Five
Centrals, 1920-1934

"I want to go to Negros and learn how to plant sugar cane," Don Sixto Lopez, the once irreducible Batangas revolutionary leader one day told a Negros woman sugar planter.
"Do come," she said, "and we will not only teach you how to plant cane but also how to go into debt."
Philippines Free Press (April 7, 1928)

My being a Capampangan is a source of pride to me, For it is the only treasure I shall bring to my grave. I am a Capampangan in thought and aspiration, Heart and soul, flesh, blood and bone.
Capampangan poet Juanito Goingco

The years from 1921 to 1934 brought unprecedented prosperity to the Philippine sugar industry. The U.S. tariff system provided the islands' crop privileged access to American markets and for several years protected the industry from the worsening effects of the Great Depression. Production accelerated at an extraordinary rate as processing facilities multiplied to accommodate overseas demand. The central, with its tall, distinctive, barnlike structure and protruding smokestacks, became the symbol of this new age.

More efficient milling, increased sugar hectarage, and guaranteed markets infused massive amounts of capital into the sugar industry and augmented the wealth, power, and prestige of its leaders. Added to the top of the structure was a layer of centralistas, those, including Americans, associated through investment, management, and/or technology with the manufacture of a competitive grade of export sugar. These millers converted their economic strength into political clout, which they brought to the halls of colonial government and to the U.S. Congress. To realize how powerful the industry became, one need only observe how the leadership manipulated the resources of the Philippine National Bank. As never before

the sugar industry influenced life in the Philippines and affected the shape of the colony's future.

Economic change brought tensions to sugarlandia, between millers and planters and between sugar hands and those for whom they labored. Negros experienced social, political, and labor unrest, but the opposition to the changes taking place was unfocused and spread out among groups with divergent concerns. In Pampanga, economic deterioration affected the resilient and resourceful sugar casamac somewhat later, when quotas were about to become a reality and just when an intelligent, articulate spokesperson for their grievances was emerging on the scene. Despite all the changes during the period, cultural distinctions between the two regions that had formed in earlier times remained unaltered.

A New Era for Sugar

Unusual circumstances in the international sugar trade brightened the dawn of this new era for Philippine sugarmen. World War I temporarily destroyed the largest contributor to world sugar supplies, the Continental beet industry, and global output dropped from 18,008,380 tons in 1912 to 15,212,772 at war's end. Europe's recovery took until about 1927, and beets never again retrieved their relative share of prewar world production. Events particularly favored Cuba, which increased its yield from 1,593,867 to 3,967,094 tons over the same period. Wartime witnessed a steep rise in prices, but nothing compared to those in the two years following armistice. In early 1920 New York raw sugar touched a phenomenal high of 20.8 cents a pound, which translated in Manila to P54 per picul for centrifugal. Better markets might have prevailed longer, but Cuba had already so increased its output as to fill much of the gap created by European losses; hence, prices slipped rapidly to preboom levels and below by the end of the year and into 1921 (see figure 4). In 1923 a temporary production shortfall of more than a million tons lowered world supplies, so that Philippine centrifugal briefly reached P20.50 per picul; thereafter, price direction followed a generally downward slant as global output once more outgrew demand.^[1]

Despite the short duration of the era of extravagant prices, euphoria reigned in Philippine sugar circles. Speculation in the Visayas for the 1920 crop became unusually vigorous as other optimistic indications appeared. The end of hostilities brought a sharp reduction in overseas freight rates, further improving the salability of the archipelago's agricultural produce. Additionally, under three separate tariff acts between 1916 and 1922 the U.S. Congress moved to raise duties on foreign sugar imports from 1.560 to 2.2060 cents per pound, and from 1.0048 to 1.7648 per pound on Cuban sugars, while continuing duty-free status for the Philippine product. Even

Figure 4.
Sugar Prices on the Manila Market, 1919-34. Based on monthly
quotations, but excluding slack period of July, August,
September, and October. Sugar News 1-15 (1919-34).

though sugar prices never again approached their immediate postwar highs, America absorbed on favorable terms all the centrifugal the Philippines could produce, and this accessibility stimulated the growth of export throughout the period (see table 10). Despite particularly poor weather conditions in parts of sugarlandia in 1923 and 1926, sugar exports grew at an annual rate of 11.2 percent.^[2]

The differential between the protected New York price for Philippine sugar and the London world price ranged from 30 to 150 percent, so that tariff preference led insular exporters to an almost complete reliance on the American market. Meanwhile, the decline of muscovado exports from 127,433 tons in 1921 to just 603 a decade later signified the demise of both the China and Japan markets, which previously absorbed all of the lowergrade product.^[3] When the Depression deepened, sugar purchases by U.S. refiners came to represent 60 percent of the archipelago's export income, as opposed to 30 percent in the early 1920s.

To profit in the face of falling prices Philippine sugarmen raised their output of high-quality sugar by augmenting advanced milling capacity and by growing more cane. In 1922 twenty-six large and small centrals turned out 233,770 tons of centrifugal, whereas the 1933-34 yield was 998,123

tons manufactured at forty-five plants. Aside from one in Batangas and two in Tarlac, other centrals constructed in the 1920s on Luzon, Panay, Leyte, and Cebu tended to be smaller, testimony to the difficulties encountered in financing major projects. While export increased almost four times, cane plantings in the archipelago grew by some 27 percent, from 241,345 hectares in 1921 to 305,890 in 1934.^[4]

Hacenderos in both western Negros and Pampanga ceased grinding in the old-fashioned muscovado factories, and the change in method netted from their cane about 20 percent more sugar of a uniformly higher grade, as well as quantities of alcohol obtained from new syrup distillation.^[5] Greater output derived from expanded capacity at the existing centrals rather than from the addition of big new centrals. The former region had seventeen factories in 1922 and just eighteen a decade later; the latter region went from two to four factories (see map 8). The twelve largest centrals in the two provinces, however, increased their production significantly over this period (table 11).

Western Negros expanded its sugar hectarage by 44 percent, while Pampanga's grew only 14 percent; instead, Pasumil and Pasudeco added to

Map 8.
Main Sugar Centrals in Pampanga and Western Negros, 1934

their stocks of cane by drawing from plantations in nearby Bataan and Tarlac. The two large centrals constructed in 1927 and 1929 in Tarlac reflected the lack of room for expansion in Pampanga and the need for the industry to move further north.

As table 12 indicates, the quantity of sugar per hectare also rose. Likewise, all centrals raised their productivity at this time; however, they did so at disparate rates and by stressing amelioration of different phases of their operations. Comparable data on sugar processing for each of the

central milling districts no longer exist, making broad comparisons of productivity impossible; however, annual reports of the Hawaiian-Philippine Company offer especially good information on how improvement came about in one case.^[6]

Hawaiian-Philippine Company was founded in 1918 by corporate members of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association in an effort to employ Philippine labor locally rather than across the Pacific in Hawaii. After failing to reach a satisfactory arrangement with planters in Pampanga, organizers decided to erect a central in Silay, drawing cane from the surrounding area and milling on the basis of a fifty-five-forty-five percent split of extracted sugar between hacenderos and central respectively. Planters who contracted with the new factory formed the Silay-Saravia Planters' Association in 1919, and grinding began January 15, 1921.

The central enjoyed rapid success and by October 1929 redeemed its initial capital indebtedness of P5,496,000 to its Hawaiian creditors. The company paid its first 6 percent dividend on 197,428 outstanding shares of stock in 1927, and thereafter shareholders' returns went up to 12 percent. In 1931, even as the Depression deepened in the United States, Hawaiian-

Philippine Company gave shareholders. a two-for-one stock split, at par value of P20, plus additional cash for a payout of P4,422,185. High dividends continued throughout these early years of world economic crisis.

Silay's productivity can be gauged from the following figures:

The central raised its milling capacity substantially, and its quality of production compared well with that of plants in other parts of the world, as evidenced by its extraction. "The efficiency of milling is generally expressed in terms of the percentage of total sucrose in the cane that is extracted in the juice (sucrose in juice per cent [of] sucrose in cane). This figure is known as the sucrose extraction or more briefly the extraction."^[7] Concurrently, Australia matched Hawaii's extraction at 95.5, while Java managed 94, and Louisiana and Cuba were slightly lower at 93. Silay's varied from a high of 96.23 in 1923 to a low of 92.679 in 1931. The effects

of weather on the quality of cane and the volume of cane milled influenced the extraction and may account for Silay's lower rate, but generally speaking the mill's performance met the world competition, despite some decline as the era closed.

In field productivity Silay milling district made large gains in cane per hectare. Aside from its contribution in greater milling efficiency, the central also provided planters with expanded field transportation, access to fertilizers, and interest-free fertilizer loans. Further, the central maintained experimental facilities to study cane varieties, supplied samples of high-yielding strains, and offered technical advice on field management.

Many hacenderos belonging to the Silay-Saravia Association responded positively. The district contained some of the most experienced farmers in Negros, and more farseeing ones understood the multiplier effect: that modern farming methods netted correspondingly much higher crop yields and, hence, better returns on investment and that good agricultural practice offered the best hedge against falling prices. Two of the district's leading sugarmen, hacendero Cesar Gamboa and technologist Carlos Locsin, stressed this point in articles for major sugar publications. In numerous ways planters contributed to higher productivity: they increased their use of fertilizer, dug drainage canals, employed irrigation pumps, set up cane seed beds, used better seed selection, and undertook deep plowing with tractors. These actions added sufficiently to yields to make Silay in 1933 the third most productive (after Bais, Negros Oriental, and San Carlos) Philippine sugar district. Gamboa's 1927 record of 129.04 piculs per hectare placed him among the most efficient farmers both in his district and in western Negros. In 1933 the top planters in North Negros Sugar Company (Manapla) included the Philippine Chinese Yee On with an extraordinary 179.82 piculs and Catalino Valderrama (of the famous lumber family) with 127.91 on his best fields.^[8]

Centrals, by virtue of their size and wealth, could undertake activities on a larger scale to support planters. For instance, Pasumil purchased tractors and rented them to farmers so they could deep plow the dry, hard soils of northwestern Pampanga. Ma-ao acquired a limestone crushing plant to supply inexpensive fertilizer, and the very progressive Victorias Central conducted advanced research on various farm activities, including studies concerning the deterioration of burnt cane. Centrals normally became involved in provincewide campaigns to eliminate such plagues as rinderpest and locusts. The government helped in numerous ways, not the least of which was through studies on seed strains conducted at its major research facility, La Carlota Experiment Station. Its findings appeared in

the quarterly Philippine Agricultural Review , published by the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources.^[9]

Not all milling districts reached the same level of productivity, and those in Pampanga did not succeed as well as ones on Negros. For instance, Pasumil district, which developed the highest yields on all of Luzon, in 1923 produced only 24.55 tons of cane per hectare and 2.67 tons of sugar per hectare, compared with Silay's 30.95 tons cane and 4.19 tons sugar. Experts proffered two explanations for the disparity: weather and outdated farming practices. Central Luzon experienced more pronounced wet and dry seasons than did Negros, and the long rainless spells affected cane growth in the north; hence, technologists recommended that Capampangan invest in major irrigation projects to assure adequate water supplies. Such waterworks, however, materialized only after World War II. In the matter of cane selection Capampangan had a more feasible opportunity to raise yields but did not take it. Despite all the research on new strains, as late as 1932 Luzon planters still sowed their fields with 57 percent old, low-yield, native varieties of cane, compared with just 28 percent in Negros. Finally, the more worn soils of Pampanga required heavier applications of fertilizer than did the fields of Negros, and many Pampangan farmers lacked financial resources to meet those demands.^[10]

Even the highest Philippine yields did not compare with those in other major world cane areas: for example, in 1932-33, the number of tons of sugar per hectare in the thirty top Philippine milling districts—5.8—was second worst among Hawaii (17.3), Java (15.7), Puerto Rico (9.9), and Cuba (4.9). And whereas the most modern planters on Negros averaged between one hundred and two hundred piculs per hectare, centrals on Hawaii regularly produced more than two hundred, while some Javanese fields employing the latest, best strains of cane reached four hundred.^[11] Although various factors—including a longer growing season, more centralized management, and more intense research in the other areas—accounted somewhat for these disparities, the poor performance of the PNB-financed centrals reduced significantly overall Philippine averages.

