2.9.

COMMISSION ON INDEPENDENCE, FILIPINO GRIEVANCES AGAINST GOVERNOR WOOD

(ZAIDE, 11. PP. 230-234). [PETITION LETTER]
The anti-Wood sentiment of Filipino officials exploded on July 21, 1923 with the decision of Governor General
to reinstate Ray Conley, chief of the vice squad of the Manila police force who was accused of receiving money
from gambling lords. Instead, they appointed Filipino politicians to key government positions hoping that by
doing so the Filipinos will slowly forget their desire for independence. Except for the governor general, the vice
governor, and a few more sensitive positions, all other positions were offered to Filipinos. The document
presented below summarizes the grievances and disgust of Filipino government officials who were affected by
Wood’s reforms and administrative ways. He also vetoed numerous bills that the Philippine legislature passed
and appointed American military men as officials under the executive branch (known as Khaki cabinet). Under
the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, the Jones Law categorically expressed that America would
give the Filipinos independence once a stable government is established. Instead of granting the request, Wood
created a board composed of other government officials. Local politicians held cabinet positions and top notch
Filipino lawyers were appointed to the Supreme Court. The Jones law also created a bicameral Congress that
gave opportunities to politicians based in the provinces to participate in policy making. Being in key
government positions, the Filipinos began to prove to the Americans that they are now competent to manage
their own affairs. However, the appointment of Francis Burton Harrison as governor general and the passage of
the Jones Law in 1916 (Philippine Autonomy Law) changed the political landscape in the Philippines. Quezon
and other members of the Nationalista Party were offended by the report because it insinuated that Filipino
leaders were corrupt and incompetent and therefore do not deserve yet to be given independence. During his
administration, he monitored closely the activities of local officials and checked their misconducts. Gov. Wood
tried to win back the Filipino officials who gave up their positions. No specific date was given but for Quezon
and other officials the written promise was already a significant achievement. The Filipinos expected that it
would not be long until America would consider the Filipinos as already compliant with the requirements of the
Jones Law and therefore must be given independence. When Manila Mayor Ramon Fernandez presented the
case to Gov. Wood, he advised the mayor file the case in court. It exposed the corruption and patronage system
that became prevalent in government owned and controlled corporations during the Harrison era. When
Leonard Wood retired from the U.S. Army in 1921, Harding appointed him as Governor General of the
Philippines. The case was initiated by Mr. Almario, secretary to the Mayor, who presented an alleged faked
telephone conversation between Conley and some gamblers. Wood personally believed that Conley was not
accountable and the charges against him were only fabrications of influential and well connected persons who
were affected by the anti-gambling campaign. After being sworn into office in October 1921, Filipino
politicians welcomed him thinking he would return to U.S. anyway in a year to assume the presidency of
University of Pennsylvania. They told Harding that they were also planning to send a delegation to the U. S. to
discuss Wood’s blatant disregard of the rights and privileges granted to Filipinos by the previous administration.
The mission conducted an exhaustive investigation visiting 48 provinces and 449 municipalities. It singled out
particularly the anomalous transactions in the administration of public lands and the banking malpractices that
resulted to the bankruptcy of the Philippine National Bank (P.N.B.).
THE TEXT
In the face of this critical situation, we, the constitutional representatives of the Filipinos people, met to
deliberate upon the present difficulties existing in the government of the Philippines island and determine how
best to preserve the supremacy and majesty of the laws and to safeguard the rights and liberties of our people,
having faith in the sense of justice of the people of the United States and inspired
by her patriotic example in the early days of her history, do hereby, in our behalf and in the name of the Filipino
people, solemnly and publicly make known our most vigorous protest against the arbitrary acts and usurpations
of the present Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, particularly against Executive Order No. 37. The
laws creating and defining the powers of the Board of Control have been in force and acted upon by the present
Governor-General and other officers of the government for a number of years and they have neither been
repealed by the Legislature, annulled by Congress, nor declared unconstitutional by the courts. Not content with
these and other arbitrary acts, the Governor-General has recently promulgated Executive Order no.37, declaring
that the laws creating and defining the powers of the Board of Control which is authorized to vote the stocks
owned by the government in certain private corporations, are absolute nullities.
The consciousness of our sacred and inescapable duty to our country and our sense of loyalty to the people of
the United States constrain to denounce the foregoing acts of the present Governor General as arbitrary,
oppressive and undemocratic.
