allies and even so, one might not be sure.

The votes cast in the 1909 elections exceeded the 1907 vote by almost 100,000. This was because the elections were general: for the Assembly, the governors and third members, and th: town officials. The Nacionalista Party again led the field, winning with 92,996 votes. But it was not a walkaway: there were 36,876 Independent and nonparty votes and 38,588 Progresista votes.

For the 1912 elections 252,456 persons applied for registration and 249,805 were accepted by the inspectors. A slightly less number of 248,154 were enrolled, and 235,786 voted. The votes for the Nacionalistas ballooned to 124,753 while the Progresistas stayed at almost the 1907 level at 37,842. A notable development was the growth of the Independent and nonparty



vote to 71,241.

The key question about the 1912 electorate is whether its growth over that of 1909 indicated a definite progress toward democracy. There were 81,916 voters who qualified by satisfying the literacy requirement; the number was not far below the total number of voters in the 1907 Assembly elections. This certainly indicated some progress in the regime's school program. However, the people who were in the electorate by other than the literacy requirement also increased notably. Those who qualified by virtue of having held office during the Spanish regime (61,815) and the voters who qualified by virtue of being property owners (60,553) totalled 122,368. The rest of the voters qualified, by having a combination of two of the three qualifications – including 1,748 who possessed all the three qualifications.

But there were 37,226 votes who had their ballots prepare for them (by the election inspectors) because they were illiterate.

These illiterates obviously came from both the officeholders of the Spanish era and the propertyowning class. Under the old laws gobernadorcillos had to be literate in Spanish, but the office of directorcillo or pueblo secretary became necessary because many of the capitanes or pueblo heads did not know enough Spanish for the preparation of pueblo official documents and correspondence. Forbes attests to the illiteracy of many of the property owners.

Moreover, many of those who were literate were not necessarily finishers of the English language school program but were Spanish literates. Since education in the new school program was the most accessible route into the electorate for the nonelite masses, a democratic trend via this route was not yet clear.

There were two elections in 1916. The first, in June, were the familiar elections. The second were the October elections for the new Philippine Senate. On 29 August 1916 the Philippine Autonomy Act was passed in the United States Congress; it provided for significant local autonomy “without impairing the exercise of the rights of sovereignty” by the United States, with a declaration of purpose about independence in some indefinite future. It also provided for a Senate to replace the old Commission, so that the colonial legislature would become allFilipino. The Nacionalistas romped all



over the opposition in both elections.33

There is not much of a story left to tell. The story of Filipino national politics until 1941, at least as much of it as can be told from the known acts of the men who became leaders since 1907, is simple. It is a story of the continuing erosion of the ideals of the nationalist Revolution and the First Republic. The Nacionalista leaders were a political generation away from Rizal and Bonifacio and Aguinaldo. Each in his own way, the latter had risked their all in the cause of their people. Rizal was a son of an inquilino family, Bonifacio a plebeian, Aguinaldo came from a provincial principalia family. They were all driven to fight and struggle so that their people would become a nation that would have a life of its own. Each had a sensitivity, according to his station, not only to political but also to social change. This was most clear to Aguinaldo because his troops in the Revolution and the war were common folk, who kept the war going even after they had lost their President and all their generals.

Quezon and Osmeña, on the other hand, were the creations and loyal beneficiaries of the American regime. Even their occasional disagreements with the regime were conducted under its rules, the bottom line of which was defined by the oath of allegiance that they had sworn to the United States. They were extremely able and respected professionals; they won success with the coin of their cooperation; while Rizal, Bonifacio, and Aguinaldo were traitors and martyrs to the regime that ruled their people.

It is not possible to chronicle the political story of the Filipinos during the rest of the American occupation without seeing Quezon and Osmeña in the focal center, except that their story was basically that of the rivalry of professional political leaders that became less and less the story of the Filipinos, so many of whom had no participation, and whose role is unrecorded.

Manuel L. Quezon, brilliant and ebullient to Osmeña's urbanity and organizational efficiency, was the son of a Spanish mestizo sergeant in the Spanish army in Filipinas, born in Manila and an emigrant to Baler, Tayabas where he married the Spanish mestiza schoolteacher. The young Quezon and Osmeña were students in the Dominicans' San Juan de Letran, a notch or two below the Ateneo, the school for the sons of the inquilinos



during Rizal's time. In 1903 Osmeña placed second in the bar examinations, Quezon fourth. Fernando Salas, secretarygeneral of the office of the president and the cabinet in the provisional revolutionary government of the Visayas in late 1898, placed third. Quezon first won notice as a successful prosecuting attorney or fiscal like Osmeña; from this post he went on to the Tayabas governorship and then to the Assembly. His national political career began to rise when he was resident commissioner from 1909 to 1917, during which he learned valuable lessons about Americans and especially about Washington politics. The passage of the Philippine Autonomy Act in 1916 was a deserved, as well as a lucky achievement, and he was catapulted to election in the fifth senatorial district without campaigning. He was duly elected first senate president, from which post he became a serious rival to Osmeña.

The most praiseworthy political practice of the early American regime was its observance of the general American respect for the electoral verdict. In the 1907 Assembly elections, for instance, the proFederal Party regime was never criticized for improperly influencing the voting, and it accepted the results. After Taft left the governorship, his habit of appointing only Federalistas to important government posts ended. The reason for this was that the subsequent governorsgeneral did not wish to appoint clearly incompetent persons who had no qualifications except membership in the favored party.

