In our image, p.48
In Our Image, page 48
A Mississippi congressman helped. A friend of his lived in the same apartment house as a lovely Eurasian woman whom MacArthur visited frequently. She was Dimples, of course, and Pearson discovered to his delight that she had saved MacArthur’s love letters. His lawyer casually informed MacArthur’s counsel at a pretrial hearing that a Miss Isabel Cooper would appear as a defense witness.
The rest resembled a bedroom farce. Pearson, alleging that MacArthur had ordered army agents to abduct her, concealed Dimples in a Baltimore hideout with a colleague, whom she reportedly seduced—or vice versa. Amid these escapades, MacArthur abruptly abandoned the case. He gave Dimples $15,000 for the letters and paid an equal sum to defray Pearson’s legal fees. The episode cost him the equivalent of his salary and allowances for three years. He never mentioned the affair. But a friend, Admiral William Leahy, later observed that he could have defeated Pearson in court had he not feared that his mother would learn about Dimples. “He was a bachelor,” Leahy remarked. “All he had to do was look everybody in the face and say: ‘So what? Cunt can make you look awfully silly at times!’ ”
The farce ended in tragedy. Dimples eventually drifted out to Hollywood, where she played a few bit movie roles and tried in vain to tell the tale of her romance. In 1960, despondent, she committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of barbiturates.
MacArthur, meanwhile, felt increasingly alienated from Roosevelt’s circle. He was uneasy with New Dealers, whose liberal ideas transgressed his traditional views. They in turn resented his Republican sympathies and imperious manner and denounced him as a “bellicose swashbuckler” or “polished popinjay.” Above all, MacArthur battled Roosevelt’s efforts to put domestic priorities ahead of defense spending; both stubborn men, they clashed bitterly. Following one shouting match, in which Roosevelt rejected his resignation, MacArthur retched on the White House steps. He clearly could not continue as Chief of Staff. The Philippines, once again, offered an escape.
* * *
Late in 1934, Quezon visited Washington. Expecting to preside over the Philippine commonwealth recently created by Congress, he sought advice on managing the new government. He had one question for his old friend MacArthur: Could the islands be defended after independence? Refuting the opinion of nearly every U.S. strategist, MacArthur replied: “I don’t think so. I know they can defend themselves.” He thereupon proposed a Swiss formula—a reserve of citizen conscripts, trained and commanded by a core of regulars, to be mobilized in the event of war. Reassured, Quezon invited him to become military adviser to the autonomous regime.
Roosevelt, by now eager to banish MacArthur, approved. The offer also tempted MacArthur, who faced either a corps command at home or retirement at the age of fifty-five, but he imposed stiff terms on Quezon. He demanded $33,000 a year, the same salary and allowances paid the U.S. governor of the Philippines, in addition to a fully air-conditioned penthouse atop the Manila Hotel, almost equal in size to the governor’s quarters in the Malacañang palace. Quezon agreed, and MacArthur accepted, pledging to “devote the remainder of my life if necessary” to defending the archipelago. Soon, however, he was jockeying to be made high commissioner, as the senior American official would be entitled under the commonwealth. Roosevelt seriously considered him until he overplayed his hand by reviling the incumbent governor, Frank Murphy, whose liberal opinions he detested. To MacArthur’s distress, Roosevelt later chose Paul V. McNutt, the former governor of Indiana. McNutt hoped to be the Democratic presidential candidate and Roosevelt, already eyeing a third term, wanted him out of the way.
MacArthur landed in Manila late in 1935, accompanied by his octogenarian mother and a token staff that included Major Eisenhower, whom he had dragooned into serving as his chief aide. He was stunned when his mother died six weeks later, but her death emancipated him. Aboard ship, he had met Jean Marie Faircloth, who was traveling to China to visit friends. A small, sparkling spinster of thirty-six from Tennessee, she may have reminded him of the southern belle his mother had been. She was proud of her Confederate forebears, one of whom had fought against MacArthur’s father during the Civil War. Captivated by soldiers, she could not resist MacArthur, a prototype of the breed. After his mother’s death, Jean returned to Manila to console him, and they were married the next year during a furlough in New York. A year later, she bore his son, whom he named Arthur, for his father.