He has rendered merely perfunctory by the power of Legislature to pass the annual appropriation law by
reviving items in the law of the preceding years, after vetoing the corresponding items of the current
appropriation act, in flagrant violation of the Organic Law. To hold that Governor-General by a mere executive
order can set them aside, is to subvert the whole system of constitutional government and destroy the theory of
separation of powers which the Governor-General has always been so intent in upholding.
Believing in the sincerity of America’s purpose, the Filipinos applied themselves with patient diligence to the
task of meeting the conditions exacted of them, anxiously awaiting the day when America would honor her
promise. He has endeavored, on the pretext of getting the government out of business, to dispose of all the
companies capitalized by the government worth many millions of the people’s money to powerful American
interest. Contrary, however, to our expectations, his conduct of the government has been characterized by a
train of usurpations and arbitrary acts, resulting in the curtailment of our autonomy, the destruction of our
constitutional system, and the reversal of America’s Philippine policy. He has adopted the practice of
intervening in, and controlling directly, to its minute details, the affairs of the Philippine Government, both
insular and local, in violation of self-government. He has insistently sought the amendment of our land laws
approved by the Congress of the United States, which amendment would open up the resources of our country
to exploitation by predatory interests.
He has used certain public funds to grant additional compensation to public officials.in clear violation of law.
He has arrogated unto himself the right of exercising the powers granted by law to the Emergency Board after
abolishing said board on the ground that its powers involved an unlawful delegation of legislative authority. He
has substituted his constitutional advisers for a group of military attaches without legal standing in the
government and not responsible to the people.
He has usurped legislative power by imposing conditions on legislative measures approved by him. This line
of conduct recently culminated in the issuance of Executive Order No. 37, by which he has attempted to nullify
laws creating the Board of Control and assumed the functions of that body.
He has sanctioned the campaign of insidious propaganda in the United States against the Filipino people and
their aspirations. He has, in the administration of affairs in Mindanao, brought about the condition which has
given rise to discord and dissension between certain groups of Christian and Mohammedan Filipinos. ` He has
refused to obtain the advice of the Senate in making appointments where such advice is required by the Organic
Act. American sovereignty was implanted in our country with the avowed purpose of training us in the art of
self-government and granting us independence. He has set at naught both the legal authority and responsibility
for the Philippine heads of departments.
 SPEECH OF PRESIDENT CORAZON AQUINO DURING
THE JOINT SESSION OF THE U.S. CONGRESS, SEPTEMBER 18, 1986
Again, as we restored democracy by the ways of democracy, so are we completing the constitutional structures
of our new democracy under a constitution that already gives full respect to the Bill of Rights. Today, we face
the aspirations of a people who had known so much poverty and massive unemployment for the past 14 years
and yet offered their lives for the abstraction of democracy. These are only two of the many burdens my people
carry even as they try to build a worthy and enduring house for their new democracy that may serve as well as a
redoubt for freedom in Asia. By the exercise of democracy, even in a dictatorship, they would be prepared for
democracy when it came. The distinguished co-chairman of the United States observer team in his report to
your President described that victory: “I was witness to an extraordinary manifestation of democracy on the part
of the Filipino people. You saw a people so committed to the ways of democracy that they were prepared to
give their lives for its pale imitation. Still, should it come to that, I will not waver from the course laid down by
your great liberator: “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the rights as God gives us
to see the rights, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have
borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Yet to all Americans, as the leader of a proud and free
people, I address this question: has there been a greater test of national commitment to the ideals you hold dear
than that my people have gone through? Today, I say, join us, America, as we build a new home for democracy,
another haven for the oppressed, so it may stand as a shining testament of our two nation’s commitment to
freedom. Yet equally, and again no friend of Filipino democracy will challenge this, I will not stand by and
allow an insurgent leadership to spurn our offer of peace and kill our young soldiers, and threaten our new
freedom. For even as the dictatorship demolished one by one the institutions of democracy – the press, the
Congress, the independence of the judiciary, the protection of the Bill of Rights – Ninoy kept their spirit alive in
himself. Half our export earnings, $2 billion out of $4 billion, which was all we could earn in the restrictive
markets of the world, went to pay just the interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people never received.
