In our image, p.44
In Our Image, page 44
The House of Representatives easily passed the revised Jones act in October 1914—yet it was to wait sixteen months to become law. Taft again mustered U.S. business and church leaders, and Republican senators managed to hobble the bill in committee. Taft’s fervid struggle against the motion mirrored his desperation. Theodore Roosevelt, whose Bull Moose dissidents had split the Republicans and thwarted his bid for a second presidential term in 1912, now dealt him another blow by supporting Philippine independence out of fear that the United States could not defend the islands against Japan. Quezon also subverted Taft’s appeals by cautioning American corporations that alternatives to the measure might be worse.
The jockeying went on into January 1916, when the success of the bill seemed sure. Then came a last-minute hitch: Senator James P. Clarke, an Arkansas Democrat, proposed an amendment to approve Philippine independence within four years.
Clarke, prodded by Republican taunts that the Jones act was a subterfuge, sent its sponsors into a frenzy as their neatly crafted consensus seemed about to collapse. They further panicked when Wilson, who had not long before opposed Philippine sovereignty, backed Clarke’s innovation. Secretary of War Garrison objected strenuously—eliciting from Wilson the foggy reply that while he too had doubts about the Clarke amendment, they should defer to Congress. Garrison resigned. The Taft lobby, suddenly in remission, mobilized a bloc of Democratic senators, most of them Irish Catholics, to rebuff the amendment, and it passed only by the casting vote of Vice President Thomas Marshall. Quezon, torn between his nationalist credo and his desire to slow down the movement toward independence, slumped into bed in exhaustion. Osmeña, back in Manila, faced a cacophony of noisy Filipino legislators, some insisting on immediate sovereignty, others protesting against independence without U.S. protection.
The House of Representatives axed the Clarke amendment in early May as thirty Catholic Democrats swung the vote in response to secret instructions from Cardinal James Gibbon of Baltimore, whom Taft had recruited. But Taft could not stop passage of the Jones bill, which the Senate approved and Wilson signed into law in August 1916. However flawed, it was a landmark gesture. No other Western power at that stage had conceded autonomy to a colony, much less promised it independence. Osmeña indirectly made that point in a congratulatory cable to Quezon: YOUR SINCERE AND STEADFAST EFFORTS HAVE SAVED YOUR COUNTRY CENTURIES OF SUFFERING THAT OTHER PEOPLES HAVE TO GO THROUGH ON THEIR WAY TO FINAL EMANCIPATION.
Emotional celebrations followed. Quezon, addressing the House of Representatives, predicted that Jones’s name would be engraved “in letters of gold” in Philippine history—and it would, indeed, be pinned on one of Manila’s main bridges. With characteristic immodesty, Quezon also threw a huge party for himself at the old Willard Hotel, performing as his own toastmaster as a hundred Washington dignitaries sang his praises. In Manila, meanwhile, forty thousand people marched through the streets, and the city sent Wilson a silver tablet inscribed with words of gratitude.
His keen political antennae now told Quezon to seek his destiny at home. He sailed back, precariously disembarking in a typhoon to a wet but raucous ovation of parades, brass bands and speeches. Girls in pink showered him with flowers, and a poet composed a sonnet in his honor. At a gaudy banquet, he hinted at his future course. Thanking those who had helped to pass the Jones bill, he conspicuously omitted mention of Osmeña. He ran for the Philippine senate in the elections held soon afterward, and a Nacionalista landslide vaulted him into the presidency of the new body. The seat, with its authority to ratify official appointments, gave him immense power—which he was to manipulate during the years ahead to displace Osmeña to become the country’s unchallenged leader.
Harrison now pressed Wilson to set a date for Philippine independence, contending that the country had a “stable government” as stipulated in the preamble to the Jones law. But a scandal partly of his own making punctured his plea.
In 1916, eager to give the new political authority of the Filipinos an economic base, Harrison founded a national bank with the help of H. Parker Willis, a scholarly veteran of the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States. Willis soon learned that the Filipinos on the board of directors regarded the institution as an instrument for dispensing patronage. He quit, leaving its direction to one Venancio Concepción, an absurd choice for the position.
