Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond. Preface by David D. Newsom
300
Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond. Preface by David D. Newsom
300Hardcover
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Overview
Originally published in 1986.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691638614 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #456 |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Crisis in the Philippines
The Marcos Era and Beyond
By John Bresnan
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1986 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05490-2
CHAPTER 1
PHILIPPINE-AMERICAN TENSIONS IN HISTORY
THEODORE FRIEND
For many Filipinos the United States continues to have almost magical power as benefactor and exploiter. In popular mentality many Filipinos ascribe to America a nearly limitless capacity to shape and resolve, for good or for evil, Philippine destiny.
In fact, the United States that once enjoyed nearly half the world's gross national product now accounts for about one-fifth. And whereas a series of victories in wars, 1846 to 1945, tempted Americans to think of themselves as invincible, Vietnam changed that. We have learned caution about the tactical applicability of power in distant situations. The rise of the Soviet Union to strategic parity in military power has intensified this new realism.
Although the United States is a presumably chastened and ordinarily cautious world power, with limits to its capabilities and intentions regarding the Philippines, Filipinos correctly note that massive differences in scale have indeed determined much of the history between the two nations. But America's raw military and economic power are not sufficient to explain the fond dependence and acute resentment that mark the Philippine side of the relationship. These conflicted feelings derive from the cumulative impact of American social models, cultural standards, and political perspectives, all of which are remarkably deep — and extraordinary for being largely unconscious and unintended by policy.
When other Southeast Asians look at the Philippines, they tend to feel that their own historical permeability to colonial influence was much less; and that they operate now out of stronger traditions and more genuine autonomy than the Philippines. That may be objectively true. Close inspection of the Philippine-American relationship, however, will not make objectivity easy for the key parties involved. Filipinos have tended to mirror American styles even while resisting American presences. And Americans have tended to look at the Philippines through a one-way glass so darkened with their own preoccupations that they can hardly see through it.
Conquest and Response
The United States did not plan the conquest of the Philippines. Neither did it sidestep the opportunity. In the century after the Northwest Ordinance, the young republic had raced across the continent, absorbing sparsely settled land into its constitutional framework as states. Still filling its land with diverse peoples, mainly European, America began to realize its capacity to express itself as an extra-continental power. Like other nation-states, it found an occasion where will joined capacity.
The last outposts of the Spanish empire, Cuba and the Philippines, had erupted in simultaneous turmoil in 1896-1898. Each threw its own revolutionary dynamic against the arthritic rule of Spain. The events that drew the United States into Cuba — most notably the destruction of the battleship Maine — drew it also into the Philippines. Why the far Pacific in addition to the near Caribbean? Chance favors the prepared mind. One of the best prepared, Theodore Roosevelt, saw the opportunity to realize the strategic imperialism theorized by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt sent Commodore Dewey steaming to Manila. There American forces overpowered the Spanish. Roosevelt himself resigned his office to lead volunteers into Cuba.
Roosevelt's triumphant gallop up San Juan Hill was euphoric for him, and John Hay called the whole thing a "splendid little war." In the Philippine theater, however, easy defeat of the Spanish was followed by a terrible struggle against Filipinos. The nationalist army led by Aguinaldo and diffusely captained guerrilla forces held out staunchly. American-declared martial law was not lifted until 1901.
The United States had stepped into the last Latin American revolution against Spain and simultaneously the first Asian revolution against Western power. In the Philippines, America prevailed in savage fighting; then had to take responsibility for the squalid deprivation that followed.
An imperial sense of triumph among some was countered by anti-imperial dismay among others. William Graham Sumner, who wrote of "the conquest of the United States by Spain," foresaw the dangers of becoming a surrogate imperial power. Those errors and terrors the United States would later repeat on a larger, more anachronistic scale: by trying to stand in for the French in Vietnam.
What tilted the United States against its anti-imperial instincts in the Philippine case? The American nation was moved by the logic of expansion that drives most political entities to grow until checked. The United States grasped a strategic opportunity in the Philippines to equip itself as a world military power with a major Asian base; as an economic power, with a tutorial ward to fulfill its democratic-religious mission. Power, profit, and prophecy here converged.
The treaty to annex the Philippines almost failed of passage, nonetheless, in the Senate. New imperial responsibilities never moved the American public to a rage of pride comparable to European cases. The summons in Kipling's exhortation to "take up the White Man's Burden" went against much in the American grain. American energies for Philippine annexation were neither conspiratorial nor inevitable; once provoked, to be sure, they were powerfully confluent with the forces of the age. But after the initial convulsion, basic policies for the Filipinos were defined by Elihu Root (secretary of war, 1899-1904) "to conform to their customs, their habits, and even their prejudices." Practices of rapid Filipinization of all branches and levels of government followed, especially under Francis Burton Harrison (governor-general, 1913-1921).
