Wealthy landowners decided that some things were more important than independence, and threw their support to the Yankees. When America passed a law that any Filipino who continued to resist would be ineligible for a job in the colonial civil service, the middle class defected. Fighting ceased. Washington claimed victory and the American public put the whole unsavory affair out of mind. The war had lasted three years; only 883 Americans died in battle, 3,349 more of disease. Of the 1 million dead Filipinos (out of a population of 6 million), 16,000 were guerrillas, 984,000 civilians.
In place of Yankee soldiers came missionaries and teachers. Benevolent assimilation entered its apple-pie stage. William Howard Taft, weighing in at 300 pounds, was sent to head the first civil government in America’s sole colony. This unique colonial experiment began with a declaration of principle, in language recalling the oratory of Tom Paine:
… theCommissionshouldbearinmindthatthegovernmentwhichtheyareestablishingisdesignednotforoursatisfactionorfortheexpressionofourtheoreticalviews, butforthehappiness, peaceandprosperityofthepeopleofthePhilippineIslands… thatthepeopleoftheIslandsshouldbemadeplainlytounderstand, thattherearecertaingreatprinciplesofgovernment… essentialtotheruleoflawandthemaintenanceofindividualfreedom… andthattheseprinciplesandtheserulesofgovernmentmustbeestablishedandmaintainedintheirislandsforthesakeoftheirlibertyandhappiness, howevermuchtheymayconflictwiththecustomsorlawsofprocedurewithwhichtheyarefamiliar.
Other great principles of government soon interfered, however. Taft was instructed to investigate the titles to large land tracts held by individuals or religious orders, and to correct any abuses. But the White House had to take into account the Vatican’s influence on Catholic voters in America. Church lands in the islands were not seized after all. As a compromise, the Vatican agreed to substitute non-Spanish and Filipino priests for the hated Iberian friars, a rotation that posed only a minor inconvenience to the Church, and in return America purchased seventeen of the twenty-one friar haciendas around Manila from the Vatican for over $7 million. In a single grand public display intended to put the whole land reform issue to rest once and for all, these haciendas were sold in tiny parcels to former tenants, at a ruinous 8 percent interest rate far beyond their means. To meet interest payments, the Malay purchasers again had to borrow from Chinese moneylenders, soon forfeiting their land once more. Corrupt local officials helped divest unschooled farmers of their property, and by 1946, after half a century of enlightened and democratic American rule, the tenancy rate in the Philippines was actually higher than it had been under the feudal Spaniards. A Jesuit priest who spent thirteen years in the dehumanizing poverty of pre-revolutionary China came then to the island of Negros, the sugar capital of the Philippines, and was horrified to find it worse. “I never saw [in China] the exploitation of man by man,” he said, “that I have seen in the Philippines.”
The government in Manila became a genial collaboration between ambitious Americans and rich Filipino landowners. Four hundred millionaire families controlled 90 percent of the wealth. At their center were forty billionaire families who rivaled the great fortunes of Paris, London, and New York — the Rothschilds, the Mellons, the Rockefellers. Sugar generated many of these fortunes in a perverse way. Philippine sugar, so inefficiently produced that it could not compete on world markets, was allowed to enter the United States duty free. In return, Washington was guaranteed the support of a powerful political-economic bloc in Manila which mediated all issues with Filipino peasants and the middle class. Sugar barons held political power while Chinese clans controlled high finance. Of the top ten Chinese clans in this inner group of forty billionaire families, Ferdinand’s clan ranked number six.
Outside Manila, provincial dynasties developed — such as the Laurels in Batangas, the Aquinos and Cojuangcos in Tarlac, the Quirinos and Crisologos in Ilocos Sur, the Lopezes in the Visayas — which formed temporary alliances to further their political ends. Unlike America, where the great industrial monopolies were broken up in the 1930s and “trust busting” has continued ever since, these corrective measures were never dispatched across the Pacific and implemented in America’s colony. So the wealth of the Philippines remained in the tight grip of a few hundred families. In concept, this oligarchy was rigidly medieval in the Spanish model, but under America they became masters of insincerity. Democracy was only a well-oiled pretense.