Agoncillo, Teodoro A. "Philippine Historiography in the Age of Kalaw." In History and Culture, Language and Literature: Selected Essays of Teodoro A. Agoncillo, ed. Bernardita Reyes Churchill. Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2003. 3-29.
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Philippine Historiography in the Age of Kalaw1
Historical writings by Filipinos from the 1880s to the death of Teodoro M. Kalaw in 1940 are necessarily limited not only in number but also in scope. This may be ascribed to several reasons, principal among which are, first, because the Filipinos were not yet a free people, being then under the Spaniards and later under the Americans and therefore did not enjoy a wide latitude of freedom so necessary in intellectual and artistic flowering; second, the lack of inducement in the form of wide readership which, in turn, is dependent on the rate of literacy; and lastly, history as a discipline was, insofar as Filipinos were and still are concerned, not considered as important and popular as literature, particularly poetry. A survey of the historical works published during the period I call the Age of Kalaw, gives the impression that Filipinos are not historically minded, an impression that finds partial justification in the way we treat our libraries and archives. Our successive governments have not been kind to these two cultural institutions, and how our own government treated them affected the attitude of the great mass of the people, the educated as well as the half-educated and the uneducated.
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The problem of history writing today in our country is not as serious as it was during the Age of Kalaw, for today we have scholarships, fellowships, travel grants, research grants, grants-in-aid, and other forms of financial help which make historical research a stretch of road strewn with roses compared with the days of Pardo de Tavera, Paterno, de los Reyes, and others who had, in some instances, to use profusely their unbridled imagination to produce historical works that are akin to fiction. Yet, in spite of the obstacles to historical research and writing, those pioneers in Philippine historiography deserve to be remembered because they produced historical works which, though not "scientific" from the point of view of the academic student of history, nevertheless cleared the way for the younger generation of historical writers to tread on it lightly and with confidence. If today they seem to some of us to appear as museum pieces, it is because we tend to forget that all have a beginning, and they, the pioneers of Philippine historiography, were our beginning, our very foundation without whom the present generation of history students would be in Erehwon.
I have chosen Teodoro M. Kalaw (1884-1940) as the centerpiece of the period and named it after him because among all the historical writers of his generation, he was the most deeply and seriously concerned with collecting Filipiniana materials, especially those relating to the most significant epoch of our history, the Revolution of 1896-1898. In saying so, I do not ignore Don Jaime C. de Veyra, with whom I had had an intimate contact, whose Filipiniana collection was one of the best in the country, Don Rafael Palma, and Don Epifanio de los Santos, whose knowledge of their country at that period of our history was something phenomenal. Although these scholars invested their time and money in knowing the past of the Philippines, they did not have ample opportunity, like Don Teodoro M. Kalaw, to concentrate their time and effort in the extensive search for the country's past. It is true that Don Teodoro himself had, on several occasions, been distracted by the multifarious activities he engaged in -- from journalism and literature to legislative and bureaucratic activities -- but he never neglected to develop his collector's instincts. On the contrary, his varied governmental and non-govern-
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mental connections gave him the widest opportunity to collect materials for our history, and although he was able to use a fraction of the materials he had at the tip of his fingers due to his varied activities, he was, nevertheless, able to publish
Born on March 31, 1884 in the town of Lipa, Batangas -- a town famous for its coffee, arrogant rich, intellectual aristocrats, and what Felipe G. Calderon jeeringly described as "inordinately proud people" -- Kalaw witnessed not the glory and grandeur of his town when, according to the old folks of Taal and Lemery, women wore their slippers dotted with diamonds, but the beginning of its decline, when the coffee blight began to destroy the coffee plants because, according to the perhaps envious or superstitious poor Lipeños, their wealthy fellow townsmen and women made the coffee beans, and not the Virgin, the object of veneration during religious processions. This was the common people's explanation of why Lipa, the jewel of Batangas after Taal declined in importance, lost its leadership in coffee production and, consequently, its economic decline.
But while Lipa continued to decline economically, it developed, on the other hand, its intellectual resources. The Katigbaks, the Kalaws, the Solises, the Aguileras, the Reyeses, the Africas, and others, rose to prominence as intellectual leaders of the town. Social stratification not only remained, it became more pronounced. Thus, as the late inimitable satirist in English, Federico Mangahas, once said in his Manila Tribune column "Maybe" long before the war in the Pacific, the Kalaws spoke only to the Katigbaks and the Katigbaks spoke only to the Almighty. So, while only a few of Lipa's wealthy of yesteryears are remembered today, its intellectuals are known and highly respected not only in Batangas but throughout the Philippines.
It was in this intellectual atmosphere that Don Teodoro grew up and had his being. Revolutionary leaflets, and one or two small newspapers, reached the common men and energized them to fight for home and country, for human dignity and freedom. At the same time, the other towns of the province flared up and the famous Batangueno tem-
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per found visible expression in what the Tagalogs call the hero's mystique of fighting more furiously the more he is wounded. Don Teodoro, then in his early teens, began collecting the revolutionary leaflets and periodicals, and, in the course of his life as journalist-literary man, legislator, and bureaucrat, he succeeded in building up a library whose centerpiece was the revolutionary period. Many years later, he collected Apolinario Mabini's works, including his letters, and published them under the authority of the National Library. I shall return to this subject when I discuss the record of the Andres Bonifacio trial whose English translation, but not the original, was published during his lifetime. Having finished his law studies in Manila, he joined the staff of the then famous nationalistic newspaper El Renacimiento, subsequently becoming its colorful editor. It is, perhaps, not irrelevant to emphasize here that Don Teodoro did not lose his interest in Philippine history in spite of his having been elected to the Philippine Assembly and his joining the central government as factotum to Sergio Osmeña and Manuel L. Quezon. On the contrary, the various positions he held gave him vast opportunities to collect historical materials, mostly documentary, without which no historian worth his name could write with competence and credibility.
Meanwhile, the history of the Philippines was being written, as it had been, by the Spanish missionaries and government officials. The Filipinos, being ignorant and generally prevented from being educated until the second half of the nineteenth century, were placed in the category of preserved specimens in the laboratory with no active participation in the administration of their affairs, except in some cases of ill-conceived revolts and uprisings. Reading the books and accounts of adventures in the Philippines, one finds the Filipinos submerged under the avalanche of Spanish self-congratulatory verbosity, thus producing not the history of the Philippines but Spanish history in the Islands. This is not to deny the self-effacing sacrifices and the sense of justice of the early missionaries who did not ignore, nor justify, the civil official's uncivil behavior in the discharge of their duties. However, by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, the succeeding missionaries, generally speaking, failed to live up to the tradition of
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high morality, suffering, and self-abnegation which their predecessors sowed in Philippine soil.
With the dissemination of the later missionaries and civil officials' accounts of the Philippines -- with the possible exception of Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas where he recognized the virtues of the Filipinos -- the mind of the Filipino had become attuned to the prejudices, lack of understanding or simply refusal to understand, and bad faith of the generality of Spanish chroniclers. Thus the Filipino developed a sense of inferiority, encouraged by the "master race," which the Americans inflamed when they came and conquered at the turn of the century. The history books written by Americans for Filipinos, such as those of David P. Barrows and Prescott Jernigan2, are a little better than those written by the Spaniards, with this difference: that the Americans tried to understand the Filipinos but could not. The Filipino's role, then, was to be written about but not to write about himself. It was not until the last two decades of the nineteenth century that some Filipinos of high education, especially those who had been to Spain were a whiff of liberalism had blown across the Peninsula or those who had been allowed to enroll at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas took courage to write about the Philippines. But it is obvious that with the possible exception of Gregorio Sanciano y Gozon's (1852-1897) El Progreso de Filipinas (Madrid, 1881) and Rizal's annotations to Morga's Sucesos (1890), the general history written by Filipinos up to approximately the 1950s has been moulded in the Spanish school of Montero y Vidal, Barrantes, and Retana.
To this school belonged Pedro Alejandro Paterno y Debera Ignacio (1857-1911). Belonging to a family that traced its wealth to the rise of the Filipino elite before the middle of the nineteenth century, Paterno studied in Spain, brushed shoulders with Spanish grandees, among them a man who would twice become governor-general of the Philippines (Fernando Primo de Rivera), and wrote verses, publishing his
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little book of poems entitled Sampaguitas. His younger contemporaries called him, more in depreciation then in appreciation, sampaguitero. It was conceded that Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera was the most versatile of Filipino writers, excepting Rizal, of course, for the Filipino scholar, although looking every inch a Spaniard — with his beard, longish face, deep-set eyes, and high thin nose decorated with a pince nez, -- wrote on many Philippine subjects, from medicine to paleography to linguistics, to numismatics to cartography to history to metrical romances to education to social problems, and so on and so forth. But in point of bulk and diversity, Paterno was not behind Pardo de Tavera, for he wrote not only on history but also on ethnography, law, politics, prehistory, poetry, drama, novel, ad infinitum. To him belonged the honor of having written the first novel by a Filipino, Ninay (Madrid, 1885), whose footnotes exceed in number the footnotes of his seven-volume Historia de Filipinas.
Paterno's first venture into Philippine history was his La Antigua Civilización Tagala (Madrid, 1887), also the first by a Filipino to deal extensively with pre-Spanish Tagalog culture. This is of course based on the testimonies of the missionaries at the point of contact whose observations of native culture at the coming of the Spaniards have been considered incontrovertible, but Paterno's historical imagination roamed widely and transcended its limits to enter the realm of fiction. His lack of control over his rich imagination which, had he properly harnessed it, would have been a great asset in the writing of history, led him to write history in the manner of his novel Ninay. In 1908, after his El Régimen Municipal en Filipinas (Madrid, 1893) and other works not related to history or only tangential to history came out, Paterno published his Historia Critica de Filipinas (Manila, 1908), 3 volumes, followed by the seven-volume Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1908-1912), by El Pacto de Biyak-na-bato (Manila, 1910), and finally, by Sinopsis de Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1911), a summary of his voluminous Historia, done probably because nobody had the time and patience to wade through seven volumes of facts and fancies intertwined in a manner that a less discerning reader would not be able to distinguish between the one and the other.
