The Founders You Erased: How the Anti-American Narrative Denies Filipino Agency in the 1935 Constitution

Marcial Bonifacio

10/12/26

My friends and countrymen, there is a claim that has circulated in Philippine public discourse for generations, repeated so often that it has acquired the appearance of settled truth. The claim is that the 1935 Constitution was not a Filipino document; that it was an American imposition dressed in Filipino signatures; that the republic it established was merely a colonial office with the nameplate changed. This claim is not only incomplete; it is, on the most critical points, demonstrably wrong.

I have compiled the most common assertions made by those who characterize the 1935 Constitution as an instrument of American domination rather than an act of Filipino self-determination. Each is stated as it is typically presented, then examined against the full historical record. The evidence does not support the narrative that many of our countrymen have accepted without scrutiny.

Claim 1

"The 1935 Constitution had to cross the Pacific for American approval before Filipinos could even vote on it. It was a constitution for independence that needed permission to exist."

The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 was the very mechanism by which the United States Congress authorized Philippine independence. The certification requirement existed because the Philippines was still a Commonwealth under American sovereignty during a defined ten-year transition period, with full independence scheduled for July 4, 1946. Every transitional independence arrangement in modern history has included an approval step by the sovereign power. Britain required approval of the constitutions of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma before those nations achieved independence. The United Nations trusteeship system imposed comparable requirements on every trust territory from Tanganyika to Palau.

The certification was not a cage. It was a gate being opened on a published schedule, and the schedule was kept.

Claim 2

"Washington did not wait to see what Filipinos would write. Washington wrote the required provisions in advance, and the delegates simply attached them as an appendix."

The provisions Washington required, contained in the Ordinance Appended, were transitional protections with an expiration date. They addressed American military installations, the property rights of American citizens, trade relationships, and immigration controls during the ten-year Commonwealth period. They were not permanent features of Philippine governance. They were the terms of an orderly transfer of sovereignty.

Every decolonization agreement of the twentieth century included comparable provisions. Britain's Indian Independence Act of 1947 contained transitional clauses on the division of assets, military arrangements, and the continuation of existing laws. France imposed far more restrictive conditions on its African territories under the Communauté française. The Netherlands attempted to retain permanent economic privileges in Indonesia. Compared to any of these, the American terms were modest in scope and fixed in duration.

Those who cite the Ordinance Appended as evidence of imperial control consistently omit the single most important fact about it: the Ordinance expired on July 4, 1946, the date it was always scheduled to expire.

It is true that the Bell Trade Act of 1946 extended economic privileges for American citizens, including parity rights, beyond independence. This is a legitimate criticism of American economic policy in the postwar period. It does not, however, transform the Ordinance Appended into a permanent instrument of control, because the Ordinance and the Bell Trade Act are separate legal instruments with distinct histories, terms, and political contexts. The Ordinance was a precondition of the constitution. The Bell Trade Act was a postwar trade agreement negotiated between two sovereign governments. To conflate the two is to obscure, not clarify, the constitutional record.

Claim 3

"The signature that made the constitution real was American. It was never going to be a Filipino one."

This assertion reverses the sequence of authority. President Roosevelt's certification on March 23, 1935, confirmed that the document conformed to the requirements of American law. It did not enact the constitution. The constitution became operative for the Filipino people only after the plebiscite of May 14, 1935, in which over 1.2 million Filipinos voted in favor. Fewer than 45,000 voted against. The signature that made the constitution binding upon the Philippine people was their collective vote, and no American signature substituted for it.

Claim 4

"The Filipino voter could not amend the document. He could not strike the appendix. He could not touch a clause. He could only write yes or no to the entire thing."

This describes the standard procedure for constitutional ratification in virtually every democratic nation that has ever adopted a constitution by popular vote. State conventions ratified the United States Constitution itself by voting to accept or reject the entire document. No American ratifying convention had the authority to amend individual clauses on the convention floor. The French Constitution of 1958 was submitted to the French people as a yes-or-no referendum. The Japanese Constitution of 1947 was adopted by the Diet without clause-by-clause popular amendment. A yes-or-no ratification vote is how constitutional democracies adopt their founding documents. It is not a colonial imposition; it is a universal democratic mechanism.

