Dr. Milagros Camayon Guerrero - Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society,1898-1902

Copyright 2015

Milagros Camayon Guerrero

and Anvil Publishing, Inc.

Introduction copyright Vicente L. Rafael

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Recommended entry:

Guerrero, Milagros Camayon.

Luzon at war : contradictions in Philippine

society, 1898-1902 / Milagros Camayon Guerrero.

Mandaluyong City : Anvil Publishing, Inc., [c2015]

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-971-27-3256-0 (e-book)

1. Philippines History Revolution, 1898-1902.

2. Philippines Politics and government 1898-1902.

3. Philippines History Social aspect 1898-1902.

I. Title.

959.9031 DS679 2015 P520150267

Book design: Robbie Villegas (cover) and Jo B. Pantorillo (interior)

PREFACE

In 1958, the United States Government returned to the Philippines nearly three tons of material documents from the 1896 revolution to the March 1901 surrender of Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the Malolos Republic. They were collectively called Philippine Insurgent Records (PIR). Prior to their return, the U, S. National Archives microfilmed all these documents, which amounted to 643 rolls of film. These documents were taken from forces surrendering to the American Army, removed from government buildings and private houses, or extricated from corpses that lay unburied in the battlefield. Also captured were wagons of official records that accompanied Aguinaldos escape from Malolos thence to Cabanatuan and finally to Palanan, Isabela. They run the gamut of important official documents of the Malolos Republic to correspondences from municipalities and provinces,letters and numerous records from private citizens to hundreds of curious small bits of paper with the single word vale or promissory note for salaries to be redeemed, taken from the bodies of soldiers, dead and alive. John Rogers Meigs Taylor of the U. S. 14th Infantry became the custodian of this unusual cache of captured documents.

They are now deposited in the Rare Books and Manuscript Section at the Philippine National Library. Officials of the Library, mindful of the true nature of the materials, gave the archive a new name: Philippine Revolutionary Papers (PRR). To this day, however, the librarians at the desk call them Insurgent Records, indicating that as custodians of such an important archive they do not even understand the value of the records in their care. Most of these documents, however, were neither insurgent nor revolutionary, but papers of the officials of the Malolos Republic, surprising even themselves, according to Emilio Aguinaldo, that they knew how to run a government.

Upon his return to the United States, Captain Taylor of the U. S. 14th Infantry was assigned to the newly established Bureau of Insular Affairs to collate, organize, transcribe, translate, and annotate these materials, presumably for the guidance of the U. S. government in formulating policy regarding the new colony. The U. S. Army approved his project for the purpose of understanding the intricacies of insurgency in what later scholars would call the first Vietnam. He began this arduous task in 1902 and finished it in 1906. He had succeeded in putting together what he called Selected Documentsmore than 12,000 itemsthat formed the basis of a five-volume work, two of which were his historical narrative. This he asserts was a truthful version of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-American War which he, of course, called an insurrection. The pile of materials he could not make heads or tails of, he labelled Old Series or New Series, which from a cursory inspection is also a treasure trove not so much for an understanding of the war but for the social and cultural history of the time.

I have pointed out in Chapter 1 that his cavalier treatment of the Filipinos contributed to the suppression of his work. But apparently, according to John Morgan Gates and William Farrel, some politics was also involved in the final decision to throw his work to the dustbin. James LeRoy was also working on the American conquest of the Philippines and he must have been absolutely flabbergasted that here was a work truly superior to his manuscripts. James LeRoys two-volume work, The Americans in the Philippines, published in 1913, was even more vituperative and condescending (to) the Filipinos. But he got the support of some officials in the Bureau of Insular Affairs where Taylor was also posted as military historian. Taylors two-volume history was accompanied by a three-volume compilation of documents which today are extremely useful to the mindful researcher, as this important period in our history is rapidly fading from our collective memory.

LeRoy had worked as a member of the staff of William Howard Taft in the Philippines and always had the latters ear. LeRoy objected to the publication; Secretary of War Taft, himself, objected to Taylors work as it could be used by the Democratic opposition which had opposed Americas adventure in the Philippines. His curt reply to Taylor that the five volumes needed corrections must have confused the author. Until the 1930s, the latter sought permission for the publication of his work, but the galley proofs lay entombed and forgotten in the Bureau of Insular Affairs. In truth, Taft feared Taylors work as it considerably was revelatory of the nature of the Filipino elite. Taylors language and analysis would embarrass and insult them and endanger the warm alliance that had been built with the Americans. The historical record shows that the Americans did not seek to obtain their collaboration. The Filipino elite applauded Americas victory over the Filipinos and they presented themselves as willing and able cogs in the machine that the Americans were set to establish. Even while still members of the Malolos Congress, they were already unabashedly enthusiastic supporters of, and were therefore important and indispensable tools for, American colonization. Indeed, as the brilliant work of Norman Owen, Compadre Colonialism has shown, if this elite had not existed, the Americans would have created one themselves.

In 1971, when the Eugenio Lopez Foundation decided to publish Taylors suppressed The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States, A Compilation of Notes and Introduction, the late Don Eugenio Lopez and his son, Oscar Lopez, probably did not know that they were bequeathing to the Filipinos a precious legacy, a key to understanding an important period in their political and cultural history and make some sense of that massive archives that lay behind his work. There were only three sets of galley proofs, one in the possession of the Lopez Museum, and a second set, safe in the United States National Archives in Washington, D.C, within the Bureau of Insular Affairs Records. A third set has not been located. A year before I left the Philippines to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, I was appointed copy editor to go through the galley proofs, along with two other young faculty members at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, whose identities I have never found out. For my part, I was gifted by the Lopez Memorial Museum a set of uncut volumes, now out of print and quite rare, which became my portal to Microscopy 254, composed of 643 reels of microfilm records of the archive mentioned above.