Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

When the announcement finally came, everything in the harbour that could manage to do so steamed down the Bay to meet him, and when the launch to which he had transferred from the Alava came up to the mouth of the Pásig River and under the walls of old Fort Santiago, seventeen guns boomed out a Governor’s salute, while whistles and bells and sirens all over the bay and river and city filled the air with a deafening din.

Wherever his eyes rested he saw people,—crowding windows, roofs, river banks and city walls, all of them cheering wildly and waving hats or handkerchiefs. And the thing which moved him most was the fact that the welcoming throng was not just representative of the wealthy and educated class, but included thousands of the people, barefooted and in calicoes, who had come in from the neighbouring and even the far provinces to greet him.

Mrs. Moses asked Mr. Benito Legarda, one of the Filipino members of the Commission, whether or not there had ever been a like demonstration in honour of the arrival of a Spanish Governor, and his answer was:

“Yes, there were demonstrations always, but the government paid the expenses.”

In this case the very opposite was true. The government had no money to waste on celebrations and all government buildings, such as the City Hall, the Post Office and the Ayuntamiento, were conspicuously bare. Their nakedness was positively eloquent of economy in the midst of the riot of gay bunting, the flags, the pennants and the palm leaves in which the rest of the city was smothered. Then there were extraordinary and elaborate arches spanning the streets through which the Governor was to be conducted. One of these, erected by the Partido Federal, displayed a huge allegorical picture which had a peculiar significance. Filipina, a lovely lady draped in flowing gauze, was seen, in an attitude which combined appeal with condescension, presenting to Columbia a single star, implying that she desired to be accepted as one of the States of the Union.

I am indebted to the descriptive art of Mrs. Moses, to photographs and to my own knowledge of the Filipino way of doing things for the mental picture I have of this celebration.

At the landing near the Custom House my husband found a great procession in line, ready to escort him to the Ayuntamiento where the speeches of welcome were to be made. There were regiments of cavalry, infantry and artillery, as well as platoon after platoon of native and American police with as many bands as there were divisions of the procession. Picked men from the volunteer regiments acted as a special guard for the Governor’s carriage and they must have added much to the impressive array, because I know of my own observation that the volunteers were always as fine a looking body of men as it would be possible to find anywhere.

When Mr. Taft reached the Ayuntamiento he listened to glowing speeches of tribute and welcome in the Marble Hall, then he stood for hours shaking hands with the people who, in orderly file, passed in and out of the building which was large enough to hold only a very small fraction of them. When this was over and his audience had settled down he proceeded to tell them in a clear and simple way all about his experiences in Rome and how far the negotiations with the Vatican had proceeded. This was a matter of paramount importance to the Filipinos and they listened with an intensity of interest which Mr. Taft said seemed to promise serious consequences if the business could not be carried to a successful conclusion.

However, despite the joy and festivity with which he was greeted upon his return, the Governor did not find general conditions in the islands either prosperous or happy.

Everything that could possibly happen to a country had happened or was happening. The cholera epidemic was still raging, and while it had abated to a considerable extent in Manila it was at its worst in Iloilo and other provinces. There had been from seventy to eighty cases a day in Manila for a long time, and the quarantine regulations had incensed the ignorant people to a point where force had to be used to secure obedience. They did not understand sanitary measures and wanted none of them; they clung to their superstitious beliefs, and were easily made to accept as truth wild statements to the effect that the Americans were poisoning the wells and rivers and had stopped transportation and business with the sole purpose of starving or otherwise destroying the entire population. Even the educated ones were not without their time-honoured prejudices in this regard, for while Mr. Taft was in Rome he receive a cabled protest from Filipino members of the Commission with a request that he order the quarantine raised.