General Macarthur used the title words a few years later. In this case it is the author’s return after 40 years absence.
I wanted to see how it has changed since, nearly 40 years ago, I wrote for its pioneer American newspapers and taught Filipino boys and girls at night school to spell "cat" and recite "Mary's Little Lamb" in English without calling Mary "Maria" and her lamb a "lamp."
Particularly, I wanted to see what effect 42 years of American rule have had on the Filipinos, who by law are soon to rule themselves.
To show you what Manila was, and what it's like now, I must "cut back" a bit, as film plays do, to let all the actors in at their right places.
Dewey had just sunk the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. That was May, 1898.
Excited Americans from Beacon Hill to Puget Sound started a mass raid on the old family atlas. Where were the Philippines? What kind of place was Manila, anyway?
Volunteer regiments sailed to find out. In President McKinley's makeshift troopships they swarmed across the Pacific, to Uncle Sam's long, strange adventure in these 7,083 tropical islands that sprawl off the southeast coast of China.
On crowded transports sweating officers grunted over maps and Spanish verbs; some soldiers, as soldiers will, matched wits with Lady Luck; Boston lost its shirt to Billings or Little Rock, and all joined in abusing the "embalmed beef" of that day, grandpa of the "corned willie" of a bigger war. All hands, as they neared Manila, sang "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."
Once ashore, they found Manila, the capital, a picturesque, lazy Spanish-Malay city set on a vast bay indenting Luzon Island, northern-most important island of the group.
Last week, when I landed at Manila again, the first familiar sight was a fat water buffalo, or carabao, hitched to a cart.
Symbol of Filipino life, this Manila bull persists, despite trucks and taxis. He belongs here, as our mule belongs down south. From this big, mud-splashing bovine, Washington's famed Military Order of the Carabao got its name. Like the animal they exalt, this order's members also enjoy regular "wallows"; all are veterans of Philippine campaigns. They shoved their mules off transports into Manila Bay and let them swim ashore. They put down the insurrection and helped start civil government.
In this new Manila, where I write, I find few of this old guard. They belong to "the days of the empire." But when you pause at some once-familiar place, say Malacañan Palace, where William Howard Taft gave lively parties when he was governor, memory begins to conjure up names and faces like those of once-famous actors seen in the revival of an old-style silent movie. "Fighting Bob" Evans, Funston, Leonard Wood, "Hell-roaring" Jake Smith-they're all now in that silent movie we call "history." Today's big Manila play is a talkie, in colors, with Filipinos and not Americans as actors.
Making these notes, I sit on the veranda of an old Spanish house, with sliding shell windows, that overlooks the Pasig River. I loafed on this same porch when it belonged to…”
7” x 10”; 27 pages, 21 B&W photos plus map
No text, just photo captions.
7” x 10”; 16 pages, 21 color photos of people and places in the Philippines.
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1940 magazine.
40J1
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Luke 12: 15
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