Hostilities subsided, sympathies arose. Filipinos over time settled into a nationwide pattern of assimilation to the conqueror's style, in harmony with the imperial ruler's accommodations of local interests and aspirations. But that took time. The fact of superior American power was hard to swallow; the realization that Americans were there to stay was hard to digest. Six men summarized the range of responses:
Felipe Salvador, who had fought against the Spanish and the Americans as a guerrilla officer, came forth in 1903 as the "pope" of the Santa Iglesia, a mystical and militant conspiracy that contended for some years against the new regime. He was hanged for murder and sedition in 1911. Having drawn upon a legacy of peasant rebellion, he left it further enriched.
General Artemio Ricarte, though captured in 1900, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new regime; was deported; returned illegally and was jailed; was deported again in 1910; took root in Japan; returned to the Philippines with Japanese forces in 1942, and died with them in 1945.
General Emilio Aguinaldo, after capture, took the oath of allegiance; ran for President of the Commonwealth in 1935 with weak results; cooperated fully with the Japanese; survived to advanced old age, archaic in his views.
Manuel Quezon, a young guerrilla captain, surrendered only after he saw Aguinaldo in comfortable detention; rose to the presidency of the Senate in 1916; was elected president of the Commonwealth in 1935; died in Washington in 1944, head of the Commonwealth government-in-exile, after two decades at the top of the Philippine political scramble.
Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, a Hispanic Filipino, a Europeanized nineteenth-century liberal, supported the Revolution; was appointed by Governor-General Taft to the Philippine Commission, an early colonial governing council; moved on to become a pamphleteer for public secular education, and against church and superstition.
Sergio Osmeña, a young Chinese mestizo from Cebu, rose as a lawyer to become the majority leader among Filipino legislators from 1907 to 1922; after that, second in command to Quezon until 1944, when he succeeded to the presidency of the Commonwealth until just short of independence, 1944 to 1946.
These six men may be arrayed in a continuum of declining hostility and ascending plasticity to the American imperial presence: Salvador, the irreconcilable guerrilla-pope; Ricarte, the unreconstructable exile; Aguinaldo, the domesticated rebel; Quezon, the conservative dissident; Pardo, the cooperating aristocrat; Osmeña, the constitutional technician. The first three were resisters. The last three represent cooperation in high degree with the new regime. Quezon was the most effective of all, because he projected to the Philippine electorate his guerrilla sense of affronted national pride, even as he learned the English language and American manners to charm American investors and officials.
Although these six can be said collectively to characterize the Filipino responses to American rule in the first part of the twentieth century, none of them epitomizes Philippine character as well as another, who died in 1896, before the Americans arrived. The Spanish executed Jose Rizal as a revolutionary, and thereby made him a national hero and martyr. Even had they not, he would have earned an elevated place in his people's memory as searcher for the lost Filipino past, loving analyst of the national character, and sublime propagandist. He continues still to endear himself to his people as novelist and physician, adventurer and healer, romantic secular saint.
The American-dominated Philippine Commission chose Rizal to honor with statues and celebrations rather than Andres Bonifacio, a more radical revolutionary, or Apolinario Mabini, a pre-Marxian theorist of class struggle. But imperial sponsorship did not besmirch Rizal in the eyes of his people. Even now, with nearly forty years of sovereignty behind them, Filipinos still look to Rizal as their prime exemplar, and their supreme educator. For some, devotion becomes worship. Numerous cults and sects among peasants and urban laborers elevate Rizal to divine status: the word become flesh in the Philippines; one man standing for liberated nation, autonomous culture, and free individual spirit.
The Philippine-American Amalgam, 1901-1941
The United States remained in the Philippines despite three major frustrations. First, the colony did not prove valuable as a jumping-off place to the China trade, and that trade itself, in relation to the visions of vast wealth in 1898-1900, proved to be a mirage. Second, the colony itself could not be deemed a significant economic asset. Private investment returns were small. The United States bought more protected agricultural products from the Philippines than it sold manufactured goods there. The costs of administration were not fully covered by insular taxes, and were enlarged by defense costs met by the United States Treasury. In sum, the Philippines could be considered a significant net economic liability. Third, United States military and naval installations in the Philippines were not developed adequately to meet the potential threat of Japan. Instead of becoming part of the globe-circling power desired by Theodore Roosevelt, they constituted what he feared would be an American "Achilles' heel."
