The Philippine Story

David Bernstein

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789122886
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Published a year after the Philippines proclaimed independence in July 1946, the chief permanent value of this book lies in its survey of the history of the American experiment in the Philippines. The Philippine Story is a concise, inclusive analysis of the background, failure, achievements and implications of the American experiment in the Philippines, from Magellan to the present post-war era. The author, David Bernstein, sketches in an overall impression: geography, education, religion, anthropology, national characteristics, and so on. He then goes on to consider each major phase of island history, the acquiescent period of Spanish rule, the era of revolt with Rizal as its inspiration and later national hero, the transition to American rule and the rapid progress in education and social and economic justice under successive Governors-General. The final section deals with the war years and the new republic.An invaluable read that challenges America's policies.

IV—THE AGE OF REVOLT

THE SPIRIT that had smoldered for so long burst into the open with the Spanish excesses of the 1870’s—of which the execution of the three Filipino priests was the most dramatically stupid example, though by no means the only one.

In a more profound sense, the spirit of revolt had merely been touched off by these events. It was bound to come, as an inevitable result of the gradual economic resuscitation of the Philippines.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had not restored the islands to their early commercial splendor. But it did cut the steaming time from Manila to Barcelona down to thirty-two days, against the sailing time of from four to eight months around the Cape of Good Hope. It came at a moment when foreign traders were establishing themselves firmly in the Philippines.

By 1842 there were twelve foreign firms in Manila, of which eight were English, two American, one French, and one Danish. In 1782, only 30,000 piculs of sugar had been exported; in 1840 sugar exports had risen to almost 150,000 piculs; by 1857 it was more than 700,000. (In the Philippines a picul is roughly equivalent to 140 pounds.) In 1830 less than 350 tons of hemp were exported; by 1858 hemp exports totaled more than 27,000 tons.

Foreign traders were bringing new energy, introducing farm machinery, advancing money to planters on their crops, helping develop new areas for cultivation. In 1856 Iloilo was opened to foreign trade; it was destined to become one of the world’s great sugar ports. About this time, too, the first steam sugar-mill was set up in Negros.

Meanwhile, the character of the Spanish population itself was changing. Before the Canal, there were few Spanish civilians in the Philippines—several merchants; an occasional planter, often a descendant of the early encomenderos; and a few retired army officers. The Spanish troops were composed largely of Mexicans and Filipinos. Civil officials were sparse; in some provinces the only Spaniard was the provincial governor himself. Only the religious orders were comparatively numerous—and certainly influential.

The rather untrustworthy figures show that in 1848 there were altogether 293 Spaniards outside the Manila area, with 7,544 Spanish mestizos in the entire archipelago, including Tondo (as Manila province was called). This was indeed a tiny group to be entrusted with the task of ruling so large a country, and perhaps an excuse for Spanish arrogance can be found here. Only the bully can dominate a restless playground.

But now the Spanish population began to increase. Spain had lost most of her American possessions, and was soon to lose the rest. Colonial administrators were going jobless for want of colonies to administer, and they were often shipped to the Philippines by the harassed ministers in Madrid.

Thus, by 1870, there were said to be 3,823 Spanish-born Spaniards in the Philippines, of whom 516 were women; and 9,710 “Filipino-Spaniards,” presumably including both Spanish mestizos and pure Spaniards born in the Philippines. A statistical résumé for 1898 raises the figure to 34,000—which is no doubt something of an exaggeration.

To the Filipinos it seemed as though Madrid was deliberately burdening the land. Shiploads of complaining carpetbaggers arrived to criticize the climate as they assumed their miserably paid jobs. These minor officials exploited every opportunity to cheat the Filipinos, to exact graft in order to accumulate enough money to retire in comfort.

Meantime the administrative reforms were making difficulties. Many of these reforms were wise and useful; the tobacco monopoly was abolished, for example, and the provincial governments reorganized. But each new reform, however progressive, meant more taxes for the Filipinos and more Spanish officeholders to handle the work.

The burden fell most heavily on the tao, on the impoverished men and women on the land. But it was felt most keenly by a new and growing group of better-educated, wealthier people. The Spaniards had never been keen farmers, and as the generations passed they let the land slip into the hands of Filipinos, some of whom had by now acquired much wealth. To the irritation of the friars, they often managed to send their sons to the universities, and even to Europe for the higher studies. There were men who had gone to work in the offices of the foreign traders, and had learned the new ways of business. There were a few who managed to raise enough money to go into business for themselves, or to plant sugar or tobacco.

In many cases, these families were mestizos, part-Filipino and part-Spanish, sometimes with a Chinese strain as well. The full-blooded Spaniards tended to look down on their half-brothers, and many mestizos began to resent their lesser status. Occasionally, even island-born “pure” Spaniards identified themselves with this resentment.