A Spanish mestizo, Concepción was a former Spanish army officer who had defected to the Filipino nationalist forces, in which he rose to the rank of general before surrendering to the Americans. Osmeña, who owed him a favor, appointed him to the bank despite his lack of financial experience. A temperamental figure given to fustian outbursts, Concepción rejected technical advice and instead operated in Filipino tradition through an arcane skein of personal contacts. The result, a U.S. official subsequently concluded, was “nearly unbelievable mismanagement, graft and the violation of every rule that good banking dictates.”
At first the bank flourished, as World War I spurred the global lust for Philippine commodities. In just three years, for example, exports of coconut oil, used to make explosives, soared in value by some twelvefold. But Harrison’s brother Archibald, one of the bank’s two American directors, charged Concepción with grave abuses—alleging that he had granted fat loans to his friends without collateral and written off their debts or allowed them to relend the bank’s money at exorbitant interest rates. Because the bank lacked a central accounting system, its reserves were $11 million less than claimed. Concepción, backed by Osmeña and Quezon, refuted the accusations. Refusing to believe that his Filipino friends could be corrupt, Harrison also spurned his brother, who promptly returned home, furious and humiliated.
The restraints on him gone, Concepción plunged ahead despite signs that the World War I boom was about to bust. Rather than retrench when hemp prices crumbled in the summer of 1918, he expanded credit to producers, crippling the bank with massive defaults. He exceeded the bank’s statutory loan limits to underwrite new sugar mills, ignoring evidence that the world sugar market was collapsing, and again disaster followed. Nor did he curb his employees from wild currency speculation, another costly venture. The total losses may have run as high as $30 million, a huge amount for those days. Jittery international financiers convened in Shanghai to explore ways to save their investments should the Philippine economy sink, and their discussions resembled the talks held during the 1980s, when foreign bankers met in New York, London and Tokyo in an effort to reschedule the vast debt incurred by the profligate Marcos regime.
In November 1920, an American banker arrived in Manila to relieve Concepción, who was to be convicted and jailed for fraud—a penalty, some older Filipinos ruefully recall today, that could have been imposed only under the U.S. judicial system. Harrison, always ready to defend his Filipino protégés, later observed that they were “only partially responsible” for the debacle, yet “received all the blame.” He was correct. The bank’s ruinous currency gambles were the fault of an American agent, and many American hemp and coconut-oil processors had been the beneficiaries of its unsecured loans. But Harrison absolved himself of any guilt, lamely explaining that he had been abroad when Concepción committed his worst misdeeds. In any event, after winning the 1920 U.S. elections, the Republicans inflated the scandal in an effort to suggest that the Filipinos had not established a “stable government”—and thus were not ready for sovereignty.
* * *
The new president, Warren Gamaliel Harding, fatuously announced a return to “normalcy,” which in the case of the Philippines meant forgetting promises of independence. As a senator from Ohio, he had opposed any plan to relinquish the islands, calling it a “national disgrace” to condemn the Filipinos “to walk alone when they had not been taught fully to creep.” Now, on the eve of his inauguration, he leaked his view of the Philippine situation to the pro-Republican New York Sun, which ran the story on page one under the headline
PHILIPPINES IN CHAOS
BIG HARDING TASK
GOVERNOR HARRISON
BLAMED FOR MISRULE
Harrison’s record, the inspired account read, was “not considered creditable either to himself or to the [Wilson] administration.” During his term, “American sovereignty in the islands had been undermined, Filipino demagogues and adventurers who urge independence for their own selfish purposes have come to the front, American authority has been sadly impaired, the fiscal affairs of the islands have been thrown into chaotic shape and things have gone backward instead of forward.” Harding, the newspaper added, would send Forbes or General Leonard Wood to the Philippines to counsel him on how to deal “justly” with the Filipinos and define a policy that Americans could “sanction and support.”