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Let me reminisce at this point and recall to you my undergraduate days at the University of the Philippines at Padre Faura when one day, my professor, Dr. Leandro H. Fernandez, suggested that I write a term paper on Paterno's seven-volume opus, accompanying his suggestion with a naughty smile. Being young and naive, I took him seriously and so I went to the Filipiniana Section of the U.P. Library and unknowingly began my trek to Calvary. After finishing the first volume, I went straight to Dr. Fernandez's office at the third floor of the University Hall, now the Ministry of Justice, and told him, quite innocently, my impression of Paterno's first volume. There was a loud explosion of laughter, Dr. Fernandez's eyes disappearing in the process and, continuing his uncontrolled laughter, said, "Agoncillo, you have had enough."
Today, Paterno's historical works are museum pieces and are touched only by bibliographers. But in his day, he was the toast of the town, the máginoó, the man who arranged the truce of Biyak-na-Bato. Of all his works of history, his memoirs of the truce of Biyak-na-Bato is the only credible and important one, for it deals not only with a crucial event in the history of the Filipinos in which he participated but also serves as a counterpoint to Aguinaldo's account of the truce and, more especially, to Governor-General Fernando Primo de Rivera's Memoria Dirigida al Senado (Madrid, 1898). Except for El Pacto, all of Paterno's historical works are forgotten and are not mentioned even in the circles of students of history.
Paterno was not alone in using his imagination freely; he had a rival in Isabelo de los Reyes (1864-1938), a patriot, a publicist, a journalist, a folklorist, a historian, occasionally a poet, and above all, a passionate lover. Like Paterno, he had written much on history, but unlike him, most of his works deal with local history. Witness his "Las Visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista," a thin pamphlet published in Iloilo in 1887; "Ang Pagsalacay ni Limahong sa Maynila," another thin pamphlet published in Manila in 1889 and translated into Tagalog by a shy person hiding under the initials JCY; and the two-volume Historia de Ilokos, published in Manila in 1890, a work that the Ilokanos considered, until recent years, their Mosaic tablets descended from the
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Caraballo Mountain. His works that may be said to be of national scope are Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1889), which purportedly deals with pre-colonial days, and La Religion del "Katipunan" (Madrid, 1899). So unreliable is the Historia that Pardo de Tavera, always in a habit of calling a spade a spade, described it as "de carácter infantile." Not a kind word to say about a fellow-author, but then Don Belong, as Isabelo de los Reyes was popularly called, could not help being a folklorist and so even as a historian he could not exorcise the folklore spirit from his body. Like Paterno, he did not know or could not rein in or harness his imagination: instead of using it for historical purposes he misused it for folkloric convenience. It is obvious to any reader of Don Belongs historical works that he mistook creative imagination, as it is used in fiction and poetry, for historical imagination. His La Religion is something that contemporary students of history should read with great care for while some of his data are correct, if checked against documentary evidence, many of his assertions are at best conjectures and therefore without factual basis. Most readers today who do not have enough background in the broad field of Philippine history, or even of any of its segments, are easily impressed by conjectures that sound beautiful to hear but which, upon close scrutiny, are nothing but sound, fury, and prejudice.
Don Belong's name in Philippine history is secure not as a writer or historian but as propagandist of the revolutionary cause, the founder of the first labor movement and, more importantly, of the Philippine Independent Church. For these three achievements alone, he truly deserves to be called one of the great Filipinos. His historical works, however, should be placed side by side with those of Paterno in a museum of pioneering works.
Philippine historiography will be incomplete without mentioning General EmilioAguinaldo (1869-1964) who, although neither a writer nor a historian, had written a historical work which may be very limited in scope but whose importance cannot be ignored -- at least by any dedicated student of Philippine history, specifically of the revolutionary period (1896-1898). His Reseña Verídica de la Revolución Filipina (Tarlak, 1899), which sets forth his side of the controversial
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issue of whether or not Rear Admiral George Dewey promised him independence in their tête-à-tête in the captain's cabin of the Olympia is indispensable in the study of the beginnings of the Filipino-American relations at the end of the nineteenth century. Some students of the Revolution -- and one of them was my former professor, the late Dr, Leandro H. Fernandez -- suspected that the Reseña Verídica was not Aguinaldo's brainchild but that of Felipe Buencamino, who, by the late 1898, had ingratiated himself into the good graces of Aguinaldo.
In my researches on the revolutionary period at the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. in the 1950s: I found in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress a box which, upon opening, yielded a thick manuscript in Tagalog. When I read it, I immediately concluded that the handwriting was Aguinaldo's and that the contents were those contained in Reseña Verídica, but only the Tagalog manuscript was detailed. A study of the manuscript, especially its internal aspect, indicated to me that Aguinaldo, not being well-versed in Spanish but could write passably in Tagalog, asked Buencamino to translate his manuscript into Spanish so that both the Spaniards and the Americans would understand why the Filipinos were fighting to death to win their freedom and independence. A comparison between the original Tagalog and the Spanish translation clearly shows that Buencamino -- or whoever rendered the translation -- took it upon himself to abbreviate the work probably for two reasons: first, it was necessary to finish the Spanish version as soon as possible so it could be published and disseminated to the world at large; and second, for the foreign readers, the details were dull and to translate them might bore them to death. Whatever the reason of the translator or summariser, the Spanish version is very much shorter than Aguinaldo's original Tagalog work.
Aguinaldo later in life wrote his memoirs Mga Gunita ng Himagsikan (Manila, 1964), whose English translation appeared in 1967. Although published long after Kalaw's death, the work was actually begun before his death. This last work of Aguinaldo may be heavily relied upon where the subject discussed fell into his competence, that is, the events narrated were actually witnessed or participated in by him. Otherwise,
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there are incidents in the memoirs which he had not witnessed but which he described as if he actually saw them. As a matter of fact, when he was writing his memoirs on yellow ruled paper, he borrowed two books in my collection: Jose M. del Castillo's El Katipunan ó El Filibusterismo (Madrid, 1897) and Manuel Sastrón's La Insurrección en Filipinas, Vol.1 (Madrid, 1897) which, he told me, he would consult to refresh his memory. But the memoirs, like the other memoirs to be mentioned here, are not, strictly speaking, creative works of history. They are, by their very nature, self-serving and should be used with great care as historical materials only after a severe critical study of their statements and conclusions.
Along with Aguinaldo, a student of Philippine history cannot ignore Apolinario Mabini's (1863-1901) pamphlet, La Revolución Filipina, which he himself translated into English. Its date of writing may be placed at about 1901 when he was an exile in Guam. In the third decade of the American regime, two editions of the Spanish and Mabini's own English translations were privately printed, but it was not until 1931 that Teodoro M. Kalaw, then Director of the National Library, officially published Mabini's Guam opus under the imprimatur of the National Library. The Kalaw edition of Mabini's works has two volumes, the first containing a long biography of the Paralytic by then President Rafael Palma of the University of the Philippines, Mabini's Constitutional Program of the Philippine Republic, and some of his letters. The second volume contains Mabini's other letters, articles, memoirs of his exile to Guam, and finally, his La Revolución Filipina. Mabini's précis of the Revolution of 1896 is, as to be expected, rather superficial and is erroneous in some places, but the importance of his work lies not in the accuracy of his statements and his impartiality -- which he was not -- but in delineating the true character of the Revolution and the sacrifices of the masses who were looked down upon by the wealthy, the not-so-wealthy, and the intellectuals, and in admitting openly that there was no unity in the Filipino camp. On the death of Luna, the reader should be extra careful, for Mabini exhibited an inconsistency: in a letter to Galicano Apacible in mid-1899, he denounced Luna for being too ambitious and defended Aguinaldo against Luna's alleged abuses. In the Guam opus, Mabini turned
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around, denounced Aguinaldo, and praised Luna. A student of history who has a good common sense, not to say background in historical methodology, can easily see the reason for the inconsistency and correctly choose which Mabini should be taken seriously.
In 1906, a series of articles entitled "Sobre Una ‘Reseña Histórica de Filipinas'," bristling with ecclesiastical indignation, appeared in the Catholic newspaper Libertas. The author was the Very Reverend Fr. Serapio Tamayo, Rector Magnificus of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas. The cause of the uncommon indignation was the publication of Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera's (1857-1925) "Reseña Histórica de Filipinas Desde su Descubrimiento Hasta 1903," which first appeared in Volume 1 of the Census of 1903, published in Washington in 1905, and republished as a separate pamphlet in Manila in 1906. The reason for the re-publication of Pardo de Tavera's only extended historical work is that his original Spanish, which was sent to Washington as part of the first volume of the Census, was translated into English without his knowledge and was in turn translated into Spanish. A case of translation of a translation. Pardo de Tavera was outraged at the result -- considering that translation is always a treason -- and his beard quivered menacingly at the American or Americans responsible for traducing his original text. Hence the re-publication of his original Spanish.
The Reseña Histórica, as the title suggests, is a brief survey of Philippine history, or more accurately, the history of Spain in the Philippines, which brings the narrative to the coming of the Second or Taft Commission in 1900, although the title of the work says "hasta 1903." One can easily understand the Very Rev. Tamayo's unusual reaction, for the Reseña is unabashedly anti-clerical and its author's clerical antipathy was, in those days of bigotry, not kindly looked upon. Moreover, Pardo de Tavera was an atheist and so one can fully comprehend the severity with which he was castigated by the Reverend Father.
Father Tamayo dissected Pardo de Tavera's only historical work and exposed what the good Father called "calumniosos errors" of the learned doctor. Before proceeding to pick him to pieces, Father Tamayo, like a cat playing with a mouse, left-handedly admitted Pardo de Tavera's learning, calling him a man whom people today would call "a man of
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all seasons," or in more pretentious terms "a Renaissance man." But, the good Father added, he was "Totus in cunctus et nihil in toto" or in less learned language, "jack-of-all-trades, knower of all but master of none." Fr. Tamayo added with no little clerical mischief that Pardo de Tavera was not a Suetonius in history, not a Solon in Law, nor a Bismarck in politics, not a Max Mueller in philology, nor a Pasteur in medicine. In other words, nothing in everything he undertook to study.