Claim 5

"The Philippine presidency was not modeled after the American presidency. It was modeled after the Governor-General's office, the same colonial chair Filipinos had fought for thirty years, with the nameplate changed."

This is the most consequential claim in the anti-American narrative, and it requires the most careful examination, because it entirely omits the three facts that distinguish the 1935 presidency from the Governor-General's office.

First, the Philippine president was elected by the Filipino people. The Governor-General was appointed by Washington and answered to the American president. Accountability to one's own voters versus accountability to a foreign sovereign is not a change of nameplate. It is the entire substance of self-governance.

Second, the 1935 Constitution included a Bill of Rights drafted by the committee chaired by Jose P. Laurel. That Bill of Rights constrained presidential power in ways the Jones Law of 1916 never constrained the Governor-General. It guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceful assembly, due process of law, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to form associations. No equivalent set of justiciable rights existed under the colonial framework.

Third, the comparison between the Philippine unitary system and the American federal system is structurally misleading. The United States is a federation of forty-eight sovereign states (as it was in 1935), each with its own governor, legislature, and judiciary. The Philippines had no history of federated sovereign states, and no colonial or pre-colonial precedent for such a system. The vast majority of democracies in the world operate as unitary republics with centralized executive authority: France, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and nearly every nation in Latin America. To compare a unitary republic unfavorably to a federation and conclude that the unitary model is a colonial defect is to condemn most of the democratic world as constitutionally deficient.

Claim 6

"When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, he did not break the 1935 Constitution. He cited it. The commander-in-chief clause authorized his dictatorship."

Every constitution that grants emergency powers can be abused by an authoritarian who is willing to exceed those powers and resist removal. Adolf Hitler cited the Weimar Constitution's Article 48 in his consolidation of power. The French Constitution's Article 16 grants the French president extraordinary powers in times of crisis. The existence of an emergency provision is not evidence of a constitutional design flaw; it is evidence of a universal constitutional dilemma.

Moreover, the claim that Marcos acted within the 1935 Constitution is historically indefensible. Marcos cited Article VII, Section 10, Paragraph 2 as his authority, yet the martial law he imposed bore no resemblance to the limited emergency power that provision authorized. He dissolved the legislature. He arrested opposition senators, journalists, and civic leaders without charge. He ruled by decree for over a decade. He rewrote the constitution itself in 1973 under conditions of martial law, through a ratification process that the Supreme Court could not certify as free.

The 1935 Constitution did not authorize the dissolution of the legislature, the arrest of senators without charge, or the imposition of one-man rule by decree. To attribute these acts to the document rather than to the man who violated it is to blame the lock for the burglar.

Claim 7

"Filipinos did not copy the American government. They copied the government Washington used on them."

The preceding points have addressed the specific instances of this claim: the nature of the presidency and the martial law it allegedly enabled. This final formulation is the overarching thesis from which those specific claims derive, and it fails for the same reason each of them fails. It reduces seven months of convention deliberation by 202 elected delegates to a single act of unconscious replication, and in doing so, it commits the very offense it claims to oppose: it denies Filipino agency.

The delegates themselves rejected this characterization from the start. Delegate Camilo Osias declared on the convention floor that "this Constitutional Convention, not being an adjunct of, or an auxiliary to, any other body or entity, is supreme in its own field of action." Another delegate stated that the convention's purpose was not to draft a temporary charter for the Commonwealth alone but "a constitution for the Philippine Republic that is to be sovereign, free and independent." These were not the words of men who believed they were copying a colonial template.

The Constitutional Convention of 1934 included documented disagreements over unicameralism versus bicameralism, the length of presidential terms, the scope of the Bill of Rights, the role of social justice provisions, and the relationship between church and state. The delegates drew from multiple legal traditions: American constitutional law, the Spanish legal codes that preceded it, the Malolos Constitution of 1899, and contemporary constitutional movements in Europe and Asia. The Malolos Constitution itself drew from the constitutions of France, Belgium, and several Latin American republics, as the constitutional historian Cesar Adib Majul documented and as the convention's primary drafter, Felipe Calderon, acknowledged in his own writings.

