THE PHILIPPINES: Destiny’s Child

One hundred and one years ago, as the U.S. approached the Mexican War of 1846, a Democratic editor found a defiant and memorable phrase: “Manifest Destiny.” The phrase fitted the temper of the times, and salved the country’s conscience: the U.S. was not really hijacking California from Mexico. It was destiny.

Destiny went west. It gathered in Alaska by peaceful purchase, and Hawaii by annexation. But the real diamond of the Pacific, the Philippine Archipelago, was not for sale. It belonged to Spain, a backward oppressor. With a deep breath and a fierce face, Manifest Destiny hitched up its pants and went to war—for “Cuba libre” and a free Philippines.

This week, after a disappointing, 48-year adventure in tempered colonialism 6,965 miles from home, Destiny vacated its western terminus. The U.S. was the first great power in its right mind which had ever kept a promise to free a colony. But the power was happy to do it for several reasons.

The Wrong Door. The promise of freedom had been freely and publicly made—and the U.S. had always intended to keep it. There were also economic reasons. The “illimitable” China market, to which the Philippines were to be the “open door,” had fizzled. In 1920, the best year of the China trade, it totaled less than $150 million—about two-thirds of Macy’s 1945 sales. Philippine trade had climbed to sixth in the U.S. books, but duty-free Philippine products, such as sugar, had duplicated U.S. products to their hurt.

Spiritually, the U.S. seemed to have added little but jazz, a love of fast cars, slang and zoot suits upon the Spanish, Malayan, Chinese, Mohammedan and native cultures already oppressing the passive and indolent Filipinos. Politically, Destiny had been more successful. The Philippine Government was a textbook democracy.

In its practical works, the U.S. had shone. Before the war, the Philippines had over 3,500 miles of first-class roads, a modern educational program, and the largest duty-free market in the world. Filipino health was about, the best in the Orient: in 35 years, cholera, smallpox and bubonic plague had been wiped out; the population had increased from seven to 16 million, and the average height of the “tao” (John Doe) from 4 ft. 11 in. to 5 ft. 4 in.

These entries in the ledger gave the U.S. a warm sense of benevolence as it closed the books on July 4, 1946.

Renunciation. Europe and Asia, more interested than ever in what the U.S. was up to, would watch the renunciation ceremonies in Manila with sidelong intensity. In a temporary grandstand just outside the old, grey Intramuros, in a welter of tropic steam and emotion, there would be excitement which many a straw-hatted Filipino could feel to his heels.

There would be speeches, flag-raising, planes in the morning sky, and the distant echoes of 21-gun salutes. Crack troops of the battle-seasoned Philippine Army of 40,000, which the U.S. returned to Philippine command June 30—after presenting it with $50 million worth of arms and equipment—would lead the big parade. On the ship-shaped platform, resolutely pointing to the future, General Douglas MacArthur, who had promised to return and did, would speak. Silver-haired Paul McNutt, the retiring U.S. High Commissioner and the first U.S. Ambassador to the Philippine Republic, would read the formal proclamation from President Truman which would transform the Commonwealth into a Republic.

But for the Filipino who cared, the Filipino who both wanted his independence and was afraid of it, the main event would come when small, smart, energetic Manuel Acuna Roxas (rhymes with slow boss), 54, the first President of their first official Republic, would rise and have his say. Then the Filipino flag would come right out in the sky.

This was the man that shrewd Manuel Quezon, the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth,* had trained and picked to succeed him. Roxas had beaten aging President Sergio Osmeña in the election last April. On him the whole moral and physical rehabilitation of the war-devastated islands depended. He would have to give the Republic credit, a face, a mind, perhaps even a heart. He was not exactly starting from scratch, but it would be a long pull.

Land & People. The 7,083 islands of Manuel Roxas’ steaming land are part of the off-Asia continental shelf, running 1,120 miles from Chinese Formosa in the north to British and Dutch Borneo in the south. Two seasons (wet and dry) make the islands fertile and the climate debilitating; typhoons, snakes and the islands’ strategic position make them dangerous. The brown and purple mountains, the beaches like white teeth, the magic water, the hectic sunsets, and above all, the deep, hushed, lusting green of the jungle make it a lotos-land—except to politicians.

The Filipino citizen is complex. He is an islander but not a seafarer. He is loyal, excitable, bright, fiercely jealous and brave. Eighty percent of him live in raised, thatched, nipa-palm huts. He rises each damp dawn to blow his breakfast fire to life and smoke a rolled “toosh-toosh” (homemade cigar). Every day he faces hours of weary plowing behind his lazy carabao (water buffalo). He beefs about the land still held by the Catholic Church, his taxes, the reformed constabulary, the Chinese who are his shopkeepers, and about his fortunes—which he often hocks for a sensational funeral or wedding.

