Claro M. Recto --Manila Times

Friday, February 10, 2006


Remembering Claro M. Recto

By Rene Q. Bas

IT was Claro M. Recto’s birthday the other day, February 8. He was born in 1890. He would have been 115 years old. He was seven years and 11 months old when that other beloved Filipino was executed at the Luneta.

Recto and Rizal were both intellectual giants. Some say Recto was a better poet than Rizal. Both were great patriots. And both died faithful to the Catholic faith. Few know that for many years before his death, Claro M. Recto had been a daily Mass-goer and communicant.

Although his dying words were: “How terrible it is to die in a foreign country” those who were close to him also witnessed his joy and heard his words about being in Romes, his spiritual home, where he died on October 2, 1960, of a heart attack.

He is remembered mainly for his nationalism, for the impact of his patriotic thoughts—written in English—on modern Philippine political thought. But he was, in fact, the greatest Filipino man of letters in the Spanish language.

Claro Mayo Recto was born in Tiaong, Tayabas, (now called Quezon) province. Because he grew up in Lipa City, he is correctly claimed as a son of both Quezon and Batangas. His parents were Claro Recto and Micaela Mayo, Batangueños of the educated and upper economic class.

He obtained his basic education in Lipa City’s Instituto de Rizal, from where he pursued higher education at the Ateneo de Manila. Like Rizal, he won the highest literary prizes and received ratings of sobresaliente (outstanding) in his academics, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors as Rizal did.

He went to the University of Santo To­mas to study law and graduated, vale­dic­torian, in 1913. While still in the senior year of law, he took the bar exam—and failed. Chastised and humbled for his arrogance, he took the bar exams again, passed and became a professional lawyer in 1914.

Recto won his first moments of fame as a poet and writer. As a youth, again just like Rizal, he wrote many poems and essays. He was still a UST law student when he became a staff member of the publication El Ideal. Later, the bigger paper, La Vanguardia, took him in. There, young Claro M. Recto wrote a daily column, “Primares Cuartillas” (First Sheets) under the penname Aristeo Hilario. The elegantly written satirical pieces were the talk of the town.

He was 21 when he anthologized some of his poems in Bajo los Cocoteros (Under the Coconut Trees). Some of his poems are, until now, in the classic poetry anthologies of the Hispanic world.

La Ruta de Damasco, The Damascus Route (1918) and Solo entre las Sombras, Alone Among the Shadows (1917)—two of his plays—received high praise not just among Filipino literati but also by critics in Spain and Latin America. Both were staged in Manila to full audiences. In the mid 50s, Dean Alejandro Ro­ces together with other cultural movers and shakers of the country had the play produced. It was great success among audiences who had almost forgotten that only 30 years before, the Filipino intelligentsia spoke both Spanish and English.

In 1929 Monroismo Asiatico was published. This book confirmed his stature an essayist and a political savant. The book has the polemical pieces he wrote in a debate he and Dean Maximo Kalaw of the University of the Philippines conducted on the pages of the Manila newspapers. Kalaw advocated the application of the Monroe Doctrine in Asia. (The original Monroe Doctrine, enunciated in 1823, was US President James Monroe’s (and John Quincy Adams’s) foreign policy keeping the Americas off-limits to European or any power because the American continents were now in the US sphere of influence. In his articles against “Asiatic Mon­roeism” Recto foresaw the danger Japan posed to the Philippines and the other countries of Asia. True enough, the Japanese Empire colonized the Asian countries from 1942 to 1945.

Recto’s literary greatness is recognized throughout the Hispanic world. The Enciclo­pedia Universal says of him that more than being a lawyer and a politician, “Recto … is a Spanish writer” and that “among those of his race (he is pure Tagalog on both sides) there is not and there has been no one who has surpassed him in the mastery of the language of his country’s former sovereign.”

The lawyer Don Claro

In the years before English became the common tongue of the Philippine elite, Recto was known as the abogado milagroso, the miraculous lawyer. This was a tribute to his many victories in the courts of the land.

He wrote a two-volume book on civil procedure, which in those days decades before the Second World War, were standard fare for law students.

He won many great cases in the Supreme Court, causing bad decisions of lower courts to be reversed. He took on, even when he was a very young man, cases against much older, wealthier and famous lawyers of any race. (In those days, Filipinos, Spaniards and Americans practiced law in the Philippines.)

He became a respected member, not just of the Philippine lawyers’ association, but also of American Bar Association, Spain’s Academia Real de Legislacion y Jurisprudencia (Royal Academy of Legislation and Jurisprudence), the Political Science Academy of New York, among others.

