Alternative history

My SunStar colleague Bong Wenceslao got me thinking. Or, to be specific, his column “Our independence” yesterday did. You see, he wondered what would have happened to the backwater Spanish colony if it hadn’t been sold to the United States of America for $20 million.

But did you know, that before the Treaty of Paris was signed on Dec. 10, 1898, American President McKinley sent a five-man commission to initially demand that Spain cede only Luzon, Guam and Puerto Rico? But the commission was besieged by advice from American generals and European diplomats that it demand possession of the whole archipelago.

On Oct. 28 that year, McKinley relented. He told the commission in Paris that “cessation of Luzon alone, leaving the rest of the islands subject to Spanish rule, or to be the subject of future contention, cannot be justified on political, commercial, or humanitarian grounds. The cessation must be the whole archipelago or none.”

And so we became America’s little brown brothers.

Did you also know that not everyone in the US was comfortable with the annexation, as many had read about Aguinaldo’s insurrection?

US steel magnate Andrew Carnegie even offered to give Washington $20 million in exchange for Washington relinquishing the islands so the inhabitants could govern themselves.

I guess there were no takers because the Americans took over, and ended up waging a deadly war with the natives, who were obviously not happy with the new interlopers.

According to the US Department of State, the conflict, which ended in July 1902, “resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants” and that “as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine and disease.”

But going back to Wenceslao, he was convinced that had the archipelago been left alone after Aguinaldo proclaimed independence, the Philippines that we know today would not have existed. That “we would have been splintered.” I think he should have added “under different foreign rulers.”

I would have imagined the British coming up with some pretext to take over Mindanao, which is a hop away from its colony in Malaya.

And it wouldn’t have been far-fetched for the Meiji Government in Tokyo to declare Luzon as a protectorate.

After all, as early as 1896, the Katipunan had sought the help of the Japanese Empire. Although Tokyo was unwilling to provide official help, Japanese supporters of Philippine independence sent weapons on a chartered ship, which sank before it could reach our shores.

As for the Visayas, I’d imagine Spain holding on to it with Panay serving as a thorn in its side.