He is many habits and many peoples—ranging from the G-stringed, pygmy Negritos and the smart, West-dressed Christian Tagalogs of Luzon, the Visayans of the middle islands, to the self-sufficient, sometimes savage Mohammedan Moros of equatorial Mindanao. He speaks a bit of English, a bit of Spanish and Chinese, and a dozen dialects. His work rarely gets him more than 240 pesos ($120) a year. For 400 years he has had foreign masters. If ever he bothers to recall his history, he shrugs.

Civilization. In 1521, Magellan discovered the Philippines for Spain and the white man—and died there in a political gang fight on tiny Mactan. Spanish customs, as well as Spanish laws, were clamped on the bewildered tribesmen like plate mail. With civilization had come the teaching missionary priest, the gold, pearl and hemp trade, running wars between the Dutch and Spanish, the British and Spanish, and the inexorable organization and pacification of the innocent bystanders. By 1892, when the brilliant and visionary mestizo, Dr. José Rizal, began his ideological revolt against the friars and tottering Spain, Spain had given his countrymen the homogeneity to make a common fight.

Rizal was executed for his ardor in 1896—a Spanish act that fixed Rizal, and freedom, forever in the Filipino mind. The same year, Spain was chastising others of its colonists—the Cubans. In the U.S., Manifest Destiny, indignant over the spectacle of Spanish soldiers hunting defenseless, freedom-loving Cubans in the hills, glowered and tugged. In Congress and in the torch-lighted squares, war fever mounted.

The tumult set a yeasty, young Assistant Naval Secretary named Theodore Roosevelt in motion. Spain’s best colony, he reasoned, was not in the Caribbean. It was practically under the guns of Commodore George Dewey’s Pacific Fleet. Promptly, and without any authorization, Teddy Roosevelt ordered Dewey to attack the Philippines if war came. Dewey’s response was an overwhelming victory. Suddenly, although nobody yet realized it, the U.S. had an empire.*

But the crown fitted uneasily, and nine months after the U.S. had cried out against the Spanish man hunt in Cuba, the U.S. man hunt in the Philippines began. It was a drawn-out, costly, tragic struggle. Long before the islands were fully possessed, a free-the-Philippines campaign had begun in the U.S.

The Flame. Benevolent paternalism became the watchword of a long and careful line of U.S. Governors General and High Commissioners. Roly-poly William Howard Taft began it, with a steady insistence that U.S. opportunists had no rights that abridged Filipino rights. Succeeding U.S. administrators, including W. Cameron Forbes, Leonard Wood, Henry L. Stimson, Dwight F. Davis and Justice Frank Murphy, made fair-mindedness and public works the U.S. trademark.

Then came the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 which gave the Philippines a ten-year period of free (or Commonwealth) government, and granted them independence on July 4, 1946.

The war was the real test for the Philippines. In 21 days, the incredible Jap fought his way from the Luzon beaches, down through the mountains to Manila. He occupied Manila and poured onto the rocky, forested peninsula of Bataan. His power was an orderly flame. Down went the docks, warehouses, airfields. Down were to come the sugar-cake houses of the rich, the country clubs, the magnificent hotels, the Government buildings. And hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were still to die. The “death march” and the rape were yet to come.

Philippine leaders were worried. President Quezon, never too great a lover of the U.S. and a continual proponent of freedom, proposed Philippine “neutrality” —which, in effect, would have turned the islands over to Japan. But Franklin Roosevelt assured him that the U.S. would fight to the last American for the Philippines; and Douglas MacArthur, getting ready to retreat to Australia, promised to return. Quezon, and the Philippines, stuck by the U.S.

From Corregidor, MacArthur ordered Leaders Quezon and Osmeña to escape to the U.S. His aide, sad-eyed Brigadier General Manuel Roxas—who was still on Bataan—was ordered by Quezon to remain behind as the head of the Philippine Government. Although Quezon later suggested that he come to the U.S., Manuel Roxas chose to stay (and was captured by the Japs on Mindanao). This decision was probably the turning point of his career. For when the first postwar elections came along, the Filipinos quite obviously preferred a man who had stayed behind to Sergio Osmeña, who had gone into exile in the U.S.

The Heir. Manuel Roxas was born on New Year’s Day, 1892, in the house of his well-to-do grandfather in Capiz, on the Visayan island of Panay. His father had been killed six months before by the Spanish. At eleven, Manuel Roxas was sent to school in Hong Kong. But his dislike of Chinese food brought him back in a year to the schools of Capiz, then being set up under the American system.

At high school in Manila, Roxas ripped the pages from his books as he mastered them, and reaped scholastic honors like rice. At the new University of the Philippines, he drew first honors. In his law examinations he set marks never equaled. He taught law for a year, became secretary to Philippine Chief Justice Cayetano Arellano, and moved into the inevitable political career facing any promising young Philippine lawyer.

In 1919, Roxas became municipal councilor for Capiz, then provincial governor, then a member of the House of Representatives, then, in 1922, Speaker of the House and a pillar of the government party, the Nationalista. In 1921 he married Trinidad de Leon, the beautiful daughter of one of Luzon’s wealthy landowners. His friends and backers were Manila’s great. They saw eye to eye.

The Nightmare. When war came, Manuel Roxas joined the Army, where he caught General MacArthur’s eye. The Japs discovered him early in 1942 when he was a Filipino war prisoner on Mindanao. They handled him gingerly: big plans were stirring. In November 1942, they flew him to his home in Manila, wooed him, and proposed that he take part in a puppet government.

Roxas refused, pleading ill health. Premier Tojo gave a dinner for him, and repeated the puppet proposition just before the meat course. Roxas explained about his health. Tojo sent three physicians to look him over. They found him in bed, weak, wan and sweating (Roxas, warned of their approach, had just been given a fever injection and had run up & down stairs). They diagnosed his trouble as hypertension.

When squat puppet president José Laurel invited him to join his cabinet, Roxas declined. He was appointed anyhow, and meetings were held at his bedside. Jap guards surrounded his house. He received checks which he did not cash. The newspapers announced his membership on puppet commissions before Roxas had heard of them. He resisted attempts to take him to Tokyo, but he did accept the chairmanship of a Laurel food-gathering commission—on the condition that “the Japanese do not get one grain of rice.” And he helped write the puppet constitution—an act that has since thrown suspicion of collaboration upon him. What critics did not know was that the constitution read almost word for word like the U.S. Constitution, and that its jumpy, slippery author was the coordinator and spark of the all-important U.S. espionage in Manila.

As the returning Americans approached Manila, Roxas and his family were taken to Baguio under guard. In April, with his family and four members of the puppet cabinet, Roxas hiked three days through the hills to the U.S. lines.

Fruits of Independence. Today, Roxas rises at 6:30 a.m., works seven days a week in Manila’s sprawling stucco Malacañan Palace, smokes up to five packs of cigarets (Camels, Kools) a day, sees up to 500 people a week and takes books to bed with him. He is thin, tense, courteous, worldlywise. Eight weeks ago he made a flying trip to the U.S., where he was greeted by Daughter Maria Rosario, a student at Vassar, made an excellent impression in Washington as an energetic, businesslike administrator who realizes that the Philippines’ best interests lie in close cooperation with the U.S.

Roxas has a strong hold on the emotional Filipino. The vast majority of his countrymen thinks of him as a war hero, not as a collaborator (an opinion emphatically not shared by the acrid newspaper columns of ex-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes).

He needs that hold. Without the greatest meeting of heart, mind and magic, no man could hope to put the Philippines together again. There is no national economy, no export trade. Fifty percent of the carabaos, on which farming depends, have been killed by bombs and bullets or slaughtered for food during the war. Next to Warsaw, Manila is the world’s most devastated city.

In central Luzon, a 150,000-man army of ex-guerrillas, the Communist-led Hukbalahaps, bristles with arms and defiance to the Roxas regime. They make their own laws and fight the Philippine Military Police. Their leader, boyish, 33-year-old Luis Taruc, bossed them when they were guerrillas. Now he bosses a seven-man anti-Roxas bloc in the House of Representatives and bides his time.

In Mindanao, the unmanageable Moros ignore Manila, as usual. Without forceful persuasion, perhaps 80% of the population could never be made to dream of anything but siesta, fiesta and sunsets.

Without the $620 million the U.S. has promised the Philippines for war damages, reparations, public works and the purchase of U.S. surplus property, the newest and poorest nation on earth could never hope to outlive its first free month. Without the Bell Act, which the U.S. Congress passed April 30, it could probably not last a year. This act gives the Philippines eight years of free trade with the U.S., then 20 years during which tariffs will be upped gradually until they are in line with the rest of U.S. tariff policy. It will be a mighty crutch to the young and apprehensive Republic.

Yet no hint of defeat crept into Manuel Roxas’ prepared Independence Day speech to his countrymen. Said he: “In the world of affairs we irretrievably subscribe to the principles enunciated by the great leaders of the American revolution, to the cause and program being led today by the U.S. The system of free but guided enterprise is our system. We will defend it against the ideological onslaughts . . . of anti-democratic creeds. The proponents of these views will be protected in their right to hold and openly advocate them. They will not be protected in subversive schemes to destroy the structure of the nation. . . .”

Wherever the future looked most troubled and unpredictable, President Roxas painted it over with a protective coloring of red, white and blue. For the future of the Philippine Republic would unequivocally depend on the U.S., which had given the Filipinos freedom, and could be counted on to see that no one took it away from them.

*Last week, the body of Manuel Quezon, who died at Saranac Aug. 1, 1944, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, was en route back to the Philippines aboard the U.S. carrier Princeton.

*For which it eventually paid Spain $22 million conscience money.