Disregarding Father Tamayo's uninhibited strictures of the good doctor, one who has read Pardo de Tavera's Reseña, which is seventy-five pages in all including the one-page bibliography, will be surprised to realize how a man of vast learning and catholicity of taste could admit gross historical errors, particularly regarding the revolutionary period which he witnessed. I shall not tarry to point out those errors and make Father Tamayo turn in his grave for competing with him, although it is more likely that he would be happy to hear that after all, he, the Rector Magnificus of the oldest university in Asia, was not alone in his thinking that the object of his inverted affection was not exactly a reliable and solid historical writer.
If Pardo de Tavera should be remembered today and in the future, it is for his Biblioteca Filipina, published in Washington in 1903 under the auspices of the Library of Congress and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department. Being a bibliography of works on or about the Philippines, this particular compilation of Pardo de Tavera is the best bibliography of Filipiniana by a Filipino of his time. In this connection it is worthwhile to note that in point of quality, extent, and critical acumen, W.E. Retana's Aparato Bibliográfico de la Historia General de Filipinas (Madrid, 1906, 3 vols.), is infinitely superior to Pardo de Tavera's Biblioteca. There is simply no comparison.
Comes now a grandson of a Franciscan friar, Felipe G. Calderon (1863-1908) who, unlike Pardo de Tavera, was not exactly anti-clerical but a good weaver of friar tales based on facts, not on fancies. His stories of friar misdeeds, told to the members of the Schurman Commission with a frankness that commands respect, made the friars still in the Philippines at the time (1899) uncomfortable, but they were
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probably consoled by the fact that Calderon was honest enough to admit in public that he was of their kind, having the blood of a friar running in his veins.
Calderon contributed not only parts of the Malolos Constitution (the other parts were suggested by Cayetano Arellano), but also, insofar as historiography is concerned, the publication of the Revista Histórica de Filipinas, which lived from May 1905 to April 1906 and pioneered in the publication of historical articles dealing with the Philippines and thus encouraged, to a certain extent, researches into and the writing of Philippine history. His contribution to Philippine historiography and upon which his reputation as historical writer rests is his Mis Memorias Sobre la Revolución Filipina, Segunda Etapa (1899 á 1901) (Manila, 1907). The unity of the book is marred by the insertion of complete texts of documents which, in almost all cases, spill over to the next page. The work is an account of the events from May 1898 to the early years of the American occupation. Being a participant in many events of the period, Calderon's memoirs, as I have already pointed out in connection with Aguinaldo, may be taken as an authority only in those events in which he actually participated but a secondary source on those related to him by others. Calderon's testimony to the effect that the educated and the wealthy looked down upon the masses of the people and that Aguinaldo's army of 1896, which he and his ilk ridiculed, was a threat to the elite establishes the validity of the thesis I expressed that the Revolution of 1896 was a mass movement, a revolt of the masses, originated and led by the masses.
The attempts of some uninformed students today to rob the masses of what rightfully belongs to them is rather awkward since the alleged participation and leadership of the middle class and the intellectuals was limited to two -- Dr. Pio Valenzuela who lost no time in surrendering to the Spanish authorities less than a week after the outbreak of the Revolution, and Edilberto Evangelista.3 Bonifacio, on the other hand, is claimed by people who never even had any dealing with the
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Katipuneros to have belonged to the middle class, being, it is claimed, photographed wearing coat and tie.4
I have personally known a few of the original founders and early members of the Katipunan and found them to be completely in the class of Bonifacio: poor and not so literate. Aguinaldo himself, who has been pictured to be a member of the middle class and, sometimes, of the upper class, told me he did not belong to the rich or even well-to-do. Hence, his trips to the Visayas to sell leather and his being a dropout, occasioned not exactly by his dullness but by the death of his parents -- a fact which clearly indicated his family's economic status. Then there are claims by some people that the Filipino clerics of the nineteenth century were "revolutionaries," and to prove their point, they quoted from Spanish sources which, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century, almost invariably considered every native, priest or non-priest, as filibustero, rebelde, and therefore, working for separation from Spain. However, and this is remarkable in those who make the fanciful claim, those who separated from the Catholic Church, like Father Gregorio Aglipay and others, are treated like felons, while those who remained with the Church are described as simply great.
I have nothing against the native priests who actually endangered their lives to express their nationalistic feelings; I have given them the proper salute in my other writings. But to make all or even most of the native priests of the nineteenth century "revolutionaries" simply because some Spanish sources said they were -- the reason being to implicate them, as the martyred priests of 1872 were implicated in the 1872 Cavite mutiny, although no proof had been presented to this day to show their alleged complicity in it5 -- is, to say the least, to exaggerate, to indulge in extravagant wishful thinking, and therefore, to go beyond what the evidence indicates.
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Calderon, to go back to the Memorias, admitted that the Malolos Constitution was not intended to humor the masses but to prevent them from putting one over the elite. Hence the primacy of the legislative over the executive, who was Aguinaldo, considered ignorant by Calderon and his colleagues. The Memorias is already passé as authority insofar as the dealings with the Americans at the turn of the century are concerned, for the United States Government had, over the years, published collections of official documents dealing with the subject. More important was the turnover in 1957 by the U.S. Government to the Republic of the Philippines of the so-called Philippine Insurgent Records6, a good haul as the fishermen would say, since the whole collection which the American Army captured during the Filipino-American War, consisted of about 400,000 pieces of documents on some aspects of the Revolution of 1896 but mostly on the Filipino-American War and its ramifications. But insofar as the framing of the Malolos Constitution is concerned, Calderon is important and indispensable, for he was an active participant in the framing and a witness to the promulgation of the Constitution. He, therefore, ranks with Paterno in being an eyewitness to a turning point in Philippine history.
The most underestimated Filipino historical writer was Manuel Artigas y Cuerva (1866-1925), a mestizo born of a Spanish father and, most probably, Spanish-Filipino mother from Bulakan. From his pen flowed voluminous books and studies, most of which are based on important archival materials which no other Filipino before him used. Such works as El Municipio Filipino, Historia Municipal de Filipinas... (Manila, 1894, 2 vols.), Los Sucesos de 1872 (Manila, 1911), Reseña de la Provincia de Leyte (Manila, 1914), and Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1916), written expressly as a textbook for the students of the Burgos Institute7, constitute his major works in history. Of these, Los
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Sucesos de 1872 is the best, for it is the least vitiated by the custom of the period of inserting in the body of the book the complete texts of documents and for having the better narrative style than the rest of his works. The Historia is not exactly history but chronology, a calendar, if you will, for it narrates briefly or at length, depending upon the materials he had, the events of this or that date. There is no continuity to speak of, an element that is important in history. His El Municipio Filipino, on the other hand, is important not as history but as source material, for it is actually a collection of laws relating to the municipality. As compiler of important documents, he preceded Teodoro M. Kalaw.
Two other historical writers may be mentioned here briefly. They are Don Jaime C. de Veyra (1874-1964) and Don Epifanio de los Santos (1871-1928), two cultured Filipinos who maybe regarded as belonging to the Age of Kalaw. Don Jaime, like most of his contemporaries, did not write much history during this period, probably because he was preoccupied with his duties as a government official: governor of Leyte, member of the Philippine Commission, Resident Commissioner to the United States, and finally, Professor of Spanish at the University of the Philippines. Don Panyong, as Epifanio de los Santos was known, was provincial governor, fiscal, and director of the National Library. Don Jaime's historical work during this period is limited to his and Mariano Ponce's Efemérides Filipinas (Manila, 1914), a sort of journal which discusses an important event that took place on a date in the calendar. As such, it does not, as the authors admitted, pretend to be a study in depth. Each entry may be taken as a sort of come-on to any historical researcher to undertake further research on the subject. All his monographs were published after the war.
Don Panyong, on the other hand, alone among Filipino historians of the period, was made member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. He was admitted to the Academy on the basis of the recommendation of his close Spanish acquaintance, Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, who, upon reading a few of his works, principally his biographical sketch of Marcelo H. del Pilar, exerted his influence to have Don Panyong admitted to the sacred groves of the Spanish Academy.
Don Panyong's reputation as a historian rests on his studies of Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Marcelo H. del Pilar, and Emilio Aguinaldo.
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The first three bio-bibliographical essays appeared in Revista Filipina in 1917-l918, while his Aguinaldo y Su Tiempo remained in manuscript form until 1973 when I lent the only remaining copy given to me by the eldest son of Don Panyong, the late Jose P. Santos, to the National Historical Commission (now Institute), for publication. Mr. Eulogio M. Leaño, then chief historical writer-translator of the Commission, undertook the translation, while I added a biographical sketch of Don Panyong and annotated the text. This posthumous work is, in my opinion, less important than the first three bio-bibliographical essays, for while we are today privileged to pore over documents in the U.S. National Archives to take notes on Filipino-American relations since 1898, Don Panyong did not have such enviable privilege, and even if he had, I do not think he would pore over hundreds of thousands of documents in order to write on a historical subject. It is this circumstance that makes his Aguinaldo not a contribution to Philippine historiography. But his first three essays are of capital importance for they contain indispensable documents not found anywhere. This is particularly true insofar as Bonifacio and Jacinto are concerned: his discovery of the letters exchanged between Bonifacio and Jacinto after the Tejeros Convention of March 1897 and certain documents on the subject -- all of which he found in a hen's nest in Bataan when he was fiscal of that province early in this century -- is a landmark in the history of the Revolution. Without the discovery and subsequent publication of the Spanish translation of the Tagalog original of those documents, the history of the Revolution of 1896, especially the relationship between the two rival Katipunan factions in Cavite, would have been spotty and, perhaps, distortedsup>8
. Outside these [3]
Philippine Historiography in the Age of Kalaw1
Historical writings by Filipinos from the 1880s to the death of Teodoro M. Kalaw in 1940 are necessarily limited not only in number but also in scope. This may be ascribed to several reasons, principal among which are, first, because the Filipinos were not yet a free people, being then under the Spaniards and later under the Americans and therefore did not enjoy a wide latitude of freedom so necessary in intellectual and artistic flowering; second, the lack of inducement in the form of wide readership which, in turn, is dependent on the rate of literacy; and lastly, history as a discipline was, insofar as Filipinos were and still are concerned, not considered as important and popular as literature, particularly poetry. A survey of the historical works published during the period I call the Age of Kalaw, gives the impression that Filipinos are not historically minded, an impression that finds partial justification in the way we treat our libraries and archives. Our successive governments have not been kind to these two cultural institutions, and how our own government treated them affected the attitude of the great mass of the people, the educated as well as the half-educated and the uneducated.