His excellence as a lawyer derived from his excellence as a writer, his infallible logic and clarity of mind and his industry. Young lawyers today, especially many of those we see on TV talk shows, would do well emulating Claro M. Recto, especially on the craft of using language correctly and in thinking logically.




(Concluded in tomorrow’s issue)




Saturday, February 11, 2006


Claro M. Recto, a true constitutionalist

By Rene Q. Bas



Second of three parts


The great nationalist and statesman said he himself did not know how he ended up being a politician. “It was one of those steps which are taken without previous deli­beration and reflection,” he admitted.

The Philippine Assembly created by the Americans in 1907 had an all-Filpino membership but real legislative and executive powers were still largely in American hands. The Jones Law passed by the US Congress created a truly Filipino bicameral legislature, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Recto joined the Senate as a law clerk but spent more time reading the tomes at the Supreme Court library than clerking in the Senate that he got fired.

In 1919, Recto was 29 when he ran for and won the House seat of the third district in Batangas as a Democrata Party candidate.

He was re-elected in 1922 and again in 1925.

He retreated from politics after his third term as a Batangas congressman and resumed his law practice.

He could not reject his old Democrata Party colleagues’ call for his presence in the Democrata Party slate for the 1931 senatorial elec­tion of 1931. This time he ran for senator against the Nacionalista Party stalwart and reelectionist Sen. Jose P. Laurel, a fellow Batangueño. Recto won. He served as a senator until 1934.

Throughout his tenure as a congressman and a senator—1918 to 1928, 1931-1934—Recto was acclaimed as an outstanding debater, a skillful parliamentarian, a wise thinker and a statesmanly legislator. He belonged to the opposition party. Many times he single-handedly won the day for the Democratas against the Nacionalistas with their large majority. He had become known as the “Great Dissenter” in those days, a name he had also been given by admiring journalists who witnessed his struggles for anti-colonial and patriotic policies in the post-World War II Senate against the majority parties.

When the Democrata Party disappeared from the political scene, he joined his old opponents in the Nacionalista Party. They embraced him as a brother.

The efforts of the movers for Philippine independence had borne fruit with the passage of the Hare-Hawes-Cutting bill under the new name of the Tydings-McDuffie Act. In this law the United States voluntarily relinquished its formal control of its Philippine colony. The Philippine Legislature unanimously accepted the Tydings-McDuffie on May 1, 1934. Henceforth, governing the Philippines was in the hands of the Filipinos. But first they would have to write their own constitution for the Philippine Commonwealth, a phase in our history that would precede full independence from the United States.

On July 10, 1934, Recto was elected member of the Constitutional convention. He was one of the 202 delegates elected at large to represent every city and province of the archipelago. His fellow delegates elec­ted him, by acclamation, president.

He led his fellow delegates from July 1934 to February 1935 in drafting what was to become the country’s first real fundamental law.

Until today, many experts and patriotic scholars agree, the 1935 Constitution is still the best charter for our country. It author was mainly Claro M. Recto.

Recto and Senate President Manuel Quezon brought the Commonwealth Constitution to the United States. The Philippines was free but only a bit more free than a state of the American Union. The US president still had to agree to what the Filipino constitutional convention wanted. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Philippine Constitution. And the great and lasting deed was done.

Right after signing the Constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth, Recto received a reward: Roosevelt appointed him justice of the Philippine Supreme Court.

Accepting the position was actually a sacrifice. He was earning very much more as a successful practicing lawyer than the P15,000 annual salary of a justice of the High Court. Justice Recto served as Supreme Court justice for only 14 months. He proved to be as tireless, fair and wise in the Supreme Court as he had always been in his other positions.

On his retirement, his fellow justices gave him this tribute:

“You came on this court famed as a man of letters, as a jurist, and as a parliamentarian. Your vast, profound learn­ing and your keen, penetrating power of analysis, which permeate the decisions which you have penned, are a byword to many. You are leaving with a lasting impression of the jurist who has tirelessly and scrupulously sifted the truth from a maze of judicial records, with an eye always to admi­nistering justice to the litigants and to lightening the burden of your colleagues.”

It was a rare tribute that no other justice of the High Court, not even any of the chief justices, had ever been given by their peers.

After his stint with the Supreme Court, Recto resumed the practice of law. He also became a law professor and continued writing political and literary works.

The call of politics came to him again. He was elected to the Senate in November 1941. He got the most number of votes among all the 24 senators elected with him.