Before departing for Manila in May 1921, Forbes advised Harding to maintain the political concessions already made to the Filipinos but recommended tighter U.S. controls to avoid another catastrophe like the bank scandal. He and Wood then toured the islands for four months, producing a report that confirmed their preconceptions. Beginning in the tone of a travel guide, they praised the Filipinos for their “many fine and attractive qualities—dignity and self-respect, personal neatness and cleanliness, courtesy.…” Predictably, however, they concluded that “it would be a betrayal of the Philippine people, a misfortune to the American people, a distinct step backward in the path of progress and a discreditable neglect of our national duty were we to withdraw from the islands … without giving the Filipinos the best chance possible to have an orderly and permanently stable government.”
Just as predictably, the Filipino leaders flayed the report in public to preserve their nationalist image, while conceding in private that it was fair. But the Republican comeback augured renewed tensions with the Americans that, Quezon reckoned, could be turned to his political advantage.
Though Quezon had dominated the Philippine senate since 1916, he resented Osmeña’s preeminence as speaker of the lower chamber. By 1923 he had maneuvered to supplant Osmeña with Manuel Roxas y Acuña, a young protégé from the island of Panay, and soon his power was uncontested. Osmeña was to survive thirty-nine more years, half that span as Quezon’s subordinate, accepting his eclipse as humbly as a Buddhist monk for whom all life is transient.
Quezon was now prepared to risk a clash with Leonard Wood, whom Harding named U.S. governor in 1921. Win or lose, he calculated, a quarrel with the American viceroy could only enhance his reputation as a Filipino nationalist.
Wood, then sixty-one, had sterling credentials. The son of a Cape Cod physician, he joined the army as a doctor after graduating from Harvard Medical School but went into combat. He participated in the Indian wars and earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in Geronimo’s capture. Theodore Roosevelt, impressed by his performance, recommended him as commander of the Rough Riders, and afterward, as president, named him U.S. governor of Cuba. He later went to the Philippines to lead the American troops fighting the Moros, stayed there to head the U.S. military establishment and returned home to become Army Chief of Staff. Annoyed by his arrogant manner, Wilson denied him command of the American forces during World War I. Wood also alienated key members of Congress, and his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 worried Harding, who offered him the Philippine governorship to keep him at bay. Though Wood could hardly refuse after his mission to the islands with Forbes, he was an unpropitious choice.
Distressed by Harding’s turnaround after the indulgent Harrison years, the Filipinos needed a sympathetic American governor to foster their experiment in self-rule. Above all, they yearned to be trusted by the Americans, whose tutelage they respected despite their nationalistic posturing—much as a rebellious adolescent seeks a parent’s approval. This psychological nuance eluded Wood. Stern and aloof, he gave Filipinos the impression that he viewed them with suspicion. His rigidity particularly dismayed Quezon, who by contrast was elastic and nimble—but, in his way, equally stubborn.
Quezon’s combustible ego would erupt at what he regarded as condescension by Wood’s “cavalry cabinet”—which included young Lieutenant George S. Patton. Wood piqued Quezon as well by vetoing his Filipino appointees and protecting American officials. In March 1923, a complicated episode catapulted them into a squabble that raised the issue of where the locus of political power lay in the Philippines.
The case involved a raffish American detective on the Manila vice squad, whom the Filipino mayor had suspended on charges of corruption. Spurning the mayor’s claim to handle the case administratively, Wood ordered a trial. The court acquitted the cop for lack of proof but cast doubts on his probity, and Wood retired him with full benefits. Angry at Wood for usurping his turf, Quezon staged a theatrical showdown.
Late on a hot night in July 1923, he strode into the Malacañang palace, the governor’s residence, flanked by six top Filipino politicians in formal garb. Wood awaited them in a white dress uniform ablaze with medals. Quezon accused him of breaking America’s “sacred pledge” to extend to the Filipinos “the greatest possible measure of self-government” and announced the resignation of the council of state, a cosmetic panel of native advisers. Wood denounced the “preconcerted attack” against U.S. supremacy, and Manila soon rippled with rumors of an impending American military putsch against the Filipino legislature.
