Backward devolution
Four presidents have been inaugurated there, three legislatures sat there, and today, it houses the artistic heritage of the nation. It was built as an act of native defiance, and its inauguration was confronted by an assertion of imperial will.
From the time the Legislative Building was opened to this day, its presence was proclaimed by an absence, caused by official censorship. This was chronicled in a very interesting article, “Nation Building in the Philippines and the Racial Ordering of International Architecture,” by Diana Martinez, which reveals the following: “Shortly before its planned inauguration on July 16, 1926, the Legislative Building … underwent a last-minute change. An inscription carved into the panel above the portico was plastered over. It had read, ‘ERECTED BY THE FILIPINO PEOPLE AS A MONUMENT TO RIGHTS WON AND DEDICATED BY THEM TO THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM.’” The order came down from Governor General Leonard Wood. Wood ordered the inscription’s removal for two stated reasons. The first was supposedly grammatical. Wood argued that the article “a” was necessary before the word monument.
The second reason was that the inscription had not been authorized. The grammatical correction was trifling—the elimination of punctuation or indefinite articles was not atypical of monumental inscriptions. The lack of “authorization” pointed to a more complicated context, one that shaped the inscription’s carefully calculated rhetoric. The inscription, for example, made no specific reference to independence—only to “rights won.” Likewise, it made no claim to freedom, only a stated dedication to the “cause of freedom.” The inscription was thus not an appeal to an imperial sovereign, but to a set of universal values that the United States claimed to represent. Finally, the petition did not come from a disembodied voice. This was the central point of the inscription, which argued that the monument was erected not for the Philippines but by the Filipino people. Wood ordered the inscription’s removal because he understood the building for what it was—not only a convincing argument for self-determination but the direct appeal of a nation to an international community—an authority that superseded the increasingly limited reach of Wood’s power.
“On the day of its inauguration in 1926, the Legislative Building, an imposing Beaux Arts structure, appeared without a dedicatory inscription. Instead, a large blank panel served as a striking symbol of the indeterminate future of a not quite independent republic. It hardly mattered. The building’s heavily loaded ornamental program restated the inscription’s case through a relentless iteration of “the Filipino” as its decorative theme, providing an exemplary image of how postcolonial nations were compelled to self-racialize in order to claim their place within a changing world order. Perfectly suited to represent the imperatives of liberal internationalism, Beaux Arts architecture provided a platform for national identity, though only within a framework formally disciplined by the classical orders. Here “expression” was presented to native elites as a strictly delimited arena of political agency. The native voice would be included—but only if enclosed within the bounds of a legitimizing “civilizational” structure.”
The Legislative Building was beautiful, so much so that people who see old photos of it online more often than not sigh that today’s National Museum should be restored to its prewar appearance—Nick Joaquin was the first and the most vocal about the hurried, pared-down manner in which the building had been rebuilt after World War II; but it showed where the power lay; the presidency wanted it back in operation by the State of the Nation Address of 1949. Congress, surprisingly, was sick of holding sessions apart, with the House in a converted Japanese schoolhouse on Lepanto Street (criminally demolished in 2006), and the Senate using Manila City Hall. In contrast, the Supreme Court, whose own home, the Ayuntamiento in Intramuros, was a ruin, had to wait for a permanent home, and was a squatter in the administrative building of Malacañan Palace. It remains a squatter in the University of the Philippines to this day, even though the Ayuntamiento has been rebuilt and is ready for occupancy. Apparently, the Treasury is more important than the Supreme Court.
In 1940, the cornerstone for a splendid national capitol was laid down, but the war stopped it, and the rise of the nightclubs of Roxas Boulevard was too tempting to legislators who dragged their feet about completing a national capitol until Congress and the capitol were abolished by martial law. During the First Quarter Storm, the House had glassed-in its public galleries with bulletproof glass to protect our solons from the people, but in the end, Marcos padlocked Congress with no one—people or legislators—complaining, ending things not with a bang but a whimper. The Senate president and Speaker had both actively participated in the planning of the maneuvers to replace the 1935 Constitution with a new one that would have a National Assembly giving instant seats to legislators and Con-con delegates who approved the new Marcos system.
The Senate returned to its old haunts, but, in a throwback to the past, instead of joining the lower house in Quezon City, it hunkered down in a converted bank vault in Pasay for the simple reason that Pasay was more convenient to senators who lived in Makati; the Senate Building in the Batasan Complex turned into a humdrum electoral tribunal. Native defiance was stimulated by foreign rule but degenerated to native sloth and shortsightedness once independence was achieved.
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3