The Nacionalista victory in the Assembly elections led to the appointment of Rafael Palma, a Nacionalista, to the Commission in 1908. This raised the number of Filipinos in that body to four, although none of them was entrusted with a cabinet portfolio. The first Filipino commissioner with portfolio was Gregorio Araneta; he became secretary of finance and justice by promotion from his post as attorneygeneral in mid1908. Juan Sumulong, judge of the court of first instance, was appointed commissioner without portfolio in 1909.

After the organization of the Assembly an opposition mentality led the Nacionalistas to disagree with the Commission, especially over the annual budget act, so that during the threeyear period from 1911 to 1913 no appropriations law was passed. However, under the law the preceding year's appropriations act was deemed passed in such a contingency, so that that



was not a serious problem.

But the Nacionalista opposition to the regime was ritualistic. A reconciliation was effected in 1913 after the Democrats won the American November 1912 elections and replaced the Republicans. When Francis Burton Harrison arrived in Manila to be the first Democratic governorgeneral, he asked for the resignations of the four Filipino commissioners. Palma's resignation was not accepted and four new Filipinos were appointed: Victorino Mapa to the post of secretary of finance and justice from his position as Supreme Court justice; two former Assembly members, Jaime C. de Veyra of Leyte and Vicente Singson Encarnacion of Ilocos Sur; and Vicente Ilustre, property owner from Batangas. The Commission now had a Filipino majority.

The Nacionalista honeymoon with the regime was sanctified and reenforced when the party won uncontested control of the new Philippine Senate in 1916. Harrison was friendly to Filipinization of the administration, if only to get rid of Americans appointed during the Republican era, even if many of them were competent or nonpartisan professionals. There was a brief interruption of the good relations during the ensuing Republican administration when the former military governor of the Moro Province, Leonard Wood, was appointed governorgeneral. The Wood era was an intermission, as the Nacionalista control of Filipino elections continued to be so pronounced that the party and its politics, which simply meant the politics of the OsmeñaQuezon rivalry, defined the themes in the world of articulate Filipino politics.34

The cozy good relations between the occupation regime and the supposedly oppositionist party, the Nacionalistas, whose members dominated the legislature, drove the proregime Progresistas, the minority party, to become the actual opposition. In other words, it opposed a regime with whose political principles it professed to agree. But it was so identified by its image as the proponent of the rejected statehood goal that it was an impotent opposition party. The proregime Progresistas were left out of the jobs that the opposition Nacionalistas enjoyed by virtue of their control of the election votes.

This abandonment of principles espoused by a political party, the anti



regime Nacionalistas by their bland nationalism and cozy cooperation with the regime, and the proregime Progresistas by their opposition, marked the beginning of the disintegration of meaning in the platforms of Filipino political parties. From here on, principle evaporated from the party system and organized political behavior in the Philippines except, maybe, in the Communist organizations.

Quezon even gave “political turncoatism” a twist by suggesting a duty of patriotism in the course of a famous split with Osmeña. It was 1922: “My loyalty to my party ends where my loyalty to my people begins!” He was correct in a way. Party loyalty is a duty only when one's party is a party of principle.

At that time the principle of nationalism that the Nacionalistas had once espoused had long ago receded into the almost forgotten past. On the other hand, Quezon did not have to invoke patriotism, since his quarrel with Osmeña was nothing but an intraparty row.

Actually, the nationalist faction within Osmeña's Nacionalista Assembly was allowed to push through a nationalist resolution in 1910. On 5 December this year the Assembly adopted a joint resolution requesting the United States Congress to recognize the Filipinos' right and capacity to prepare and adopt a constitution for their selfgovernment. This was sent to the Commission, where it was tabled, and that was the end of it.35

After 1910 Osmeña's Nacionalistas accepted the lesson that one could not even have selfgovernment, much less independence, just by passing resolutions. Independence became a slumbering issue, coming alive only in the few times when someone, perhaps Quezon, whose long service as resident commissioner had earned him good contacts in the Congress, would report that a bill affecting the Philippines, especially an independence bill, had been filed in the insular affairs committee of either house of the Congress.

Then Harrison came in 1913, and the honeymoon became a commonlaw marriage. The nationalists kept their commitment to immediate independence alive, a goal which they thought their own party had now become apathetic about. They could not accept their party's love affair with the regime. They were also deeply concerned with what they thought was



the party system's smug acceptance of elite politics and cavalier neglect of social change. Their twin goals were those of the Revolution and the Republic: independence and democracy. In 1914 they founded the Partido Democrata Nacional as a protest party; its members were called Terceristas, the third voice in the party system, or Democratas.

The Democratas were articulating the last echoes of the ideals of the nationalist Revolution. They charged that the Nacionalista Party failed to support the spirit of democracy. The party under Osmeña was a personalist or elite group; it did not even have an executive committee. Like everybody else, the Democrata founders advocated political independence. But they went farther, calling for policies toward industrial and mercantile independence (which in those times meant national selfsufficiency); expansion of Philippine markets and protectionist policies for Filipino trade, agriculture, and commerce; and more authority for the provincial governors (a principle in the Malolos Constitution). All of these concerns were consistent with the old ideals. There was another set of Democrata concerns. They advocated populist systems such as the initiative, recall, and referendum. They declared that:

The Nacionalista party and its leaders have been deaf to fraternal entreaties to desist from playing the role of "Mazarins" in politics, their conduct causing the American imperialists to assert that an independent government in the Philippines would be tantamount to the rule of a few at the expense of the masses.

