Character of the Filipinos

The people are the most important element in a nation; the land and grain are next; the sovereign is the least in importance.

So said Mencius, Chinese sage. Last week the U.S. was considering the character of a people it has not thought enough about in the past—the 16,000,000 human beings who are scattered among the 7,000-odd islands of the Philippines.

What was happening to the 16,000,000 as the Japanese poured in? There was sparse news to give the U.S. a clue. In Washington, Joaquín Miguel Elizalde, Philippine Resident Commissioner, admitted that he was perplexed at the reports that came from the islands. Boyish, athletic Mike Elizalde gave up his suite at the Shoreham Hotel and took modest living quarters on the fourth floor of the redbrick Philippine Commonwealth Building. For Mike Elizalde, as for all Filipinos to greater or lesser degree, the change meant a test of the Filipino character as it has not been tested in 44 years.

The Elizalde family was probably the richest in Manila. In terms of the potential wealth of its strategic investments, it was far richer than that would suggest. Last week there was no news of the Elizaldes’ inter-island shipping fleet, gin and rum distilleries, three sugar mills, lumber company, insurance companies, paint and floor-wax factory, huge rope factory, cattle ranch, iron mines, gold mines.

Last week the Spanish Falange, in a move that might have been intended to influence Spanish Filipinos like polo-playing, society-loving Mike Elizalde, announced that in the new Axis World Order the Philippines were to be returned to Spain. Mike Elizalde broadcast by short wave to Manila that U.S. help was on its way.

Silence lay over the islands that the Japanese had overrun. That silence was to be expected from the 600,000 Moros of the South, one of the most warlike peoples in the world, who approved U.S. rule, did not want Philippine independence, could be counted on to resist the Japanese as fiercely as they once resisted the Spaniards and the Americans. Silence was to be expected from the Ilocanos, the ingenious “Yankees of the Philippines” in whose villages life followed its immemorial pattern regardless of conquest. Silence was expected from the Chinese who tend the stores in the villages, do much of the islands’ trading, lend money to extravagant Filipinos, mind their own business and have bowed temporarily to invaders before.

But for the educated Tagalogs and Visayans—for all the Filipinos who learn English, admire U.S. ways, vote for President Quezon, argue about independence, revere the memory of José Rizal, whose pulse was normal as he faced a Spanish firing squad—for these the Japanese conquest was the unbelievable crisis of their destiny as a people. For the individual it meant facing a situation for which nothing in his education or history had prepared him.

The Filipino is a stubborn gambler even for the Orient, an unbusinesslike dweller in the Far East of shrewd traders. His wife handles the money of the household, because otherwise he gives it away, loses it, bets it, or spends it. According to ancient tradition he takes in his kinspeople when they are in trouble, unworriedly moves in on them when in trouble himself. Americans think he is indolent, but his passivity “is a combination of natural dignity and a protest against unnecessary haste.”

He loves cockfighting and beauty contests, dancing, American clothes, American movies. If Americans think he is evasive, it is because his natural courtesy is so great that he does not want to offend. If his greatest fault is his imitativeness, it is the U.S. of the past two decades that he has imitated. He has grown up like the heir to a rich estate—as rich and as little exploited as any in the Orient—whose guardian has been unable either to plan for him or to set him an example that he could follow.

Now he faces a new world in which his character will be tested. Before the enemy took Manila, Japanese bombers scattered leaflets calling the U.S. an oppressor. Presumably these are ,now delivered door-to-door, telling that now at last the white man is being driven from Asia, reciting incidents, whether true or false, of Filipinos being barred from Americans’ clubs, promising that Japanese armies will get out of China and that after Japanese victory all Asiatics will enjoy the Orient.

It is not yet clear whether the Japanese will set up opium dens to debauch the Filipinos, as they have the Chinese, or what oppressive measures they may put upon the people. Already in provinces of Luzon (but not in primitive Bataan, which the U.S. still held) the Japanese had set up their own governments. Japanese residents, once outwardly peaceful shopkeepers and fishermen, blossomed out into uniforms and became provincial governors. Filipino quislings and renegade whites joined with them. The Jap’s Special Service Station had also begun the looting of the islands by the familiar Nazi methods, including the use of cleverly counterfeited money.

The Japanese also announced that they had appointed as mayor of captive Manila a Filipino big shot: swart, well-educated, luxury-loving Jorge Vargas, long one of President Quezon’s right-hand men. Whether this was the first step in the establishment of a Philippine equivalent of a Pétain Government, it was too early to say. For it remains to be seen whether after 44 years of American government Filipino civilians will feel as capable of maintaining the fight for their freedom as Filipinos have so far proved in the army of General MacArthur.