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The problem of history writing today in our country is not as serious as it was during the Age of Kalaw, for today we have scholarships, fellowships, travel grants, research grants, grants-in-aid, and other forms of financial help which make historical research a stretch of road strewn with roses compared with the days of Pardo de Tavera, Paterno, de los Reyes, and others who had, in some instances, to use profusely their unbridled imagination to produce historical works that are akin to fiction. Yet, in spite of the obstacles to historical research and writing, those pioneers in Philippine historiography deserve to be remembered because they produced historical works which, though not "scientific" from the point of view of the academic student of history, nevertheless cleared the way for the younger generation of historical writers to tread on it lightly and with confidence. If today they seem to some of us to appear as museum pieces, it is because we tend to forget that all have a beginning, and they, the pioneers of Philippine historiography, were our beginning, our very foundation without whom the present generation of history students would be in Erehwon.
I have chosen Teodoro M. Kalaw (1884-1940) as the centerpiece of the period and named it after him because among all the historical writers of his generation, he was the most deeply and seriously concerned with collecting Filipiniana materials, especially those relating to the most significant epoch of our history, the Revolution of 1896-1898. In saying so, I do not ignore Don Jaime C. de Veyra, with whom I had had an intimate contact, whose Filipiniana collection was one of the best in the country, Don Rafael Palma, and Don Epifanio de los Santos, whose knowledge of their country at that period of our history was something phenomenal. Although these scholars invested their time and money in knowing the past of the Philippines, they did not have ample opportunity, like Don Teodoro M. Kalaw, to concentrate their time and effort in the extensive search for the country's past. It is true that Don Teodoro himself had, on several occasions, been distracted by the multifarious activities he engaged in -- from journalism and literature to legislative and bureaucratic activities -- but he never neglected to develop his collector's instincts. On the contrary, his varied governmental and non-govern-
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mental connections gave him the widest opportunity to collect materials for our history, and although he was able to use a fraction of the materials he had at the tip of his fingers due to his varied activities, he was, nevertheless, able to publish
Born on March 31, 1884 in the town of Lipa, Batangas -- a town famous for its coffee, arrogant rich, intellectual aristocrats, and what Felipe G. Calderon jeeringly described as "inordinately proud people" -- Kalaw witnessed not the glory and grandeur of his town when, according to the old folks of Taal and Lemery, women wore their slippers dotted with diamonds, but the beginning of its decline, when the coffee blight began to destroy the coffee plants because, according to the perhaps envious or superstitious poor Lipeños, their wealthy fellow townsmen and women made the coffee beans, and not the Virgin, the object of veneration during religious processions. This was the common people's explanation of why Lipa, the jewel of Batangas after Taal declined in importance, lost its leadership in coffee production and, consequently, its economic decline.
But while Lipa continued to decline economically, it developed, on the other hand, its intellectual resources. The Katigbaks, the Kalaws, the Solises, the Aguileras, the Reyeses, the Africas, and others, rose to prominence as intellectual leaders of the town. Social stratification not only remained, it became more pronounced. Thus, as the late inimitable satirist in English, Federico Mangahas, once said in his Manila Tribune column "Maybe" long before the war in the Pacific, the Kalaws spoke only to the Katigbaks and the Katigbaks spoke only to the Almighty. So, while only a few of Lipa's wealthy of yesteryears are remembered today, its intellectuals are known and highly respected not only in Batangas but throughout the Philippines.
It was in this intellectual atmosphere that Don Teodoro grew up and had his being. Revolutionary leaflets, and one or two small newspapers, reached the common men and energized them to fight for home and country, for human dignity and freedom. At the same time, the other towns of the province flared up and the famous Batangueno tem-
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per found visible expression in what the Tagalogs call the hero's mystique of fighting more furiously the more he is wounded. Don Teodoro, then in his early teens, began collecting the revolutionary leaflets and periodicals, and, in the course of his life as journalist-literary man, legislator, and bureaucrat, he succeeded in building up a library whose centerpiece was the revolutionary period. Many years later, he collected Apolinario Mabini's works, including his letters, and published them under the authority of the National Library. I shall return to this subject when I discuss the record of the Andres Bonifacio trial whose English translation, but not the original, was published during his lifetime. Having finished his law studies in Manila, he joined the staff of the then famous nationalistic newspaper El Renacimiento, subsequently becoming its colorful editor. It is, perhaps, not irrelevant to emphasize here that Don Teodoro did not lose his interest in Philippine history in spite of his having been elected to the Philippine Assembly and his joining the central government as factotum to Sergio Osmeña and Manuel L. Quezon. On the contrary, the various positions he held gave him vast opportunities to collect historical materials, mostly documentary, without which no historian worth his name could write with competence and credibility.
Meanwhile, the history of the Philippines was being written, as it had been, by the Spanish missionaries and government officials. The Filipinos, being ignorant and generally prevented from being educated until the second half of the nineteenth century, were placed in the category of preserved specimens in the laboratory with no active participation in the administration of their affairs, except in some cases of ill-conceived revolts and uprisings. Reading the books and accounts of adventures in the Philippines, one finds the Filipinos submerged under the avalanche of Spanish self-congratulatory verbosity, thus producing not the history of the Philippines but Spanish history in the Islands. This is not to deny the self-effacing sacrifices and the sense of justice of the early missionaries who did not ignore, nor justify, the civil official's uncivil behavior in the discharge of their duties. However, by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, the succeeding missionaries, generally speaking, failed to live up to the tradition of
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high morality, suffering, and self-abnegation which their predecessors sowed in Philippine soil.
With the dissemination of the later missionaries and civil officials' accounts of the Philippines -- with the possible exception of Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas where he recognized the virtues of the Filipinos -- the mind of the Filipino had become attuned to the prejudices, lack of understanding or simply refusal to understand, and bad faith of the generality of Spanish chroniclers. Thus the Filipino developed a sense of inferiority, encouraged by the "master race," which the Americans inflamed when they came and conquered at the turn of the century. The history books written by Americans for Filipinos, such as those of David P. Barrows and Prescott Jernigan2, are a little better than those written by the Spaniards, with this difference: that the Americans tried to understand the Filipinos but could not. The Filipino's role, then, was to be written about but not to write about himself. It was not until the last two decades of the nineteenth century that some Filipinos of high education, especially those who had been to Spain were a whiff of liberalism had blown across the Peninsula or those who had been allowed to enroll at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas took courage to write about the Philippines. But it is obvious that with the possible exception of Gregorio Sanciano y Gozon's (1852-1897) El Progreso de Filipinas (Madrid, 1881) and Rizal's annotations to Morga's Sucesos (1890), the general history written by Filipinos up to approximately the 1950s has been moulded in the Spanish school of Montero y Vidal, Barrantes, and Retana.
To this school belonged Pedro Alejandro Paterno y Debera Ignacio (1857-1911). Belonging to a family that traced its wealth to the rise of the Filipino elite before the middle of the nineteenth century, Paterno studied in Spain, brushed shoulders with Spanish grandees, among them a man who would twice become governor-general of the Philippines (Fernando Primo de Rivera), and wrote verses, publishing his
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little book of poems entitled Sampaguitas. His younger contemporaries called him, more in depreciation then in appreciation, sampaguitero. It was conceded that Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera was the most versatile of Filipino writers, excepting Rizal, of course, for the Filipino scholar, although looking every inch a Spaniard — with his beard, longish face, deep-set eyes, and high thin nose decorated with a pince nez, -- wrote on many Philippine subjects, from medicine to paleography to linguistics, to numismatics to cartography to history to metrical romances to education to social problems, and so on and so forth. But in point of bulk and diversity, Paterno was not behind Pardo de Tavera, for he wrote not only on history but also on ethnography, law, politics, prehistory, poetry, drama, novel, ad infinitum. To him belonged the honor of having written the first novel by a Filipino, Ninay (Madrid, 1885), whose footnotes exceed in number the footnotes of his seven-volume Historia de Filipinas.
Paterno's first venture into Philippine history was his La Antigua Civilización Tagala (Madrid, 1887), also the first by a Filipino to deal extensively with pre-Spanish Tagalog culture. This is of course based on the testimonies of the missionaries at the point of contact whose observations of native culture at the coming of the Spaniards have been considered incontrovertible, but Paterno's historical imagination roamed widely and transcended its limits to enter the realm of fiction. His lack of control over his rich imagination which, had he properly harnessed it, would have been a great asset in the writing of history, led him to write history in the manner of his novel Ninay. In 1908, after his El Régimen Municipal en Filipinas (Madrid, 1893) and other works not related to history or only tangential to history came out, Paterno published his Historia Critica de Filipinas (Manila, 1908), 3 volumes, followed by the seven-volume Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1908-1912), by El Pacto de Biyak-na-bato (Manila, 1910), and finally, by Sinopsis de Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1911), a summary of his voluminous Historia, done probably because nobody had the time and patience to wade through seven volumes of facts and fancies intertwined in a manner that a less discerning reader would not be able to distinguish between the one and the other.
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Let me reminisce at this point and recall to you my undergraduate days at the University of the Philippines at Padre Faura when one day, my professor, Dr. Leandro H. Fernandez, suggested that I write a term paper on Paterno's seven-volume opus, accompanying his suggestion with a naughty smile. Being young and naive, I took him seriously and so I went to the Filipiniana Section of the U.P. Library and unknowingly began my trek to Calvary. After finishing the first volume, I went straight to Dr. Fernandez's office at the third floor of the University Hall, now the Ministry of Justice, and told him, quite innocently, my impression of Paterno's first volume. There was a loud explosion of laughter, Dr. Fernandez's eyes disappearing in the process and, continuing his uncontrolled laughter, said, "Agoncillo, you have had enough."