Exalted by his new job, MacArthur arrogated for himself the rank of field marshal, the only U.S. Army officer in history to hold that grade. He also concocted a comic-opera uniform of black trousers and a white tunic filigreed with intricate designs. The ludicrous costume not only reflected his vanity but also caught the flavor of the Philippines, which then appeared to be devolving into a coconut republic.
Quezon, now president of the commonwealth, articulated the language of American democracy, but he was, in practice, an autocrat primarily preoccupied with preserving his power. Recalling his mythical peasant past, he would rattle on about “social justice” as he wielded nearly absolute authority to control wages, prices and profits as well as to ban strikes and other “unwholesome agitation.” Such was his ego that he peremptorily canceled an experiment with daylight savings time after stubbing his toe in the early-morning darkness. Exercising his prerogative as head of government, he moved into the Malacañang palace, whose lovely gardens he used for large parties devised to depict himself as successor to the Spanish and American colonial masters. He also entertained lavishly on his sleek white yacht, and spent huge sums on clothes, nightclubs and other luxuries during his trips abroad, staffing his private railway coaches with native cooks to prepare his favorite fare. One of his delights on his visits to New York was to take over the Roseland ballroom for the night, paying the taxi girls to dance with him and his friends. Filipino and American businessmen underwrote him, often with blank checks, and he usually repaid them with patronage. Once, in need of funds to finance a journey to the United States, he cleaned out the bank account of a big Manila footwear manufacturer. Finding the industrialist in trouble on his return months later, he breezily told him, “Oh well, you can have the contract to supply the entire Philippine army with shoes.”
Nothing sustained Quezon’s sense of self-importance more than being treated as a chief of state on visits to China and Japan, whose leaders courted him as part of their own policy of encouraging Asian nationalism. He genuinely rejoiced in the banquets, salutes, decorations and other gestures, which appealed to his opulent tastes. But he would repeatedly be reminded of his semisovereign status, as he was in 1936, when Roosevelt denied him permission to attend the coronation of King George VI of Britain as an independent ruler.
Despite his pretenses, though, Quezon realized that the Philippines was an American dependent. “Every Filipino,” he would intone, “owes allegiance to the United States … without mental reservation.” But he identified America with MacArthur, his compadre. Quezon’s wife, Aurora, along with her husband a godparent of MacArthur’s son, once explained it to Murphy, who envied their intimate relationship: “Frank, you don’t seem to understand. Douglas is our brother.”
Quezon, by entrusting MacArthur with the security of the Philippines, felt that the United States was consecrated to his country’s protection. But MacArthur’s concept for defending the archipelago was at best clouded, and, as Quezon discovered when the chips fell, the American commitment was murky.
Guided by the Swiss example, MacArthur envisioned a core of eleven thousand Filipino regulars who would train four hundred thousand native troops to be mobilized at the outbreak of war. Buttressed by a fleet of fifty patrol boats and two hundred aircraft, they would fight in small mobile squads from their assorted home areas to defend the beaches against attack—and then, as MacArthur put it, continue to resist “to the furthermost retreat left available.” He saw the force as primarily a deterrent that would, as he pledged in his sententious rhetoric, confront an enemy with “such difficult problems as to give pause even to the most ruthless and powerful.” To conquer the islands, he calculated, would require “a half million men, ten billion dollars, tremendous casualties and three years’ time”—far more than any rational adversary would want to expend. His program, on the other hand, would cost a comparatively modest $8 million a year over the span of a decade.