Bank centrals (as they were often called), though founded in an era of great optimism about sugar's future, could not have been launched at a worse time. Machinery prices had steadily risen throughout the war and the immediate postwar periods, fueled by a scarcity of parts and high wages; hence, investors had to borrow heavily to finance these projects. The new factories quickly evolved into investment and management nightmares because original cost estimates proved so low that initial loans did not cover all the construction. In several cases the new central operators

did not have money to lay down sufficient railway track to reach contracting planters in their district. PNB extended further loans (see table 13) and mortgagees, mainly local planters, had to put up as further collateral most of their fields, often evaluated at inflated prices. Moreover, PNB estimated the payback time on the assumption that extraordinary wartime prices would prevail for several years longer. When sugar dropped precipitously in 1921, bank centrals could not meet even their interest payments. There followed a series of crises, and the government found it necessary to create the Philippine Sugar Centrals Agency, a special branch of the PNB just to supervise management of the six plants. Ownership of several of these ventures changed hands; and for his gross mismanagement of bank funds, especially with regard to loans to sugar interests, PNB president Venancio Concepcion eventually went to prison (see appendix D).^[12]

By 1923 sugar experts correctly concluded that, given the inflated debt structure of bank centrals, all save Pasudeco lacked sufficient milling capacity to meet their minimum payments and that only by expanding extant facilities could they become viable enterprises. PNB, which had recently faced a situation in which its ratio of outstanding loans to deposits was woefully inadequate and in which 52 percent of those loans was already committed to bank centrals, moved conservatively to become involved in further expansion. Nevertheless, pressure from the presidents of Bacolod and Isabela centrals, Rafael Alunan and Emilio Montilla, and from knowl-

edgeable American sugar technicians overrode the conservative advice of financial advisers, and PNB provided money, first to Talisay, later, in smaller amounts, to Isabela and Ma-ao, and finally, to Bacolod in 1924.^[13]

But the bank's troubles did not end at this point, for both Talisay and Bacolod overdrew their extension loans, the latter by P2,102,970 ! Unsurprisingly, the annual report for 1925 noted that the bank centrals' total debt in outstanding loans and unpaid interest exceeded by almost two million pesos the obligations owed in 1922. When the 1925-26 planting season on Negros proved a disaster, PNB at last called a halt to serving as an open wallet to the centrals. Not until 1927 did they all begin to show positive results from their enlarged milling capacity and to pay down on their enormous debts. Pasudeco, the best-planned operation with the smallest outstanding obligation, paid off its mortgage that year, and Talisay followed in 1929. Extremely productive seasons in the early 1930s seriously reduced the debt of Bacolod, Isabela, and Ma-ao. By the mid-1930s, only Binalbagan remained a problem.^[14]

Throughout much of its early history, a combination of corruption and maladministration associated with Binalbagan's financing and operations caused PNB, the government, and local planters serious difficulties. Originally founded by the Yulo family, Binalbagan changed hands in 1919 because its owners feared losing their lands while raising necessary capital to meet increased construction costs. An American named Philip Whitiker managed to acquire the major interest, almost solely with bank credit; moreover, he presented PNB president Venancio Concepcion with more than P600,000 worth of stock "for services rendered." Senator Esperidion Guanco acted as the company's vice-president at this time when the Binalbagan estate owed PNB P12,000,000. Eventually the credit pyramid crumbled, and the bank, under a new president, took over ownership of the plant.

More than a year of bad management ensued, and hacenderos complained of losses incurred during milling. In late 1923 a minority shareholder, Enrique Echaús, attempted to buy the factory. He failed, despite obtaining a PNB loan with his land serving as collateral, and the bank now had invested P14,000,000 in a factory valued by some outside experts in 1923 at P4,000,000. It seems that Echaús employed his loan to make high-interest crop loans to Binalbagan planters; moreover, he found himself locked in combat with the unpopular manager, an American named Locey. In early 1924, Echaús engaged 250 armed men, invaded the factory grounds, evicted Locey, and began to ship out sugar held in the central warehouse. Order subsequently returned, and lawyers for the bank and Echaús sorted out the tangled web of debts. PNB, still the owner, in 1927

turned operations over to John Dumas, a highly efficient manager who so boosted the central's production that it achieved its first million picul season in 1934. PNB general manager Rafael Corpus served as president of Binalbagan and succeeded in reducing its debt considerably; nevertheless, it remained the only plant under the bank's ownership until after World War II.^[15]

Bank centrals did not have the same resources as privately funded centrals to raise productivity and profit margins. Investors owed PNB for construction costs, and since many of them were also planters, they had to pay off crop loans as well. The bank, already overcommitted to the centrals, proved miserly with funds for improvements and did not sponsor the kind of research that increased yields in the private milling districts. Talisay, for instance, appears to have operated far more effectively after it returned completely to private control in 1929.^[16]

On three occasions between 1920 and 1926, the government and PNB entertained offers to sell their interest in the bank centrals to private American financiers—Philip Whitiker, Pacific Commercial Company (PCC), and Hayden, Stone and Company. Each time, however, Filipino leaders and American officials turned down the bids, either because the financing was inadequate or on the grounds that it was important to maintain a strong Filipino presence in milling.^[17]

Native opposition to these various offers did not imply a hostility toward all American participation in the Philippine sugar industry. Indeed, in no other endeavor did Americans become more active or cooperate with native entrepreneurs more fully. Political leaders like Manuel Quezon and Rafael Alunan made it clear that U.S. capital remained crucial to the continued development of Philippine agriculture.^[18] On many issues Filipinos and Americans shared a common interest and point of view, so that sugar represented the business area of most cosmopolitan interaction.

The launching of centrals brought to prominence a group of U.S. sugarmen, some with prior experience in the Philippines, some, including the Hawaiians at San Carlos and Silay, new to the islands. Laws inhibited foreign ownership of land, and Americans became most numerous at top levels of finance and management and in the construction and technical operations of centrals. The experiences of two early American businessmen offer good examples of the origins of U.S. participation in the Philippine sugar industry.

John Switzer's career coincided with the rise of PCC, which had its origins as California-based Castle Brothers, Wolf and Company, selling produce to the U.S. Army in the Philippines since 1899. Castle Brothers became involved in scandal involving commissary supplies but evaded

prosecution, and the firm grew into the largest American export-import firm in the Philippines. Meanwhile, Switzer, a veteran of the Philippine-American War, achieved financial success on his own in Cebu, where he developed diverse commercial enterprises.

A major change occurred in late 1911 when Maurice Lowenstein, an employee of Castle Brothers, acquired the firm and reorganized it into PCC with better financing. Switzer merged his Cebu interests into the new corporation and became its general manager. Stockholders and members of the board of this new company included Galen Stone of Hayden, Stone and Company; Andrew Preston of United Fruit; and Francis Hart of Old Colony Trust Company of Boston. New York's prestigious Sullivan and Cromwell acted as the company's legal council. PCC had by this time branch offices in Cebu, Iloilo, San Francisco, New York, Kobe, and Sydney. Under Switzer's guidance PCC went into sugar milling. Along with Alfred Ehrman, Switzer in 1912 finessed the friar lands at Calamba, Laguna, and established Canlubang Sugar Central. Several years later Ehrman and PCC, backed by the resources of the powerful West Coast Spreckels sugar interests, constructed Pasumil, and PCC continued as agent for these two major centrals throughout much of the pre-World War II period.

The firm in 1917 became a branch of the umbrella conglomerate Pacific Development Corporation. Among the most important new investors and members of the board were William Endicott of Kidder, Peabody and Company and Herbert Fleishacker of the Anglo-London Paris National Bank of San Francisco, which had become chief fiscal agent for Calamba Sugar Estate as well as its largest shareholder. Anglo-London included among its stockholders Governor-general Francis Burton Harrison (1913-20). Besides their connections with Harrison, Lowenstein and Switzer maintained personal ties with Clarence Edwards and then Frank McIntyre, successive chiefs of the U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs (BIA), the liaison office between the Philippines and the U.S. government. These ties proved very helpful, for both Harrison and the BIA provided useful assistance in the establishment of Pasumil.

Switzer departed the Philippines a wealthy man in 1919, having served PCC and Pacific Development well. He had brought into the firm very talented personnel like sugar agent Alfred D. Cooper (taken from San Carlos Milling), central managers John Dumas and R. Renton Hind, executive Horace Pond, and publicist Lorenzo Thibault, former editor of the Manila Times . A staunch Republican, Switzer firmly held the view that for economic reasons the United States should postpone as long as possible granting independence to the Philippines. As head of the New York office of PCC until the mid 1920s and as a member of the board of the Philippine-

American Chamber of Commerce he continued to use his influence in this cause. Even in retirement he unofficially advised his old friend, senate, then commonwealth, president Manuel Quezon on economic and political matters. Meanwhile, under General Manager Horace Pond PCC remained an active participant in the milling and export ends of the sugar business.^[19]

As an individual George Fairchild probably had more sway over the industry than any other American. Arriving from Hawaii in 1912 with considerable experience in sugar manufacture, he became involved in one or more phases of the construction of at least five centrals. He also formed Welch, Fairchild and Company, a major sugar trading and management firm that had among its clients Silay-Hawaiian Central. Like Switzer, Fairchild remained a solid Republican wedded to retention for both political and personal economic reasons. In 1920 he purchased (curiously, with the help of Manuel Quezon) the Manila Times , and for six years used that paper as his forum against independence. He also helped found and actively participated in the American Chamber of Commerce to promote his cause. His greatest influence, however, came through his role as cofounder and longstanding secretary-treasurer of the Philippine Sugar Association (PSA).^[20]

Established in 1922 as a technical forum for all participants in the industry, the PSA within a decade became an organization representing the collective voice of more than 80 percent of the central millers in the Philippines. From the dawn of the central era the Philippine sugar industry became a game of statistics in which chemists, engineers, and agronomists played an increasingly important role, and it remained for such privately employed individuals to isolate new strains of cane, to raise field productivity, and to ameliorate milling procedures. The PSA acted as the clearinghouse for their findings. Even at its outset, however, PSA maintained a legislative committee to keep track of insular and metropolitan government actions affecting Philippine sugar; and this subgroup, which included Fairchild and Felipe Buencamino, Jr., received regular intelligence from the BIA in Washington. As time passed and membership in PSA grew, the legislature committee greatly augmented its activities and achieved added importance within the organization. Initially about one-third of the centrals belonged to PSA, but that number grew in the late 1920s and early 1930s as schemes for the imposition of tariffs and/or import restrictions began to attract attention in Congress.

Through PSA Filipino, American, and Spanish millers united as a single force to compete with Cuban, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and U.S. beet interests for privileged access to the American market. Officers of PSA came from the upper ranks of mill owners and managers and constituted

a cosmopolitan mix. In succession, American R. Renton Hind (Pasumil), Filipinos Rafael Alunan, Wenceslao Trinidad (Pasudeco), Cesar Ledesma (Talisay), and Alunan again became the organization's presidents, while Fairchild (Silay-Hawaiian) served as permanent secretary-treasurer. Vicepresidents, such as Spaniard J. M. Elizalde (La Carlota), and other members of the board of trustees represented all other participating centrals. Even PNB president Rafael Corpus in his capacity as president of Binalbagan joined the association's ruling council. The PSA therefore included practically all the most influential and wealthiest sugarmen and the most outstanding professional managers and technicians.^[21]

Despite PSA efforts and claims to represent the entire sugar industry, it did not. As new centrals came on line in the late 1910s and early 1920s, planters in each milling district formed associations to protect their interests. They hired their own technicians to check the centrals' test results and to supervise the distribution of cane and sugar among member planters and between hacenderos and centrals. In 1924 four planter groups—those milling at Talisay, Bacolod, Ma-ao, and Isabela—founded the Confederation of Associations and Planters of Sugar Cane (La Confederacion de Asociaciones y Plantadores de Caña Dulce, Inc.). Working with a subsidy of two centavos for every picul of sugar milled, this umbrella organization gradually attracted to its ranks planter groups from all the other major milling districts on Negros and from Pasumil in Pampanga. The confederation, representing 52 percent of centrifugal output, did everything from securing better loan terms from PNB to lobbying through its president and chief spokesman Amando Avancefia in Manila and Washington. Planters at times adopted an adversary relation toward millers and tended to take their own stand on the twin issues of immediate independence and free trade.^[22]

The struggles over Philippine independence and economic arrangements have captured considerable attention from scholars, and only the critical role of sugar in those deliberations needs emphasis here. On the American side, a major—perhaps the chief—impulse toward Philippine independence came from agribusiness: sugar and dairy people who wanted to exclude Philippine sweetener and coconut oil from the duty-free U.S. market. Politicians and lobbyists for the U.S. Beet Sugar Association, American Sugar Cane League, American Farm Bureau Federation, Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, Association of Sugar Producers of Porto Rico, as well as corporations heavily involved with Cuban centrals such as National City Bank, United Fruit, and Hershey's Chocolate, all joined the campaign. Although Philippine sugar never represented more than a fraction of the total production within America's tariff walls, its share of imports grew

dramatically from 7.6 percent in 1921 to 24 percent twelve years later, alarming American competitors. As world supply became overabundant and prices skidded, they somewhat incorrectly viewed the Philippine product as a substantial threat to their profits and in some cases to their survival.

The Philippine movement for independence had its roots in the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century it involved partisans from every region of the archipelago. In Philippine politics, the Nationalista party with its platform calling for immediate, absolute independence captured the hearts and minds of most Filipinos in elections after 1907. The two main leaders of that party, Manuel Quezon of Tayabas Province and Sergio Osmeña of Cebu, rose to power on that platform and never wavered from that stand in their public utterances.

Several factors impeded the road to swift independence, however. In the United States many members of the Republican Party continued to share the view of Governor-general Leonard Wood (1921-26) that the Philippines was simply not ready for self-government. Also, those who profited, either as importers of American goods to or exporters of Philippine produce from the archipelago, those who had invested their lives and savings in the Philippine economy, as well as others with strategic concerns favored gradual devolution of power to native hands. Filipinos who feared the economic and global political dangers of independence expressed, albeit softly in the face of strong contrary opinion, a need to postpone total autonomy until some indefinite time in the future. Payne-Aldrich had accomplished what many nationalists feared it would; it had made the Philippine economy, especially the pivotal sugar industry, dependent on American preferences. Against this background, the drama of Philippine national and international politics unfolded.^[23]

Between 1924 and 1933 American interests in and out of Congress attempted by various means to curb the access of Philippine sugar. In the Fairfield Bill (1924) they sought to do so by granting the Philippines early independence, but actions by John Switzer, members of PSA, and other Filipino politicians prevented their success. In 1928 Congressman Charles Timberlake of beet-growing Colorado introduced a resolution seeking to cap Philippine imports, but Switzer, the PSA, Governor-general Henry L. Stimson (1928-29) and former BIA chief Frank McIntyre, among others, managed to bury his proposal. Likewise, Cuban and American interests tried to cut imports of duty-free Philippine sugar in the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930, but again Stimson, now Herbert Hoover's secretary of state, intervened, and free Philippine entry remained. While the Philippine sugar interests escaped American legislative efforts against their industry,

they also refused to participate in the Chadbourne International Sugar Agreement of 1931, which planned to limit world production.^[24]

As Philippine independence loomed, the thinking among Philippine political and economic leaders clarified as they contemplated the consequences of losing duty preferences. Some sought means to protect that access as the best way of preserving economic health, even as they worked toward the highly desired goal of self-rule. Others concluded that the quicker Filipinos obtained independence, the sooner they could begin taking charge of their economic destiny. This dichotomy of thought appeared in the remarks of leading sugarmen, some of whom became directly involved in independence negotiations. Urbano Zafra, an administrative secretary of the PSA and sometime Washington lobbyist, wrote the following in the procentral Sugar News :

Taken as a whole, with all its imperfections, the tariff relationship between the United States and the Philippines, under which the trade and commerce between the two countries have been developed for the past 33 years, has resulted in mutual benefits to the Philippines and the United States. To the Philippines it has opened to the products of these Islands the great American market—a prize for which the nations all over the world are striving—and has been responsible for the attainment of our present economic progress. . . .