Then on December 8, Pearl Harbor and the Philippines were bombed by the air force of the Japanese empire.

During the Japanese occupation, first under the Philippine Executive Commission headed by Jorge Vargas and then under the Second Philippine Republic with Jose P. Laurel as president, Recto served as Commissioner of Education, Health, and Social Welfare and then as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

During the Liberation of Manila in 1945, the Americans arrested Recto with Laurel, Camilo Osias, Quintin Paredes, Antonio de las Alas, Vargas, and other prominent Filipinos who had been officials of the government during the Japanese occupation. They were charged with collaboration and tried by the People’s Court.

All the accused were freed when President Manuel A. Roxas issued his Amnesty Proclamation.




(To be concluded tomorrow)




Sunday, February 12, 2006



Recto’s writings are as relevant today as when he was alive

By Rene Q. Bas


Last of three parts



Despite his detractors’ efforts to stick the collaborator and communist labels on him, Claro M. Recto was elected to the Senate in 1949. As a lawyer, an intellectual and a man sensitive to the dignity of other men, Recto defended friends and ordinary people who were being badly treated by anti-communist authorities for holding nationalist and communist views.

Six years later, in the 1955 elections, Recto was reelected. The “great dissenter” won with a respectably large number of votes despite President Ra­mon Magsaysay’s—and the Magsaysay boys’—efforts to make Recto lose.

And Recto was the Magsaysay presidency’s most nettle­some critic on the issue of nationalism, the preservation of Philippine interests and national dignity in the face of America’s power as the leader of the “Free World” against the Soviet Union with its satellites and the People’s Republic of China.

Recto, the true patriot, could see the dangers Magsaysay’s US-subservient policies posed to Philippine social and economic development. His alternative view was simply for the Filipinos and their leaders to make sure that Philippine national interests were not sacrificed on the altar of the country’s loyalty to the American vision of how the world should be run.

In many ways, Recto’s outlook coincided with those of the neutralists and non-aligned leaders—India’s Nehru and Indonesia’s Sukarno – which earned him the “communist” or at least “pro-communist” label.

But the truth is that Recto’s views about preserving our own patrimony, upholding our dignity —and making sure that our national interests are served first and America’s only served second —were shared and applied to their countries’ relations with the United States by its closest anti-Soviet and anti-Communist European allies, including Britain and France.

Recto’s writings and speeches in the 1950s until his death in Rome in 1960 are where the essentials of Philippine nationalism can be found up to this day.

He never became president. But many of his nationalist ideas are now conventional wisdom in our country. Still, his prescriptions—just like those of Jose Rizal, whose patriotism and thoughts Recto immensely admired—have not been put fully to practical use in our politics, foreign policy and socio-economic development.

The Recto Valedictory (and the Recto Day Program 1985) is a 1985 book published by the Claro M. Recto Memorial Foundation.

The book contains, in both the original Spanish and in Nick Joaquin’s English translation, the ten speeches that Don Claro would have delivered in Spain to various audiences of “Brother Spaniards” had he not died in Rome on October 2, 1960.

The ten speeches written in most elegant language summarize the wisdom of Claro M. Recto and teach Filipinos of today to appreciate our country, to look at history and the world with the mature eyes of modern citizens who have not lost their sense of wonder at a world governed—despite everything—by God’s goodness.

Recto – and these 10 never-delivered speeches – are as relevant today as when he was alive.

For example, those who can’t understand the fuss patriotic Filipinos are raising now about the Visiting Forces Agreement will learn much from “The Military Treaties on Bases between Spain and the United States and between the Philippines and the United States.”

Recto’s thoughts about governance are as grippingly valid today as they were when he first wrote and uttered them in the years before the Second World War and in the 1950s.

To Recto the root of our country’s problems is the corruption of those whose job is to serve the public and the criminal rapacity of the privileged and powerful elite.

About poverty in the Philippines, in 1958 Recto wrote: “We are confronted with problems—economic, moral and political—among the gravest, perhaps, in all our history, which have been the result of wrong policies and malpractices of the government, ranging from incompetence and opportunism to downright dishonesty and perverted morals…”

He saw that corrupt government officials, “…the betrayers of public trust, the influence peddlers and the beneficiaries of all these racketeering or horrendous proportions”—steal from the Filipino people the public services that they need and have the right to enjoy.





http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/feb/10/yehey/opinion/20060210opi5.html

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/feb/11/yehey/opinion/20060211opi7.html

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/feb/12/yehey/opinion/20060212opi7.html