You saw a nation, armed with courage and integrity, stand fast by democracy against threats and corruption.
Elsewhere, and in other times of more stringent world economic conditions, Marshall plans and their like were
felt to be necessary companions of returning democracy. With little help from others, we Filipinos fulfilled the
first and most difficult conditions of the debt negotiation the full restoration of democracy and responsible
government. Three years ago, I said thank you, America, for the haven from oppression, and the home you gave
Ninoy, myself and our children, and for the three happiest years of our lives together. He detained my husband
along with thousands of others – senators, publishers and anyone who had spoken up for the democracy as its
end drew near. And true to their word, when a handful of military leaders declared themselves against the
dictatorship, the people rallied to their protection. Wherever I went in the campaign, slum area or impoverished
village, they came to me with one cry: democracy! At the end of the day, before another wave of fraud could
distort the results, I announced the people’s victory. I held fast to Ninoy’s conviction that it must be by the ways
of democracy. Archibald Macleish had said that democracy must be defended by arms when it is attacked by
arms and by truth when it is attacked by lies. The people vindicated me in an election shamefully marked by
government thuggery and fraud. So within about a year from a peaceful but national upheaval that overturned a
dictatorship, we shall have returned to full constitutional government. My predecessor set aside democracy to
save it from a communist insurgency that numbered less than 500. When a subservient parliament announced
my opponent’s victory, the people turned out in the streets and proclaimed me President. And so began the
revolution that has brought me to democracy’s most famous home, the Congress of the United States. But the
spirit of democracy that inheres in our race and animates this chamber could not be allowed to die. The task had
fallen on my shoulders to continue offering the democratic alternative to our people. Not work, although they
surely wanted it, but democracy. But I feel the pressing obligation to respond quickly as the leader of a people
so deserving of all these things. He had willed that the blood drawn with the lash shall not, in my country, be
paid by blood drawn by the sword but by the tearful joy of reconciliation. They didn’t expect me to work a
miracle that would instantly put food into their mouths, clothes on their back, education in their children, and
work that will put dignity in their lives. Yet, I must explore the path of peace to the utmost for at its end,
whatever disappointment I meet there, is the moral basis for laying down the olive branch of peace and taking
up the sword of war. Today, I have returned as the president of a free people. Two million people threw aside
their passivity and escorted him to his grave. I held out for participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship
called, even if I knew it would be rigged. But I was not fighting for lawyers but for the people in whose
intelligence I had implicit faith. Not food, although they clearly needed it, but democracy. We face a communist
insurgency that feeds on economic deterioration, even as we carry a great share of the free world defenses in the
Pacific. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it. At any
time during his long ordeal, Ninoy could have made a separate peace with the dictatorship, as so many of his
countrymen had done. He held out, in the loneliness of his cell and the frustration of exile, the democratic
alternative to the insatiable greed and mindless cruelty of the right and the purging holocaust of the left. We
have swept away absolute power by a limited revolution that respected the life and freedom of every Filipino.
That is my contract with my people and my commitment to God. The opposition swept the elections, garnering
a clear majority of the votes, even if they ended up, thanks to a corrupt Commission on Elections, with barely a
third of the seats in parliament. Last year, in an excess of arrogance, the dictatorship called for its doom in a
snap election. Surely, the people take care of their own. You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring
freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. A country that had lost faith in its future found it in a
faithless and brazen act of murder. Many conditions imposed on the previous government that stole this debt
continue to be imposed on us who never benefited from it. The people obliged. He stopped only when it dawned
on him that the government would keep his body alive after the fast had destroyed his brain. And then, also, it
was the only way I knew by which we could measure our power even in the terms dictated by the dictatorship.
And so, with barely any life in his body, he called off the fast on the fortieth day. I was warned by the lawyers
of the opposition that I ran the grave risk of legitimizing the foregone results of elections that were clearly going
to be fraudulent. You saw women poll watchers break out in tears as armed goons crashed the polling places to
steal the ballots but, just the same, they tied themselves to the ballot boxes. Fourteen years ago this month was
the first time we lost him. As President, I will not betray the cause of peace by which I came to power. Three
years ago, I left America in grief to bury my husband, Ninoy Aquino. As I came to power peacefully, so shall I
keep it. But his death was my country’s resurrection in the courage and faith by which alone they could be free
again.