Today, Paterno's historical works are museum pieces and are touched only by bibliographers. But in his day, he was the toast of the town, the máginoó, the man who arranged the truce of Biyak-na-Bato. Of all his works of history, his memoirs of the truce of Biyak-na-Bato is the only credible and important one, for it deals not only with a crucial event in the history of the Filipinos in which he participated but also serves as a counterpoint to Aguinaldo's account of the truce and, more especially, to Governor-General Fernando Primo de Rivera's Memoria Dirigida al Senado (Madrid, 1898). Except for El Pacto, all of Paterno's historical works are forgotten and are not mentioned even in the circles of students of history.
Paterno was not alone in using his imagination freely; he had a rival in Isabelo de los Reyes (1864-1938), a patriot, a publicist, a journalist, a folklorist, a historian, occasionally a poet, and above all, a passionate lover. Like Paterno, he had written much on history, but unlike him, most of his works deal with local history. Witness his "Las Visayas en la Epoca de la Conquista," a thin pamphlet published in Iloilo in 1887; "Ang Pagsalacay ni Limahong sa Maynila," another thin pamphlet published in Manila in 1889 and translated into Tagalog by a shy person hiding under the initials JCY; and the two-volume Historia de Ilokos, published in Manila in 1890, a work that the Ilokanos considered, until recent years, their Mosaic tablets descended from the
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Caraballo Mountain. His works that may be said to be of national scope are Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1889), which purportedly deals with pre-colonial days, and La Religion del "Katipunan" (Madrid, 1899). So unreliable is the Historia that Pardo de Tavera, always in a habit of calling a spade a spade, described it as "de carácter infantile." Not a kind word to say about a fellow-author, but then Don Belong, as Isabelo de los Reyes was popularly called, could not help being a folklorist and so even as a historian he could not exorcise the folklore spirit from his body. Like Paterno, he did not know or could not rein in or harness his imagination: instead of using it for historical purposes he misused it for folkloric convenience. It is obvious to any reader of Don Belongs historical works that he mistook creative imagination, as it is used in fiction and poetry, for historical imagination. His La Religion is something that contemporary students of history should read with great care for while some of his data are correct, if checked against documentary evidence, many of his assertions are at best conjectures and therefore without factual basis. Most readers today who do not have enough background in the broad field of Philippine history, or even of any of its segments, are easily impressed by conjectures that sound beautiful to hear but which, upon close scrutiny, are nothing but sound, fury, and prejudice.
Don Belong's name in Philippine history is secure not as a writer or historian but as propagandist of the revolutionary cause, the founder of the first labor movement and, more importantly, of the Philippine Independent Church. For these three achievements alone, he truly deserves to be called one of the great Filipinos. His historical works, however, should be placed side by side with those of Paterno in a museum of pioneering works.
Philippine historiography will be incomplete without mentioning General EmilioAguinaldo (1869-1964) who, although neither a writer nor a historian, had written a historical work which may be very limited in scope but whose importance cannot be ignored -- at least by any dedicated student of Philippine history, specifically of the revolutionary period (1896-1898). His Reseña Verídica de la Revolución Filipina (Tarlak, 1899), which sets forth his side of the controversial
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issue of whether or not Rear Admiral George Dewey promised him independence in their tête-à-tête in the captain's cabin of the Olympia is indispensable in the study of the beginnings of the Filipino-American relations at the end of the nineteenth century. Some students of the Revolution -- and one of them was my former professor, the late Dr, Leandro H. Fernandez -- suspected that the Reseña Verídica was not Aguinaldo's brainchild but that of Felipe Buencamino, who, by the late 1898, had ingratiated himself into the good graces of Aguinaldo.
In my researches on the revolutionary period at the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. in the 1950s: I found in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress a box which, upon opening, yielded a thick manuscript in Tagalog. When I read it, I immediately concluded that the handwriting was Aguinaldo's and that the contents were those contained in Reseña Verídica, but only the Tagalog manuscript was detailed. A study of the manuscript, especially its internal aspect, indicated to me that Aguinaldo, not being well-versed in Spanish but could write passably in Tagalog, asked Buencamino to translate his manuscript into Spanish so that both the Spaniards and the Americans would understand why the Filipinos were fighting to death to win their freedom and independence. A comparison between the original Tagalog and the Spanish translation clearly shows that Buencamino -- or whoever rendered the translation -- took it upon himself to abbreviate the work probably for two reasons: first, it was necessary to finish the Spanish version as soon as possible so it could be published and disseminated to the world at large; and second, for the foreign readers, the details were dull and to translate them might bore them to death. Whatever the reason of the translator or summariser, the Spanish version is very much shorter than Aguinaldo's original Tagalog work.
Aguinaldo later in life wrote his memoirs Mga Gunita ng Himagsikan (Manila, 1964), whose English translation appeared in 1967. Although published long after Kalaw's death, the work was actually begun before his death. This last work of Aguinaldo may be heavily relied upon where the subject discussed fell into his competence, that is, the events narrated were actually witnessed or participated in by him. Otherwise,
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there are incidents in the memoirs which he had not witnessed but which he described as if he actually saw them. As a matter of fact, when he was writing his memoirs on yellow ruled paper, he borrowed two books in my collection: Jose M. del Castillo's El Katipunan ó El Filibusterismo (Madrid, 1897) and Manuel Sastrón's La Insurrección en Filipinas, Vol.1 (Madrid, 1897) which, he told me, he would consult to refresh his memory. But the memoirs, like the other memoirs to be mentioned here, are not, strictly speaking, creative works of history. They are, by their very nature, self-serving and should be used with great care as historical materials only after a severe critical study of their statements and conclusions.
Along with Aguinaldo, a student of Philippine history cannot ignore Apolinario Mabini's (1863-1901) pamphlet, La Revolución Filipina, which he himself translated into English. Its date of writing may be placed at about 1901 when he was an exile in Guam. In the third decade of the American regime, two editions of the Spanish and Mabini's own English translations were privately printed, but it was not until 1931 that Teodoro M. Kalaw, then Director of the National Library, officially published Mabini's Guam opus under the imprimatur of the National Library. The Kalaw edition of Mabini's works has two volumes, the first containing a long biography of the Paralytic by then President Rafael Palma of the University of the Philippines, Mabini's Constitutional Program of the Philippine Republic, and some of his letters. The second volume contains Mabini's other letters, articles, memoirs of his exile to Guam, and finally, his La Revolución Filipina. Mabini's précis of the Revolution of 1896 is, as to be expected, rather superficial and is erroneous in some places, but the importance of his work lies not in the accuracy of his statements and his impartiality -- which he was not -- but in delineating the true character of the Revolution and the sacrifices of the masses who were looked down upon by the wealthy, the not-so-wealthy, and the intellectuals, and in admitting openly that there was no unity in the Filipino camp. On the death of Luna, the reader should be extra careful, for Mabini exhibited an inconsistency: in a letter to Galicano Apacible in mid-1899, he denounced Luna for being too ambitious and defended Aguinaldo against Luna's alleged abuses. In the Guam opus, Mabini turned
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around, denounced Aguinaldo, and praised Luna. A student of history who has a good common sense, not to say background in historical methodology, can easily see the reason for the inconsistency and correctly choose which Mabini should be taken seriously.
In 1906, a series of articles entitled "Sobre Una ‘Reseña Histórica de Filipinas'," bristling with ecclesiastical indignation, appeared in the Catholic newspaper Libertas. The author was the Very Reverend Fr. Serapio Tamayo, Rector Magnificus of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas. The cause of the uncommon indignation was the publication of Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera's (1857-1925) "Reseña Histórica de Filipinas Desde su Descubrimiento Hasta 1903," which first appeared in Volume 1 of the Census of 1903, published in Washington in 1905, and republished as a separate pamphlet in Manila in 1906. The reason for the re-publication of Pardo de Tavera's only extended historical work is that his original Spanish, which was sent to Washington as part of the first volume of the Census, was translated into English without his knowledge and was in turn translated into Spanish. A case of translation of a translation. Pardo de Tavera was outraged at the result -- considering that translation is always a treason -- and his beard quivered menacingly at the American or Americans responsible for traducing his original text. Hence the re-publication of his original Spanish.
The Reseña Histórica, as the title suggests, is a brief survey of Philippine history, or more accurately, the history of Spain in the Philippines, which brings the narrative to the coming of the Second or Taft Commission in 1900, although the title of the work says "hasta 1903." One can easily understand the Very Rev. Tamayo's unusual reaction, for the Reseña is unabashedly anti-clerical and its author's clerical antipathy was, in those days of bigotry, not kindly looked upon. Moreover, Pardo de Tavera was an atheist and so one can fully comprehend the severity with which he was castigated by the Reverend Father.
Father Tamayo dissected Pardo de Tavera's only historical work and exposed what the good Father called "calumniosos errors" of the learned doctor. Before proceeding to pick him to pieces, Father Tamayo, like a cat playing with a mouse, left-handedly admitted Pardo de Tavera's learning, calling him a man whom people today would call "a man of
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all seasons," or in more pretentious terms "a Renaissance man." But, the good Father added, he was "Totus in cunctus et nihil in toto" or in less learned language, "jack-of-all-trades, knower of all but master of none." Fr. Tamayo added with no little clerical mischief that Pardo de Tavera was not a Suetonius in history, not a Solon in Law, nor a Bismarck in politics, not a Max Mueller in philology, nor a Pasteur in medicine. In other words, nothing in everything he undertook to study.
Disregarding Father Tamayo's uninhibited strictures of the good doctor, one who has read Pardo de Tavera's Reseña, which is seventy-five pages in all including the one-page bibliography, will be surprised to realize how a man of vast learning and catholicity of taste could admit gross historical errors, particularly regarding the revolutionary period which he witnessed. I shall not tarry to point out those errors and make Father Tamayo turn in his grave for competing with him, although it is more likely that he would be happy to hear that after all, he, the Rector Magnificus of the oldest university in Asia, was not alone in his thinking that the object of his inverted affection was not exactly a reliable and solid historical writer.