Irrespective of what political relations may be established in the future between the United States and the Philippines, it is to the advantage of both Filipinos and Americans to continue, even in modified form, the present reciprocity in Philippine-American commerce.^[25]

On the other side, leading planter spokesman Amando Avanceña declared:

The sugar planters of Negros, however, are always disposed to forego at any time the advantages offered by the American market, provided the loss of such advantages will bring independence to the Philippines, not a nominal independence but one real and complete. We are therefore disposed, moreover, and so we ask, that America concede to the Philippines its independence without any period of transition, although this may mean that we have to abandon the planting of sugar cane and must produce other products; but such independence should be real, in other words, once she has granted independence to the Philippines, the United States should not have

any military or other reservations within the territory of the Philippine Islands.^[26]

Manuel Quezon, the consummate politician best able to clarify Philippine sentiment, bridged the dichotomy in the arguments when he offered these thoughts in a letter to John Switzer in 1931:

I will not advise my people to oppose immediate and complete independence without free trade if it is the purpose of Congress to grant it. On the contrary, I would advise them to accept it. The present situation is getting to be intolerable and rather than continue it indefinitely, not knowing what is to come next, we had better face whatever consequences the loss of free trade might involve.

. . . And if the only means to do away with [the present] government is through the loss of free trade with the United States, I am ready to lose it. For one, I am willing to compromise on the question of immediate independence and let it be postponed, if thereby I can prevent poverty to my people and make independence more secure when it comes. But under no circumstances am I willing to compromise on the question of self-government.^[27]

The two independence bills, Hare-Hawes-Cutting (1933) and its near clone the Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), contained provisions both beneficial and detrimental to Philippine sugar. The main provision of the bills, a ten-year commonwealth period, represented a triumph of American agricultural and Cuban sugar interests in Congress over the wishes of President Hoover and other Republican retentionists, who wanted a longer transition period. However, the final independence bill included a sizable quota of 850,000 long tons of sugar—800,000 centrifugal and 50,000 refined allowed duty-free entry into the United States during the first five years. Then would follow a 5 percent duty increase in each of the next five years. All sugar over the limit and all imported after ten years would be subject to the full foreign tariff. The limitation represented a sum larger than American farmers had demanded.^[28]

In all these deliberations Philippine sugarmen, especially centralistas, spent heavily to forward their interests. The PSA opened a New York office in 1929 and paid for it with an assessment on every picul produced by its member centrals. The funds also supported negotiators and lobbyists taking care of business in Washington. PSA did not rely just on Philippine officials and businessmen to advance its cause; it hired influential Amer-

icans as well. In 1933, following his retirement from the Senate, Harry Hawes of Missouri, one of the authors of the first independence bill, became PSA's leading lobbyist. He had served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Insular Affairs, and in 1930 traveled to the islands on a factfinding mission. Hawes also came to know Quezon and other Philippine leaders and subsequently solicited their thinking on legislative matters in Washington. After retiring, he devoted much of his time to protecting Philippine quota rights. For several years Joseph Tumulty, formerly a personal adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, joined Hawes in those lobbying efforts.^[29]

In the political struggles between Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña, sugarmen generally supported the former and helped him become the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth. Quezon numbered among his most important allies both Rafael Alunan and Amando Avanceña. Almost all sugar legislators backed Quezon, including Senators Sotero Baluyut (Pampanga) and Gil Montilla (Negros Occidental) and Representatives Felipe Buencamino, Jose de Leon, Emilio Yulo, and Enrique Magalona. An important exception, however, was Benigno Aquino, Sr., of Tarlac, who kept faith with Osmeña. Even so, most of the big-money contributors like the Elizalde family and M. J. Ossorio helped Quezon.^[30]

While consideration of the two independence bills proceeded apace in Washington and Manila, New Deal administrators sought to uncover means of alleviating America's farm crisis. Since Hawley-Smoot tariff legislation had not succeeded in raising prices sufficiently to aid the plight of sugar producers, the government turned to restrictions on production as a means of coping with the industry's dilemmas. Congress amended the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 to incorporate more reasonable production limits suggested by the administration. Approved on May 9, 1934, the Jones-Costigan Act provided quotas for all domestic, insular, and foreign suppliers to the U.S. market, the total amount adjusted to annual American consumption. It was hoped that a decline in output would stimulate a rise in American prices. To minimize the economic sting of limitations, producers would receive proceeds from a sugar-processing tax. Congress made provisions of the bill retroactive to January 1, 1934.

Throughout the negotiations Philippine sugar interests lobbied energetically for higher limits. Hawes, Alunan, Governor-general Frank Murphy (1934-35), and many others either testified before committees or corresponded with officials to prevent cutting the insular quota, despite efforts of fiercely competitive rivals to accomplish such reductions. What finally emerged in the Jones-Costigan Act was a 1934 export quota of

1,015,186 short tons (920,970 metric tons) of sugar, including 79,661 short tons (72,268 metric tons) of refined. Again Philippine advocates had prevented the worst from happening to their industry.^[31]

Difficulties associated with the administration of Jones-Costigan initially created confusion in Philippine government circles and caused considerable anxiety among sugarmen. Several problems immediately surfaced, the most salient of which centered on matters of scheduling. Because the law applied retroactively to January 1 and the milling and crop seasons ran from November to May, what limits should, or could, be placed on the 1933-34 crop, the one just harvested and milled? Allotments to various centrals and planters could not be applied rationally, for by June of 1934 shippers had already sent to market quantities equivalent to the 1934 quota, and some large centrals had not yet completed their milling season. Should the government stop further shipments?

A second set of problems centered on equitable quotas. Given a maximum figure for export each year, what basis should determine each central's share of that amount? Two plans surfaced: one, favoring older, larger factories, called for averaging production for calendar years 1931, 1932, and 1933 at each plant, and then giving each one a proportional share tied to that number. A second option, favored by smaller centrals, including seven that had only recently started up, proposed taking each factory's single best year as the figure on which to divvy up the quota. The choice involved considerable differences in the size of allocation to each central and led to sharp cleavages among the membership of PSA. Felipe Buencamino and Esteban de la Rama among others favored the latter method, while spokesmen like L. Weinzheimer of Pasumil and Avanceña, on behalf of many planters, favored the former. The matter precipitated something of a credit crisis as well, for PNB became reluctant to offer crop loans until it had some idea of how many hectares each hacendero could plant.^[32]

In June 1934, Governor-general Murphy set about laying down the rules and building the machinery by which the Philippine quota would be administered. He opted for the system of average central output as the basis of allocation, thus pleasing the larger centrals, and he decided that sugar should continue to go to the United States throughout 1934, the amount over the quota (some 400,000 tons) to be held in bonded customs warehouses for sale after January 1, 1935. He thus postponed the hardships of output reductions until the following year and allowed himself sufficient opportunity to emplace the insular quota system. During the remainder of the year local advisers and AAA officials from Washington helped him turn out the legislation and establish the bureaucracy to give each central and each planter an exact share of the dwindled pie.

By mid-December, all plants had their 1935 allocation, based on a total export of some 552,000 tons. At the same time the first 195 planters in Silay received their quotas, and others were on the way. Despite troubles in 1934 and the prospect of a bleak future, the Philippines exported its largest crop ever, a fitting conclusion to the prosperous central era.^[33]

Sugar Society and Centrals

New mills brought change to sugar society. At the top of the revised socioeconomic pyramid stood the centralistas, Filipino, Spanish, and American owners and executives managing either corporate or family interests. Americans included Fairchild, Renton Hind, and Horace Pond, all pillars of the expatriate community. Miguel Ossorio, the Elizaldes, and officials of Ynchausti and Company and Tabacalera represented the Iberians, while Jose de Leon, Augusto Gonzalez, and the Montillas, Aranetas, and Lizareses were the leading Filipino capitalists. Lines of nationality tended to blur, however, for Ossorio became an American citizen and Angel Elizalde married Mary Huntington Spreckels, thus forging bonds between Spanishowned La Carlota and the Pasumil-Calamba U.S. combine.

Intermarriage inextricably enmeshed native central families as well. For example, Eusebio Lopez, founder of Sagay Central, married the sister of Cesar Ledesma, vice-president of Talisay Central. One of the daughters of that union married Nicholas Lizares, president of Talisay; another wed lawyer, entrepreneur, and PSA executive Salvador Araneta. Meanwhile, Ledesma's son Ricardo married a daughter of Carmen Yulo, who possessed holdings in Binalbagan Central; thus ownership of three centrals was linked by kinship. Beyond Negros, too, the centralistas formed affinal ties. In November 1926, Fausto Gonzalez Sioco, brother of Pampangan magnate Augusto, married Amparo de la Rama, and wedding gifts included 350 shares of Central Talisay from her father, Esteban, and 100 shares of Pasudeco from his relatives.

The new class of central owner-operators did not spring sui generis from the establishment of the sugar factories but rather derived from some of the most entrepreneurial planter families of old. Lopez, the Elizaldes, de Leon, and Gonzalez all had substantial haciendas first. Ossorio represented fairly new money when he organized Victorias and Manapla, but the Lizareses and Aranetas planted well before they became mill proprietors. Their collective initiatives in modern processing made them even wealthier, the richest, most powerful people in their industry and society. In 1930 Carlos Locsin calculated that, depending on crop yields, profits from direct investments in centrals doubled or trebled those from investments in sugar lands.^[34]

Equities of central corporations were traded regularly on the Manila exchange, and sometimes planters received shares in their centrals in lieu of cash payments. During the 1920s those grinding at PNB centrals agreed to buy shares worth 25 percent of their net profit as a condition of not selling the plants to foreign buyers. But by the late 1920s centrals yielded good returns and appeared to have a profitable future, so shares became scarce on the open market and remained closely held by the largest investors.^[35]

Wealth bred further wealth, and several millionaire millers diversified with outside investments, some close to the sugar industry, some quite far afield. Ossorio purchased a seat on the New York Sugar and Coffee Exchange, de la Rama added new vessels to the family fleet, sugar merchant and investor Jose Ledesma bought PNB bonds, while Jose de Leon sat on its Board of Directors. Ynchausti and Company owned not only three centrals, plantations, and a distillery, but also paint, lumber, and shipping companies. The Elizaldes bought Ynchausti. Jose Gomez, general manager at Ma-ao, took an active interest in the construction of the very important shipping facility at Puhupandan; and Jose Escaler, who held a similar position at Pasudeco, acquired a major stake in the Philippine (copra) Oil Company. Pasudeco's Wenceslao Trinidad founded in 1931 the Luzon Investment Corporation and in 1933 the National Life Insurance Company. In the latter endeavor two of his coinvestors were Jose de Leon and Cesar Ledesma. Nicholas Lizares, Ledesma, and Salvador Araneta were among those who joined with the entrepreneurial Lopez family of Iloilo in forming the pioneering air passenger company in the Visayas. Sugar money penetrated almost every area of Philippine enterprise from agriculture and food processing to mining.^[36]

Philippine politics, whether a person was running for office or supporting other candidates, demanded considerable cash and time; hence, only the wealthiest members of society—for example, the centralistas and biggest hacenderos—could afford the game at the provincial level and higher. In Negros two of Manuel Quezon's chief lieutenants, Gil Montilla, associated with Isabela Central, and Rafael Alunan, vied to control offices. Montilla became successively representative, governor, and senator during this time and acted as political lider (local boss), influencing the choice of local slates. Alunan, though for a while serving as a legislator, preferred cabinet positions and the role of eminence grise in provincial elections. Negros's top officeholders tended to come from centralista ranks or centralista-supported candidates, men such as Mariano Yulo, Emilio Montilla, and Hermenegildo Villanueva; otherwise they tended to be big planters

like Jose Locsin, Isaac Lacson, Emilio Gaston, or Enrique Magalona (see appendix E).

In Pampanga the system worked somewhat differently, because Americans operated one of the two big centrals, and at the other, leading executives de Leon, Gonzalez, and Trinidad chose to concentrate on business. However, the latter three owned clout by virtue of their wealth and position, and Quezon solicited their support in his various local initiatives. Pampangan sugarmen had to share power with rice land proprietors; nevertheless, those connected—either through employment, shareholding, or family ties—with Pasudeco achieved success at the highest levels of insular government. Sotero Baluyut, from a relatively obscure local family, acquired an American education as an engineer and went on, following employment at the central, to become Pampanga's governor and senator.^[37]

Central owners gained numerous advantages from holding so much political power, including their ability to affect the legislative outcome of key bills. For example, despite growing labor agitation for passage of an eight-hour-per-day labor law, PSA managed to delay such legislation—at least as it applied to sugar central workers—for more than a decade. PSA, with the aid of such high-priced legal talent as Jose Yulo and the American Clyde Dewitt, also prevented the imposition of added taxes on processed sugar.