Although Spain had also clung to the Philippines despite its financial losses, it did so because of its territorial imperatives, Christianizing mission, and imperial nostalgia. The United States held on far less tenaciously. The liabilities were analogous, but the motivations to cut loose were much stronger. As early as 1916, a bill for Philippine independence almost passed the American Congress. The act that did pass contained a promise of eventual independence, the first such to arise amid the neomercantilist wave of imperialism that had swept over Asia and Africa from 1870 to 1900.
By 1933 the American forces for independence were strong enough to prevail. These included American beet and sugar lobbies opposed to Philippine sugar, dairy lobbies opposed to coconut oil, and labor lobbies opposed to Filipino immigrant labor. Such economic factions could not have prevailed without the isolationists and the power realists (the latter concerned about exposure vis-à-vis Japan), a new generation of anti-imperialists by party or by principle, and others who might be called emancipatory gradualists, disinterested persons who simply believed that "the time had come" for an independent Philippines.
The time was scheduled for 1946. During this period, a semi-autonomous Commonwealth was headed by a nationally elected Filipino president. Quezon won more than two-thirds of the vote. But nearly one-third of the vote was split between General Aguinaldo and Bishop Gregorio Aglipay of the Philippine Independent Church. Together, the two minority candidates might be said to represent the nativist, provincial, traditional side of nationalism. Judge Juan Sumulong continued as a critic of Quezon, and precursor of the socially conscious, programmatic nationalism of Claro Recto in the 1950s, Jose Diokno in the 1970s and 1980s, and Lorenzo Tañada spanning both periods.
The Commonwealth period was the peaceful apex of Philippine-American cooperation. A constitutional representative system was functioning effectively with a native chief executive. The style that went with this structure was one of shifting, personally based coalitions, with strong familial and provincial ties determining allegiances. Concepts of the debt of honor and of in-group togetherness and trustworthiness were pronouncedly important in a bilaterally extended family system. They produced angles of discourse and axes of alliance too fluid to be called feudal, but certainly regional and factional, bound by personal, authoritarian, and charismatic values.
Two quotations by Manuel Quezon suggest the dynamics and dilemmas of the system in which he flourished: "Better a government run like hell by Filipinos than one run like heaven by Americans" and "Damn the Americans! Why don't they tyrannize us more?" The first, a classic anti-colonial slogan, might have been invented anywhere; but it was earliest said in the Philippines, and easier to say there than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. The second was the frustrated statement of a leader in need of a foreign antagonist and issues of imperial injustice, but not finding them.
Politically conscious Filipinos looked about them and realized, with gratitude toward the Americans, that they had the highest literacy rate in Southeast Asia, even though that was partly owed to a foundation in Spanish times. They saw expenditures on health unrivaled as a proportion of government budget throughout the region. The infrastructure of roads, bridges, and communications lagged behind the Netherlands East Indies, and in agricultural development the Japanese were doing far better in Formosa. What came through to the average Filipino, however — often more forcibly to the minimally educated peasant than to the analytical urban dweller — was that the aim of the United States was to help the Philippines evolve to a scheduled independence, and that its policies with regard to education, health, and welfare were in accord with that aim.
Some other realities clouded the picture. Part of American motivation was negative self-interest, to get rid of the Philippines as a responsibility. The absolute expenditures of the insular government per capita were dramatically small, even if relatively great compared to other imperial powers. American racial attitudes tended to cluster in the range from condescension to bigotry. Even so, the Fil-American colonial skies were fundamentally sunny, whereas stormy overcasts were gathering in Indochina and Indonesia.
With political development toward independence, however, there also proceeded economic development toward dependency. The United States avoided some errors of European empires, such as the plantation systems in Sumatra, Malaya, and Indochina, and the government opium monopolies operated by the Dutch, the French, and the British. The American Congress in the Progressive Era passed landholding and corporation laws that made it extremely difficult for American investors to wrest away "the patrimony" (as Filipino politicians called the land) or to control industrial growth. Meantime the trade patterns fostered by American legislation pushed the external economy into further dependence upon sugar and coconut exports, while allowing preference for American manufactured goods.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crisis in the Philippines by John Bresnan. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Foreword, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. xi
- Chapter I. Philippine-American Tensions in History, pg. 1
- Chapter II. Tradition and Response, pg. 30
- Chapter III. The Social Situation, pg. 55
- Chapter IV. Politics in the Marcos Era, pg. 70
- Chapter V. The Political Crisis, pg. 114
- Chapter VI. The Economic Crisis, pg. 145
- Chapter VII. Reconstituting the Political Order, pg. 176
- Chapter VIII. Economic Relations, pg. 200
- Chapter IX. Political and Security Relations, pg. 228
- Selected Readings, pg. 259
- About the Authors, pg. 269
- Index, pg. 271