If Pardo de Tavera should be remembered today and in the future, it is for his Biblioteca Filipina, published in Washington in 1903 under the auspices of the Library of Congress and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department. Being a bibliography of works on or about the Philippines, this particular compilation of Pardo de Tavera is the best bibliography of Filipiniana by a Filipino of his time. In this connection it is worthwhile to note that in point of quality, extent, and critical acumen, W.E. Retana's Aparato Bibliográfico de la Historia General de Filipinas (Madrid, 1906, 3 vols.), is infinitely superior to Pardo de Tavera's Biblioteca. There is simply no comparison.
Comes now a grandson of a Franciscan friar, Felipe G. Calderon (1863-1908) who, unlike Pardo de Tavera, was not exactly anti-clerical but a good weaver of friar tales based on facts, not on fancies. His stories of friar misdeeds, told to the members of the Schurman Commission with a frankness that commands respect, made the friars still in the Philippines at the time (1899) uncomfortable, but they were
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probably consoled by the fact that Calderon was honest enough to admit in public that he was of their kind, having the blood of a friar running in his veins.
Calderon contributed not only parts of the Malolos Constitution (the other parts were suggested by Cayetano Arellano), but also, insofar as historiography is concerned, the publication of the Revista Histórica de Filipinas, which lived from May 1905 to April 1906 and pioneered in the publication of historical articles dealing with the Philippines and thus encouraged, to a certain extent, researches into and the writing of Philippine history. His contribution to Philippine historiography and upon which his reputation as historical writer rests is his Mis Memorias Sobre la Revolución Filipina, Segunda Etapa (1899 á 1901) (Manila, 1907). The unity of the book is marred by the insertion of complete texts of documents which, in almost all cases, spill over to the next page. The work is an account of the events from May 1898 to the early years of the American occupation. Being a participant in many events of the period, Calderon's memoirs, as I have already pointed out in connection with Aguinaldo, may be taken as an authority only in those events in which he actually participated but a secondary source on those related to him by others. Calderon's testimony to the effect that the educated and the wealthy looked down upon the masses of the people and that Aguinaldo's army of 1896, which he and his ilk ridiculed, was a threat to the elite establishes the validity of the thesis I expressed that the Revolution of 1896 was a mass movement, a revolt of the masses, originated and led by the masses.
The attempts of some uninformed students today to rob the masses of what rightfully belongs to them is rather awkward since the alleged participation and leadership of the middle class and the intellectuals was limited to two -- Dr. Pio Valenzuela who lost no time in surrendering to the Spanish authorities less than a week after the outbreak of the Revolution, and Edilberto Evangelista.3 Bonifacio, on the other hand, is claimed by people who never even had any dealing with the
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Katipuneros to have belonged to the middle class, being, it is claimed, photographed wearing coat and tie.4
I have personally known a few of the original founders and early members of the Katipunan and found them to be completely in the class of Bonifacio: poor and not so literate. Aguinaldo himself, who has been pictured to be a member of the middle class and, sometimes, of the upper class, told me he did not belong to the rich or even well-to-do. Hence, his trips to the Visayas to sell leather and his being a dropout, occasioned not exactly by his dullness but by the death of his parents -- a fact which clearly indicated his family's economic status. Then there are claims by some people that the Filipino clerics of the nineteenth century were "revolutionaries," and to prove their point, they quoted from Spanish sources which, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century, almost invariably considered every native, priest or non-priest, as filibustero, rebelde, and therefore, working for separation from Spain. However, and this is remarkable in those who make the fanciful claim, those who separated from the Catholic Church, like Father Gregorio Aglipay and others, are treated like felons, while those who remained with the Church are described as simply great.
I have nothing against the native priests who actually endangered their lives to express their nationalistic feelings; I have given them the proper salute in my other writings. But to make all or even most of the native priests of the nineteenth century "revolutionaries" simply because some Spanish sources said they were -- the reason being to implicate them, as the martyred priests of 1872 were implicated in the 1872 Cavite mutiny, although no proof had been presented to this day to show their alleged complicity in it5 -- is, to say the least, to exaggerate, to indulge in extravagant wishful thinking, and therefore, to go beyond what the evidence indicates.
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Calderon, to go back to the Memorias, admitted that the Malolos Constitution was not intended to humor the masses but to prevent them from putting one over the elite. Hence the primacy of the legislative over the executive, who was Aguinaldo, considered ignorant by Calderon and his colleagues. The Memorias is already passé as authority insofar as the dealings with the Americans at the turn of the century are concerned, for the United States Government had, over the years, published collections of official documents dealing with the subject. More important was the turnover in 1957 by the U.S. Government to the Republic of the Philippines of the so-called Philippine Insurgent Records6, a good haul as the fishermen would say, since the whole collection which the American Army captured during the Filipino-American War, consisted of about 400,000 pieces of documents on some aspects of the Revolution of 1896 but mostly on the Filipino-American War and its ramifications. But insofar as the framing of the Malolos Constitution is concerned, Calderon is important and indispensable, for he was an active participant in the framing and a witness to the promulgation of the Constitution. He, therefore, ranks with Paterno in being an eyewitness to a turning point in Philippine history.
The most underestimated Filipino historical writer was Manuel Artigas y Cuerva (1866-1925), a mestizo born of a Spanish father and, most probably, Spanish-Filipino mother from Bulakan. From his pen flowed voluminous books and studies, most of which are based on important archival materials which no other Filipino before him used. Such works as El Municipio Filipino, Historia Municipal de Filipinas... (Manila, 1894, 2 vols.), Los Sucesos de 1872 (Manila, 1911), Reseña de la Provincia de Leyte (Manila, 1914), and Historia de Filipinas (Manila, 1916), written expressly as a textbook for the students of the Burgos Institute7, constitute his major works in history. Of these, Los
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Sucesos de 1872 is the best, for it is the least vitiated by the custom of the period of inserting in the body of the book the complete texts of documents and for having the better narrative style than the rest of his works. The Historia is not exactly history but chronology, a calendar, if you will, for it narrates briefly or at length, depending upon the materials he had, the events of this or that date. There is no continuity to speak of, an element that is important in history. His El Municipio Filipino, on the other hand, is important not as history but as source material, for it is actually a collection of laws relating to the municipality. As compiler of important documents, he preceded Teodoro M. Kalaw.
Two other historical writers may be mentioned here briefly. They are Don Jaime C. de Veyra (1874-1964) and Don Epifanio de los Santos (1871-1928), two cultured Filipinos who maybe regarded as belonging to the Age of Kalaw. Don Jaime, like most of his contemporaries, did not write much history during this period, probably because he was preoccupied with his duties as a government official: governor of Leyte, member of the Philippine Commission, Resident Commissioner to the United States, and finally, Professor of Spanish at the University of the Philippines. Don Panyong, as Epifanio de los Santos was known, was provincial governor, fiscal, and director of the National Library. Don Jaime's historical work during this period is limited to his and Mariano Ponce's Efemérides Filipinas (Manila, 1914), a sort of journal which discusses an important event that took place on a date in the calendar. As such, it does not, as the authors admitted, pretend to be a study in depth. Each entry may be taken as a sort of come-on to any historical researcher to undertake further research on the subject. All his monographs were published after the war.
Don Panyong, on the other hand, alone among Filipino historians of the period, was made member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. He was admitted to the Academy on the basis of the recommendation of his close Spanish acquaintance, Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, who, upon reading a few of his works, principally his biographical sketch of Marcelo H. del Pilar, exerted his influence to have Don Panyong admitted to the sacred groves of the Spanish Academy.
Don Panyong's reputation as a historian rests on his studies of Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto, Marcelo H. del Pilar, and Emilio Aguinaldo.
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The first three bio-bibliographical essays appeared in Revista Filipina in 1917-l918, while his Aguinaldo y Su Tiempo remained in manuscript form until 1973 when I lent the only remaining copy given to me by the eldest son of Don Panyong, the late Jose P. Santos, to the National Historical Commission (now Institute), for publication. Mr. Eulogio M. Leaño, then chief historical writer-translator of the Commission, undertook the translation, while I added a biographical sketch of Don Panyong and annotated the text. This posthumous work is, in my opinion, less important than the first three bio-bibliographical essays, for while we are today privileged to pore over documents in the U.S. National Archives to take notes on Filipino-American relations since 1898, Don Panyong did not have such enviable privilege, and even if he had, I do not think he would pore over hundreds of thousands of documents in order to write on a historical subject. It is this circumstance that makes his Aguinaldo not a contribution to Philippine historiography. But his first three essays are of capital importance for they contain indispensable documents not found anywhere. This is particularly true insofar as Bonifacio and Jacinto are concerned: his discovery of the letters exchanged between Bonifacio and Jacinto after the Tejeros Convention of March 1897 and certain documents on the subject -- all of which he found in a hen's nest in Bataan when he was fiscal of that province early in this century -- is a landmark in the history of the Revolution. Without the discovery and subsequent publication of the Spanish translation of the Tagalog original of those documents, the history of the Revolution of 1896, especially the relationship between the two rival Katipunan factions in Cavite, would have been spotty and, perhaps, distortedsup>8
[20]
works, Don Panyong's contribution to Philippine historiography is nil. He was too busy with his piano, his guitar, his study of Spanish literature and, most of all, his fondness for the bottle, that he neglected to serenade the ever-jealous goddess Clio. But he is remembered today, thanks to the physical and vocal exertions of his son, Jose, because of the old Highway 54, which encircles Manila from the northwest to the southwest -- a wide arc half of which Bonifacio traversed immediately before and during the Revolution -- that old Highway 54 which now is Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, popularly known as EDSA.
I need not dwell long on Josué Soncuya whose Historia Pre-hispania de Filipinas (Manila, 1917) now appears to be of no value except as a bibliographic oddity. He treats of the story of the alleged ten Bornean datus who settled in Panay, treating this event as historical when in fact it is legendary. But then he lived in an age when Philippine anthropology was still in its swaddling clothes. Even so, this legend-considered-as-history died hard, for it was only in the late 1960s that it died as history, although it persists to day as a legend.9
Beginning with the third decade of this century, English became a popular medium of writing with most historical writers. Máximo M. Kalaw (1891-1955), Conrado Benitez (1889-1971), Leandro H. Fernandez (1889-1948), Encarnación Alzona (1898-2001), and Gregorio F. Zaide (1907-1906) -- all wrote in English, having been educated in the schools established to teach and propagate American English. Only a few did not write in this medium: Artemio Ricarte (1866-1905) whose Himagsikan ng mga Pilipino Laban sa mga Kastila (Yokohama, 1927) and Juan Villamor whose Inédita Crónica de la Guerra
[21]
Americano-Filipino en el Norte de Luzon (Manila, 1926) and La Tragedia de Cabanatuan (Manila, 1930) are Filipino sources of information on he Filipino-American war in northern Luzon. Ricarte's Himagsikan is generally fair and accurate although he was a known anti-Aguinaldo general who nevertheless did not allow his personal feelings to interfere with his military duties. Some of Villamor's La Tragedia sources are not exactly impeccable but the narrative as whole is clear. Its bias is also clear.
