Doña Maria Peña de Romulo

Doña Maria Peña de Romulo

In his lifetime Lolo earned countless honors and wore many hats. He distinguished himself as a soldier, journalist, educator, author, and diplomat—topping each field and moving on to conquer the next. Much has been written and said about his career, but he was first and foremost a devoted son to his mother, Doña Maria Peña de Romulo.

“There was never any doubt in our home as to the real source of family authority,” he wrote in his 1961 autobiography, I Walked with Heroes. “My mother ruled us with a velvet scepter. Small and soft-spoken, she reigned with the discipline of love. She had been a beauty when she was young, and she carried the authority of beauty until she was very old.”

“After MacArthur returned to the Philippines . . . American soldiers liberated Camiling. Frank Hewlitt, interviewing my mother for the United Press, described her as a small woman, widowed, and ‘with the dignity of a Spanish queen.’”

Two and a half years after Liberation, Lolo and his mother reunited at their ancestral home in Camiling, Tarlac, March 7, 1947.

“One of my favorite childhood memories of her is of the day our house caught on fire. Mother calmly called her six children about her, ushered her brood out of the house as sedately as if we were going to church, and stood us in line in the middle of the street. She counted us quickly, ‘One-two-three-four-five-six,’ warned us not to move, went calmly back into the burning house, and came out carrying boxes containing family documents. Putting these down beside us, she made a brisk recount, ‘One-two-three-four-five-six,’ warned us again not to stir, returned into the house, and came back with more valued possessions. She did this again and again until the fire was out, and each time she counted us in line like an army on parade.”1

Born Maria Besacruz Peña on September 2, 1869, in the neighboring province of Pangasinan, she became known as Tia or Lola Titay to younger generations. For young Carlos, however, with her unwavering strength and love, she was undoubtedly one of life’s greatest heroes.

Doña Maria Peña de Romulo (Lola Titay) died less than a year later, on May 24, 1948. Lolo’s eldest son, Carlos, Jr., takes the arm of his grieving father. In the foreground, wearing a black armband, is Lolo’s brother Henry.

1 Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked with Heroes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 16 – 17.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

5 Comments

Child of a Revolution

“He is a very bright, intelligent and magnetic young fellow,” Major Dalrymple wrote to my great-grandmother, Maria Peña de Romulo, in 1933, “and he has made just the kind of man that I hoped he would make.”

He was speaking, of course, of dear Lolo, who had just paid him a visit in the United States roughly thirty years after Dalrymple served as teacher and school superintendent in Camiling.1 Alfred Vernon Dalrymple was now the chief of the Bureau of Prohibition in Washington, DC, where Lolo was visiting as a journalist chronicling the progress of the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act, the US law that set a specific date for Philippine independence.2

Lolo was just a boy when they last saw each other. The American-officer-turned-schoolteacher moved into the Romulo home when Lolo was around three years old, offering his father tutoring in English while amusing the children with boxing and dancing lessons. “He . . . was sort of an extra uncle to us children,” Lolo wrote in his memoirs.3

My great-grandfather, Lolo Oyong, probably invited Dalrymple to live in their home soon after the Americans captured Philippine President Emilio Aguinaldo. This was the event that ended the Philippine–American war (technically, perhaps, but not in the hearts of Filipinos, who would continue fighting for the right to self-government). Lolo Oyong, who fought in the revolution against the United States, had in fact surrendered to Captain Minor (the commanding officer in Camiling) two days after Aguinaldo’s capture, on March 25, 1901. Once the Americans established a civil government, the pueblo of Camiling was given new form under the Municipal Council chosen by a limited native electorate.

Gregorio Romulo

“My father was elected the town mayor,” recounted Lolo, “and it was a sight to see Major Dalrymple before election day haranguing a crowd of Filipinos in his broken Spanish, making campaign speeches in favor of my father.”4

Actually, Lolo Oyong served first as a municipal councilor. Then, from 1906 to 1907 he was head of the local administration, referred to as Presidente (formerly Governadorcillo or Capitan under the old Spanish system), which essentially meant he was town mayor.

