The next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department, and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!” Contemporary American policy makers shirk from the hypocrisy of McKinley’s manifest destiny rationale, but it is useful to recollect in trying to understand the frustrations of Filipino nationalists.
On that same spot where the grandstand stood, amid the ruins and devastation of Manila nineteen years ago, the United States formally relinquished the islands back to its people, in ceremonies that mocked the truth. For even the little that was saved from the war was grudgingly given, and the aid that was to help Filipinos to reconstruct the country was tied up with the onerous Laurel-Langley Agreement giving Americans parity rights in the development of its natural resources. To Filipinos, it was the war for independence of 1898 all over again. This time it would not be fought in battlefields but in legislative halls, front pages, and diplomatic missions. It would be played out in slow motion, devoid of cataclysmic surges but equally painful and destructive. No matter what was said in the name of freedom and democracy, what 1946 meant was that the Philippines was being set free so long as they remained under American control. True, there was formal political freedom, but this amounted to nothing in the face of economic hardship and need for American aid. It merely signaled a more subtle form of domination, as colonial as the pre-independence period, but this time Filipinos were deprived of even the indignation of revolt. From here on, if Filipinos botched up their chance to develop their country, they would have only themselves to blame.
At the inauguration, across the grandstand stood the monument to the country’s national hero, José Rizal, who was executed by the Spaniards for fomenting revolution only a year before the Americans came. These historical facts were lost to most of the audience that morning, standing at attention during the ceremonies that would install the sixth President of the Philippine republic. There was not a cloud in the sky. But such are December mornings in this exotic city. It is the time of year with near-perfect weather.
Away from this convivial gathering were other Filipinos, the heirs of the recalcitrant revolutionaries of 1898 who viewed Presidential inaugurations with understandable reserve. They were not deceived by declarations of independence.