Yulo represented a category of appointed politicians who looked after sugar from the executive branch. After representing Pasumil-Calamba in numerous matters and acting as PSA attorney, he became secretary of justice from 1934 to 1938. Salvador Laguda typified the active hacendero in politics. A former newspaperman, he served successively as assemblyman, vice-president of the first Agricultural. Congress, vice-president of PNB, secretary of commerce and communications, and president of Lopez Central. Honorio Ventura of Pasudeco was chosen chief of the executive bureau from 1921 to 1925, then secretary of the interior between 1925 and 1933. From these vantages such administrators could influence government policy on crucial matters relating to sugar. In 1931, when strikes began to affect the sugar industry in the western Visayas, Ventura ordered the Philippine Constabulary to intervene if necessary to prevent violence and the disruption of central operations. Of all groups associated with the sugar industry, the centralistas dearly commanded the most influence in the halls of government.^[38]

The division between planters and centralistas contained a nationality component, for up to 91 percent of hacenderos were Filipinos while perhaps

50 percent of central owners were not. Not only did Americans and Spaniards directly possess from one-third to one-half of mill production, but local central-owning families with long residence in the Philippines sometimes held foreign passports. Miguel Ossorio acquired American citizenship, and the Elizaldes remained Spanish subjects. Foreign planters, who constituted a distinct numerical minority, came mostly from Spain but included a few other Europeans and a handful of Americans like H. B. Ross and W. J. Fassoth in Pampanga and Richard Nolan in Negros. Such outsiders possessed little influence on industry policy, unless they were, like Nolan, married into an influential local family, in his case the Lizares-Alunans. On national issues, planters tended to adopt a more consistently proindependence point of view, whereas centralistas, reflecting their mixed loyalties, assumed more flexible positions.^[39]

With the creation of a supraclass of millers, planters lost power and prestige as well as income, and the economic condition of many became more precarious as a result of the change. For the biggest landholders, centrals initiated more efficient operations on their estates and provided them with opportunities to improve crop productivity. The rich could also diversify their sources of income so that they did not have to depend exclusively on the whims of sugar's fortunes for their livelihood. President Corazon Aquino's father, Jose Cojuangco, in addition to cultivating some 15,000 hectares of Tarlac sugar plantings, also held considerable banking interests. Juan Nepomuceno, who became one of the biggest hacenderos with Pasudeco, also operated the electric companies of Angeles and Magalarig. Planters such as Segundo Montilla, Roberto Toledo III, and Timoteo Unson, who had the highest production of roughly 15,000 to 50,000 piculs per harvest, earned an excellent livelihood from the industry. Others with careers outside the sugar industry dabbled in cane production as a sideline and as a way of gaining status. Manuel Quezon, for instance, possessed some 52 hectares of farm land in Lubao and 200 in Arayat.^[40]

For those smaller planters who derived their main livelihood from their harvests, the central era brought some peril. Thomas McHale, a former sugar executive at Victorias Milling, summed up their new circumstance thus:

The new central mills clearly represented a quantum jump in technical and economic efficiency. Drawing cane from many sources and with no direct vested interest in the specific problems or prosperity of individual cane planters, however, the mills tended to be highly impersonal in their dealings with planters. As a result, planters began to complain that the contracts were onerous in that they required them to plant cane

irrespective of weather cycles, disease infestations, price movements or other problems and that the mills had the right to take over management of their land if they didn't comply with their contract regardless of the reason. . . . While planters were aware that from a practical point of view the mills had little control over the quality and quantity of cane they produced under their contract, they were also aware that if they wanted the cane made into sugar, they had no alternative to the one mill to which they were bound.

As corporate organizations with professional engineering and management personnel, many of the new sugar mills tended to treat their contract planters with condescension or patronizing formality rather than as business partners and equals. Their attitude was partly due to differences in social and technical backgrounds on the personal level; it was also a result of the fact that the mills, with their wider access to credit, were usually in a strong bargaining position with invariably less well-financed planters.^[41]

Large-scale renters, too, began to feel economic pressures. The leaseholder (arrendatario; inquilino in Pampanga) had long been a respected agriculturalist in Negros, though less frequently appearing in Pampanga. In the south, owner-planters sometimes added to their production by renting additional fields. According to his study of Negrense hacienda economics, Carlos Locsin estimated that 50 percent of farms in his two sample mill districts were leased. New grinding contracts, however, made the arrangement less desirable for renters. Centrals received normally 45 percent of milled sugar in Negros and 50 percent in Pampangao Rents varied but usually ran about 10-12 percent, so that leaseholders obtained a 40-45 percent share, from which they had to deduct expenses. They frequently borrowed cash from centrals or other credit institutions, thus adding interest costs. As prices fell toward the end of the 1920s, renters saw their margins shrinking to the point of extinction. Lessors, especially those charging fixed cash rents, large owner-planters, and centrals all had hedges against deflated prices, but lessees (all but the biggest) and small planters lived ever closer to desperation fearing bankruptcy and/or loss of their lands.^[42]

Mateo Guanzon, a small farmer from Kabankalan, lamented to Makinaugalingon in 1930 that, whereas hacenderos used to have tenants, the former were now the tenants of the centrals, that is, that the factories currently made milling, marketing, and credit decisions that planters used to handle themselves. This observation reflected the commentator's social anxiety rather than legal reality. The fear of becoming a tenant, an acsa

(also agsador) paying shares to a landholder, pointed to a significant socioeconomic distinction within sugar society: possessing land not only provided security, it conferred status as well. Owners, large or small, sought, for both social and economic reasons, to keep their property, despite new pressures to lose it.

Before the central era the distinction between sugar acsas and arrendatarios had blurred, since both manufactured sugar at hacienda muscovado factories and paid their rent in cash or produce to the owner; however, the separation became pronounced again under the influence of the new milling system. Arrendatarios signed formal contracts with landholders and might possess property in their own right. They managed their lease-hold alone, dealing personally with the central and receiving quedens (plant vouchers often used in lieu of cash) in their own name. Furthermore, they obtained direct loans from PNB and tended to rent larger estates from 10 to 200 or 300 hectares. In contrast, acsas frequently emerged from the ranks of duma'an and cultivated but 2 to 8 hectares that often contained both rice and sugar. Their annual share, established by verbal agreement, came from the hacendero who held the central milling contract and who provided cash advances and other necessities. Some acsas worked land themselves, but others only supervised paid hands. Acsas made a better living than duma'an and exercised some control over farm management, but they lacked the flexibility and status that belonged to arrendatarios. While reliable statistics do not exist, sugar acsas clearly cultivated only a small fraction of Negros sugar lands.^[43]

Lessees and small planters frequently lacked the incentive, skills, or cash resources to make prescribed improvements in irrigation, seed selection, fertilization, and farm mechanization. Centrals such as Silay, Ma-ao, and San Carlos constructed shoreline loading docks, and Pasumil built new railroad tracks, all to reduce their transportation and handling expenses; however, cost-cutting innovations remained sporadic among their contracting hacenderos. The technology gap between planters and central operators pointed to an unequal socio-cultural, as well as economic, response to the introduction of modern processing.^[44]

A revised system of credit distribution emphasized the changing hierarchy in the sugar industry as well. Centrals and PNB replaced exportimport houses and wealthy private individuals as major sources of loans, although a few entrepreneurs still continued to supply money to smaller farmers. Exporters like PCC, Warner, Barnes and Company, and Ker and Company offered mortgages, sometimes tied to sales of fertilizer, to their customers; however, these transactions were confined to the Negros sugar area and remained infrequent compared to the business of the centrals.

Most Chinese lenders withdrew from the sugar industry with the decline of muscovado exports. Thereafter they concentrated on the distribution of imported goods, making infrequent crop loans and occasional purchases of sugar for resale to bigger exporters.

Credit remained the essential lubricant of the sugar industry during the central era, but a major difference persisted between conditions in Negros and Pampanga; planters in the former region still depended much more on government funding than did those in the latter. PNB's program of crop loans granted directly to Negrense farmers or indirectly to them through the five bank centrals year after year sustained their sugar plantations. In 1925, of a total of P6,003,260 in PNB crop loans, P5,545,060 (92 percent) went through the Bacolod and Iloilo branches. Najeeb Saleeby, representing the hemp industry, complained as early as 1922 about sugar's monopolization of bank loans, and four years later Juan Alegre, a senator from another district, commented that businessmen had no faith in PNB, describing it as "only a collection agency, its resources being buried in the Negros cane fields."^[45]

About this time an official of PNB wrote to Quezon:

The crop loan to Pampanga is less than P600,000 for the present 1925 crop—the biggest they ever had—and [as of] now 95% is already paid to the Bank although the milling season is not yet finished. No planters of Pampanga Sugar Development Co. owe the Bank any amount, outside of crop loan and on the first milling season in 1920 the planters paid up not only their crop loan but their original debt to the Bank .^[46]

This comment indicated a major socio-cultural as well as economic disparity between residents of the two regions.

A 1927 Free Press article contrasting Capampangan and Negrenses contained the following insight:

The difference between us, the planters of Negros, and those of Pampanga—told us by a very knowledgeable woman sugar planter of the south three years ago, with notable frankness—is that they do not know how to owe, while we start with little or no capital, charging everything against the productivity of our fields. . . .

But now that the Pampanga Sugar Development, the only mill in Pampanga financed by the National Bank, has just redeemed itself totally, paying all of its debts to the Bank, the commentary that involuntarily comes to our lips is that the Pampangan planter, if he does not know how to owe, on the other hand knows how to get out of debt. . . .

We use these terms only by way of comparison, and to mark better the dividing line between the one and the other, for we all know that the Negrense is intrepid, extravagant and optimistic; the Pampango is conservative, foresighted and prudent. All this, naturally, speaking in general terms.^[47]

This perceived difference touches on only partially accurate cultural stereotypes. Indeed, hacenderos who invested in the cultivation of wilder portions of the two regions shared a common outlook, both "optimistic" and "foresighted"; even so, Negrenses, on the whole, earned more money than their northern counterparts and could afford the more "extravagant" lifestyle their reputation implied. But, more to the point, each region had a markedly different credit system.

Capampangan still arranged credit through local sources: mortgages with Pasumil, Pasudeco, and (after 1929) Tarlac Central, plus smaller mills at Mabalacat, Arayat, and Calumpit, Bulacan; through private mortgages on both land and crops; through the old pacto de retro; and, to a limited extent, through little local institutions like People's Bank and Trust. Although associated with Pasudeco, Emilio J. Valdes of Angeles and the de Leon-Joven family of Bacolor still provided agricultural credit. All these sources kept PNB business to a minimum.

Closer-knit ties among the Capampangan made possible the Arayat Cooperative Marketing Association, formed in 1934 in the face of a credit squeeze caused by the pending imposition of quotas. A joint stock company, the cooperative provided 12 percent mortgages, with milled sugar as the main security, to small farmers in eastern Pampanga from San Luis to Magalang. Collateral ranged from a high of 1,500 piculs to a low of 20, with the average around 250, and loans were for no more than P1 per picul. The subscribers and stockholders included members of the Alejandrino family of Arayat, all relatives of Revolutionary War hero General Jose Alejandrino. Officers of the cooperative included a local farmer and a director of the small Arayat Central, who followed the policy of making modest loans available to farmers to enable them to put down next season's crop. The modesty of the venture contrasted with the large, impersonal loan policy carried on by PNB in Negros.^[48]

Relations between Negrenses and their chief creditor, PNB, proved unsatisfactory in that hacenderos became heavily reliant upon the bank. The policy of providing crop loans based on estimates of forthcoming harvests sometimes left planters overextended if the crop failed for some reason. Furthermore, PNB, perhaps responding too much to industry pressure, set loan amounts too high for planters to pay back comfortably. In 1922 PNB gave P3 per picul, and the sum rose to P4.90 by 1930. All the while sugar prices continued to drop from the P10 range down to

around P6.50 in the early 1930s. Interest charges ran from 7 percent to 12 percent, depending on the degree of risk of the loan. Furthermore, as part of agreements made in the mid-1920s, contracting planters at bank centrals had an obligation to pay off a portion of the accrued debt of those plants. Hence, PNB became the prop not only of the five centrals, but also of the farmers who milled there. One estimate of 1927 noted that PNB money financed 30 percent of the crop at Isabela Central, 60 percent at Binalbagan, 70 percent at Ma-ao, 80 percent at Tallsay, and practically all at Bacolod. Negrense sugarmen enlisted their planters' associations, politicians, central officials, and journalists in efforts to coerce bank officials and senior government administrators to keep funds flowing in an ever-faster stream.

Bankers became worried about these investment patterns in view of the failure of some planters to repay, for the health—and perhaps very survival—of PNB came to depend on the sugar industry. By 1926 the threat of numerous farm loan failures loomed, though PNB officials revealed a reluctance to foreclose. In a 1929 petition to lower interest rates and refinance loans, officials of the Bacolod-Murcia Planters' Association admitted that 20 to 25 percent of planters' debts consisted of accrued interest. PNB sought to reduce loans in 1930 but had only partial success. The bank branch at Bacolod slated for closure in 1932 remained open, though with a reduced staff, because of a persistently high volume of business there. A revised policy went into effect in 1933, with PNB offering smaller loans to Negrenses and seeking to make credit available on a modest scale in Pampanga.^[49]

Sugar planting not only depended on a continuous supply of credit and good international markets, it proved incapable of generating additional off-farm industry. Instead, the sugar business produced a regular outflow of plantation-derived capital. The erection of centrals initially drew off cash, and profits from foreign plants regularly fled to Spain, Hawaii, and the United States. Gains from locally owned centrals also left in the form of expenses for fertilizers, mechanical farm and transportation equipment, and conspicuous consumption, another notable trait of the Negrense lifestyle. Outside the centrals, sugar created some additional service industry and little more. In 1939 the number of chauffeurs (2,361) for private auto owners surpassed that for all categories of nonsugar manufacturing save carpenters, embroiderers and dressmakers, and sawmill workers.