Conrado Benitez's claim as a historian rests on his History of the Philippines (Boston, 1926; Rev. ed. 1954) which we used as textbook in our fourth year high school. Like any textbook of similar purpose, it was not intended to contribute to Philippine history but to serve as a guide to young students. Basically, the book is more economics than history. The first half is mostly quotations from foreign authors, the purpose probably being to acquaint the young high school students with what are still considered standard authorities.
Máximo M. Kalaw, on the other hand, did a wonderful, job of tracing the development of politics in the Philippines in his book The Development of Philippine Politics (Manila, 1926), which brings out for the first time certain documents not available to other researchers. The book, however, seems to have been hurriedly written, for it lacks polish and even its footnotes are sometimes not well placed. And this is aside from its bad printing. This is the only contribution to historiography that Dean (of the University of the Philippines) Máximo M. Kalaw had made; all his contributions to Philippine social science are in the field of political science. When he abandoned scholarship for politics, certain irreverent Batanguenos described his adventure in politics a shift in allegiance from political science to political saying.
Leandro H. Fernandez (1889-1948), renowned during his time as an eminent historian, authored two books on the Philippines: his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University entitled The Philippine Republic (New York; 1926) and A Brief History of the Philippines (Boston, 1919, with later revisions). The latter, like Benitez's History, can be categorized as a mere textbook for children (the textbook we used), but
[22]
unlike Benitez's and Artigas' Historia, that of Fernandez is better organized. It is, however, American-oriented and reckons seasons the American way, for example, the use of the word "spring" or "winter" when there are no such seasons in the Philippines. Fernandez's contribution is contained in his doctoral dissertation which deals with the events from the Truce of Biyak-na-Bato to the Filipino-American war, with emphasis on the Malolos Republic. For the first time in the writing of Philippine history, a Filipino scholar uses the so-called scientific method of research, but like all dissertations its countless footnotes dazzle but bore the sensitive readers. Known for his meticulousness, Fernandez could not escape being human and so he stumbled a few times, as a consequence of which his reputation for accuracy was bruised in a way unknown to him. The work, however, is a contribution to Philippine historiography and is indispensable for a well-rounded study of the second epoch of the revolution against Spain and the Filipino-American war. It is, however, no longer treated as the bible of the students of the Revolutionary period, for after the war other students of Philippine history wrote on the same subject but based on the so-called Philippine Insurgent Records which Dr. Fernandez never saw because the collection was, at the time he was preparing his doctoral dissertation, off limits to researchers. Outside of The Philippine Republic, Fernandez had not written anything worth noting. And the reason is that he loved administrative work so much that he neglected his research work. He was head of the Department of History and at the same time Registrar and, later, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. He never gave up his headship of the Department of History to the last minute of his life. For neglecting the jealous Clio, Fernandez is punished by being hardly read or remembered today -- except by two or three of his former students.
When one speaks of Dr. Leandro H. Fernandez, one inevitably calls to mind the first Filipino lady scholar, Dr. Encarnación Alzona (1898-2001). Unlike her colleagues in the Department of History, Dr. Alzona did not dissipate her intellectual and physical energy by blissfully accepting debilitating and decivilizing administrative work. So, in the whole pre-war Department of History she produced the
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most number of scholarly works. Her pioneering History of Education in the Philippines (Manila, 1932) was the first of its kind, the result of many years of hard work. I do not include her doctoral dissertation Some French Contemporary Opinions of the Russian Revolution of 1905, published by Columbia University in 1921. Her History of Education, which was written from the Filipino viewpoint, a rare approach during that time, so irritated certain Spanish clerics that a book on the same subject but from the Spanish point of view was published. Later on, a critic, now dead, made it known that while in Spain undertaking some research work he discovered that the Spanish cleric who wrote the book on education in the Philippines allegedly invented his data.
Dr. Alzona's other historical works are The Role of Filipino Women in Philippine Progress (Manila, 1934), another pioneering research on the subject; and Ang Bisa sa Lipunang Pilipino ng "Urbana at Feliza" (Manila, 1939), a work that brings literature to the aid of history, for historical writers before her, with the exception of Don Teodoro, satisfied themselves with political history and neglected or ignored social life which is, strictly speaking, an important part of history. Many of her solid works were published after the war, although some of them were conceived during the prewar years. Dr. Alzona's place in Philippine historiography is secure, certainly more secure than that of her colleagues in the Department of History who were more interested in holding administrative positions or in playing golf rather than producing works of enduring value.
Younger than the preceding historical writers are Jose P. Santos (1907-1964) and Gregorio F. Zaide (1907-1986). Santos, the eldest son of Don Panyong, wrote in Tagalog, satisfying himself with putting out small pamphlets whose publication he himself financed, and more frequently, writing articles for the Sunday supplement of Tagalog periodicals, but particularly Pagkakaisa and when this folded up, the daily Mabuhay. Santos inherited his father's interest in collecting documents but unfortunately not the writing ability. Jose kept and used in his historical articles and pamphlets what Don Panyong left behind after his death in 1928. In the sense that Santos brought to light some hitherto unknown documents on the Revolution which he inherited from
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his father, he made a contribution to historiography, but in the strict sense of having written a unified, carefully presented and well-reasoned out work of history, he may be considered as not having written anything at all. His historical pamphlets Mga Kasulatang Lumiliwanag sa Pagkamatay kay Andres Bonifacio (Manila, 1935), Si Andres Bonifacio at ang Himagsikan (Manila, 1935), and others of less import, are all taken from his father's collection but do not actually contribute to the literature of the Revolution precisely because he could not write.
Gregorio F. Zaide, a product of the University of the Philippines and student of Dr. Leandro H. Fernandez and Dr. Encarnación Alzona, began his career as a historian by writing one article after another in machine-gun fashion and publishing them in the magazines of the Tribune and the Herald and, sometimes, in the monthly edited by the late A. V. Hartendorp, the Philippine Magazine. His first work that attracted attention was Documentary History of the Katipunan (Manila, 1931), a work that raised the hackles of many faculty members of the University of the Philippines principally because its pro-clerical bias was too palpable even to the blind. He was then my instructor, young, industrious, active, in knickerbockers, and perpetually shifting his unlighted half cigar from the right side of his mouth to the left side and back, right to left and so on, without any help from his hand -- to our silent delight and admiration. In 1939, he revised his Documentary History and gave it a new title: History of the Katipunan, but traces of the old predilection are still there.
The most prolific Filipino historian, he could conjure up a volume in one sitting. It was in this fashion that he brought to the attention of the public his Early Philippine History and Culture (Manila, 1937), Catholicism in the Philippines (Manila, 1937), a work written to attract the attention of Catholics the world over who came to Manila to attend the International Eucharistic Congress in 1937; Philippine History and Civilization (Manila, 1939), and many more volumes which were published after the war in the Pacific and therefore outside the purview of this paper. In between volumes of history, he dashed off short stories, an activity that sometimes affected the veracity of his facts. His prose, both in history and in fiction, is heavily larded with
[25]
purple patches for, he once told me, literary effect.
It is not an easy task to assess such a complex personality. I leave this difficult undertaking to those more competent and courageous than I am. But one thing I can say with candidness is that he had been honest enough to acknowledge his indebtedness to authors by suffusing his pages with footnotes -- something which cannot be said of the old pioneers, with the exception of Drs. Alzona and Fernandez who were trained in the mechanics of history writing. So copious are the footnotes that sometimes the page citations overshoot the total number of pages of a particular book.
I now come to the giants of the age of the pioneers -- Don Rafael Palma (1874-1939) and Don Teodoro M. Kalaw (1884-1940), in whose memory we are met here to recall their varied achievements. Don Rafael, in spite of his multifarious tasks as newspaperman, member of the Philippine Commission, Senator and concurrently Secretary of the Interior, and President of the University of the Philippines, produced two historical works, aside from the now famous Biografia de Rizal, namely: Our Campaign for Independence (Manila, 1923) and the posthumous Historia de Filipinas, published by the University of the Philippines only in 1968 and 1972. The first work, the Campaign, is informative and authoritative, particularly because Palma was part of the campaign for "immediate, complete and absolute independence," the catchy slogan concocted before the election of 1907 when the Nacionalista Party rode to victory in the polls on that platform. His solid work, however, is his Historia which combines narration with interpretation and shows Don Rafael at his best as a thinker and interpreter. I have been informed that when then Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon learned of the existence of the Historia, he offered Don Rafael what in those days was a princely sum, for it was rumored that the author had made unflattering remarks about the Kastila. But Don Rafael, then sick and suffering from the effects of poverty but maintaining his dignity, self-respect, and honor, allegedly turned down the offer -- just as he turned down Quezon's noble gesture, made a year or so before, of offering him a cheque for five thousand pesos to tide him over the difficulties he was encountering.
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Historiographically, the Historia is the best one-volume general history of the Philippines written within the first fifty years of this century. He wrote not only of political events but also of the economy, politics, social life, and literature of the country. He was particularly scintillating in his discussion and interpretation of events and personalities he witnessed or in which he participated and knew what is called the "inside story".