The ideals of the Partido Democrata Nacional of 1914 derived from its leadership. The moving spirit was Sandico, a key figure in the fusion that led to the Nacionalista Party of 1907. He was among the Bulacan activists of the 1880s; served the Propaganda in Europe, the Hongkong Junta, the Revolution; and then fought as a general in the war. With him were three other exgenerals: Juan Cailles of Laguna, Francisco Macabulos of Tarlac, and Emiliano Riego de Dios of Cavite. They were joined by other Nacionalista rebels and some Progresistas. Among the latter was Arsenio Cruz Herrera. He was a delegate in the Malolos Congress and a member of the Permanent Committee of the Assembly under the Republic, and then became a founding member of the Federal Party.

The Progresistas and Democratas were overrun in the 1916 elections.



They fused into the new Partido Democrata only to be overwhelmed again in 1919. In 1920 they adopted a new platform. They asked for absolute and immediate independence and accused the Nacionalistas of having abandoned that goal "since the Jones Law was enacted." They also espoused democratic policies in favor of labor in general, and better conditions for workers, arbitration in labor conflicts, and benefits for the aged. Two more figures from the Revolution joined the party: Col. Simeon Villa and Gen. Tomas Mascardo. Forbes thought many of the party's policies “very radical and occasionally socialistic.”36

The OsmeñaQuezon split in 1922 helped the Democratas win 26 of the 93 seats in the lower house. In the 1925 elections they almost maintained their strength, but the Quezon and Osmeña blocs made peace and the reunited Nacionalistas kept their dominance of electoral politics until the eve of World War II.

Filipino politics and government did not change much over this period. The sources and the base of political leadership did not change. The party of Quezon and Osmeña did not think to review or expand the limited electorate. This neglect was glaring because the Autonomy Act of 1916 authorized the allFilipino legislature to prescribe, and therefore modify, the suffrage qualifications after the 1916 elections. But the Nacionalistas were unbeatable and content with the status quo. It was in fact the United States Congress that liberalized the suffrage requirements: the 1916 law lowered the voting age from 23 to 21 years and allowed literacy in a native language as an additional qualification. The Autonomy Act was also silent on the loyalty oath requirement for voters and elected officials, although in practice it remained in force because violation of the oath of allegiance to the United States was a disqualification for voting pursuant to Section 432 of the Administrative Code.

The quintessential symbol of this political system was Quezon. He was elected in the fifth senatorial district (the provinces of Cavite, Batangas, Mindoro, and Tayabas) without ever campaigning.

The merger of the nationalists (Partido Democrata Nacional) with the proAmericans (Progresistas) after 1916 was conclusive evidence that the Filipino electorate was no longer moved by the nationalism of the



Revolution and Republic. What was most needed therefore was for the Filipino leadership to spell out and spread a new and appropriate nationalist ideology for the times. It was not enough for the nationalists to oppose the Nacionalistas, who were now working with and for the regime. There had to be fresh views of the nation and its ethics and ideals, and everything had to be derived from a sense of the worth of the Filipino and his identity and culture and aspirations.

The man who came closest to contributing to this redefinition was Claro M. Recto, a Democrata in the House of Representatives. He castigated Quezon and 0smefia and Manuel A. Roxas (a protege of Quezon) during the mid1920s but, obeying the now clear script of Filipino politics, Recto seemed to ally himself with the American governorgeneral, now a Republican, against the latter's Filipino opponents. Recto was an intellectual without Quezon's charisma or Osmeña's diplomacy. He had little popular appeal, either with the limited electorate then or with the expanded electorate later on.

Recto became president of the 1935 constitutional convention that was convened pursuant to the Philippine Independence Act or TydingsMcDuffie law of the United States Congress, approved on 24 March 1934. Section 10 of this law provided for recognition of independence and withdrawal of American sovereignty after a tenyear transition period following the inauguration of the government to be organized under the constitution. This would have been in November 1945. There had been, in fact, the HareHawesCutting law before the TydingsMcDuffie law. The earlier law was approved in January 1933, and had the same provisions on independence and a transition period. The Quezon and Osmeña blocs in the majority party fought a battle royal over the acceptance of this earlier law. It would have been too much for Quezon if the law had been accepted; it would have been Osmeña who would get the credit for the passage of the independence law since it was 0smefia (joined by Roxas) who had been in the United States and supported passage of the law in the Congress. The Quezon bloc won; the HareHawesCutting law had no effect because acceptance by the Filipinos was a legal requisite to its effectivity; Quezon went to Washington, came back with the TydingsMcDuffie law that was almost identical with the rejected law, posed as the savior of the nation, and won approval by the electorate.



There was irony in the fact that 0smefia and Quezon fought each other bitterly over the independence acts. The irony is that, way back in April 1924 H.R. 8856, otherwise known as the Fairfield bill, was introduced in the United States Congress, authorizing the Filipinos to adopt a constitution and providing for recognition of the independence of the Commonwealth of the Philippines twenty years after its inauguration. This would have worked out to almost exactly 1945.

Public opinion in the Philippines was against the bill, mainly because the interim period of twenty years was seen as too long. The most important among the objectors to this provision in the bill was Gen. Aguinaldo. Quezon and Osmeña, who had both been in the United States when the bill was in Congress and who supported its passage, reported after they returned to Manila that they had been “unable to accept” the Fairfield bill. But Recto, who was with the QuezonOsmeña mission as the Democrata minority member, revealed that the two had in fact supported the bill. And he had documents to prove his accusations.