Negrense sugarmen spent prodigally in the 1920s, often acquiring big obligations along the way. American Baptist missionary W. B. Charles wrote the following from Bacolod in 1922:

The hacienderos [sic ] (in the main sugar planters here) plunged deeply on possible continuous high prices on sugar. Invest-

ments in machinery needed and useless also ran high. Luxuries of all kinds were purchased on time payments. Borrowed money was lost at the gaming table. . . . The inevitable crisis left many woefully in debt.^[50]

The very rich set the tone for this lifestyle with stunning examples of extravagance. The Elizaldes formed their own polo team and played in international competition. In 1925 the Free Press wrote the following concerning the five daughters of Gil Lopez:

The parents of the girls believe in education by travel, so years ago they spent weeks and months traveling on the family's steam cutter, making trips over the Visayan islands. On the boat they had their musical instruments, such as the piano, violin and cello. They took their teachers with them during these trips.^[51]

The same paper announced in 1928 that Miss Consuelo Lopez (not of the same family) would wear jewelry worth P250,000 during her crowning as carnival queen of Negros Occidental.

The smaller Negrense farmers could not match the lifestyle of the very rich; nevertheless, they too had diversions befitting the Negros image. Foreign travel; gambling; tea dances in town and, for students, in Manila; beauty contests; jewelry; and, above all, automobiles absorbed planter resources. Despite the fact Negros had relatively rough roads and poor bridges crossing its many rivers, in 1925 the province boasted ownership of 1,038 cars, highest for any area in the Philippines save Manila. Some planters began to take out mortgages on their crops and other property in order to purchase vehicles.^[52]

Capampangan, too, spent on such luxuries, but, as befit their image, they did so generally on a smaller scale; hence, the problems of debt associated with Negros do not seem to have afflicted Pampanga, at least not on the same alarming scale. Some Capampangan lived in the grand manner: Florentino and Tomasa Pamintuan became residents of Washington while their children attended school there; the province claimed ownership in 1925 of 322 autos, fifth highest in the archipelago; and the beauty pageants at the provincial carnival attracted daughters of the leading planters. Nevertheless, social life among the hacendero class had a practicality about it that seemed lacking in Negros. The carnivals, for instance, though very elaborate and costly, were in actuality trade fairs designed to attract investment. Social clubs like Circulo Fernandino did conduct frequent dances, but other groups formed in the period the Pampanga Cooperative League (1920) and the Pampango Youth League (1933), for example—had

mainly professional and political purposes. Although usually more conservative than southern hacenderos, Pampanga's landlords gained sufficient freedom to participate in their province's active town social life and, for some, to take up residence in Manila.^[53]

For several reasons comprehending changes in living conditions among sugar hands as a result of the inauguration of modern mills is difficult. Comparative material for previous and subsequent periods continues hard to accumulate; worker well-being remains, to some extent, as much a matter of perception as of physical reality; and several categories of workers existed, each with its own history. Nevertheless, certain observations about life in the central era emerge from available sources.

Modern developments brought new jobs to sugarlandia to replenish those lost when muscovado factories closed. Workers at centrals, trainmen on central railroads, sugar weighers (manugpisar ), paymasters (pagador ), bookkeepers (tenedor de libro ), and warehousemen (bodeguero ) replaced maestrillos and others who made sugar the old-fashioned way. In 1929 a plant the size of La Carlota employed 118 workers and 9 foremen. Carters (pakyador ) and truckers found extra work moving some cane to mills, and there now existed additional demands for tractor drivers, herdsmen (bakero ), timekeepers, watchmen (ronda ), and other supervisory personnel to fill the jobs created by expanded production. Furthermore, the opening of piers along the Negros shore, while it diminished the number of dockworkers at Iloilo, provided a new source of employment to Negrenses as cargadors, loading sacks onto ships. Centrals thus created more jobs, both in the fields and out, than were lost. Whether this labor force enjoyed a better life, however, represents another question.

A 1970 information questionnaire about their livelihood in the 1920s and 1930s, administered to 255 Negrense duma'an and to rice and sugar agsadores from the ages of 56 to over 100, drew a wide range of responses, from how hard their life seemed to how much better it was before than in 1970. They continued to work long hours at strenuous, sometimes debilitating jobs simply to earn a livelihood. The Sugar News in 1929 offered the following description of wages and work in the Negros fields that, generally, coincides with data provided by the older hands themselves:

Movement of hand labor is more important in Negros than in Luzon, because the system of tenants is less widely established. Permanent hand labor is derived from laborers living on the land with their families, having at their disposal a bit of land and sometimes possessing a team of carabao. They do the usual labor of cultivation according to their age and sex. The

men do the plowing and harrowing, establishing and maintaining the canals and ditches. Their usual wage is P2.50 per week plus seven kilos of rice which is given in daily rations.

The boys do the lighter work, such as weeding and hoeing and taking care of the animals. The average salary is P1.50 with seven kilos of rice per week.

The women and girls plant the cane generally by contract [pakyaw]. They are paid for each 10,000 [laksa]: P0.50 for stripping and P2.00 for planting and covering up, which bring the cost of planting a hectare up to P6.25 to P7.50, depending on whether 25,000 or 30,000 points are planted. . . .

Daily farm wages are as follows:

The only discrepancy between this description and the questionnaire comments lay in the number of gantas given: of those who acknowledged receiving daily rice, few earned more than three to four gantas a week. No matter that planters garnered P40,000 a year for 120 hectares; they paid their hands about P100 for a season's work.

It may have happened that as the central era progressed more duma'an labored on the pakyaw system, that is, having their pay set according to the number of hectares plowed or fertilized, rows weeded, and tons of cane cut, loaded, or transported to the mill. Almost two out of three interviewees stated that they worked either totally or part-time on pakyaw. One planter, Ramon Ramos of Bacolod, noted that he moved to pakyaw from daily wages in the 1930s and that performance-driven work presented obvious advantages to planters confronting lowered prices. Nevertheless, more comparative evidence from years preceding the 1920s needs to become available before this trend can be confirmed.^[55]

As yearly production expanded, the outlook for wages and employment continued bright for farmworkers throughout the 1920s. Sugar News and other publications complained about shortages in the fields and urged that officials curtail labor migration to Hawaii and Mindanao. Industry leaders like John Dumas and Rafael Alunan revived the notion of bringing in "Oriental" immigrants to work during milling season and then to retire docilely to government-provided homesteads. By 1930, however, when sugar prices had slipped to dangerous levels, Sugar News changed its tune, insisting that the labor force be reduced and carping on the high wages paid to Philippine sugar workers, compared to those in Java and elsewhere. In

1932 and 1933 large numbers of duma'an usually hired throughout the year found themselves unemployed when harvesting ended. Governor Isaac Lacson then initiated a program of ensuring that public works jobs went first to Negrenses needing work.^[56]

Numerous duma'an noted that although wages stayed low, so did commodity prices. They expressed contentment often in terms of eating three meals a day, of times remaining peaceful and their place uncrowded. Some described their existence as hand-to-mouth, but more that it was comfortable. None commented that the coming of centrals either appreciably improved or worsened their lot. For many, satisfaction rested upon their ability to supplement low hacienda wages with some other source of income, because many hacenderos did not pay wages during the slack season from June to September, called tiempo muerto (dead time) or tiempo tinggulotom (starvation time). Some duma'an had permission to plant either rice or sweet potatoes (carnotes ) and vegetables on fallow fields, while others served as ronda or as part-time agsadores on hacienda rice lands. Duma'an also found a variety of off-hacienda work as fishermen, vendors, carpenters, house help, firewood and rattan collectors, tuba (palm wine) makers, and cargadors. A few returned to their original home provinces, where they farmed or stayed with relatives.

Comparisons with workers' salaries in other regions make little sense because of differences in living conditions, but as an indication of the sorry state of Visayan economic life elsewhere, sacadas from neighboring islands risked travel to Negros on crowded vessels to accept poor wages because they could earn more than by staying at home. Carlos Locsin estimated that Negros needed 15,000 sacadas to handle the 1927 crop; by 1931 that number had grown to 20,000.

Even when planters enhanced the anticipo to one-third of their seasonal wage, they had no assurance that the workers would materialize or stay. Hacendero Ramon Ramos noted an additional problem: that sacadas unprepared for the rigors of hacienda labor did not do good work. Locsin estimated that 25 percent of the work force could not perform their job adequately. Negrenses tried to solve the migrant labor problem by several means. A scheme to establish recruiting stations in Antique and Cebu failed for lack of cooperation, as did one to register and fingerprint all sacadas when they arrived to keep them from escaping from one hacienda to another. Planters sent encargados and cabos, even went themselves, to outlying islands to enlist help, but sacadas generally preferred to work for a contratista from their own community.

Sacadas I interviewed expressed mixed attitudes toward Negros. Some went annually because they needed money to support their families, others

occasionally for the adventure. A few took their wives, some of whom also cut cane. Most disliked the place and felt homesick. They brought back from P20 to P70 for an entire season's work, depending on their strength, and all observed they could not earn as much at home. A considerable portion of the rest of their wages went to the contratista to pay for their food and any medical expenses they incurred. More experienced and daring hands might eventually go to Negros on their own, thereby avoiding having to share their money with the capataz. Usually hacenderos provided money for their passage to Negros, but sacadas paid their own return fare, and transportation costs ate into salary as well, equal to as much as ten days of work. Amador Española of Barrio San Francisco, Tibiao, Antique, recalled paying P0.40 for a bus from Ma-ao to Pulupandan, P1.50 for the boat across the Guimaras Strait to Iloilo, and P3 for the truck (bus) to his hometown, a barrio along the main road on the narrow coastal plain of eastern Panay. Several hours of walking from the bus stop awaited those living in Guba’ and Bugtung Bato ("Destroyed" and "Lone Stone" in the local dialect), remote sitios (hamlets) of Bugasong, Antique, high on the slopes of the province's mountain spine. Despite all the difficulties facing sacadas, however, contratistas every year filled to overflowing the passenger boats plying the waters of Negros.

In a sense sacadas participated only peripherally in sugar society, despite their crucial economic role. They came for four to six months, remained largely to themselves, and returned to their own world. Many stayed in Negros, however, and became part of the permanent labor force, so that 40 percent of the workers surveyed had a birth place outside Negros. Sacadas thus transformed into duma'an, and occasionally a contratista became a cabo or encargado.^[57]

Much better wages awaited those sacadas or duma'an fortunate, ambitious, and adept enough to become skilled and lower-management personnel. Cabos regularly made P30 to P40 a month, and encargado salaries ranged between P30 and P180, depending on the level of responsibility assumed. Truckers earned P30 to P40, while tractor drivers received from P1.25 a day to P50 a month. Even watchmen could garner a salary of P3.50, more than the regular wages of field hands.

At centrals the scale reached even higher, up to P220 for a locomotive mechanic and P160 for an electrician. Sugarmen relished pointing out to social critics and others that mill personnel enjoyed the highest standard of living and most perquisites of any laborers in the Philippines. Mills offered permanent housing, health benefits, and recreational facilities to their help, for management fully comprehended the value of maintaining a healthy labor force. Moreover, centrals needed the medical help because of the numerous industrial accidents experienced by those who regularly

worked around the machinery and chemicals during the long, hard hours of milling season.^[58]

While the south remained committed to a paid labor system with a plantation hierarchy, the Capampangan still opted for tenancy. On the typical Pampanga sugar farm, a landholder contracted with casamac, from one to a hundred or more, depending on the size of the holding. Larger plantations concentrated in the newer northern towns. Under the more or less loose supervision of an owner or his representative, called palsunero or katiwala, tenants grew both rice and sugar on plots of 2 to 7 hectares, sometimes alternating the crops in succeeding seasons. They and the landlords normally split harvests fifty-fifty; however, with loans of cash and, sometimes, draft animals, the sharing favored owners. The two parties divided most expenses equally, but landholders supplied cane points (tab-tab ) and casamac paid the people (sakul ) who planted them. Tenants delivered cane to factories, and landlords kept the milling records and settled accounts seasonally.

Casamac bound to a particular landowner clustered in the same community, working on adjoining fields. They selected their own barrio lieutenants, although in a few places the palsunero held the title. Often related to one another, casamac frequently employed the sugu system of ganging together to accomplish chores. Occasionally on bigger estates, hired migrants from the Ilocos region to the north harvested cane, but more often casamac saved money by doing the work themselves.

The system generally provided tenants who planted sugar with a satisfactory livelihood, according to their own estimation. They earned sufficient income, often stated as around P150 to P200 a year, and some even made enough to provide schooling for their children. Managing their holdings, they possessed access to a variety of local resources so that when harvests came up short, they could supplement their income with fishing; trapping crabs, frogs, and locusts in paddies; raising animals for meat; collecting materials for craft work; gathering firewood; and growing produce in home gardens. All these items had value in local markets. Besides acting as vendors, women and children performed extra housework in wealthy homes, while men did carpentering and other forms of day labor. Casamac thus exercised more control over their economic lives and gained more independence than did the duma'an of Negros.

Tenancy in Pampanga baffled observers who could not understand its persistence, from either the point of view of the planter or the casamac. An editorial in Sugar News in 1924 contained the following appraisal:

Under the existing system . . . namely, the tenant system, the high cost of cane, or the low return for cane, is passed on to

the tenant. It is an idiosyncrasy of Filipino character that he will willingly work under the tenant system on his own time in the production of cane and be quite satisfied if, at the end of the year, he has averaged but thirty, forty or fifty centavos for each day of labor, his return being based on the price per tonne paid him by the hacendero or the Central. This same laborer would scoff at any offer under eighty centavos or one peso a day for a day's work of from ten to twelve hours.^[59]

That casamac had long labored under this arrangement, preferred its managerial autonomy and economic latitude, and relished their barrio life, escaped the purview of outsiders. Plantation efficiency may have offered a better means of meeting production demands, but it scarcely satisfied the needs of the soul.

Specialists contrasted low productivity in Pampanga with higher Negrense yields and urged management reform; however, landholders, like their tenants, resisted change. The diversified two-crop farms of central Luzon provided a hedge against unfavorable market conditions, and tenants absorbed lower sugar prices with diminished shares. Owners profited from sugar, despite receiving on average a 5 percent lower share from centrals than did their counterparts in Negros. In addition, casamac took better care of land and tools than did hired workers, and the system in general reduced administrative costs while at the same time providing a stable, reliable labor force. Even when ownership changed hands, casamac tended to remain with the property.

Modern production delivered prosperity to sugarlandia but did not change the basic settlement and cultural patterns that had previously developed in the two areas. Negros still demonstrated something of its flamboyant character, while Pampanga continued to exhibit a more traditional lifestyle in its stable communities. Having room to expand and more commitment to sugar, the former area experienced far more rapid population increase than did the latter. The annual growth rate of 3.55 percent in Negros Occidental greatly exceeded the 2.12 percent for the archipelago as a whole, while Pampanga's 1.83 percent fell considerably below both. However, towns in southern Tarlac absorbed Capampangan seeking new sugar fields to plant.^[60]

Perhaps the greatest alteration in the Negros landscape, besides the appearance of smoke-gushing centrals with their veins of narrow-gauge railroad tracks reaching onto vast expanses of cane, was the port at Pulupandan and the offshore loading facilities near the mill towns. These new docks and wharves not only denied business to Iloilo, leading to its demise as a major commercial center, they also kept more Negrenses at home to

conduct affairs. Bacolod, the capital and fastest-growing city on Negros, stole much of the luster that had formerly accrued to the city across the Guimaras Strait.

Centered on its newly renovated plaza, Bacolod emerged as an attractive, bustling community with markets, department stores, and amusements. Carnivals with the accompanying round of balls annually drew the Visayan sugar community to the city. The Arco Theater went up in 1926, and planters who formerly journeyed to Iloilo to see films could now watch them on their own turf at one of the largest picture houses in the islands. They could attend meetings and conferences or just hobnob at the popular University Club; meanwhile, the Negros Golf and Country Club provided an opportunity for centralistas and hacenderos, Americans and Filipinos, to meet in a more social setting. The Bacolod Sporting Club offered bowling, and the Negros Jockey Club introduced regular horse racing to the province in 1934. Whatever sense of isolation had previously existed on Negros ended through the easy communication with Manila and the outside world that followed inauguration of daily mail in 1924, long distance telephone calling in 1927, and airplane travel via Iloilo in 1931. Much improved passenger boat service supplemented these other facilities and made it possible for tourists to visit such spots as the nearby Mambucal spa. Symbolic of its improved status, the city became the seat of a new Roman Catholic bishopric in 1933.^[61]

Other communities, especially some of those with large centrals, harbored an active urban life as well. Silay, despite new docking facilities, continued as the grand old center with theaters, the province's most beautiful church, and after 1928, its second high school. Facing toward Cebu and with a large Cebuano-speaking population, San Carlos turned into the most active settlement along the eastern shore, boasting new sugar-loading facilities, three cinemas, a new church, and other amenities. Visitors also commented on the transformation in the center of La Carlota. Even smaller towns now obtained electric lights and telephone service, and Pulupandan offered a hotel to the travelers who appeared daily at its port. More than in prior times town plazas became places where the local elite congregated, held their club meetings, and enjoyed the attractions of the modern world.

May Coggins, a Baptist missionary who operated a girls' dormitory in Bacolod, wrote home in 1925 that people in Negros seemed to possess an anti-American attitude and dung to the old Spanish Catholic culture; however, despite her observation, lifestyles had certainly altered. During the 1920s—as novelist Nick Joaquin now laments—old Filipino-Spanish culture and values gave way to the manners and norms of the new con-

querer, and the sugar industry undoubtedly provided means and motives for the change. While Spanish and Ilongo remained the languages of choice among many planters, American English increasingly served as the medium of business and government. U.S.-style public schools and American teachers played a very important role in this transformation. Furthermore, baseball, golf, beauty contests, vaudeville, jazz, movies, and radios all served as carriers of change, replacing the zarzuela and other traditional forms of native entertainment. In 1923 Negros even claimed a world boxing champion: flyweight Pancho Villa of Ilog, the son of a duma'an. Negrense youth responded easily to their times, and the dowagers of San Enrique sought to impose a P50 yearly tax on girls who bobbed their hair.^[62]

Pampanga experienced similar changes, and San Fernando, home of the provincial hospital and public high school, led the way. The most rapid growth occurred in towns with centrals and large expanses of sugar. The province was linked to Manila by two bus companies, railroad service, and car travel. Tourism flourished after the government developed a spa and park at the base of Mount Arayat, as well as other attractions, and arriving visitors feasted on the vaunted native cuisine. Intertown travel also remained more frequent than in Negros.

Long-settled Pampanga clung more tightly to its well-developed native culture, despite the presence of electric service, long distance telephones, a dozen movie theaters, bowling halls, and other seductions of the Jazz Age. The province boasted seventeen brass bands, and President Diosdado Macapagal as a young man in the 1930s still toured with a company of players performing Capampangan zarzuelas, some of which were written by his father. Evangelina-Hilario Lacson describes the era this way:

The Kapampangan literary world of the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century comprised many writers, all of whom were productive and delightfully festive. They made the period a bountiful one of writing, the writers as lively as birds in a wide-spreading molave tree—the magical tree lording it over the Athens of Pampanga, the town of Bacolor. In other Pampanga towns the same liveliness obtained in Hilario's birth town of San Fernando; Yuzon's Guagua; Macapagal's Lubao; Punsalan's Magalang; Sanchez's Angeles, and in almost all the other towns of Pampanga.^[63]

Besides its venerability, another reason for the survival of so much native culture was the large professional class in the towns. Capampangan prided themselves on their educational achievements, and local yearbooks

always touted those with professional success more than those who had been successful exclusively as farmers. Capampangan placed greater importance on intertown communication and support of education than did their counterparts to the south (see table 14). Although the school-age population of Pampanga was 40 percent less than that of Negros Occidental, Pampanga had almost as many public high school students. Pampanga also boasted more private schools. Negrenses depended much more on the casual generosity of planters to maintain local public schools, in town and on haciendas, so when economic times turned bad, schools faced being dosed for want of money.^[64]

Despite the expansion of modern culture in western Negros, the province still exhibited characteristics of its frontier past, especially in its interior and on its northern fringes. Homesteading continued in the north, as did incidents of land grabbing, and the Philippine Constabulary chased and arrested cattle rustlers and robber bands. Makinaugalingon reported on persistent plantation violence, and even in the towns where new centrals sprang up, trouble occurred between managers and workers and between foreign and native laborers. Use of guns during arguments was ubiquitous in the province. Northern Pampanga and southern Tarlac exuded some-thing of the same atmosphere, but not to the same degree. Overall, Pampanga gave the impression of being more stable and sedate than its southern counterpart. In both Places, provincial character had been set by 1920, and nothing that happened during the central era or since has changed that essence.^[65]

Tensions

Prosperity during the central era did not necessarily generate harmony within the sugar industry, and the maldistribution of profits created tensions. Planters observed stockholders at centrals, particularly private ones,

receiving high dividends while they struggled under debt burdens, and they concluded that a bigger share of those rewards should go to them. Although locked mainly into thirty-year contracts, hacenderos sought to improve their situation in a shorter time.

The first signs of hacendero pressure surfaced sometime in mid-1929 as Negrense planters began approaching politicians about improving their share of milled sugar—called participation from an average 55 percent to 60 percent. Within a year planters instigated their first legislative proposal to change the terms by statute, a bill the legislature narrowly defeated because Senate President Quezon opposed it on the constitutional grounds that it went against the laws of contract. Despite his legal objections, Quezon sympathized with the hacenderos and supported Amando Avanceña's proposal that the government have the bank centrals voluntarily offer higher participation. In early July, however, PNB declined to change the terms at its centrals. Centralistas proffered the sanctity of contracts argument and the somewhat specious contention that landowners, rather than planter-lessees, would benefit most from a change in terms. The second reason lacked validity in that only a fraction of planters rented lands; besides, in July 1930 landowners belonging to the Federation of Planters of Negros Occidental agreed to reduce rents by five percentage points in the event of altered participation.

Angered by their defeats, hacenderos adopted a more militant attitude. During August they threatened (1) to vote for the opposition Democrata party, (2) to halt purchases of fertilizer for the coming year, and thus (3) to reduce cane production. Suggested compromises that centrals, land-owners, and planters share their fertilizer costs more equitably and that PNB lower its interest rates did not appear to soften planter ire. The protests failed, the centrals reported a bumper crop for 1930-31, and Negros remained a Nationalista stronghold.

By 1931 the situation began to improve slightly for planters. In January, Quezon, backed by a plea from Negros Occidental Governor Isaac Lacson, endorsed a plan to have Isabela Central raise hacendero participation by 5 percent and even advocated that another 5 percent go to mill hands. PNB responded by granting the planters a 5 percent bonus, thus keeping the prior contract intact. The central did not offer workers anything extra. The idea of providing bonuses instead of altering the contract caught on, and other centrals adopted it. Binalbagan gave 5 percent in the form of shares of stock, and Talisay and La Carlota returned the equivalent of 25 centavos per picul. In the event that sugar prices turned upward, centrals could then revert to the old standard. The confederation still pressed for a uniform 60 percent, but many centrals resisted, and only hacenderos at Ma-ao and some at San

Carlos received the higher rate. With the prospect of limitations came added planter clamor for sixty-forty; however, centralistas increasingly resisted the appeal, and the bitter dispute continued. Some Negrenses favored a planter strike in 1932, and by August 1933 some growers advocated, to no avail, abrogating all contracts and selling cane directly to centrals. As the era of quotas dawned, the issue remained unresolved.

Despite the fact that planters in Pampanga received a smaller participation than did those on Negros, hacendero protests in the former area did not arise until 1934 when quotas loomed. Perhaps, as Sugar News suggested, the minimal amount of leaseholding made a difference in the planters' attitude; then, too, Capampangan also owed fewer debts and paid less interest than did southerners. While both Negrenses and pampangan derived much of their income from sugar, the latter also grew rice as a cash crop so had diversified sources of livelihood. The tenant system as well had the effect of cushioning Luzon planters against losses incurred by low prices. Possibly, too, planters simply enjoyed better relations with centrals than was the case in Negros.^[66]

Without effective organizations and influential spokespersons, field hands in sugarlandia lacked the means to protect their interests or to voice their objections to changes occurring around them. For the most part the poor remained dependent on the casual, often insincere generosity of powerful and wealthy patrons for whatever benefits they derived from the newfound wealth. The evidence of prosperity and modernity in towns contrasted sharply with the poverty and unchanging life of barrios and haciendas. Poorer wages and working arrangements among plantation workers and diminishing shares for casamac led sugarlandia's labor force to begin pressuring planters, just as hacenderos leaned on the centrals. Old forms of folk protest reappeared alongside more up-to-date expressions of dissatisfaction.

Inadequate medical services meant that faith healers in Pampanga continued to attract a following among the rural poor, and certain of these practitioners enjoyed a wide reputation as possessors of strong curative powers. One healer, Mang Tanong, caused considerable alarm among authorities. This former carpenter appeared in 1931 in Arayat, the site of Felipe Salvador's earlier religious passion, and drew a large crowd of poor folk from the surrounding area. Reminiscent of Apong Ipe, Mang Tanong claimed that six years before he had lost his way on Mount Arayat and returned a changed man. Local officials observing his success ordered him to cease his activity, and the healer desisted. Clearly, however, the tradition of messianism persisted in Pampanga, and followers of Santa Iglesia still held services in the depths of the Candaba Swamp.^[67]

Millenarianism made a rare appearance in the western Visayas in the mid-1920s and elicited only limited enthusiasm from duma'an throughout Negros. From a palatial home in Iloilo, Emperor Florencio Intrencherado preached the coming of a reign of justice throughout the Philippines, based on independence, reapportionment of national wealth, and removal of the Chinese. An attractive feature of his program for the poor was his plan to reduce the head tax from P2.20 to 20 centavos. His agents fanned out to surrounding towns, signing up members for his paramilitary organization and selling them pictures and medals.

Historian David Sturtevant has traced Intrencherado's life and career from his early years as a petty merchant along the Guimaras Strait to his incarceration and death in 1937 in a mental asylum. Here one need only mention a few points concerning the response of sugar workers in Negros. Intrencherado's flamboyant style and urban location brought him considerable notoriety, and the government, ever on the alert for signs of rural unrest, paid particular attention to this highly visible figure.

On May 13, 1927, in the face of Intrencherado's imminent departure for mental examinations, five protests occurred in Negros, the two most serious in Victorias and La Carlota. In the first town, two policemen were killed, tax and land records were destroyed, and Chinese stores were pillaged by an estimated three hundred supporters led by the Montarde brothers. In La Carlota a policeman died and another was wounded. In Bago and Silay local officials and the constabulary prevented any serious violence, and in La Castellana three Spanish hacenderos and a Swiss were flogged. All these events happened the same day, and no others followed. The constabulary arrested fifty-six of the putative three hundred rioters in Victorias but released most of them shortly thereafter. Some supporters in Victorias and Murcia were beaten and sent home by the constabulary, and fifty-nine adherents from La Castellana served six-month terms in jail; the ringleaders, however, all received long sentences.