Quezon, asserting that his target was Wood, not America, sent a mission to Washington to explain the Filipino side to Harding. But Harding, hit by pneumonia on a visit to Alaska, had suddenly died in San Francisco on August 3, 1923. The Filipinos now faced Calvin Coolidge, who bluntly warned them that their protests would only delay their independence. For them to antagonize “as good an administration” as that of Wood, he declared, would be “rather a testimony of unpreparedness for the full obligations of citizenship than an evidence of patriotic eagerness to advance their country.” The futile encounter convinced Quezon that his dealings with the United States would remain deadlocked until “someone” was “taken out of the way.” Indeed, nothing was to budge before 1927, when Wood died in Boston during surgery for a brain tumor.
Quezon went to Washington soon afterward to lobby for a more congenial governor. His candidate was Henry L. Stimson, who had visited Manila years earlier as Taft’s secretary of war. Coolidge, bored by the subject, acquiesced.
Stimson, at sixty, belonged to America’s peerage. The son of a rich New York banker who had forsaken finance for medicine, he was Skull and Bones at Yale and a Harvard Law School graduate and subsequently joined Elihu Root’s Manhattan law firm. Theodore Roosevelt’s influence made him a Republican reformer, a political path into Taft’s cabinet. During World War I, though already fifty, he served briefly in France as a field artillery colonel and proudly bore the rank for the rest of his life. His family fortune further cushioned by the Wall Street boom of the 1920s, he replied to a plea from Coolidge to mediate a rebellion in Nicaragua. He had just finished that task when the Philippine assignment beckoned as a “last short adventure” before old age, as he later put it. He held the job for less than a year before becoming Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, but he was to profoundly determine the fate of the Philippines.
Little in Stimson’s attitude should have commended him to the Filipino leaders. He candidly told Quezon and Osmeña that he opposed independence because their “Malay tendency to backslide” would wreck the archipelago. Only the Americans could promote “free institutions” and check the country’s “undemocratic oligarchy,” which had no interest in the “great farming masses.” And, he added, a U.S. presence was vital to defend the islands against Japan. He would accept the assignment only on condition that they cooperated with him while recognizing his “final authority.” Quezon agreed.
He admired Stimson’s rectitude. Stimson was in fact a moralist who later vetoed the creation of a U.S. espionage agency because “gentlemen don’t open each other’s mail” and truly believed such homilies as “the best way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” Full sovereignty as a goal was also receding in Quezon’s mind as he considered a tie with America like Canada’s autonomous status within the British empire. Stimson was thinking along similar lines, and Quezon confided in him, “Give us certainty, and we will take dominion status.” But, fearful of ceding the independence issue to his rivals, Quezon warned, “If you quote me on this, I will say you lie.”
* * *
By the late 1920s, a growing number of groups in the United States pondered the future of the Philippine connection, and the Filipinos swiftly lost control of their own destiny as the debate intensified.
Predictably defending the status quo were a few big U.S. companies with investments in the Philippines, the American community of Manila, the U.S. importers of duty-free products from the islands and exporters with a virtual monopoly there for their goods. The American partisans of change comprised a crazy quilt of bedfellows, most of them also concerned with their special interests. With world sugar prices sliding, U.S. beet sugar producers decried Philippine competition—even though their real rival was Cuban sugar. American dairy lobbies denounced Philippine coconut oil as an ingredient in margarine, when in fact most of it went into soap. Though the U.S. textile business reaped fat profits from its market in the islands, Senator Thomas J. Helfin of Alabama called them a “millstone about the necks of the cotton producers.” He was, he asserted, “in favor of freeing the Philippine people and hereafter, when their cheap and inferior stuff comes in to swamp our American farmers, we can put a tariff on it, protect our interests and preserve the home market for our American home people.”
In October 1929, as the Wall Street crash spread to Main Street, sugar, dairy and other lobbyists stepped up their demands on Congress to block Philippine imports while labor unions clamored for curbs on the flow of Filipinos into the country. Some sixty thousand had arrived by 1931, unaffected by the exclusion law against Asians. Welcomed at first as cheap farm and domestic workers, mostly on the Pacific coast, they rapidly became pariahs as unemployment among Americans proliferated. The American Federation of Labor joined the American Legion and other self-styled patriotic movements to insist that they either be denied entry to the United States or that America’s links with the Philippines be severed. In early 1930, a Filipino died in a California race riot against Asian workers.
