Recto: The man and the legend

Icampaigned for Claro M. Recto for president knowing little about the man and long before I even knew what elections were really all about.

As a young boy, I did as I was told by my father who was Recto’s man in Bukidnon. My brother and I were Dad’s foot soldiers, doing all sorts of things like pasting Recto posters on every wall or lamp post we encountered and passing out leaflets to whoever accepted them all across town. We served Coke and sandwiches to whoever showed up at our house, which doubled as Recto’s headquarters. 

Our candidate hardly rang a bell in our remote mountain town and the few who knew him were hostile, calling him bad names like “communist” and “subversive.”

In that presidential fight of 1957, just months after President Ramon Magsaysay died in a plane crash, there were three other candidates aside from Recto: President Carlos Garcia of the ruling Nacionalistas, the former vice president who automatically succeeded Magsaysay, the sugar baron Jose Yulo of the opposition Liberal Party, and Manuel Manahan, the RM loyalist and look-alike.

Recto was clearly the least popular candidate. In our school’s mock election, I was hooted down by classmates who were overwhelmingly for Garcia, followed by Yulo and Manahan. This was understandable. Bukidnon was part of the solid Visayan-Cebuano bloc and its favorite son was Garcia of nearby Bohol province. Yulo was an Ilonggo from another Visayan island with a large contingent in our province. Manahan was from Luzon but he capitalized on Magsaysay magic.

Much to our side’s consternation, Recto seemed old and stern looking; he came across as too intelligent or too aristocratic for people in the rural areas. In fact, however, he far outclassed all his rivals in terms of prestige and service to the nation. The first two were his non-scintillating contemporaries in pre-war politics and the third one was a neophyte who had never won an election.

I wasn’t aware at that time that Recto was fighting the last electoral battle of his life and at the humiliating end of a long and complicated career in politics. Like Garcia and Yulo, he was in his late 60s, but he only had three more years to live; the two would survive into the Marcos era or more than a decade into the future.

Little did I know that Recto’s fading star would rise again after he was struck down by a mysterious heart attack in Rome on Oct. 2, 1960.  In death, he would become bigger than he ever was in life; his followers, the best and brightest of the next generation, would set off an intense period of nationalist revival that would last for 10 years and shake Philippine politics to its very foundations.

“Rectonian nationalism,” as this phenomenon was known, would later be captured and discarded by the Maoist left, provoke a ferocious conservative backlash and end up somewhat co-opted by the Marcos in both its democratic and dictatorial periods (1966-72 and 1972-86, respectively). Ferdinand Marcos was the consummate kind of politician who knew the propaganda or cosmetic value of nationalism. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Back in 1957, Dad was a Recto true believer. They were from the same province (Batangas) where people took pride in fighting colonialism and championed the ideals of the failed Revolution of 1896. Dad introduced his kids to Jose Rizal and our people’s struggle for freedom against Spanish and American colonial rule. I memorized “Mi Ultimo Adios” early in grade school and devoured Rizal’s novels and Apolinario Mabini’s essays. Recto was straight out of that glorious tradition.

“Don’t be ashamed to campaign for Recto,” Dad told me one day when I came home complaining that I was being bullied by some big boys for supporting a communist. “Recto is a great man, not a communist. He wants to build a country where Filipinos are free and prosperous, not beholden to foreign oppressors and big landlords as we are today.”

I must confess that these fighting words flew over my head. All I cared about was that Dad knew what was best for our country and I had to obey his wishes.

The high point of my first involvement in politics at age nine was when Recto came to town and dropped by our house. The great man perfunctorily shook my hand and he patted me on the head. That was all. Later that evening, I heard him speak before a small audience at the town plaza. He was given a polite round of applause after his speech in English and Tagalog (he spoke no Visayan), which I thought very few of his listeners understood.

It goes without saying that on election day a few weeks later, Recto lost as spectacularly in Bukidnon as he did on the national level, coming out at the tail-end of the race.

Looking back, I realize that I totally missed out on the grave importance Recto attached to his doomed candidacy, the depths of despair he fell into after his defeat, and the roots of his unshaken resolve to turn nationalism into a political force that would transform the Philippines into a modern and self-respecting nation.

I would come to learn that Recto was far from a quixotic fool. He stood up to be counted when nationalism was regarded as passé and not worth the sacrifice.