Newsmen reported on Intrencherado during the asylum years, keeping his name before the reading public and making him the most noticed messianic figure in Philippine history, but it does not appear that he attracted much of a following among the poor of Negros. Lists taken by the constabulary from his house claimed that he had 14,275 followers in the towns of Negros Occidental; however, there exists no clear notion of just what constituted membership. Did that number represent all those who paid P2.50 to enroll in the organization, those suspected of joining, or those who simply purchased a picture or medal as a talisman? Among older sugar hands interviewed in 1970, only 75 out of 257 had any recollection of Intrencherado, and of those, 29 had heard his name but knew

nothing else about him or his movement; furthermore, another 7 confused him with someone else. An additional 15 possessed only negative memories, dismissing Intrencherado as a madman, fanatic, or flimflammer. Altogether, only 8 admitted to paying dues to the organization, and of that number, just 3 could recall in some detail the medals, pamphlets, and uniforms they acquired, while 1 admitted to being a sergeant in the organization. The distinct impression emerges that few comprehended much about Intrencherado, sympathized with him, or had any faith in his movement.

The movement never achieved any provincewide cohesion, and in only five of the province's twenty-six towns did any incidents happen, and then on only one occasion. Furthermore, among the interviewees knowledge of the Victorias and La Carlota raids was confined to individuals living in or near those towns. Heuristic evidence suggests that in the three towns where any violence occurred, local tensions between duma'an and a landlord or landlords served at least as a partial cause. Perhaps the clearest evidence of the movement's weak reception rests in the experience of Policarpio Montarde, known locally as "Karpo," the chief agent of Intrencherado and leader of the attack on Victorias. Following the raid Karpo fled to other islands because he could find no sanctuary on Negros, and upon his return two years later to eastern Negros, he was quickly captured.

Negros's single flirtation with messianism seems to have affected little those oppressed who might otherwise have sympathized with such movements. Perhaps the cellular nature of the hacienda system made it difficult for Intrencherado or his followers to reach duma'an. He rarely, if ever, traveled to the province. Or possibly messianism—as opposed to shamanism—better suited peasant societies like Pampanga than the plantations of Negros. Perhaps the historical ties of Negros and the western Visayas to babaylanism simply precluded success for a millenarian movement.^[68]

Attacks upon isolated Negrense haciendas persisted into the central era, and marauders still found sanctuary along the mountain core where traditional religious practices flourished within isolated, poverty-ridden settlements of aborigines, kaingeros (slash and burn farmers), and lowland escapees. In these backwoods communities, memories of Papa Isio still survived. In late June 1928 policemen in Barrio Camangcamang, Isabela, confronted a band of forty pulahanes (bandits) led by Lucio Brender, a former member of Papa Isio’s movement. Brender, pardoned by Governorgeneral Wood in 1922, returned to his old haunts and formed a new group called Siete Sagrados (The Sacred Seven) to whom he explained the hidden messages of his former chief. The sect exhibited all the trappings of babaylanism: the anting-antings, secret signs and words, black robes and

priestesses. Members took nicknames redolent with dissent and folk heroism, names like "Quintin Intrencherado" and "Bernardo del Carpio." The police managed to fend off the attack, killing or capturing several gang members, meanwhile having nine of their own seriously wounded. Brender fled, only to die in another engagement with the constabulary in rural Isabela. Those captured received prison terms, and the raids ceased. Babaylanism, however, continued to thrive in the province's interior wilds.^[69]

Alongside traditional protest, more secular forms began to appear in sugarlandia, often led by aspiring politicians. As conditions worsened for workers and as the modern sugar industry encroached upon their lives, they turned to leaders and organizations that proffered help in dealing with governments and solidarity against the economic and political power of the big hacenderos and centralistas.

Perhaps the most blatant manipulation of hacienda and central workers for political ends involved two mutual-help societies, Kusug Sang Imol (The Strength of the Poor) and Mainawa-on (Merciful), that operated during the 1920s. The idea for such groups did not originate on Negros and may have come from Panay, where they had existed since at least 1919. The societies functioned primarily to offer members or their widows financial help in the event of personal catastrophe or death. This type of organization with its local chapters fit the autonomous nature of the plantation labor structure while presenting workers with some insurance in an insecure world. For an initiation fee of 1-5 pesos, plus 20-50 centavos a month in dues, one became a member, wore the triangle ring of Kusug Sang Imol (KSI) or the eagle ring of Mainawa-on, and enjoyed other benefits. Supporters regularly attended services for their deceased colleagues, conducted flag-raising ceremonies on special occasions, and in the case of KSI, received a twice-weekly newspaper. Membership of the two organizations included not only laborers, but also doctors and lawyers who provided services to members and Chinese merchants seeking to maintain good community relations and to guard against possible intimidation.

Despite its economic attraction to the poor, at its establishment in Bacolod in mid-1922, KSI had basically political aims. The founder, Felix Severino, a former newspaperman and nephew of revolutionary leader Melecio Severino, induced General Emilio Aguinaldo, Manuel Quezon, Manuel Roxas, Senator Esperidion Guanco, Governor Gil Montilla, and Assemblyman Vicente Jimenez Yanson to act as honorary patrons. Such important leaders agreed to affiliate with a group supposed to appeal to workers because, as McCoy notes, the real power behind its formation was Montilla himself, who used the organization to ensure his election as governor in 1922. Severino took advantage of these connections too: when

Emilio Aguinaldo visited Negros, members appeared on daises everywhere with the Revolutionary War hero. Also, after the court of first instance came down with a ruling unacceptable to the association, its leaders felt confident in writing Quezon to have the judge transferred.^[70]

Jealous of Montilla's success and anxious to build a counterforce, opponents in late 1922 introduced Mainawa-on from Panay to Negros. The latter group included as its sponsors Iloilo politician Julio Hilado, planter Federico Lazarate, newspaperman Esteban Vasquez, and Cesar Barrios, president of Iloilo's main wharfage and shipping concern, Visayan Stevedore Transportation Company (Vistranco). Both associations quickly spread to all towns in Negros and lined up with locally powerful liders. For instance, Assemblyman Enrique Magalona and Jose Ledesma headed the Saravia chapter of Mainawa-on. To reach out into the countryside both groups began at this point to stress the mutual aid facet of their organizations.

Mutual-help societies proliferated in Negros during this period, usually possessing brief life spans, limited areas of operation, and small member-ships, numbering in the hundreds; however, KSI at its height had an estimated twenty thousand adherents throughout the province. Its following included policemen, justices of the peace, contratistas, cabos and other supervisory personnel, and central employees as well as acsas and duma'an. So prominent had the organization become that local authors composed a zarzuela and a fox trot titled "Kusog Sang Imol." Mainawa-on, constructed along the same lines, enrolled a slightly smaller constituency, perhaps fifteen thousand, drawn from essentially the same clientele. The charge lodged by KSI that Mainawa-on more clearly represented the rich does not seem justified, either by contrasts in membership or by the nature of the leadership. The major differences seem to have been that KSI was larger and more powerful than Mainawa-on and that the former originated in Negros and later established chapters on Panay while the latter followed the reverse course.^[71]

If any distinction existed, it lay within the membership of each group. Town proper residents involved themselves more in the societies' social activities, while rural workers participated mainly in their mutual-aid programs. This compartmentalization became most apparent when competition between the two societies escalated into violent conflict. From late in 1923 to mid-1925 Negros was transformed into a battleground as KSI and Mainawa-on vied for control of politics and other financi resources. Incidents varied from a scuffle between the heads of the two groups to the assassination of the justice of the peace in Escalante. Most towns witnessed Chicago-style gang warfare, coercion, and corruption as local policemen

and toughs sided with the two organizations in the struggle. At this time Negros Occidental became notorious for violence. Meanwhile, rural workers went on paying their dues and assisting their friends in trouble.

Severino apparently behaved like a local dictator, strutting about in a khaki uniform with red tie, leather leggings, and pistol. KSI enforcers intimidated workers, political leaders, and even American managers of local companies. When Echaús raided Binalbagan Central in early 1924, he did so with the assistance of KSI thugs. Mainawa-on tried to respond in kind to assaults upon its members but seemingly suffered more damage. Constabulary troopers spent much of their time confiscating weapons from the antagonists but faced difficulties in trying to control the situation, given the participation of planters and politicians in the melee.

Gradually the insular government won the upper hand. In July 1924 Governor-general Wood wrote to Montilla insisting that he resign from KSI, and the governor of Negros did distance himself from the organization; nevertheless, six months later provincial office holders still feared being seen by KSI members in the company of Montilla's enemy Rafael Alunan. The Bureau of Justice sent attorneys and auditors to check the books of both organizations and to ensure that no fraud occurred. Mainawa-on eventually closed down because of lack of funds, and KSI diminished in scope and size after Severino went to prison, ironically for adultery.

Violence and the backing of masoniclike organizations have been a part of Philippine politics since the nineteenth century; however, political historians may wish to look to the battles between KSI and Mainawa-on as early instances of a more intense level of rough-and-tumble electoral competition for which the Philippines has become so well known. Negrense liders have sometimes achieved notoriety for their employment of personal armies, and the KSI episode provides a very visible instance of that type of usage.^[72] At the same time, KSI and Mainawa-on, while they did not primarily help duma'an and acsas, did highlight the worth of mutual-help societies, and such groups have operated in the province to this day.

Likewise, union activism produced but little improvement for sugar workers. Field hands occasionally walked away from plantations when conditions became too harsh, but genuine union organizing did not reach the province much before early 1930, by which time several small locals existed for cargadors, sawmill hands, pakyadors, and central workers. The only major strike action during the central era occurred from January 23 to February 28, 1931, when Federacion Obrera de Filipinas (FOF) sought to obtain union recognition on the docks and in the centrals of Negros. Founded in Iloilo in 1928 by newspaperman Jose Nava, FOF possessed the largest union membership (185,000) in the Visayas and exerted consid-

erable control over shipping in the central Philippines. The strike on Negros failed, however, when the centrals refused to recognize the union and brought in scab labor from Panay and Negros. The Philippine Constabulary sided with the centrals, as did the provincial government under Governor Agustin Ramos. In the end only some of the strikers recovered their jobs, and centrals granted no concessions. Sugar output for the 1931-32 season reached its highest level to date.

A sidelight to the 1931 strike was that planters supported neither the centrals nor the strikers but sat on the sidelines, hoping to gain some leverage in their own pursuit of better participation. This action—or inaction—seemed typical of protest on Negros. Like the sporadic burnings of hacienda cane fields in the early 1930s by anonymous, disgruntled workers, dissent went unsupported, unanswered, and perhaps worse, unnoticed, ensuring failure for attempts to rectify the industry's economic inequities.^[73]

Labor activism in central Luzon had its origins among the Manila work force in the late nineteenth century, but in its early years it had little success. In 1913, with the founding of Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (Philippine Labor Congress), union bosses such as Hermenegildo Cruz (later the director of labor), Crisanto Evangelista, and Jacinto Manahan introduced more effective management, developed a larger following, and won some concessions for their members. During and following World War I union activity widened, and a group of labor leaders attended their first worker conference outside the country, in Canton in 1924. With the encouragement and support of two Comintern agents, the American William Janequette (a.k.a. Harrison George) and the Indonesian Tan Malacca, Evangelista and Manahan in the mid-1920s steered the union movement in a leftist direction. In 1929 the Congreso Obrero split into right-and left-wing factions, and out of this rift sprang Kongreso Proletario de Filipinas (Katipunan ng mga Anakpawis ng Pilipinas) and Partido Komunista (1930) both under the leadership of radicals like Evangelista, Manahan, and Juan Feleo. Trade unionism remained firmly tied to the Manila and surrounding Tagalog area where Philippine industry concentrated; hence, its activities had little to do initially with sugar-growing tenants in Pampanga. Nevertheless, union leaders introduced to Philippine protest movements the idea of labor organization and a leftist and nationalist ideology, notions that traveled throughout central Luzon and beyond.^[74]

The first tenant union, Pagkakaisa ng Magsasaka (Union of Peasants), later called Union de Aparceros de Filipinas, appeared in Bulacan Province in 1917. This association was but one of many that proliferated in central Luzon in the 1920s and that became constituents in 1924 of Katipunang

Pambansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (National Association of Peasants in the Philippines or KPMP). Manahan, Feleo, and other leaders of the left took an active role in this organizing, and such unions, along with other peasant protest movements like Tanggulan, Colorum, and Sakdal, attested to the growing dissatisfaction with conditions in the archipelago's paddy bowl.

Pampanga's rice casamac joined in the unrest as well. The first recorded incident, the burning of landholder rice stocks, took place in Candaba at the beginning of 1921, and during the following year the Bureau of Labor arbitrated seven more agricultural disputes in the province. In 1924 Governor Olimpio Guanzon tried unsuccessfully to create a system to resolve the growing number of conflicts that spread as far as Tarlac; meanwhile, peasants formed a five thousand-member organization called Anak Pawas (Sons of Sweat). Incidents of violence persisted throughout the decade and into the 1930s, especially in rice-growing sections of Santa Rita, Arayat, Mexico, San Luis, Candaba, and Masantol, but no town stayed free from unrest.^[75]

While protest lapped the shores of central Luzon's sugarlandia, casamac who grew cane did not participate to any extent in the movement before the mid-1930s. In 1923 the Manila Times reported Jacinto Manahan's observations on the agrarian situation in Pampanga:

The reason for Pampanga tenants' assuming a rather lukewarm attitude on the situation may be the fact that they get tolerably good treatment from their landlords. The province, besides, is not totally devoted to the production of rice, and the spread of the movement seems to be rapid only in those places where rice production is the principal occupation of the people. The people of the province of Pampanga are principally engaged in the raising of sugar cane, while in many of the lowland towns fishing is the chief source of the peoples' income.

