RIPH

• The Treaty of Paris was signed


  December 10, 1898
• The Treaty of Paris was concluded and signed by their respective plenipotentiaries at Paris
• Commissioners (August 12, 1898, 5 Americans and 5 Spanish commissioners)


  • USA (citizens): Cushman Davis, William Frye, Whitelaw Reid, George Gray, William Day
  • SPAIN: Eugenio Montero Rios, Buenaventura Abarzuza, Jose de Garnica, Wenceslao Ramirez de Villa-Urrutia, Gen. Rafael Cerero
• The Peace Commission met in Paris from October to December 1898 and negotiations were made
• The Treaty of Paris provided that Spain would cede the Philippines to the US for $20,000,00
• The controversial treaty was approved on February 6, 1899 by a vote 57 to 27, only one vote more than the two-thirds majority required
• Treaty Provisions


  • Gave up all rights to Cuba
  • Surrendered Puerto Rico and gave up its possessions in the West Indies
  • Surrendered the island of Guam to the United States
  • Surrendered the Philippines to the United States for a payment of twenty million dollars
• Philippine political cartoons gained full expression during the American era
• Filipino artists recorded national attitudes toward the coming of the Americans as well as the changing mores and times
• The 377 cartoons compiled in this book speak for themselves
• Alfred McCoy's extensive research in Philippine and American archives provides a comprehensive background not only to the cartoons but to the turbulent period as well
• Alfredo Roces (Artist-writer) designed the book and contributes an essay on Philippine graphic satire of the period
• Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in Southeast Asia
• Alfred McCoy has written about and testified before Congress on Philippine political history, opium trafficking in the Golden Triangle, underworld crime syndicates, and international political surveillance
• A. Is the Police Force Bribed?

  The first of Manila's periodic police scandals
• Pedro Chua, a mysterious informant, wrote the Philippines Free Press alleging that senior police were accepting bribes from Chinese gambling houses in Binondo and Quiapo districts
• The Philippines Free Press


  A leading weekly newspaper with the power to spark allegations that led eventually to "the suicide of a police chief"
• Despite the Free Press retreat, Vicente Sotto's Independent insisted that Chua's charges were accurate
• Police corruption in gambling law enforcement were a constant theme in cartoons throughout the American period (several times per year)
• The cartoonist Fernando Amorsolo gave the illustration a racist edge, depicting the Filipino policeman with normal features and the Chinese as caricatured, emaciated, leering creatures more rodent than human
• B. New Bird of Prey


  An allusion to the most famous libel case in the history of Philippine journalism, where the nationalist weekly El Renacimiento published an editorial titled Aves de Rapina (Birds of Prey) which attacked the Philippines commission's secretary of the interior, Dean C. Worcester, for abusing his office to exploit the country
• As Manila's population began to pilot upward during World War I, housing became scarce, and rents escalated, reducing the Manila working class to sudden poverty
• Governor-General Francis B. Harrison made a tentative move towards rent reform by suggesting passage of a bill which set rents at 12 percent of assessed value of the property, but this was little more than a temporary palliative
• Although collected from all Filipinos, government taxes were used to reward the Filipino elite for their loyalty, not to advance the mass
• With the exception of public education, the mass had little access to any of the new government programs or services
• The marketplace resolved the food crisis when world market cereal prices crashed in the early 1920's
• C. While the Priest Lives Alone in a Big Building

  The nationalist publisher Vicente Sotto of The Independent never missed a chance to attack the Catholic Church, urging the government to confiscate the large priests' residence attached to Santacruz parish church
• The 1906 Philippine Supreme Court had ruled that the Roman Catholic Church was the legal owner of all disputed properties, thus stripping the nationalistic Aglipayan Church of the parish churches it had occupied right after the revolution
• The controversial parish house became a branch of Phil Trust, a church owned bank
• D. Where the Mosquito Is King, Donde El Mosquito Es Rey


  Manila was built on a swamp and ringed with streams and ponds, a natural breeding ground for malarial mosquitos
• Through an arbitrary application of public health regulations, the Board of Health brought tropical disease -- malaria, smallpox, cholera and plague -- under control during the American era
• The "Filipinization" program led to the Board of Health being turned over to Filipino civil servants who did not administer the public health programs with the same efficiency or arbitrary authority, leading to a resurgence of mosquitos in Manila
• E. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" "Libertad, Igualdad, Fraternidad"

  The Philippine Assembly passed a law authorizing all legislators, active or retired, to bear firearms, which the Manila press was outraged by but the legislators ignored
• The Free Press mocked this law, commenting that it would allow the officials to "strut around with a gun or two guns strapped about their manly waists" and be "respected"
• F. The Returning Student – El Estudiante Vuelve

  The annual ritual of the city-wise student returning home to his village from Manila, the national center for university education, was played out in barrios across the archipelago
• The Free Press description captures the flavor of this ritual, with the returning student being the "cynosure of all eyes" and the "arbiter elegantiarum", strutting along Main Street in his latest fashions and being the object of "emulation and envy"
• The Free Press description of this annual ritual in 1929: 'These are the days of the returning student -- the days when he comes into his own. Behold him as he struts along Main Street of his little town or barrio, the cynosure of all eyes, the observed of all observers, a king In his own right, a sort of collegiate Caesar. The arbiter elegantiarum, also, he is. Does he not come from the great city, with all the latest there is in dress and fashion? His clothes are studied, his shoes are studied, his hat and how he wears it-- everything about him becomes the object of emulation and envy. Even his manner of walking, of carrying himself, are studied and aped.'
• Is it any wonder that, under the incense of such flattery, he feels himself a superior being, a conquering hero? Nor let us blame him. For after all the student, like the rest of us, is human, and all of us expand in an atmosphere of homage and hero-worship. Nor do student days and these joyful homecomings last for ever. All too soon comes the stern battle of life with its trials and sorrows and tribulations. So, carpe diem, and be joyful while we may.
• As social conflict and socialist ideology spread in Central Luzon during the 1930s the Free Press was forced to deal with social substance instead of bucolic trivia in its provincial reportage.
• The Depression worsened

  Central Luzon peasants mounted strikes and demonstrations to win tenancy reforms