Elihu Root, who as secretary of state had pioneered the U.S. presence in the Philippines, turned MacArthur’s equation upside down with uncanny foresight. In 1937, Just before his death at the age of ninety-two, he reckoned that the Japanese could take the archipelago within a week, compelling America to commit “five years and twenty-five billion dollars to beat them.” Official U.S. strategists were equally gloomy. With the patience and fortitude of Talmudic scholars, they had been analyzing and modifying the Orange Plan for years, and still it was little more than a formula for withdrawal. Nor did MacArthur’s Swiss model infuse them with much confidence. Unlike Switzerland, a survey by War Department experts noted, the Philippines was not a “compact land unit” that could be protected by flexible troop units, but a sprawl of islands vulnerable to various enemy assaults. The Japanese navy, they also warned, could easily blockade the archipelago, thus cutting its lines of supply. They suggested that the infant Filipino force concentrate instead on “internal disorders,” such as banditry and peasant dissidence. The United States, however, no longer governed the Philippines completely. The commonwealth regime now legislated its own defense policies, and Quezon had placed his faith in MacArthur.
Domestic instability was indeed worrisome. As it is today, the Philippines was then a social volcano, constantly rumbling with discontent, erupting periodically in local revolts. The U.S. administration in Manila, after a few abortive attempts at liberal measures, had delegated the agrarian issue to Filipino officials, most of them servile to an entrenched gentry implacably opposed to reforms. The worldwide economic slump had also shriveled the foreign market for exports like sugar and coconut oil, and a surging birth rate exacerbated the problem. Conditions in the countryside had steadily deteriorated, driving the average income below subsistence levels. One statistic in a census conducted during the 1930s illustrated the gravity of the situation: Out of a population of sixteen million, about three and a half million were classified as “agricultural day laborers”—in short, a dispossessed fourth of the nation.
Farms had become unproductive as swelling families split up their acreage into increasingly smaller plots, and tenancy spread as creditors foreclosed on insolvent peasants. Hunger and poverty paralyzed what had been America’s two most notable programs: education and public health. Parents pulled their children out of school to help make ends meet, while malnutrition, dysentery and tuberculosis grew to epidemic proportions. An American researcher dubbed the barrios a “rural slum,” saved from starvation only by the fecundity of the tropics. Early in 1931, a U.S. official in central Luzon saw a crisis ahead. “Take a man’s land away from him and he is desperate,” he declared, warning that the area was “ready for an uprising.”
The same could have been said of almost any spot in the Philippines at almost any time. The provinces swirled with a profusion of mystical cabals, secret societies, clandestine brotherhoods, seditious associations and other such groups. Many, rooted in religious factions and messianic movements that dated back centuries, were animated by assorted patriotic zealots and political dissenters. Understandably, they attracted the alienated and aggrieved, who had little to lose from hopeless ventures.
During the recession after World War I, for example, a fishmonger named Flor de Entrecherado organized the indigent tenants and sugar workers of the Visayas, and soon became a potent figure in the area. He proclaimed himself “Emperor of the Philippines” under the title of Florencio I, converting his villa into a “royal palace” in which, seated on a rattan throne on the veranda, he held court in a purple robe and bejeweled crown, scepter in hand. In 1925, he announced a crusade to “liberate” the archipelago, alerting his faithful to await the order for “the poor … to kill all the rich.” He issued the order two years later, and the comedy turned ugly. Wielding axes, knives and homemade guns, his disciples raided police stations and constabulary garrisons in several towns—fortunately causing more furor than casualties. The American governor, Leonard Wood, checked the violence by going to Iloilo, where he induced Florencio to surrender by plying him with a gourmet dinner. Psychiatrists diagnosed the emperor as mentally unstable and confined him to a Manila asylum, where he spent his final years writing voluminous memoirs while puffing perfumed cigars. His chief lieutenants, deemed sane, went to jail.
The Florencio episode may have been a squall, but more severe social storms hit Luzon with typhoon intensity. Early in 1931, scores of dejected farm laborers occupied Tayug, a town in coastal Pangasinan province. They seized municipal offices and burned hated land records before troops arrived, losing five of their own and killing six rebels in a fight that raged for twelve hours. One of the slain insurgents was a young woman, shot by soldiers as she strode barefoot across the town square in the afternoon sunshine, apparently in a trance, waving the Philippine flag above her head in cadence to her steps. Several alarmed Americans in Manila called for reform. The Free Press, a liberal weekly, asserted that “no nation can be founded on a downtrodden peasantry,” and urged that “facts” be “looked in the face.” However, neither senior American nor Filipino officials would confront facts.
