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Heresies
Revisiting the American Past
by P.N. Abinales

During his tenure at Cornell University, Frank Hindman Golay became one of the leading authorities on Philippine economic development. His book The Philippines: Public Policy and National Economic Development (Cornell, 1961) remains one of the best evaluations of the country’s post-war political economy, its potentials and its bottlenecks. It was also quite controversial since it elicited criticisms from both ends of the political spectrum.

Nationalists and radicals attacked it for its advocacy of more open economy, while the right – and by this I refer to those who held political power – expressed anger over its general criticism of government corruption and inefficiencies. But as a work by a liberal scholar, it was quite a solid opus – many of its recommendations adopted, at least formally, by government and its commentaries on state corruption appropriated by anti-state political forces.

When he retired from Cornell, Golay found himself becoming more interested in tracing the origins of the post-war Philippine political economy to its colonial roots. He would spend countless hours at Cornell’s extensive Philippine materials at then the Wasson Collection of the Olin Graduate Library, as well as in the American National Archives, amassing the empirical evidence that would enable him to understand how post-war economic and political configurations came to be. Golay managed to write a first draft but was unable to return to it in his last years. The ravages of Alzheimer’s disease took their toll on his brilliant mind, and he passed away in August 1990 leaving behind the manuscript unfinished.

His wife first approached Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program to inquire about the possibility of publishing this tome, but no one had the time, and the energy to go over the manuscript, check the endnotes (many of which were incomplete) with the two huge filing cabinet-full of note cards and scribbling, revise the manuscript and then prepare it for publication. Besides no one among the Program’s brilliant faculty was a Philippine and American specialist: Benedict Anderson was the one who knew most about the Philippines and perhaps of turn-of-the-century America, but his priorities were with Indonesia, Thailand and political theory.

Clara Golay eventually ended up asking the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison if it would be interested in the manuscript. Unlike Cornell, the Center’s staff included a solid group of Philippinists (historians Alfred W. McCoy and Michael Cullinane and political scientist Paul Hutchcroft). In a laudable effort and using whatever human and material resources it could muster, the center undertook the revision. The result is Face of Empire, a thick, extremely detailed but also analytically sophisticated work on the American colonial period.

Golay’s traced “the intricate development of U.S. colonial policy in the Philippines,” focusing mainly on difficulties of colonial governance, particularly when it came to economic policy. He argued that US-Philippine relations progressed or backslid depending on the character of those in power. For example, a resilient narrow-mindedness and an ignorance of a world outside the continent accounted for American disinterestedness towards the “new possession.” These were reflected in the refusal of the U.S. congress to aid in economic development and its unwillingness to consistently fund the colony. Personal ambition that was directed at a future in American domestic politics likewise politicized colonial policy. So when American officials regarded their ambitions more important than colonial development, the result was devastating for the Philippines. Such was the case of Douglas MacArthur and his mismanagement of the defense of the Philippines in World War II. And there were many others like him.

Golay was more ambivalent towards the Filipinos. He described his book also as “essentially an account of the campaign of Filipinos for political power” via “a monolithic political party capable of speaking for an overwhelming majority of the Filipino people and headed by a nationalist leader firmly in control of the party.” One-party rule engendered corruption and administrative mismanagement, but there were also flashes of Filipino political and administrative capabilities. Golay was suspicious of Manuel L. Quezon, but could not help admire how the latter “enroache[d] upon the American monopoly over executive power” and eventually dominated the colonial state. In the end, his criticism of Quezon was not as intense and methodical as his censure of MacArthur. In fact there was a hint of admiration in the book for the passionate way Quezon sought to expand his power in the government.

By focusing on the idiosyncrasies of people, the book is an odd post-colonial echo of the writings of colonial bureaucrat-scholars like J.R. Hayden. Golay accepted the reality of colonialism and seemed to suggest that there was something intrinsically good in the enterprise. It went awry because Filipinos and Americans put their ambitions ahead of the colonial mission (here Golay parted company with Hayden when he placed equal blame on the Americans). What eventually happened was a “well-intentioned” imperial policy [that] ended up with the U.S. granting the Philippines independence under “dishonorabl[e]” terms.

The book’s value lies not only in the incredible detail it went into to show the nuances of colonial politics. Golay also did one thing that many Philippinists often ignore: he examined the links between American domestic politics and colonial state-building, showing – without explicitly stating however – the unusual parallel development of these two processes. By devoting attention to the struggles involving the War Department, the Presidency, Congress and the Democratic and Republican parties over how to govern the Philippines, Golay further suggested that there was really no unanimous, single ideology of colonial rule. In fact, what made the United States unique among the colonial powers in the region was her inability to maintain a coherent policy on the Philippines. There were always constant institutional, party and group battles among Americans in the U.S. domestic arena, between Americans in the Philippines and their compatriots in the mainland, and among Americans in the colony, over the directions that “benevolent assimilation” should take.

While Golay failed to situate these institutional battles within the broader context of an American polity undergoing a “critical realignment” at the turn of the century, his presentation was more than enough to show that American colonialism was not just a local process. In fact, at the same time as the colonial state was being built, a structural transformation was also taking place in American politics with the construction of a “new American state” with potentially powerful national administrative capacities. Thus the Philippine colonial state and the American national state evolved at almost the same time, exhibiting features that reminded one of the other, and laying down the foundations for the strengthening of their respective central leaderships (Quezon and the Commonwealth; Roosevelt and the New Deal) up to the eve of World War II.

Review of Face of Empire: United States-Philippine Relations, 1898-1946, by Frank Hindman Golay. Quezon City. Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.

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Opinyon

Editorial
Pagpukaw sa kolektibong gunita

Heresies
Revisiting the American Past

Etsa-Pwera
Ang partnership ni Big Boss at ni Boss

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