The constitutional scholar Joaquin Bernas, S.J., who later served as a framer of the 1987 Constitution, examined this question directly in a 1967 article in the Ateneo Law Journal. Bernas analyzed the convention debates and found that the delegates actively contested whether the Tydings-McDuffie Law limited their authority to drafting a Commonwealth charter or whether they possessed the sovereign power to draft a constitution for the independent Republic itself. The delegates resolved that question in favor of their own sovereignty. That debate, documented in the convention proceedings and analyzed by one of the most respected constitutional scholars in Philippine history, is itself proof that the framers were not passive recipients of an American template.

The 1934 delegates were heirs to a constitutional tradition that was already multicultural before a single American provision entered the discussion. To claim that the framers simply reproduced a colonial template is to erase the record of their deliberations and to treat the most educated legal minds in Asia as passive recipients of instruction. This is not anti-colonialism. It is a different form of condescension.

Before proceeding, I wish to acknowledge what motivates the claims I have just examined. The resentment is not invented. The experience of foreign governance was real, the indignity of needing American permission for Filipino self-determination was real, and the desire to claim full ownership of our national story is honorable. I do not ask my countrymen to abandon that desire. I ask them to follow it to its logical conclusion.

If we are serious about claiming ownership of our republic, then we must also claim ownership of the choices the framers made, including the ones that proved unwise. The anti-American narrative, in its determination to deny America credit, also denies Filipinos credit. It trades one form of diminishment for another.

Claim 8

"American colonialism gave Filipinos nothing they could not have built for themselves. The Americans extracted what they wanted and left."

Those who reduce the American period to a single word, "colonialism," and treat that word as a complete account must contend with the following facts, all of which are part of the same historical record.

The United States established a public education system in the Philippines on a scale no colonial power in Asia had attempted. By 1935, Filipino literacy rates had risen from an estimated 20 percent under Spain to over 50 percent, and English-language education had produced the very lawyers, legislators, and civic leaders who staffed the Constitutional Convention.

The United States created the Philippine civil service, established the Bureau of Lands, built the judicial system the framers inherited, and introduced competitive examinations for public office, replacing the patronage systems of the Spanish colonial era.

The United States introduced local elections in the Philippines as early as 1901 and established the Philippine Assembly in 1907, making it one of the first elected national legislatures in Southeast Asia. By the time the Constitutional Convention met in 1934, Filipinos had nearly three decades of continuous legislative experience.

The Jones Law of 1916, which anti-American commentators cite exclusively for the powers it granted the Governor-General, also Filipinized the Philippine legislature, created an elected Senate, and declared in its preamble that the purpose of American governance in the Philippines was to prepare the Filipino people for independence. No other colonial power in Asia made a comparable commitment in law.

The delegates to the 1934 Constitutional Convention themselves acknowledged this. On August 3, 1934, the convention passed a formal resolution "expressing the sincere gratitude of the delegates of the Constitutional Convention to the Congress and people of the United States for the opportunity they have given the Filipino people to become an independent nation."

Manuel Quezon, testifying before the United States Congress in 1919, stated the matter in terms that anti-American commentators have never answered: "How can you afford not to recognize the independence of the Filipino people whom you have solemnly promised independence, whom you have helped to acquire the science and practice of self-government, and who are bound to you by ties of affection, friendship, and eternal gratitude?" In his 1939 speech on civil liberties, Quezon added: "No one has outdone me in giving credit to the government and people of the United States for what they have done in the Philippines." These are the words of the first president of the Commonwealth, the man who led the independence movement. Those who claim to honor his legacy while denying American contributions to Philippine self-governance have not read him carefully.

The abuses of the American period are documented facts. The Philippine-American War, the racial paternalism that attended even well-intentioned policies, and the economic arrangements that favored American interests are realities that responsible commentary does not deny. I address these in full, including the specific atrocities of the Philippine-American War and their place in the complete historical ledger, in a separate commentary, The Full Ledger: Why America Remains the Philippines' Greatest Ally.

The abuses do not, however, erase the rest of the record. Any complete account of the 1935 Constitution must acknowledge that the framers were not colonial subjects groping in the dark. They were trained, experienced, and deliberate political actors who made choices within real constraints, and those choices, including the ones that proved unwise, were their own.

Claim 9

"The American colonial period was no different from Spanish or Japanese rule. Colonialism is colonialism, regardless of which flag flies over the palace."

This is perhaps the most historically reckless assertion in the anti-American repertoire, because the comparison is devastating to the thesis it is meant to support.