Recto was a romantic ahead of his time. He loved to quote Pilosopong Tasyo, the misunderstood wise man in Noli Me Tangere, probably as an advanced epitaph of his own life: “There were those who kept vigil in the night of our forefathers.”

Born in Tiaong, Quezon on Feb. 8, 1890 (we just marked his 123rd birthday; also the 78th anniversary of the 1935 Constitution that he profoundly influenced), Claro M. Recto was a child of the 1896 revolution that failed and which he felt called upon to redeem in his lifetime.

Recto and his generation would live under three foreign flags (Spanish, American, Japanese) before witnessing the 1946 birth of what he regarded as a deeply flawed republic that remained tied to the apron strings of Uncle Sam.

As a brilliant poet and lawyer educated in Spanish but too young to fight for the revolution, he grew up protesting against the new American colonial order that would cast a dark cloud over his entire life. America’s ominous presence would hang over his political career which started in 1919 when he was first elected a congressman from Batangas and ended some four decades later as a revered senior statesman following his defeat for the presidency.

Recto’s extended stint in public office would be divided into two contrasting periods: the first phase (1919-45) as a conventional politician, or trapo in modern parlance, under the shadow of Manuel Luis Quezon, who dominated the Philippine scene all throughout that period, and the second phase (1945-1960), when he consciously repudiated past allegiances and raised the nationalist banner that was closest to his heart and his ideals as a young man witnessing the tragedy of the Philippine revolution.

As his biographer Renato Constantino aptly described the transition from the first to the second phase of Recto’s career, the man went through a classic case of “the making of a Filipino” (the title of the 1969 biography) or his painful but exhilarating passage from elitist to mass-based politics.

Always known as an intellectual and legal giant, he immersed himself in local politics for almost a decade as the rising star of the Democrata minority, which gave Quezon’s ruling Nacionalistas a stiff fight in the 1920s. Recto at one point lost the speakership of the House of Representatives to Manuel Roxas, Quezon’s protégé and destined to be the future republic’s first president.

Burned out as an opposition stalwart, Recto abandoned politics in 1928 to practice law. But being suddenly out of the limelight bothered and led him back to public office three years later. He took on the incumbent Jose Laurel for the Southern Tagalog senatorial district, engaging in a legendary debate tournament which saw the two intellectual pillars heaping elegant abuse against each other from town plaza to town plaza. Recto won that historic contest, only to preside over the voluntary dismantling of what remained of the Democrata Party and to enlist as Quezon’s compliant senate majority leader. It was not his proudest moment.

After just one term of three years, the much-mellowed Recto was drafted by his new patron to preside over the making of the 1935 Constitution in preparation for the promised American grant of independence in 1946. His pivotal role in this undertaking is reflected in the fact that the Constitution was passed on his 45th birthday. To this day, Feb. 8 is celebrated as Philippine Constitution Day, long after the 1971 Marcos and the 1987 Cory Constitutions superseded Recto’s magnum opus.

In the early Commonwealth period leading to independence (1935-41), Quezon served as autocratic president and Recto sought a measure of dignity by being appointed by Quezon as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Because Quezon wanted a second term that the constitution prohibited, the fundamental law of the land had to be amended, some say, badly desecrated by its own authors. Quezon cracked the whip and virtually all players, including Recto in his judicial perch, toed the line. Another amendment abolished the unicameral National Assembly and restored the Senate. Recto left the high court and ran for the senate in the same 1941 election that gave Quezon his coveted second term.

Of the 24 senators elected, all handpicked by Quezon, Recto polled the highest number of votes, ahead of Roxas, the designated heir. This feat would catapult Recto to the frontlines of the succession battle that was already being silently fought out in the light of Quezon’s life-threatening illness (tuberculosis).

The three-year Japanese occupation would intervene (January 1942-February 1945) to undermine the Quezonian order and plunge the country into another harrowing period reminiscent of the 1898 American conquest and its aftermath.

Recto would become a major casualty of this brutal reversal of political fortunes. He would go through the darkest period of his life as a so-called Japanese collaborator, serving as Commissioner of Education and Minister of Foreign Affairs under wartime President Jose Laurel, the provincemate he bested in 1931. Recto’s classic defense, like Laurel’s, was that he was never disloyal to Filipino national interest at a time when America was incapable of protecting its colony from Japanese occupation; in effect, America abandoned the hapless Filipinos to their devices in favor of its “Europe First” policy in World War II against Hitler’s Germany. 

