WK 7B- POLITICAL CARICATURES

The Independence, June 9, 1917

Is the Police Force Bribed?

Is the Police Force Bribed?

The first of Manila's periodic police scandals

▪  Alleging that senior police were accepting bribes from Chinese gambling houses.

▪  Chua’s letter sparked allegations.

▪  Led eventually to "the suicide of a police chief".

▪  After a series of counter-charges, the free press withdrew its illegal allegations.

▪  Police corruption in gambling law enforcement was a constant theme in cartoons throughout the American period.

▪  Manila Police protecting gambling clubs.

▪  Fernando Amorsolo gives the illustration his usual racist edge.

▪  Chinese are caricatured as emaciated, leering creatures more rodent than human.

▪  cartoonists often showed Chinese corruptors or opium smugglers in a similarly racist manner.  

▪  Pedro Chua- mysterious informant name

▪  Vicente Sotto- supports Chua’s charges

The Independent, January 17, 1920

New Bird of Prey

New Bird of Prey

▪  Manila’s population began to pilot upward during World War I

▪  Housing became scarce and rents escalated

▪  Rising rent combined with high food prices to reduce the Manila working class in sudden poverty

▪  Governor-General Francis B. Harrison made a tentative move towards reform

▪  He suggested the passage of a bill that set rents at 12 percent of the assessed value of the property. 

▪  Harrison’s suggested reform was little more than a temporary palliative

▪  Government taxes were used to reward the Filipino elite for their loyalty, not to advance the masses

▪  Lucrative government appointments went to educated children of the elite

▪  Infrastructure development profited planters and merchants who used the highways and the waterfronts

▪  Masses had little access to any of the new government programs or services

▪  Colonial Americans loath to intervene as food and rent speculators pushed the masses to the breaking point

▪  In the end the marketplace resolved the food crisis when world market cereal prices crashed in the early 1920's.

The Independent, May 1, 1920

While the Priest Lives Alone in a Big Building

While the Priest Lives Alone in a Big Building

▪  The publisher of The Independent, never missed a chance to attack the Catholic Church.

▪  urged the government to confiscate the large priests’ residence attached to Santa Cruz parish church

▪  people should not be made to share the painful congestion of Plaza Goiti and Plaza Santa Cruz

▪  The question of Church property was a particularly sensitive one for nationalists in 1906

▪  The Philippine Supreme Court had ruled that the Roman Catholic Church was the legal owner of all disputed properties

▪  stripping the nationalistic Aglipayan Church of the parish churches it had occupied right after the revolution

▪  Aglipayan Church went into decline and nationalists remained embittered over the issue.   

▪  The church originally acquired the land shown in this cartoon during the mid-19^th

▪  While Sta. Cruz church parish still stands, and the controversial parish house became a branch of Phil Trust, a church-owned bank.  

Free Press, April 16, 1921

Where the Mosquito is King, Donde El Mosquito Es Rey

Where the Mosquito is King, Donde El Mosquito Es Rey

▪  Manila is the natural breeding ground for malarial mosquitos

▪  Spanish public health procedures were grossly inadequate to the imperatives of Manila's site

▪  the Americans found the city of cesspool of ill health when they occupied it in 1898.  

▪  Americans made major advances in epidemic disease control during the first decades of their rule

▪ The Board of Health brought tropical disease -- malaria, smallpox, cholera, and plague -- under control.

▪  construction of sewers and sanitary waterworks combined with an activist public health program made the conquest of malaria in Manila a colonial success story

▪  Board of Health distributed millions of doses of quinine and eliminated mosquito breeding grounds by filling up the standing water hole

▪  Houses near swampy sites were relocated and the low ground filled

▪  The Board of Health was resting on its laurels and the quality of mosquito control was slipping dangerously

▪  The Board of Health had been turned over to Filipino civil servants who did not administer the public health programs with the same efficiency or arbitrary authority

Philippines Free Press, February 12, 1921

“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity““Libertad,Igualdad, Fraternidad“

“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity““Libertad,Igualdad, Fraternidad“

▪  The Philippine Assembly passed a law authorizing all legislators active or retired, to bear firearms.

▪  The Manila press was outraged, but the legislators ignored the opposition and promulgated the law over the screams of protest.

Philippine Free Press, April 6, 1929

The Returning Student

The Returning Student

▪  When Manila emerged as the national center for university education during the 1920s

▪  The annual March ritual of the city-wise student returning home to his village was played out in barrios across the archipelago

▪  graduation and tertiary degree often allowed a villager to leave the barrio for a city civil service post

▪  while still a student he had to return to the village for the summer holidays

▪  The Free Press description of this annual ritual in 1929 captures something of its flavor:

Philippines Free Press, June 18, 1938

Brothers Under the Skin

Brothers Under the Skin

▪  As social conflict and socialist ideology spread in Central Luzon during the 1930s 

▪  The Free Press was forced to deal with social substance instead of bucolic trivia in its provincial reportage.  

▪  Brothers Under the Skin urges Filipinos to end social conflict and deal with each other fairly

▪  Central Luzon peasants mounted strikes and demonstrations to win tenancy reforms

▪  Refusing concessions, landlords in Pampanga, Tarlac, and Nueva Ecija provinces responded with goon squad repression. 

The Independent, April 14, 1917

The Loyalty of the Filipinos

The Loyalty of the Filipinos

▪  World War I sparked an outburst of pro-American loyalty among Filipinos and transformed Uncle Sam’s media image.

▪  The prewar cartoons of 1907-08 showed him as a satanic monster, drawn in Caucasian caricature with a great nose, fanged teeth, and crooked smile

▪  Fernando Amorsolo draws a wise, handsome Uncle Sam leading little Juan, loyal and smiling, on the road to war

▪  Sergio Osmeña won unprecedented political concessions

▪  by suspending the independence campaign duration and offering the United States 25,000 troops, a destroyer, and a submarine.

▪  Osmeña orchestrated a nationwide loyalty drive which netted $20 million in U.S. war bond sales and $500.000 in Red Cross donations. 

Philippines Free Press, October 14, 1933

The Latest- Lo Ultimo

The Latest- Lo Ultimo

▪  Throughout 1933 the battle over acceptance or rejection of the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Independence Bill continued to divide Philippine politics

▪  Senator Quezon led the battle for rejection

▪  When all three leaders returned from Washington in June 1933, the struggle for power began in earnest

▪  In July Quezon’s faction ousted Manuel Roxas as House Speaker and installed loyalist Quintin Paredes.

▪  When the University of the Philippines’ President and Arts Dean supported Osmeña and the H-HC Quezon slashed the university budget by one-third.

▪  Both resigned and Quezon installed a protégé, Law Dean Jorge Bocobo, as president

▪  When the Roces family’s Times Vanguardia-Taliba chain came out for Osmeña and the H-H-C Bill.

▪  Quezon raised ₱300,000 among his cronies to buy out Vicente Madrigal’s Debate-Mabuhay Herald chain and install protégé Carlos P. Romulo as editor in chief

▪  Through ruthless reprisals against opponents, Quezon gradually broke the opposition.

▪  The Philippine Legislature, now under his control, voted to reject the H-H-C Bill in October 1933.

▪  Quezon led a new mission to Washington and returned five months later with the same bill by a different name

▪  Quezon’s leadership for the rest of the decade was assured.