Osmeña was back in the United States in 1925 carrying another petition for independence. The petition was eloquent because it is easy to be eloquent on a matter such as independence, but it relied less on the Filipinos' rights and more on American “good faith.”37

The constitutional convention began its work on a Monday, 30 July 1934. The proceedings were recorded in a mixture of Spanish and English so that we note, for instance, that “El Doorkeeper anuncia la entrada de los presidentes de ambas cámaras.” Quezon, as senate president, opened the ceremonies, in English. Exactly two hundred delegates answered the roll call. The record suggests that Quezon repeatedly ignored the persistent efforts of Tomas Confesor of Iloilo to get the floor to make a nomination for the provisional chairmanship of the convention. It also appears that the nomination of Jose P. Laurel of Batangas was railroaded, and the nominations were closed and he was elected by acclamation. Quezon yielded the chair to Laurel, who asked for nominations for permanent president of the convention. Recto, of Batangas, was nominated.

At this point Confesor was recognized and he nominated Pedro Guevara, resident commissioner during the passage of the independence law. He



explained the nomination by saying that Guevara was now poor and old and would soon pass away. But Guevara declined the nomination and Recto was elected by acclamation.

The convention completed its work on 8 February 1935, when the final draft of the constitution was adopted. In his valedictory that evening Recto noted that there was no single provision that was not formulated by the delegates through their suggestions. But he made special acknowledgment to the “Seven Wise Men” of the convention who wrote the draft as presented to the assembly. They were: Filemon Sotto and Manuel Briones of Cebu, Manuel Roxas of Capiz, Vicente Singson Encarnacion of Ilocos Sur, Miguel Cuaderno of Bataan, Norberto Romualdez of Leyte, and Conrado Benitez of Laguna. In his speech Recto observed that:

For it is not alone by means of constitutions and laws, however wisely conceived and formulated they might be, that we may hope to found a free nation, a stable government and a happy and prosperous community, but by building up here a citizenry as conscious of its duties as of its rights, if not more so, and purified by the precepts of the patriotic code of honor and morality.

During the convention debates Confesor had proposed inclusion in the declaration of principles of the following:

The Filipino people hereby declare themselves ready for immediate, complete, and absolute independence, and are in a position to assume now the obligations and responsibilities of a sovereign state.

The assembly disagreed, but provided in Article II (Declaration of Principles) that: “The Philippines is a republican state.” Article XVII provided that the government to be established under the constitution was to be the Commonwealth of the Philippines, which would be known as the Republic of the Philippines upon the withdrawal of United States sovereignty.

Despite the fact that it had to include principles and mandatory provisions imposed by the United States Congress, the rest of the 1935 constitution was not only a good political constitution. In the declaration that the Philippines was a state wherein sovereignty resided in the people, the delegates were risking the entire constitution's disapproval by the Americans; but they were reasserting nationalism and abandoning the well



mannered stance of the Nacionalista leadership since 1907.

The constitution featured clearly nationalistic and democratic provisions and, in the long neglected area of suffrage, expanded the electorate. It prescribed a basic literacy qualification but abolished the old elitist requirements and provided for women suffrage if at least 300,000 of them voted for it in a plebiscite to be held for the purpose, which they later did.

From 1935 onwards the Filipinos began to have full control of their political system. Its beginnings had been virtually defined by American prescriptions, but from here on it would develop only according to Filipino desires and abilities. The Americans could no longer be properly blamed for what it would become, and so the Filipinos would have only themselves to praise, or blame, for what they would make of it.

The tenyear transition period before independence was broken by the Japanese invasion and occupation during World War II. The Japanese regime sponsored a republic. Its president, Laurel, took his oath of office on 14 October 1943. Not counting the BiaknaBato republic of 1897 and starting with the Republic of 1899, the third Republic was inaugurated on 4 July 1946 after the war.

The ending of the American occupation did not clear up the old issues: McKinley's pious professions, the Commission's theory of government, Taft's assessments in 1907. George F. Kennan wrote in 1951 that the United States “set the Filipinos free” in 1946:

but not really primarily for their sake not primarily because we were sorry for them or thought them prepared for freedom and felt that we had an obligation to concede it to them but rather because we found them a minor inconvenience to ourselves; because the economic intimacy that their existence under our flag implied proved uncomfortable to powerful private interests in this country; because, in other words, we were not ourselves prepared to endure for long even those rudimentary sacrifices implied in the term “the white man's burden.”

Nor, as later events proved, would the American withdrawal in 1946 be clearcut. Aside from the great military bases in their former colony, something more than ghosts and memories from the occupation would endure. We have quoted from Quezon's 1943 letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt



saying that the Filipinos, "spiritually" speaking, had an "Occidental way of life" that could be preserved only through continued association with America and the western world. The depth of Quezon's conviction is confirmed in his autobiography (1946) where he wrote that when the United States went to war in Europe in World War I:

It was then for our own cause and our own national aspirations that America was unsheathing her sword and for the first time in her history taking active part in the bloody quarrels of old imperialist Europe. America's policy in the Philippines – its solemn pledge to grant the Filipino people their independence contained in the preamble of the Jones Act [the law of 1916] had borne its fruit.

Twenty years earlier, in a speech before a provincial audience, Quezon made one of his most engaging and oftquoted remarks, to the effect that he would “prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by Americans.” Between our views on the shortcomings of the Nacionalista leaders' nationalism and the images they projected as nationalists, there are, maybe, the complexities of their roles and times to consider.38

It was the successors of Quezon and Osmeña, some of whom were the latter's protégés during the years of accommodation with the regime and the years of the independence campaign, who would lead the country during the first years of the new republic, the years of rebuilding after World War II.