By and large, the Filipino spirit of revolt was inflamed by such men as these—by what, for want of a better term, might be called the colonial middle class of the Philippines. This was the class that produced the Rizals and Aguinaldos, the Quezons and Osmeñas—as it had produced the three garroted priests, one of whom was a Spanish mestizo and another a Chinese mestizo. The peasants’ role was to listen, to be inspired, to follow, and to fight. It was the common pattern of nationalism in colonial areas—not greatly different, indeed, from the revolt of the Boston merchants and Virginia planters against the arrogant, oppressive British a century before.

Feodor Jagor, a German scientist who traveled in the Philippines just before 1860, could even then see what was bound to happen. “The old situation is no longer possible of maintenance, with the changed conditions of the present time,” he wrote. “The colony can no longer be shut off from the outside. Every facility in communication opens a breach in the ancient system and necessarily leads to reforms of a liberal character. The more that foreign capital and foreign ideas penetrate there, the more they increase prosperity, intelligence, and self-esteem, making the existing evils the more intolerable....

“Government monopolies mercilessly administered, grievous disregard of the creoles and the rich mestizos, and the example of the United States, these were the principal causes of the loss of the American possessions [of Spain]; and the same causes are menacing the Philippines also....Mestizos and creoles are not, it is true, shut out, as formerly in America, from all offices; but they feel that they are deeply injured and despoiled by the crowds of office-seekers whom the frequent changes of ministers at Madrid bring to Manila.”

II

“The sleep had lasted for centuries,” José Rizal was writing, “but one day the thunderbolt struck, and in striking, infused life. Since then new tendencies are stirring our spirits; and these tendencies, today scattered, will some day be united, guided by the God Who has not failed other peoples, and Who will not fail us, for His cause is the cause of liberty!”

José Rizal, more than any other man the symbol of the new tendencies in the Philippines, was one of the giants of the nineteenth century.

In a brief life he achieved recognition as a poet and physician, as an anthropologist, linguist, biologist, zoologist, engineer, and economist. He was also something of a sculptor, painter, and illustrator. Above all, he was a Filipino patriot.

Rizal was born in Calamba, near Manila, on June 19, 1861. His family was predominantly Filipino, though there were strains of Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish blood in his forebears. His parents were wealthy enough to send him to a Jesuit school, and later, for four years, to the University of Santo Tomas. From there he went to Spain. In Madrid, as a student, he began work on a novel that would expose the cruelties of Spanish rule in the Philippines. Moving from one university to another, in Paris, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Berlin, he kept adding to the manuscript, until at last, when he was twenty-six years old, the 200,000-word novel called Noli Me Tangere was published in Berlin.

Noli Me Tangere was a sermon in the form of a story. It bears an inevitable comparison with Mrs. Stowe’s earlier book, which had done so much to inflame the abolitionist cause; and it is likely that Rizal had been influenced by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like Mrs. Stowe’s novel, Noli Me Tangere is rather difficult reading today; it is not a literary masterpiece, but rather a great political document.

The book was smuggled into Manila, where literate Filipinos read it aloud to secret groups of the less educated, thrilling at its scenes of tyrannical Spanish friars, brutal officials, and arrogant men of wealth. They were less inspired by Rizal’s attempt to show the Filipino some of his own defects. The Spanish censorship denounced it as seditious and anti-Catholic, and threatened to punish any Filipino caught with a copy. But it was like trying to stop the tropical typhoon.

Overnight Rizal was a hero to his countrymen. Here was a man who, in his twenties, had caught the voiceless emotions of his people and given them words—who had proven to the world that a Filipino could be as cultured and gifted, by Europe’s own standards, as any Occidental. Rizal was still in Europe, moving from Vienna to Dresden and then to Rome, but now came news that his mother was rapidly growing blind. Her failing eyesight, when he was a boy, had impelled him to specialize in the treatment of the eye, and he came home to perform the delicate operation that restored her sight.

The Spaniards were fearful of Rizal, for his presence was like yeast in the dough of discontent. In 1888, they ordered his deportation. He went to Hong Kong and Macao, and then to Japan, where he mastered the language in a month (an incredible feat, as any who have tried to learn Japanese will agree). From Yokohama he sailed for San Francisco, and spent some time in the United States before moving on to London. At the British Museum he found Antonio de Morga’s book, written in 1607, about the condition of Filipino civilization when the Spaniards first arrived. Rizal republished the work, pointing out that matters had not been greatly improved by three centuries of Spanish rule. In London, too, he wrote El Filibusterismo, in which, more plainly than before, he preached the need for progress from among the masses rather than a mere shifting of power to a Filipino élite.