Spain governed the Philippines for over three hundred years and produced no elected legislature, no public education system, no independent judiciary, and no credible promise of independence at any point. The Spanish colonial government was administered for the benefit of the Crown and the religious orders, and Filipino participation in governance was confined to the local principalía under Spanish supervision.

Japan occupied the Philippines from 1942 to 1945, established a puppet republic under Jose P. Laurel (the same Laurel who had chaired the Bill of Rights committee in 1934), and presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Some scholarly estimates place the toll above one million. The destruction of Manila in 1945 made it one of the most devastated cities of the Second World War.

The Dutch governed Indonesia for over three centuries and resisted independence by military force from 1945 to 1949. France fought a war in Indochina from 1946 to 1954 to prevent Vietnamese independence. Britain, the most orderly of the European colonial powers, did not introduce elected legislatures in Malaya until the 1950s.

To place these facts in sequence: the United States introduced local elections in 1901, established a national legislature in 1907, passed a law promising independence in 1916, enacted a specific independence timetable in 1934, and honored that timetable in 1946 despite the intervening devastation of the Second World War. No other colonial administration in the region approached this sequence of commitments.

The Philippines is, in fact, the only American-administered territory to have received a binding independence timetable under federal law. Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa remain under American sovereignty to this day. The Philippine experience was not a reflection of a general American policy of decolonization; it was the product of a specific political relationship, a specific set of Filipino leaders who fought for independence over three decades, and a specific series of legislative acts that those leaders secured. That specificity makes the Philippine case more remarkable, not less. To treat the American period as equivalent to Spanish or Japanese colonialism is not historical analysis. It is ideological commitment masquerading as scholarship.

Claim 10

"The flaws of the 1935 Constitution prove that it was an American product. Filipinos would not have designed a government that concentrated so much power in a single office."

The 1935 Constitution had real defects. The presidency it created was too strong, and subsequent history confirmed that weakness. The unitary structure concentrated too much authority in Manila. The social justice provisions were aspirational rather than enforceable. These are legitimate criticisms, and honest Filipino commentators have made them for decades.

Those defects, moreover, did not die with the 1935 Constitution. The 1987 Constitution, under which Filipinos live today, drew directly from the 1935 document. The Bill of Rights that Laurel's committee drafted in 1934 is largely preserved in the current charter. The presidential system, the unitary structure, and the social justice provisions all trace their lineage to the choices the 1934 delegates made. Every time a Filipino invokes a constitutional right, files a case in court, or votes for a president, the framers' decisions are still operating. This is not a question about a dead document. It is a question about who authored the government Filipinos live under today.

What is not legitimate is the claim that these defects were American in origin. Washington required the Ordinance Appended, which expired. Washington did not require a strong presidency. Washington did not require a unitary state. Washington did not require the specific distribution of powers that the framers chose. Those choices were made by Filipinos, in a Filipino convention, after months of deliberation, and they were ratified by the Filipino people in a free vote.

To deny this is to deny Filipino agency in the most consequential political act of the twentieth-century Philippines. It is to say that our own founders were not authors of their own republic, merely scribes copying a foreign template. That is not a position of national pride. It is a position of national diminishment, and it does not withstand contact with the evidence.

Those who invoke President Quezon against the Americans should read him in full. His most famous remark, "I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans," is quoted endlessly as an anti-American declaration. It was nothing of the kind.

In the same speech, Quezon clarified: "That is not an admission that a government run by Filipinos will be a government run like hell. Much less can it be an admission that a government run by Americans, or by the people of any other foreign country for that matter, can ever be a government run like heaven." Quezon was not condemning America. He was asserting Filipino competence. He was saying that self-governance, with all its imperfections, is superior to foreign administration, however benign, because a free people can correct their own mistakes. That is not anti-Americanism. That is the founding principle of the republic the delegates wrote.

Remember, my friends and countrymen, there is no shame in reexamining the assumptions we have inherited. There is, however, great shame in refusing to examine them at all, and greater shame still in denying the authorship and the agency of the very Filipinos who built our republic with the tools they had, under the constraints they faced, in the best judgment they could exercise. They were not scribes of someone else's design. They were the founders of their own republic.

Long live the Republic of the Philippines!