This story of the roots of the Filipino nation ends here. In the Epilogue we will briefly assess what the Filipinos have made out of their heritage from the past.



Notes

The FilipinoAmerican War, 19021906; The American Occupation

The quotation at the beginning is from Carlos Quirino, Quezon, Paladin of Philippine Freedom (1971), 372.

I Re turnover of authority from US military governor to civil governor: Philippine Commission, 19001903, 140. Taft's inaugural address is in ibid., 277281. Re program in plaza: John R. White, Bullets and Bolos (1928), 34.

Re insular affairs bureau: see Section 87, US Public Law No. 235, a text of which appears in Philippine Commission, 19001903,438460.

Re Taft opinion on anomalous creation of the Commission, etc.: ibid., 1907, Part 3, 247.

Re divisions of authority in regime: "The Ford Report on the Situation in the Philippines,"Historical Bulletin, XVII, 586589.

Re surrender of generals and guerrilla leaders: Philippine Commission, 1902, Part 1, 13.

Re Commission's certification of end of "insurrection": ibid., 1907, Part 1, 210. Re November report: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 3. Re 1903 report: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 3.

Re Taft admission that there had been a war: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 216.

Re town officials being insurrectos: ibid., 19001903, 182. Re creation of Philippine Constabulary: ibid., 182183. Re civilmilitary differences, civil government unsure of Army cooperation: White, 8.

Re Cavite governor's report of 1905: Philippine Commission, Part 1, 1905, 212.

2 Re San Miguel in late 1899: Taylor, V, Exhs. 1022 and 1023. Re report on marauding bands in Bulacan and Rizal: Philippine Conmission, 1903, Part 1, 29.

Re Paterno note on San Miguel: Paterno, 72. Paterno was right in 1903 an E.F. Ongcapin had three transactions with the occupation government's insular purchasing agent valued at 289,30 pesos. see Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 119, 121.

Re Mrs. Taft note on irreconcilables: Mrs. Taft, 255.

Re Partido Nacionalista, Katipunan: Philippine Commission, 1903 Part 3, 3942.

Re Mabini letter: an English text is in ibid., Part 1, 2627; thi source also provides the details on the contact between San Migue and Mabini. Paterno, 72, is our source on San Miguel's death.

3 Re disturbances in Surigao, Misamis: Philippine Commission, 1903 Part 1, 30. Re Blount findings in Misamis: Blount, 422.

4 Re disturbances in Albay, Ola, other leaders: Philippine Commission 1903, Part 1, 31; and ibid., Part 3, 91. Re the concentration i Albay: ibid., 1904, Part 1, 365366. See Blount, 416, for brief note on elements of concentration.

Re Constabulary report: Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 3, 139 Re Reconcentration Statute: It was passed 1 June 1903, after th Americans had declared peace; a text is in ibid., Part 1, 140141.

Re Blount judgment that the Albay "insurgents' were not out laws: Blount, 423429. The lists of men are in: ibid., 430433. R1 Blount's comment about Andersonville: ibid., 434.

5 Re Hongkong Junta and irreconcilables: Philippine Commission, 1905 Part 1, 52. Re slur on De



los Reyes: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 4. Re slur on Tolentino: ibid., 1904, Part 1, 4. Details on Tolentino as a responsible revolutionary figure are in: Taylor, V, Exh. 1121. R. Ricarte: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 1, 45.

6 Re war in Cavite in 19041905, leaders: ibid., 1905, Part 1, 5253 ibid., 1907, Part 1, 37.

Re raids in Laguna, etc.: ibid., 1905, Part 1, 5354. Re militar; campaign, concentration: ibid., 5459. See also reports of the era vincial governors of Batangas and Cavite, ibid., 173176; 207217. R 1906 situation: ibid., 1906, Part 1, 30.

Re Gomez, from Spain to Manila: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 36. Re hi 1906 offer: ibid., 1906, Part 1, 3031.

Re bandolerismo: a text of the law is in ibid., 1903, Part 1, 343! Re conviction of the accused: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 3642. Re Quezon and bandolcrismo cases: Quezon, 9091.

7 Re Katipunan ng San Cristobal: Taylor, III, Exhs. 278 and 2781/2; and V, Exhs. 548, 560, and 970 for related matters.

Re Constabulary report on religious movements: Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 3, 39. Even a simple survey account of these groups would require a work of book length. Our account is limited to their appearance as "disturbances' during this era and is basically illustrative. The reports of the Philippine Constabulary in Philippine Commission, 1902, Part 1, 179ff., identified the leaders of the groups or movements. The annual reports of the provincial governors (beginning in Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 731935) are interesting but appear, in the case of the Filipino governors' reports, to be restrained. It is not correct to view the groups simply as "religious fanatical movements." Certainly some of them had a political and revolutionary orientation. Papa Isio, the "babaylan leader" in Negros, formally reported on his command to Aguinaldo in March 1899. Although most of the groups were rural folk associations, there was the striking exception of the Guardias de Honor, which was strongest in Pangasinan; it opposed the Katipunan and the Revolution and was encouraged if not promoted by the friars. see Taylor, III, Exh. 337, and Note to Exh. 970.

Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution (1979), is a study of the Apolinario de la Cruz type of these groupings. It lays stress on their quaint features, and they appear basically as oddities. It is surely in error to the extent that it treats of the Katipunan as if it were no different from the others. Alvarez, 340347 (typescript), has material on the early Kolorum.

Re Felipe Salvador: Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 3233. Ileto, 261263, has details of Salvador's background. Re Salvador in 1906, and Commission report about peace in Luzon: Philippine Commission, 1906, Part 1, 3133.

8 Re Cebu, Iloilo, Capiz, in 1903: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 31.

Re hacienda in Negros society: White, 116117. Re Papa Isio reporting to Aguinaldo: Taylor, II, 413415. Re Constabulary pursuit, victory at Mt. Mansalanao: White, 97103. Re fading away of Papa Isio, Dalmacio the Negrito captured: ibid., 149154.

9 Re ladrones bands in Filipinas: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 1, 1.

Re Papa Bulan and Samar situation in 1904: ibid., 23. Re pulahanes, Samar, in 1905: ibid., 1905, Part 1, 4748, 5052. Re aborted surrender, Samar in 1906: ibid., 1906, Part 1, 3436. Re pulahan attack in Leyte in 1906, pulahanes and land tax, conference of higt officials, US Army battalions, ibid., 3638. Details of the raid ir Burauen, and the situation in Leyte in general, are in the provincial governor's report, ibid., 320322.

Re English lady's observations, note on Samar in 1905: Mrs. Campbell Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines (1906), 288.



Re Salvador's capture: Philippine Commission, 1910, 9. Re Otoy's capture: ibid., 1911, 15.

10 Re unilateral acts of Spain in 1851, 1860: Montero y Vidal, Historic General, III, 308310. Re 1870 population figures: supra, Appendix tc Volume I. The overall picture is in Vic Hurley, Swish of the Kri: (1936), 139148. There were two versions of the 1851 "treaty." ThE Spanish version declared the submission of the Sultan of Sulu and the incorporation of Jolo and its dependencies into the Spanisl• crown. The Sulu version declared "agreement in union (in friendship) between Spain and Sulu. see Saleeby, History of Sulu 107111.

Datu Michael O. Mastura, Muslim Filipino Experience (1984), 4750, has lists of Maguindanao and Sulu treaties with foreign powers There is a problem in interpreting these treaties. To the sultan they were primarily and almost solely evidence of foreign power recognizing them. But the western parties see them primarily in terms of rights and obligations assumed and undertaken. Thus when the American general Leonard Wood was appointed governor of the Moro Province in 1903, he said of an 1899 treaty with the Sultan of Sulu that "absolute subordination to the sovereignty of the United States was not made as clear by the Bates Treaty when translated into their language as it might have been....Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 80.

11 Re first probe in May 1899: Hurley, 152153.

Re policy to merely occupy abandoned Spanish posts: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 1, 6. Re population of Sulu archipelago Gazetteer, 846. Re friendly relations in 1901, the Maranaos fierce etc.: Philippine Commission, 19001903, 160.

Re 1902 Commission report: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 884.

Re Wood on Taosugs: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 490. Re Wood o Muslim laws in general, in 1904: ibid., 1904, Part 2, 577. Re hi deputy's opinion: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 498, 506. Re constabulary officer's impression: White, 265.

Re illustrative dispute, quoted: Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 540. Re sultan's letter: ibid., 518.

Re juramentados: ibid., 489; and see Samuel K. Tan, The Filipino Muslim Armed Struggle (1971), 1214, for distinctive features of juramentado, sabilallah, jihad.

12 Re Maranao attack, fight with Americans in 1902: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 1, 7.

Re Pershing: Hurley, 162; Forbes, I, 189. Re Maranao situation in 1903, Zamboanga, Maguindanao, and Jolo: Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 79; and ibid., 1904, Part 1, 7.

Re KiramBates Treaty: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 492 refers to the agreement but without detail. Hurley, 156159, has the English text; ibid., 154156 has the draft proposed by the sultan but rejected by the Americans.

13 Re failure to bring Muslims under control by 1903: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 1, 6. Re Sulu military governor's complaint: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 491. Re Wright's 1904 statement: ibid., 1904, Part 1, 12. Re unchanged situation in Lanao and Cotabato: ibid., 7.

Re Moro Province: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 7679; ibid., 1904, Part 1, 810. The organization of the Moro Province was in preparation for abrogation of the KiramBates treaty, notice of which was given to the Sultan on 21 March 1904. He pleaded loss of revenues; after hearings in Manila, which he attended, he was voted 13,500 pesos in annual payments, of which 6,000 was for him personally. see ibid., 13; and Sixto Orosa, The Sulu Archipelago and Its People (1970), 3637.

Re result of American intrusion: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 1, 10.

Re Panglima Hassan: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 490; Hurley, 167169.

Re abrogation of treaty: Philippine Commission, 1903, Part 1, 489543, being mostly material



appended to justify Wood's recommendation for abrogation.

14 Re Lake Lanao region in 1903 and 1904: ibid., 79; and ibid., 1904, Part 1, 11.

Re Cotabato campaign: the quotation is in White, 218. Majul, 33; and White, 215, refer to Datu Ali. Re Wood's description of Ali's cotta: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 2, 578. Re death of Ali: ibid., 1906, Part 1, 86.

Re Datu Usap's last stand: ibid., 1905, Part 1, 343. Hurley says Wood had 400 men to Usap's 100 and criticizes Wood for what he calls a "slaughter." Hurley, 176.

15 Re Bud Dajo: ibid., 182187; White, Chapter 37.

Re Commission's justification of Bud Dajo action: Philippine Commission, 1906, Part 1, 3940.

Re 1908 Commission report on Lanao Moros: ibid., 1908, Part 1, 44. Re Buldong country campaign: ibid., 1909, Part 1, 42.

Re Jikiri: see ibid., 1908, Part 1, 44; ibid., 1909, 42; and Hurley, Chapter 21.