Basically, Rizal was too intelligent to be a fiery revolutionist. He believed that freedom could be found within a Spanish frame-work, if Filipinos were truly treated as equals. He dreamed of his countrymen’s regeneration, assuming, as they matured, an ever greater sense of responsibility. In El Filibusterismo, the old Filipino priest expressed Rizal’s philosophy:

“We owe the ill that afflicts us to ourselves; let us not put the blame on anyone else. If Spain saw that we were less complaisant in the face of tyranny, and readier to strive and suffer for our rights, Spain would be the first to give us liberty....But so long as the Filipino people has not sufficient vigor to proclaim, with erect front and bared breast, its right to the social life and to make that right good by sacrifice, with its own blood; so long as we see that our countrymen, though hearing in their private life the voice of shame and the clamors of conscience, yet in public life hold their place or join the chorus about him who commits abuses and ridicules the victim of the abuse; so long as we see them shut themselves up to their own egotism and praise with forced smile the most iniquitous acts, while their eyes are begging a part of the booty of such acts, why should liberty be given to them? With Spain or without Spain, they would always be the same, and perhaps, perhaps, they would be worse. Of what use would be independence if the slaves of today would be the tyrants of tomorrow? And they would be so without doubt, for he loves tyranny who submits to it.”

In 1892, Rizal was allowed to come back to the islands. He founded the Liga Filipina, whose aims were moderate indeed: union of the archipelago into a compact, vigorous, and homogeneous body; mutual protection in all cases of pressing necessity; defense against violence and injustice; encouragement of education, commerce, and agriculture; and study of such reforms as were vitally needed.

On this program, Rizal toured the provinces, talking to the educated and wealthy Filipinos. The Spaniards retaliated by searching the houses of his friends, and finally by clapping Rizal into the dungeons of Fort Santiago, Later they exiled him to the little town of Dapitan on the northwest coast of Mindanao. They accused him of having attacked, “directly or indirectly, the Catholic religion or the national unity”—and, in truth, there was a Masonic, anticlerical flavor to nearly all Filipino nationalist writing in those days.

The Liga was composed mostly of intellectuals. It did not satisfy the more ardent and revolutionary spirits, especially as the Spanish counteraction became increasingly harsh. To Andres Bonifacio, the Sam Adams of the Philippine Revolution, it smacked of compromise and vacillation, and Bonifacio soon created a new and more radical organization to appeal to all Filipinos, whether educated or not. This was the notorious Katipunan, and it was to play a crucial role in the rapid unfolding of revolutionary action.

Rizal, at Dapitan, still hoped for reform rather than revolt. He was in the ever difficult position of the liberal who places his faith in reason when the times are charged with emotion. He built a school in a picturesque spot near the town, and undertook the education of fourteen disciples. In July, 1896, a Katipunan leader named Pio Valenzuela came secretly to report that an uprising was in the making. Rizal said the plan was absurd and refused to accept revolutionary leadership, even though his visitor pointed out that the Spaniards would implicate him anyway. Rizal commented that if anything should happen to him he would be able to prove his innocence. But, he said, “do not consider me, but our country, which is the one that will suffer.” He insisted that the time was not ripe for adventures in revolt, because no unity existed among the Filipinos. He pointed out that there were neither arms nor ships nor trained fighting men. In Cuba, he said, where the insurgent resources were great, and where the people enjoyed the moral support of the United States, there had been failure after failure. He was certain that Spain would finally make concessions in the Philippines; he thought it best to wait.

A few months later, Rizal volunteered to serve as a physician in the Spanish Army in Cuba, where insurrection had broken into the open, and the Spaniards assured him safe passage for reasons of their own. He boarded the “España” in Manila Bay, and Katipunan leaders again visited him secretly, offering to free him by force of arms. Rizal insisted that he knew very well what he was doing, and that he did not approve of their actions. It was enough to convince the Katipunan leaders that their distrust of intellectuals was well-founded.

Rizal could have escaped from the Spaniards when his ship touched at Singapore, but again he chose to go on. However, despite the official promises of safety, the worried Spaniards decided to take him off the steamer in Singapore, and he was ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• INTRODUCTION
• I-BACKGROUND
• II-THE FILIPINO PEOPLE
• III-THE SPANISH RECORD
• IV-THE AGE OF REVOLT
• V-THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS
• VI-REFORM FROM ABOVE
• VII-TRANSITION
• VIII-THE WAR YEARS
• IX-GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE
• X-LIBERATION?
• XI-THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERATION
• XII-THE POLITICS OF LIBERATION
• XIII-THE SUMMING UP
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER