Did America Save the Philippines From Spain?

Not so long ago, in our university’s English lounge, I had a discussion with two colleagues about a comparative study on the effects of native and non-native English language teachers on students’ performance in English. When the discussion brought us to the three concentric circles of English, we tried to identify the countries colonized by England and America. Surprisingly, one said, “The Philippines (my country) was rescued by the Americans from the Spaniards.” I paused, looked at him, and said, “Are you sure you want us to discuss that topic?”

I was ready for a debate. I had the advantage — I am Filipino. I know my nation’s history, which he apparently knew little or nothing about. Philippine History was also one of the subjects I had taught, quite passionately, in my country, and I was ready to teach him a lesson. I was prepared to hit him with my historical whip. But when I asked that question, he only smiled and redirected the discussion back to the original topic.

I wanted to return to his statement — I needed to respond — but our time in the English lounge was over. We had to leave. The bell saved him.

That desire to respond stayed with me. It tortured my Filipino soul. The Filipino in me could not stand down. I did not stand down, either, when another colleague made some unsavory remarks about Filipinos in his own country. I still recall how irate he became at what I had to say in response. He was so vexed by the way I refuted his statements that, one time when he got drunk, he gave me a mouthful and had to be restrained by his friends.

To that fit of rage from a drunk man, I did not respond violently. Why would I? I simply retorted wittily, which I think inflamed his bruised ego all the more. And to that earlier statement — that “my country was saved by Uncle Sam from the bullies from the Iberian peninsula” — I also had to do something. The only way to regain my peace was to respond in some way. So I decided to write this article, hoping that one day, that colleague who wrongly believed the Americans were the Filipinos’ knights in shining armor during the colonial period would read it.

Now, let me answer the question: Did the Americans save the Filipinos from the Spaniards?

HELL NO!

The Americans extinguished the flames of Filipino nationalism just as they were beginning to flicker, depriving the Filipinos of the chance to chart their own destiny as a nation. That’s what they did. And it shouldn’t have surprised anyone — if they treated African Americans in their own backyard the way they did during those times, why would they be any kinder to Filipinos in a foreign land?

Let me share some excerpts from my ongoing study, “How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character.”

* * * * * * * * * *

In 1896, the Filipinos staged the biggest and most organized revolt against Spain. Their previous attempts to overthrow their invaders from the Iberian peninsula had all been quelled. Historians say those earlier uprisings failed because they were driven by localized issues confined to limited geographical scales and lacked a truly national character. The 1896 revolution was different. It started in the capital, Manila, then spread to surrounding provinces and eventually became national in scope, driven mainly by the rise of Filipino nationalism.

The Spaniards had their hands full, and it was only a matter of time before their more than three centuries of rule would have ended. Even if the Americans had not come, the Filipinos could have succeeded in ending Spanish rule on their own.

The Americans duped Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the revolt against Spain, into believing they had come to help the Filipinos establish a republic and had no designs on a colony of their own.

Then the Filipinos watched helplessly as the Spaniards — too proud to accept defeat at the hands of the Indios they had enslaved for centuries — surrendered to the Americans instead, and were paid $20,000,000 for the improvements they had made to the Philippine islands during their colonial rule. That was one of the conditions set in the Treaty of Paris of 1898, which the two countries concluded without securing the consent of the Filipino people.

Would the Americans really pay the Spaniards that huge sum — worth more than $800 million today — and get nothing in return?

HELL NO!

America, then an emerging world power, needed to flex its muscles in the Pacific, and the Philippines was the ideal place to do it. Its military strategists likely believed America needed a presence in Asia to counter the growing might of imperial Japan.

So, contrary to the promise Aguinaldo said he had naively believed, the Americans declared the Philippines a territory ceded to them by Spain.

It was a painful experience for the Filipinos. After centuries of struggle against Spain, they finally had a chance to chart their own destiny as a nation. But the Americans stood in their way, and the Filipinos had to continue their search for that elusive freedom.

So the Philippines changed hands — from one colonial master to another, from the Spanish yoke to the American one.

What if the Americans had observed the principle that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and decided not to stay in 1898, allowing the Filipinos to govern themselves? The Americans should have known better — that very principle drove their own Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is touted as the model for the right to self-determination, the very right they denied the Filipinos when they colonized the Philippines. The Americans justified their occupation by claiming the Filipinos were not ready for self-governance. But how sure were they? Even then, the Filipinos would certainly have preferred to chart their own destiny as a nation, no matter the consequences. The world will never know what would have happened had the Americans given them the reins of their own government. While it isn’t certain the Filipinos would have succeeded, one thing is clear: the Philippines didn’t become a better nation simply because the Americans occupied it, either.

And let us not pretend that whatever roads, schools, or railways the Americans built were gifts paid for with American dollars. They were not. The colonial government operated under what was called a “self-supporting” budgetary system — every peso spent on Philippine infrastructure came from Philippine taxes, Philippine tariffs, and Philippine export revenue. Filipinos paid for their own colonization, administered by American hands. And what did those hands take in return? In 1899, American goods made up a mere 7 percent of what Filipinos imported; by 1934, that figure had ballooned to 66 percent. In that same span, the share of Philippine exports flowing to the United States rose from 26 percent to 84 percent — sugar, coconut, tobacco, abaca, and the gold and chromite pulled from Baguio and Surigao. The 1909 Payne-Aldrich Tariff dressed this up as “free trade,” but free trade between an industrial power and its colony is never quite free — one side sends raw material, the other sends finished goods, and profit finds its way to the side that already has the factories. Add to this the naval and military foothold the Americans secured in the Pacific — a strategic prize never once listed on any balance sheet — and the picture becomes clear: whatever the Americans built in the Philippines, the Filipinos had already paid for it twice over, once in tax pesos and once in raw resources shipped abroad.

It would have been a significant boost to Filipino pride had they been allowed to continue their war with Spain, which they were winning at the time. Instead, Spanish and American strategists connived to stage what later became known as the “Mock Battle of Manila Bay,” which the Americans purportedly won. That plan was concocted to prevent Manila, the nation’s capital, from falling into the hands of Filipino revolutionaries. Just imagine how a genuine victory like that would have affected the Filipino psyche — the nation’s character would have evolved in a much different direction. But it was not meant to be.

The last quarter of the 19th century was perhaps the most significant stage in the Philippines’ development. It was when nationalism began to flourish. It had taken centuries for the natives to put up a united front against their colonizers, but like the sun rising in the east, spreading its golden rays to signal a new day, an emerging solidarity among the natives became a portent of greater things to come — things that never came.

The most essential ingredient for national development was finally manifesting among Filipinos: the seeds of nationalism had begun to sprout. The influx of liberal ideas from Europe, the rise of the middle class, and the martyrdom of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora (GomBurZa) were among the factors believed to have fanned the flames of national unity.

It was a long and arduous journey toward national solidarity, made difficult by a combination of factors: the island nation’s geographical fragmentation, its people’s many dialects, and the Spaniards’ deliberate employment of divide-and-conquer tactics.

The Spaniards succeeded tremendously at this tactic — so much so that they reigned supreme for more than 300 years. But once the Filipinos began to develop a cohesive spirit that closed their geographical gaps and dismantled their language barriers with a deafening cry for freedom, the days of the Hispanic colonizers became numbered. The colonial masters suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the very people they had held by the neck for so long, and were forced to retreat to the walled city of Intramuros.

However, the next chapter of the Philippine drama unfolded not as the Filipinos had written the script, but as the directors from Hollywood penned it. Just as the Filipinos were ready to hammer the last nail into the coffin of Spanish tyranny, the Americans said, “CUUUTTTT!”

With near certainty, the revolution the Filipinos started in 1896 would have finally ended Spanish rule. The natives had them figured out. All they needed was to march together, hands bound by the bond of patriotism. The Filipinos were ready to storm Intramuros, the last bastion of Spanish rule, but were stopped in their tracks by the Americans — whom they wrongly perceived as an ally in their quest for freedom. The Filipinos naively believed that the Americans, who were also waging war against Spain in Cuba, had come as friends, not foes.

To cut the story short: the Americans occupied the Philippines once the Spaniards left, and the Filipinos were forced to wage war against a military far more powerful and advanced than their former colonizers.

The natives eventually lost that war, and the sprouts that had grown from the seeds of nationalism sown by the forebears of the Filipino race were never allowed to bloom. They were forcibly uprooted and trampled by the Americans. Historians explain that the new colonial masters extinguished the flames of Filipino nationalism through laws like the Sedition Law (1901), which imposed the death penalty or lengthy imprisonment on anyone advocating independence from the United States — even by peaceful means — and the Flag Law (1907), which prohibited the display of the Philippine flag anywhere.

Filipino nationalism was nipped in the bud. That period in Filipino history came to be called the “Era of Suppressed Nationalism.” While the natives were still licking the wounds inflicted by their former Spanish masters, the Americans began opening the very same wounds of subjugation.

As everybody knows, the justification offered by the Filipinos’ new colonial masters was that the natives were not ready for self-governance, and that leaving them to fend for themselves would have been chaotic.

They could have been right. But if they were wrong, we will never know now, will we? What critical-thinking Filipinos today do know is that the Americans had no right to deprive them of the chance to determine their own fate as a people at that time. The natives could have been left to face the consequences of standing on their own feet. No one had the right to deny the Filipinos the opportunity to claim their own victory against Spain. It would have meant so much had the colonizer surrendered to the colonized — that would have been a huge moral and psychological victory for a people enslaved and deprived of their fundamental rights and freedoms for so long. But instead of a boost to their spirit, the Americans’ actions wounded Filipino pride and stunted the growth of a stronger national character.

The Americans should have taken a page from their own history to understand how the Filipinos felt. According to historians, the American colonists fought for independence against Britain in the 1700s largely because they believed in the individual’s inalienable rights, and being taxed by the British Parliament without representation violated those rights. They believed no government could act without the consent of the governed. The Filipinos, likewise, did not want another foreign power ruling them — they had already had enough of the Spaniards. The Americans never had the Filipinos’ consent to stay in the country and govern them.

But the Filipinos could do nothing; no other country could come to their aid at the time. The Americans had had France to support their own bid for independence from Britain, and perhaps the Filipinos hoped America would “do a France” for them when it arrived. It was wishful thinking.

The Filipinos were on their own, and the world then was a vast jungle where colonial powers were the predators and weaker nations the helpless prey.

The Filipinos, then, could not even invoke any law to contest the legality of the American occupation. Imperialism makes its own rules and enforces them with brute force; because of its armed strength, imperial law simply supersedes international law. As one historian put it, the legality of imperial activity rests largely on the imperial state’s own judicial system and its own legal experts — a convenient arrangement, given that Americans, who championed liberalism, should have known that natural rights are not contingent on any particular culture, government, or custom, but are universal and inalienable.