A bigger upheaval was to rock Luzon four years later. Its leader, Benigno Ramos, was a prolific Tagalog-language journalist and poet who had moved to Manila from nearby Bulacan province. His writing attracted Quezon, who gave him a staff job in the Philippine senate. In 1930, lusting after elected office, Ramos bid for nationalist support by protesting against an American high school teacher accused of maligning Filipinos as “monkeys.” Quezon, then striving to soothe the United States, disowned him. At that, Ramos founded a weekly, Sakdal, meaning “accuse” or “strike” in Tagalog, and flayed Quezon for helping the Americans to exploit the “masses.” Filipinos thrive on abusive polemics, and Ramos’s vitriolic genius made him an instant celebrity. He formed a political party, also called Sakdal, capturing three seats in the national legislature and several municipal posts in central Luzon. Frank Murphy guardedly advised Washington that while the movement “may become dangerous,” a populist antidote to the reactionary oligarchy “might be a welcome development.”
To maintain his nationalist momentum, Ramos decried the commonwealth status then scheduled for the Philippines and demanded immediate independence. He went to Japan in quest of support and, during his absence, local Filipino officials harassed his followers—denying them, among other things, the right to speak publicly. Japanese sympathizers financed Ramos’s propaganda, which he smuggled back to the islands. It was puerile stuff that, for instance, labeled Frank Murphy a “Frankenstein” and Quezon his “Super-Servant.” But the restive farm laborers and tenants of central Luzon needed no prodding. By 1935, they were ripe to explode in revolt, and Sakdalista agitators touched off the fuse.
Early in May, a month of dense heat and humidity, some six thousand peasants flared up in the area around Manila—as if ignited by a single spark. Spilling through the region in hundreds of bands, they brandished knives, sickles, clubs and primitive guns. They converged on municipal offices, constabulary barracks and police stations, naïvely expecting to be supported by seditious soldiers and friendly townsfolk. Instead, to their astonishment, they met withering fire everywhere. The bloodiest battle occurred in Laguna province southeast of Manila. The governor there was Juan Cailles, a part-French mestizo, who as a swashbuckling young nationalist guerrilla at the turn of the century had been one of the last holdouts against the American conquest of the Philippines. Though now middle-aged, he had lost none of his verve. Pistol in hand, he rushed forth at the head of his troops against three hundred insurgents crouched behind an ancient Spanish stone wall in the town of Cabuyao, killing fifty of them in the assault. Another ten or twenty rebels died elsewhere in the area as the survivors fled in panic, dazed and disillusioned that the rural population had failed to rally to their cause. By the end of the day, the odor of cordite hung in the air as corpses began to rot under the scorching sun. Benigno Ramos, safe in Tokyo, later served the Japanese during their occupation of the Philippines in World War II—as did many of the rich Filipinos he detested.
In different guises, under different leaders and spurred by different ideologies, larger uprisings were to disrupt the Philippines during the decades ahead—nearly all of them rooted in social dissatisfaction. But the Sakdal rebellion had been the biggest within memory, and it stimulated a few prescient Americans in Manila to clamor again for reforms.
One of the more liberal, A.V.H. Hartendorp, editor of Philippines Magazine, cautioned that despite their “vague, foolish and uncoordinated” principles, the Sakdalistas had nevertheless manifested “a groping for remedies that have not been brought to them by the politicians.” Murphy, ever the New Dealer, shared that opinion and released almost all the convicted rebels as his last official act as governor in late 1935. Many Filipinos also began to appeal for progressive measures, but, like the Bourbons, the wealthy landowners neither forgot nor learned. In parts of central Luzon, they formed vigilante groups to crush the dissidents and instructed their surrogates in the Philippine legislature to reject proposals aimed at easing the plight of the peasantry.
Presumably an expert on the archipelago, MacArthur must have been aware of the ferment. But he seemed to be blind to its revolutionary potential. He was a conventional officer assigned to create a conventional army capable of waging a conventional war against a conventional enemy.