Aside from Palma's Historia, other contributions to Philippine history were made by Don Teodoro, whom Don Jaime C. de Veyra used to call "Dorong Kalaw". A literary man like Don Rafael, Don Jaime, Don Panyong, and, to a limited extent, Don Pedro Paterno, Don Teodoro's career as newspaperman, legislator, under-secretary of the interior, factotum to Sergio Osmeña and Manuel L. Quezon, member of the advisory staff of the independence missions to the United States, and finally, director of the National Library, left him very little time to commune with the goddess Clio. Still, in his very limited spare time he was able not only to compile the five-volume Epistolario Rizalino (Manila, 1930-1938) and the two-volume compilation of the works and letters of Apolinario Mabini entitled La Revolución Filipina con Otros Documentos de la Epoca (Manila, 1931), but also wrote La Masonería Filipina (Manila, 1920), La Revolución Filipina (Manila, 1924), which was translated into English and published in 1925, reprinted in 1969 by the Jorge B. Vargas Filipiniana Foundation, and General Gregorio del Pilar: El Heroe de Tirad (Manila, 1936), which Dr. Marcelino A. Foronda, Jr., translated into English and was published by the National Historical Commission (now Institute) in 1974.
Of the three books, the most scholarly is La Masonería: its primary sources, mostly documentary, are impeccable and the treatment of the subject is less heavy than if a less gifted writer undertook the project. It was translated into English by Frederic H. Stevens and Antonio Amechazurra and published in 1956. The history of Philippine masonry is important in that many of those involved in the propaganda, including Rizal, Lopez Jaena, Marcelo H. del Pilar, and many others, were Masons. Andres Bonifacio himself was a Mason and this fact led him to adopt
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the initiation rites of Masonry into the Katipunan. It is not without reason that the Spanish authorities both in Manila and in Madrid suspected that what they called deviltry in the Philippines was being perpetrated by the hated Masonry. It is in this context that Don Teodoro's Masonería should be seen.
His La Revolución Filipina, on the other hand, is the first book by a Filipino to treat of the Revolution from the Katipunan to the surrender of General Miguel Malvar in 1902. Considering the time and circumstance of its writing, La Revolución may be considered the best survey of the Revolution of 1896 and the Filipino-American war that ended in the change of sovereignty over the Philippines from Spanish to American. As regards General Gregorio del Pilar, this is the first serious attempt to write the biography of the "boy general" who, at an early age, liberated the province of Bulakan from the Spaniards. Don Teodoro, a romantic at heart, treated his subject romantically and avoided the ugly incidents that would mar the romantic image of his hero. Such romanticism was frowned upon by his translator, Dr. Marcelino A. Foronda, Jr., who, in his "Introduction" complained that Don Teodoro used "only sources partial to Del Pilar," thereby painting a figure of a man "who could do no wrong, although it should be quite clear to the perceptive reader that, alas, Del Pilar also had the same weaknesses which the Filipino, barely out of his adolescence and thrown into an atmosphere which meant instant power, could easily fall into."
Dr. Foronda's mild rebuke has its justification and I am not one to deny its validity. But he should have taken into account the time in which Don Teodoro had his being, for he, like Epifanio de los Santos, Rafael Palma, and the rest of the pioneers, belonged to a polite age when a spade was not called a spade, when plain speaking and bluntness of speech were considered lack of urbanidad or good breeding, when biography meant hagiography, when to criticize was synonymous with personal affront. This is not the only example of Don Teodoro's avoiding trouble by speaking in Filipino style. In his introduction to the English translation to the trial of Andres Bonifacio made by Paz Policarpio (later, Mrs. Mauro Mendez), he did not solve the problem
[28]
of why the Bonifacio brothers were executed in spite of General Aguinaldo's commutation order. He had the facts at his finger tips, he had the record of the trial in his possession, and from the record one can more or less deduce the truth about the execution. Yet, Don Teodoro avoided the unpleasant and satisfied himself with asking the simple but perceptive question: "If Bonifacio was to die", he said, "why was he pardoned? And if he was pardoned, why was he executed?" Being a product of his own time, Don Teodoro refused to commit himself lest he might hurt somebody or some people's feelings.
He was not alone in what we now call lapses. Don Panyong himself, both in his essay "Como se Perdió la Batalla de Bagbag" and his longest work, Aguinaldo y su Tiempo, exhibited the same politeness or timidity that Don Teodoro showed in his hagiography of Gregorio del Pilar. Don Panyong studiously avoided the unpleasant incidents that showed General Antonio Luna at his worst, although he extolled General Aguinaldo as a long suffering hero without blemish. But such was the spirit of the age in which Don Teodoro and Don Panyong lived.
Don Teodoro's collection of Revolutionary papers was probably the best private collection, but unfortunately every bit of this wonderful collection went up in smoke during the so-called Battle of Manila in 1945. What surprised me specially was how he got hold of copies of Mabini's works, including his letters, and the record of Bonifacio's trial since all these documents were found only in the U.S. National Archives. They were "off limits" to researchers and were made available to the public only in the 1950s. My guess is that when Don Teodoro was a member of the independence missions to the United States, he induced either Sergio Osmeña or Manuel L. Quezon to influence the authorities in Washington to allow him to go over the so-called Philippine Insurgent Records. And so in his spare time he must have pored over the thousands of documents comprising the collection, came across Mabini's works in his own handwriting, and the record of Bonifacio's trial by a kangaroo court. He translated Mabini's Tagalog writing into Spanish and had them published as La Revolución Filipina con Otros Documentos de la Epoca, in two volumes. But he did not publish the original Tagalog of Bonifacio's trial, and it was not until I got photostatic copies of the documents of the trial
[29]
in the early 1950s that I was able to translate them into English and, together with the original Tagalog and Bonifacio's works in prose and verse, had them published by the City of Manila in 1963 as a volume to commemorate the Bonifacio Centennial.
Don Teodoro's place in Philippine historiography is two-fold: first, as author of three history books (La Masonería Filipina, La Revolución Filipina, and Gregorio del Pilar) and second, as compiler of important historical and biographical documents (Epistolario Rizalino, La Revolución Filipina con Otros Documentos de la Epoca, Documentos Constitucionales, Planes Constitutionals Para Filipinas, El Ideario Politico de Apolinario Mabini, Las Cartas Politicas de Apolinario Mabini, and the controversial Ang Pinagtatalunang Akta ng Katipunan. He was also responsible for translating to English the trial of the Bonifacio brothers. For a man whose varied interests interfered with his scholarly pursuits, these are achievements that cannot be ignored. His autobiography which his daughter Maria translated into English as Aide-de-Camp to Freedom (Manila, 1965) is to a great extent history written by a participant or eyewitness. It is the personal touch that makes this book, at least to me, the most interesting of all his books, for it is not only the autobiography of a gifted man but also the history of a colorful segment of our nation's history whose colorful personalities contributed not only their political talent but also the high drama that inevitably makes history, both as reality and as re-creation, alive and lively. This book, together with La Masonería, is the most durable of his writings. 10
1Delivered on March 31, 1984, on the occasion of the Centenary of the Birth of Teodoro M. Kalaw, at the National Library, Manila. Published in Solidarity 5:98 (1984):3-16. In this paper, the non-historical works of the historians are excluded.
2Prescott Jernigan of the Normal School in Manila, in 1907, wrote a series entitled Letters to Fourth Grade Pupils about Civics. David P. Barrows, Director of the Bureau of Education, in 1903-1904, introduced a new set of primary texts, the Insular Readers, to replace the earlier Baldwin series.
3Edilberto Evangelista, civil engineer, later, revolutionary general, responsible for the defense works and fortifications in Cavite. He died in the Battle of Zapote Bridge in Bacoor, on February 17, 1897.
4See Ambeth R. Ocampo, Bonifacio's Bolo (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1995). See also Milagros C. Guerrero, Emmanuel N. Encarnacion, and Ramon N. Villegas, "Andres Bonifacio and the 1896 Revolution," in Sulyap Kultura (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2nd Quarter 1996): 3-12.
5See John N. Schumacher, Father Jose Burgos, A Documentary History, with Spanish Documents and their Translation (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999).
6The Philippine Insurgent Records have been renamed the Philippine Revolutionary Papers and are presently located in the National Library. In 1996 the PRP became the center of an investigation because of the discovery of the theft and sale of some important revolutionary papers.
7The Burgos Institute provided secondary education under the Revolutionary Government with the approval of its curricula by the decree of October 24, 1898. Wherever the Malolos Republic retreated to avoid capture by the America, the Burgos Institute also went.
8Early in 1997, American historian, Glenn Anthony May, published Inventing a Hero, the Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1997). The book, at once, became controversial in the Philippines (it was published earlier in mid-1996 in the United States) with its claim of having "uncovered a history of mythmaking in the service of nationalism" through a close reading of the primary sources that have been used in the writing of the history of Bonifacio and the Philippine Revolution of 1896. To answer May's assertion, the Manila Studies Association , at its Annual Conference convened a panel on June 27, 1997 and tour papers were presented to asnwer practically all of the "suppositions" of May. These papers were published in Determining the Truth. The Story of Andres Bonifacio, edited by Bernardita Reyes Churchill (Manila: Manila Studies Association and National Commission for Culture and the Arts-Committee on Historical Research, 1997).
At the 1997 Conference of the Asociacion Espanola de Estudios del Pacifico in Valladolid, Spain, a roundtable was held at the Casas del Tratado, Tordesillas, on the subject of "Bonifacio y la documentacion sobre la revolucion Filipina," where Glenn May faced a panel composed of Reynaldo C. Ileto, Milagros C. Guerrero, and Bernardita Reyes Churchill to explain/defend the assertions he made in his book. On Hero's answer to May's criticism of his Pasyon and Revolution, specifically the portion on Bonifacio, see his Filipinos and their Revolution, Event, Discourse, and Historiography (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998), pp. 203-238. See also Antonio C. Hila, The Historicism of Teodoro Agoncillo (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2000).
9See William Henry Scott, Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1984), pp. 91-104.
10For an update on the state of Philippine historiography, see Bernardita Reyes Churchill, "History and Current Situation of the Discipline of History in the Philippines," in Philippine Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. II: History (Quezon City: Philippine Social Science Council, 1993), pp. 4-34. See also "Historiography of 1898 and a Critical Biography," in Florentine Rodao and Felice Noelle Rodriguez, The Philippine Revolution of 1896, Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001), pp. 277-300.
See also Reynaldo C. Ileto, Knowing America's Colony, A Hundred Years from the Philippine War (Honolulu: Center for Philippine Studies, University of Hawaii's at Manor, 1999).
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