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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.