Both Recto and Laurel would suffer persecution upon the victorious return of the American forces. Manuel Roxas, who wisely stayed on the edges of the Laurel regime, was the Americans’ favored successor to Quezon, who died in exile in Washington, DC, just before the war ended.

The collaboration issue would poison post-war politics. Embittered by American persecution and repelled by what they considered onerous American impositions accepted by the newly-elected President Roxas (parity rights for Americans, setting up of giant US military bases), Recto and Laurel would enter their grand period of anti-American nationalist advocacy beginning in 1945.

Elected post-war senators in their own right, the two men would in due time turn the senate into a bastion of nationalism and good governance and the bane of every president who, of course, had little choice but to tow the American line.

Recto’s fired his first big salvo in March 1951 with a landmark speech on the nation’s “mendicant foreign policy” that he said was dictated by the United States. He and Laurel would soon become the darlings of the University of the Philippines’ vigorous intellectual crowd.

Especially after his death in 1960 while on what would be his belated first sentimental voyage to Spain, he would be recognized as the country’s preeminent nationalist guru. He never touched Spanish soil.

In sharp contrast to Recto’s fervent anti-Americanism, it must be noted that he adored Spain all his life, spoke and wrote in elegant Spanish, and was regarded highly in the Spanish-Latin American world as a man of literature and letters. It was Spanish misrule, he always said, that he condemned, not Filipino-Spanish culture which was imbibed from birth.

The next Filipino generation of equally respected leaders like Lorenzo Tanada, Jose W. Diokno and Jovito Salonga would proudly acknowledge Recto as their personal role model and mentor.

The irony of it all was that the 1970s rise of Maoist radicalism, partly facilitated by the nationalist revival of the previous decade, would harshly condemn Rectonian nationalism as a vestige of ilustrado (elitist) politics or one inordinately focused on anti-American polemics to the exclusion of truly socialist or proletarian ideas.

Fairly or unfairly, Recto would be accused of being the willing tool of certain Filipino vested interests that took advantage of “Filipino First,” a key component of the nationalist movement, to gain monopoly control in key industries (energy, sugar, telecommunications, mining, transportation) once owned by Americans but targeted by the former for self-aggrandizement at the expense of the people. Some critical writers have pointed out that Recto was as vehemently opposed to land reform as the rest of the landlord-dominated legislature.

The turbulent times of the 1970s, it was argued by the radicals, called for armed struggle against Marcos, his American masters and the Filipino oligarchy. It was a leap into the unknown that mainstream nationalists warned could only stoke right-wing reprisals and push the country into dictatorial rule.

Subsequent events would indicate that the armed-struggle advocates overreached themselves and were misguided all along. The fight against Marcos could not have been won through violent Maoist-style revolution. In February 1986, almost 27 years ago, it was non-violent People Power with dogged Rectonians like Tanada, Diokno and Salonga joining Cory Aquino’s once-lonely crusade that vanquished Marcosian tyranny and restored democratic rule, no matter how flawed.

The question remains: what if the advancing nationalist movement had not been rudely interrupted by Marcosian machinations and Maoist adventurism and had instead bought enough time to usher the nation into a more pluralist and non-authoritarian direction? Would we have avoided the 14 “lost years” of martial law that turned the Philippines into the sickman of Asia, a cruel designation that sticks like glue to this very day?

All I know is that it’s pointless to argue against history or what has already transpired against all our pious wishes. I can only hark back to that memorable day in 1957 when I shook Recto’s hand and I didn’t realize it was as close as I could ever get to Filipino greatness, then or now. He was no saint and no perfect human being, that I always knew, but he was fighting the good fight of the Filipino race and that’s all that really mattered. We can only aspire to follow, no matter how humbly, in Recto’s footsteps.

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com

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(Correction: Regarding my Feb. 3 Cebu article, it has been pointed out that then-Gov. Lito Osmena, in behalf of the province, sold the Club Filipino de Cebu property, not the adjacent lot still occupied by the Cebu Country Club, to the Ayala interests in the mid-1980s.)