Re second Bud Dajo in 1911: White, 312.

16 Re Bud Bagsak: our account is based on Hurley, Chapter 24. Orosa, 4041, says 300 Muslims were killed.

17 Re new Department of Mindanao and Sulu: Mastura, 5253; Peter Gowing, Muslim Filipinos Heritage and Horizon (1979), 35. The Moro territory was in the twelfth senatorial district by virtue of US Public Law No. 240, approved 29 August 1916; a text of this law is in Maximo M. Kalaw, Philippine Government Under the Jones Law (1927), 437452.

Re Hadji Butu, appointed senator: Mastura, 53.

Re Wood's recommendation against codification: Philippine Commission, 1904, Part 2, 579; ibid., 1905, Part 1, 330. Re Commission's aborting codification: ibid., 1904, Part 1, 13.

18 Re Table: for the 1887 numbers see Gazetteer, 2728, 30; for the 1903 numbers Philippine Commission, 1907, Part 1, 201.

Re opinion that 1903 population level had been reached in the mid1890s: Censo de 1903, 1, 477.

19 Re loss in hectarage tilled: Le Roy, 154155. Re losses in carabao stock: the interior secretary (Manila) reported 75 per cent Philippine Commission, 1902, Part 1, 297; the Commission reported 90 per cent ibid., 4; and the secretary of war (Washington) reported 90 per cent. ibid., xii.

Re Taft on famine: ibid., 19001903, 278. Re soaring rice and carabao prices: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 5. Re need to import food: ibid., 16. Re Commission setting aside funds for rice: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 9899, which has a text of Act No. 485. Re rice imports in 1901 and 1902: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 20; and ibid., 1903, Part 1, 1718. Re 1903 rice distribution: ibid., 688689. Re warning of famine; planting of fastgrowth crops: ibid., 98.

Re carabao prices: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 5. Re importation of carabaos: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 2325.

Re rice crop down to 25 per cent of normal: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 16. Re locusts in 1901 and 1902: ibid., 4, 16; and ibid., 1903, Part 1, 1920. Re "locust law": Act No. 817, in ibid., 9596.

Re people dying, according to Taft due to improper cooking: ibid., 2223. Re epidemic: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 5, 16, 267274, 304404, 411414; ibid., 1903, Part 2, 15.

20 Re relief fund: ibid., 1902, Part 1, xii. Re rinderpest: ibid., 1909, 6061; ibid., 1911, 171; ibid.,



1912, 2526. Re locusts: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 689; reports of the provincial locust boards are in 695712. See also ibid., 1905, Part 1, 94; ibid., 1909, 47, 61; ibid., 1912, 25.

Re rice imports, 1902: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 23. Re rice imports, 1908: ibid., 1909, 1314. Re situation up to 1912: ibid., 1912, 22, 3940.

Re schools in campaign: ibid., 4142.

21 Re numbers of friars, 18961900: ibid., 19001903, 39. Re Jesuits, etc., not assaulted: ibid., 3940.

Re war secretary letter to Taft, 1902: Stuntz, 300.

Re Taft against return of friars to curacies: Philippine Commission,

1903, Part 1, 46.

Re friar numbers in 1902 and 1903: ibid., 45. Re people's hatred for friars, murder if they returned: ibid., 4647, 148.

Re 1899 rules on land titling: Taylor, IV, Exh. 952.

22 Re irregularities in Spanish registration system: Philippine Commission, 19001903, 49. Re reversion of untitled land into the public domain, small number of parcels registered: ibid., 1907, Part 2, 540; ibid., 1911, 7.

Re friar estates in 1900: ibid., 19001903, 43. Re decision to buy the haciendas: ibid., 48. The purchase was authorized in Sections 6365 of US Public Law No. 235.

23 Re apparent conveyance to "dummy owners": ibid., 1903, Part 1, 40; ibid., 19001903, 48.

Re Villegas: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 39, 142179; ibid., 1904, Part 1, 747751. This material includes testimonies.

Re prices offered and counteroffered: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 40, 43. ibid., 1905, Part 1, 26, shows the amounts paid to the vendors over October 1904 and October 1905.

Re Taft buying a dispute: ibid., 1903, Part 1, 4244. Re Instruc tions: ibid., 19001903, 910.

Re the various estates, questions raised on the law firm's ap proach: our list is assembled from the data in the lengthy report c Del Pan, Ortigas y Fisher in ibid., 1904, Part 1, 752816; and ou questions relate to this report.

Devins, 246247; and Stuntz, Chapters 16 and 17, deal with thi friar lands issue from the American Protestant antifriar attitude The Stuntz material quotes correspondence between Taft and th, Vatican including the agreement between him and the cardina secretary of state to the Pope.

24 Re allowances to Duke of Veragua, etc.: Corpuz, 140.

25 Re January 1901 cable messages: Philippine Commission, 19001903, 2829.

Re "General Theory" of the Commission: ibid., 143147. Re Daun cey comment: Dauncey, 13.

Re suffrage requirements: Philippine Commission, 19001903, 144; sec also Stuntz, 172173. A justification of the requirement arguing that they were liberal, is in Philippine Commission, 190 Part 1, 164165.

Re Federal Party manifesto: Taylor, V, Exh. 1182.

Even though the numbers of voters that we will be citing ar low, they may in fact overstate the number of legally qualifi voters since there were cases of registrants under the officeholder



qualification who were not actually officeholders in the Spanis regime. see Philippine Commission, 1907, Part 1, 163.

Re Filipinos appointed to the Commission: ibid., 19001903, 140141.