"The tenants' movement will certainly spread throughout the provinces of central Luzon," declared Jacinto Manahan, president of the National Confederation of Tenants and Farm Laborers, "but it will take time. "^[76]

The Tribune supported this commentary when in 1932 it reported on a Bureau of Labor survey that pointed to the fact that Pampanga's sugar tenants received better participation than did those in Batangas Province; however, rice tenants in Batangas fared better than their counterparts in central Luzon.

Evidence suggests that during most of the central era, even as relations between Pampanga's aparceros and landlords became strained, those who

raised sugar on just part of their holding earned more than those who grew only rice. The difference had to do with dissimilar circumstances that resulted from improvements in both the rice and sugar markets. The Philippines, with its rapidly rising population and so much of its land devoted to cash crops, needed vastly increased amounts of rice, and the Central Luzon Plain proved the best place to produce those stocks. However, central Luzon, especially the longer-settled areas like Pampanga, was becoming more crowded, and its denizens consumed more of their own output. Density rose in the province by 30 percent between 1918 and 1939, from 349 per square mile to 456; meanwhile, agricultural hectarage expanded only 22 percent, from 100,400 hectares to 122,006. Rice land increased 26 percent, from 52,936 hectares to 66,453.^[77]

To increase rice output in Pampanga (without interfering with sugar production), landowners needed to improve their yields, either through better farming methods or by further gouging the peasants. Since more scientific agriculture demanded heavy capital investments, landholders preferred first to tighten terms of aparcero contracts, charge higher interest rates on farm loans, remove inefficient tenants, agglomerate holdings, and demand more work from casamac. Some proprietors also resorted to outright cheating of tenants on the annual division of crops. Landlords tended to term these practices "making the tenant-landlord arrangement more businesslike," but casamac viewed the changes as unjust. Because of the increasing competition for holdings, however, tenants found themselves in a poor bargaining position and could not rectify the situation. Protest resulted.^[78]

In the meantime, however, while the sugar market held, casamac growing cane maintained an acceptable standard of living. Income derived from a combination of sugar profits and some sales of rice, supplemented possibly with off-season work, kept sugar tenants from turning to the more radical organizations. Of those 149 cane growers questioned in the 1964 survey who might have joined such groups, only 17 did, while another 9 enrolled in the conservative, landlord-sponsored Katipunan Mipanampun (Mutual Protection Association or KM). This latter organization, founded by Representative Zoilo Hilario, an ally of Quezon and Sotero Baluyut, began in Pampanga and eventually spread throughout central Luzon. Writers of the era described KM as similar to KSI, with the same mutual-aid function and masoniclike structure. The group drew mainly from the towns, enlisting teachers, workers, local politicians, and casamac; it even had a women's auxiliary called the Amazons. A superpatriotic group, KM's members conducted flag-raising ceremonies, sponsored beauty contests, and supported economic protectionism; however, KM's chief function was

to provide counterdemonstrations to those of the peasant unions. Lasting from roughly 1922 to 1924, KM represented the largest organization in the growing backlash against tenant radicalism.^[79]

Only twice during the 1920s did sugar tenants briefly protest their treatment at the hands of landlords, and both complaints had to do with shifts in sugar prices. The rapid fall in price in 1922 and 1924 following the exceptional highs of the respective preceding years led tenants to believe they had been cheated, that they had received too little during the boom and had dropped back too far afterward. On these occasions they sought redress from landlords and, unsuccessfully, from Governor Olimpio Guanzon. As soon as prices stabilized, however, the protests ceased.^[80]

Another factor favoring peace among sugar casamac was that they obtained some satisfaction from the government. During their two protests, aparceros complained that landlords provided them with incorrect mill data. In time the government passed a measure requiring landlords to furnish tenants with full documentation on the milling and disposing of sugar stocks. By contrast, rice farmers never succeeded in obtaining an effective law to protect them in their contracts with landlords. Sugar tenants thus appeared to have more clout than those who grew only rice.^[81]

In an indirect way the sugar industry also contributed to unrest among rice tenants by forcing many of them off parcels of land and planting cane in their stead. Perhaps the most notorious case occurred in Dinalupihan, Bataan, where Pasumil acquired rights to farmland belonging to the Catholic Church. The central removed the rice tenants and in the process raised a storm among those evicted. Although the tenants lost, the area remained thereafter a hotbed of protest. Similar incidents on a smaller scale, involving landowners and tenants, happened elsewhere in Pampanga and Tarlac during these years of sugar prosperity.^[82]

Two circumstances changed the relative passivity among sugar tenants: the coming of limitation and the rise of effective local leadership of the peasant movement. Beginning in 1933, talk of market restrictions, on top of already depressed sugar prices, began to alarm tenant farmers and to encourage landlords to harden the terms of sugar contracts. As the era of quotas dawned, close observers of the industry noted in the new situation a potential for unrest.^[83] Meanwhile a new leader of Pampanga's tenants had recently emerged on the scene, in time to lead the next round of strikes against landlords and centrals.

One of the more pressing needs in the study of twentieth-century Philippine history is a good biography of Pedro Abad Santos, given his contributions, long unappreciated and misunderstood, to his country's intellectual and political development. Too often his reputation has been

overshadowed by that of his younger brother, Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos, executed in 1942 for his refusal to collaborate with the Japanese military government.

The few scraps of source material on Pedro Abad Santos that have so far surfaced present a paradoxical view of him. Born in 1876 into a professional family of San Fernando, he grew up in the company of the local elite, enjoying such pastimes of the wealthy as tennis. Large sugar land holders including Alfredo Ganzon of Magalang and Roberto Toledo III of Floridablanca considered him a friend. Abad Santos attended the elite Manila school San Juan de Letran with schoolmates Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña and completed his education at Ateneo de Manila and University of Santo Tomas. After passing the bar in 1907, he became a justice of the peace and provincial fiscal in the succeeding years. He and brother Jose briefly formed a law partnership in 1920-21, practiced in the capital area, and had as one of their clients the Manila Railroad Company. Despite his background, however, Pedro exhibited a genuine sympathy for and understanding of the plight of the poor and in later years spent much of his time in their company. Even so, he liked being referred to as "Don Pedro" or "Don Perico."

Abad Santos had a taste for public office, yet he chose to become a political outcast defending peasants in suits against landlords and founding Aguman ding Talapagobra ning Filipinas (Workers' Union of the Philip-pines) in 1929. Before then he served two terms in the Philippine Assembly from 1916 to 1923 and vied unsuccessfully against Sotero Baluyut for governor of Pampanga in 1927. He ran several times more for governor in the 1930s. Yet this same ambitious politico adopted a spartan personal lifestyle, electing to live in a nipa hut in the yard of his family house near the center of San Fernando, where he daily met with casamac seeking his legal help and moral support.^[84]

There remains a core mystery as to why Abad Santos moved from his role as a conventional politician to spokesman for the peasants of his province. His siblings stayed within the fold: Antonio, a successful hacendero and businessman, served as president of San Fernando's municipal council; Irineo was successful in both farming and finance; Jose, a favorite of Quezon, worked his way up in the Department of Justice; while Quirino, a local justice of the peace, carried out provincial political chores for Quezon. Even Quirino did not understand why his eldest brother drifted so far to the left; however, he believed that Pedro's defeat at the hands of Baluyut affected this transformation. Other unsympathetic commentators also saw the move as one of revenge against the ndowners and politicians who helped bring about his 1927 loss. Even supporter Casto Alejandrino

felt that the landlords abandoned Abad Santos in the election because of his aid to tenants, and that this betrayal by his own class made his jump inevitable. The vengeance explanation scarcely accounts for Abad Santos's seventeen-year commitment, filled with great personal sacrifice and fraught with danger, to the cause of the aparcero. Deeper motivations surely lay behind his decision.

Present-day historian Antonio Tan sees in Abad Santos's record as a legislator evidence of a longstanding sympathy for the poor; however, the latter's opposition to a head tax and support for women's suffrage and legalization of divorce provide testimony only of a liberal attitude. Those stands indicate simply that Abad Santos possessed a social conscience, not that he might someday advocate dismantling the existing socioeconomic structure in favor of the casamac.

Luis Taruc and others explain the turn to the left as due to Abad Santos's association with communists and suggest that Evangelista and Manahan may have converted the lawyer from Pampanga. Local historian Mariano Henson hints that the visiting Tan Malacca affected Abad Santos's thinking. Conceivably, he might have learned something about Marxism from others, but that he altered his life because of their persuasion seems improbable. Testimony by relatives and associates makes one thing clear: Abad Santos possessed a keen intellect; indeed, he was, perhaps, the most original thinker the Left ever had, and he exerted a tremendous influence on those who came in contact with him, not the other way around.^[85]

Ironically, for all his considerable intellectual prowess, Abad Santos left few written clues as to why he made his deep commitment to the cause of the poor. One needs to examine his actions for insight into his thoughts, and the events of his life reveal much about him. Furthermore, in some letters he wrote in the late 1930s to his friend the American Communist Sol Auerbach (a.k.a. James Allen), he demonstrated how far his thinking about social and political matters had progressed since his days in formal politics.

Above all, Abad Santos was a nationalist devoted to his country's independence. At the turn of the century he left a teaching job in Bacolor to become military secretary to General Maximino Hizon, one of the Revolution's diehard holdouts. For crimes committed Abad Santos faced a twenty-five-year sentence and stayed in prison until pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt. Described at the time as being small in size and sickly, Abad Santos had already learned English and earned the respect of his prosecutors for his intellectual prowess. Despite his pardon, the patriot never wavered in his nationalism and in later years labored to have the exiled Hizon's remains brought back from Guam for reburial and to erect

a statue in Pampanga to his former chief. In 1918 as a member of the Assembly, he urged the sending of the first Philippine independence mission to Washington and raised money toward that end. He himself joined the second mission in 1922.

Upon his return from Washington he withdrew from insular-level politics sometime in 1923 and repaired to Pampanga, which became his permanent base. Here he commenced defending peasants in their suits against landlords. One wonders if by this time he had become disillusioned with the duplicity of the Philippine leadership on the independence issue. At any rate, he now supported Osmeña rather than his friend Quezon, and during the debates over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act the two became involved in a bitter exchange when Quezon accused Abad Santos and his ally Honorio Ventura of cheating in earlier elections. Abad Santos answered the charge coolly, and cordiality between the two ceased.^[86]

The weakening nationalist ardor of elected representatives in favor of more pragmatic economic goals clearly left Abad Santos disappointed and could account for his rejection of conventional politics and politicians; however, as both a nationalist and an inventive thinker, he still sought ways to gain his country's freedom and pondered the socio-political structure of an independent Philippines. From comments he made to Auerbach, it would appear that the protest swirling around him in Pampanga deeply affected his thought and that he became swept up in his late forties in the tide of unrest. He wrote in 1937:

But in the Philippines we have no strong bourgeoisie. The bourgeois revolution has not been completed and left the feudal landlord system untouched. The ruling Filipino bourgeoisie is timid, ignorant and backward. It is timid because it is aware of its weakness. It is ignorant for even its intellectual leaders lack understanding of advanced political and economic thought. It is also backward for its outlook and methods are almost feudal. Therefore, I believe that in the Philippines an agrarian revolution will precede the proletarian revolution, as it has happened in China.^[87]

Some have argued that he had little familiarity with theoretical Marxism, but as the above statement reveals, he knew the literature. Throughout his life he remained a voracious reader, and Auerbach and others supplied him with books. Nevertheless, Abad Santos fits the pattern of Asian leftists, including Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, who sought to adapt communist theory to indigenous society. Like those contemporaries, he drew ideas from a variety of sources, perhaps the most important of

which was local circumstances. He lived in the arena, not the ivory tower, and expressed himself in action rather than print.

A passage from another letter reveals the way Abad Santos operated. In considering the merits of shortening the commonwealth period in the face of a threatening Japan, he wrote: "All these things confuse me greatly. I intend to consult with fellow-workers in the labor movement, so that we may in common counsel find a way out for the right solution of our problems."^[88] Abad Santos realized, as did Quezon, that the Philippine elite lacked strength, weakened as they were both by Quezon's machinations and by their economic dependency on America; however, the Capampangan sought not to lead in the same dictatorial manner but rather to build a new political edifice based on more democratic consultation. To make such a system work required enhancing the peasant's role in society. Abad Santos thus not only challenged Quezon, he also threatened the sugar industry with its rigid socioeconomic structure and its reliance on America's favors. Nestled too in Abad Santos's thought lay the principle of cooperative action, so natural to the Pampangan aparcero and small farmer.

After the courts declared the Communist party illegal in late 1931, Abad Santos formed the Socialist party the next year, using his peasant Aguman ding Maldang Talapagobra (League of Poor Workers; AMT) from Pampanga to provide a base of membership. He hoped thus to maintain an above-ground voice for the Left and an arm for carrying on the struggles in court. Peasants now boasted their own party, and the Philippine sugar industry faced an implacable political foe with a resourceful and dedicated spokesman. To the new organization Abad Santos attracted such talented younger cadre as labor organizer Casto Alejandrino from a nationalist landholding family in Arayat and the charismatic speaker Luis Taruc, originally from smallholder stock in San Luis. As the era of quotas dawned, the new party stood ready to challenge further planter exploitation.^[89]

Independence promised retrenchment for the sugar industry, and its leaders started weighing new strategies for survival. Appraising the international market as inescapably grim, they contemplated expanding the domestic market by exciting the Filipino taste for their product. Free packets of sugar in workers' rations would create a craving, and ad campaigns could be designed to convince the poor to spend extra pesos for white sugar rather than save on the "less healthy" dark. Other sugarmen examined the prospect of crop diversification, of planting cotton, fruit trees, beans, mulberry bushes, and vegetables; meanwhile, the pages of Sugar News contained thoughts about gold-mining ventures and poultry raising. The era that commenced in bright optimism concluded in gloom.^[90]