26 Re Taft speech at Assembly inauguration: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 215 226. Re Taft report: ibid., Part 3, 237310. Re Roosevelt endorsement: ibid., 235.

27 Re provincial Sorties, appointment of governors: ibid., 19001903, 133135.

Re 1903 governors: see the reports of provincial governors in ibid., 1903, Part 1, 731935. Re Dancel: Taylor, IV, Exh. 673, and V 1182. Re governors, 19041907: see the reports in Philippine Commis sion, 1904, Part 1, 360684; ibid., 1905, Part 1, 123436; ibid., 1906. Part 1, 157483; ibid., 1907, Part 1, 246491.

Re 1906 governors conference: ibid., 8283, 150151.

28 Re Arellano: ibid., 19001903, 7; Taylor, II, 122. Re Mrs. Dauncey's account: Dauncey, 307340.

Re Taft party, Philippine government asked to defray transport costs: Philippine Commission, 1905, Part 1, 3541.

29 Re Wright proclamation: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 211212.

Re civil service: a text of the civil service law, passed 19 September 1900, is in ibid., 19001903, 1319. Re 1901 examinations: ibid., 1902, part 1, 4958. Re 1907 examinations and cumulative data by 1907: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 145.

Re distribution of posts between Filipinos and Americans: ibid., 146148. Re recruitment in the U.S.: ibid., 1902, Part 1, 50. Re attraction of employment in Panama, Cuba, and loss of American employees: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 7980, 149.

30 Re resolution of March 1907 and call for elections: ibid., 212214. Re comment on Filipino political parties: ibid., 166. Re registration in Capiz: ibid., 168. Re Bataan: ibid., 166.

Re data on qualified electors, registered electors, and actual voters: ibid., 201202. Re municipal election votes: ibid., 201.

31 Re Taft's appointing only Federal Party members: Forbes, I, 146; II, 108. Re nonpartisanship of his successors: ibid., II, 108109. Re Taft admission that Federal Party had no popular support: Philippine Commission, 1907, Part 3, 274.

Re Nacionalista parties in 1905, 1907: Lang, 5762, has a summary of the organizing activities up to 1907.

The data on parties and votes received are in Philippine Commission, 1907, Part 1, 203; and pp. 5051 is a list of the successful candidates and their party affiliations.

Re welcome program for Taft, and inaugural program of the Assembly: ibid., 205, 227228.

32 Re no mention of Osmena's father in his biography: Pacis, I, Chapter 2, mentions only his mother and uncle and that Osmena was the "man of the family."

Re contest for spcakcrship of Assembly: ibid., 121.

Re Osmena's maiden speech, his idea of the role of the Assembly: ibid., 121123, 126127.

Re resident commissioners: Philippine Commission, 1907, Part 3, 277.

Re joint resolution: ibid., 1908, Part 1, 88.



33 Re social status of elected delegates: ibid., 1907, Part 1, 5051. Re per diem: ibid., 164.

Re 1909 elections: ibid., 1910, 4547.

Re 1912 elections: ibid., 1912, 4549. Re illiterates among the property owners: Forbes, II, 124.

A text of the 1916 law is in Maximo M. Kalaw, 437452.

34 Re Quezon: Quezon, 16; Quirino, 34. Re bar examinations: Pacis, I, 46.

Re Palma, Araneta, Sumulong: Forbes, I, 170.

Re AssemblyCommission conflict over appropriations: "The Ford Report on the Situation in the Philippines," Historical Bulletin, XVII, 390.

Re resignation of Filipino commissioners, their successors: Forbes, II, 220221.

35 Re Quezon and political turncoatism: Quirino, 145. Re 1910 resolution: Philippine Commission, 1911, 17,

36 Re Partido Democrata Nacional: Liang, 8990, and 113, Note 10. Re merger of Democratas and Progresistas into the Partido Democrata: ibid., 92. Re new Democrata platform: Forbes, II, 113114.

37 A sympathetic treatment of Recto is: Emerenciana Yuvienco Arcellana, The Social and Political Thought of Claro Mayo Recto (1981). Re Recto exposé of Quezon and Osmena: Liang, 140144.

The 1935 convention proceedings are in Salvador H. Laurel, Proceedings of the Philippine Constitutional Convention (1966). The Appendices include the texts of the approved constitution, the HareHawesCutting law, the TydingsMcDuffie law, and Recto' valedictory. see Volume VII.

Re Fairfield bill: Forbes, II, 374, describes the system of govermnent that the bill would set up in the Philippines as "a supervised republic." Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires (1964), 4, maintains that Osmena and Quezon "starved it with indifference," referring to the Fairfield bill. However, the evidence Friend provides is not convincing; the key element in the matter has to be Recto's public accusation that they supported the bill, despite their claim to the contrary.

Re Osmena's 1925 independence petition: Forbes, 11, 554555.

Re the independence campaign: Bernardita Reyes Churchill, The Philippine Independence Missions to the United States (1983), x, concludes: "Political leaders often vied with one another to demonstrate the intensity of their advocacy of independence, yet seemed to shrink from it when its attainment seemed imminent."

38 Re initial proceedings in the 1935 convention up to the election of Recto: Laurel, I, 116.

Re Confesor's proposed provision in the declaration of principles: ibid., VI, 124. Even in his later career, Confesor came to be known as "the stormy petrel."

Re Japanesesponsored republic: Hartendorp, 1, 609649.

Re Kennan assessment: George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (1951), 1819.

Re Quezon on US in World War I: Quezon, 133.


Documents

The Filipino-American War: 1902-1906; The American Occupation