Enemy thus became friend pretty much overnight; and even as the Romulo family took the American into their home, my grandfather still harbored deep resentment toward Americans in general. The war broke out in 1899, just a year after his birth. Consider too that Lolo Oyong fought Spanish colonizers as a guerilla leader before the Americans grabbed power. The Romulos were fiercely patriotic, it’s fair to assume, and Lolo’s earliest experiences cultivated in him a righteous longing for freedom—one that would later extend not just to Filipinos but to all colonized peoples.

Hostilities on both sides continued throughout his childhood, at least until Lolo was around seventeen, and the bitterness of the conflicts haunted him. “I was still thinking of the way my grandfather was tortured and of the hanging of a neighbor by the Americans,” he recalled in 1943. But the big-hearted Dalrymple managed to win him over. He “played with me in the afternoons. He taught me how to box and how to swim, and every time he would come back from Manila he would have a toy or candies for me . . .”

Lolo thus felt conflicted. In the midst of widespread hatred of Americans during this particular period in history, he found it difficult “to believe that this husky American who was playing with [him] could be one of a nation of bad men.”5

Yet hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in the Philippine–American War, and I’m sure their families felt the United States was a nation of very bad men indeed. Even Americans were opposed to the war:

“Talk about dead Indians! Why, they are lying everywhere,” wrote Theodore Conley of the 20th Kansas Regiment in 1899. “The trenches are full of them. . . . There is not a feature of the whole miserable business that a patriotic American citizen, one who loves to read of the brave deeds of the American colonists in the splendid struggle for American independence, can look upon with complacency, much less with pride. This war is reversing history. It places the American people and the government of the United States in the position occupied by Great Britain in 1776. It is an utterly causeless and defenseless war, and it should be abandoned by this government without delay. The longer it is continued, the greater crime it becomes—a crime against human liberty as well as against Christianity and civilization. . . .”6

Atrocities of the Philippine-American War: execution by hanging and the "water cure."7

The fighting between US troops and Filipino guerillas persisted for more than a decade after President Theodore Roosevelt announced the end of the war. Finally, in 1915, the United States government agreed to return the islands to the Filipino people, but in fact US military troops would remain in the Philippines all the way until 1992, nearly a hundred years after the first shot had been fired in the Philippine–American War.

US military presence in the Philippines would later become one of Lolo’s ongoing concerns and areas of official responsibility; and the necessity that every nation’s sovereignty be respected was a driving force behind everything he did from the day he was born until the day he died. These are ideas one would expect from the child of a revolutionary, who grew up bound by an imperialist yoke, surrounded by bloodshed, repression, and injustice. A little more subtle was a lesson culled from the complex relationship he shared with Dalrymple and other would-be enemies: that even “good” men take part in ill-conceived missions. It was, therefore, at least as important to build relationships with individuals as it was to develop diplomatic ties with other nations—a nugget of understanding that would serve Lolo well in the United Nations and beyond.

1 According to www.tourism.etarlac.com, Dalrymple served briefly as the Tarlac Division Superintendent from May 1904 until July 10, 1904.
2 At the time my grandfather was editor-in-chief of Don Alejandro Roces’s TVT Newspapers, which included The Tribune (English), La Vanguardia (Spanish), and the Taliba (Tagalog). The Tribune was a morning paper; the other two, evening papers. All three were dailies.
3 Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked with Heroes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 32.
4 Carlos P. Romulo, “Why I Fight for the U.S.A.,” The Rotarian, February 1943, pp. 10-12.
5 Ibid.
6 www.philippineamericanwar.webs.com

7 Ibid.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comment

The House on Garfield Street

Scribbled at the bottom of this photo is “To Mike From Bobby” in childish handwriting—a dedication from Bobby Romulo (around age 11) to his oldest brother, Mike, who had returned to the Philippines to attend law school in 1947.

The Romulos moved to Washington, DC, arriving in the Spring of 1945. After more than three years’ separation, this was a special time for my grandparents and their boys—a period of healing and getting to know each another anew. Critical years had been lost. My dad, now six years old, no longer recognized his own father. “Who’s he?” he had asked his mother, as the story goes. Japan had dropped its first bombs on Manila on his third birthday, after all, and immediately afterward my grandfather joined the ranks of the military, disappearing into a crowd of other uniformed men.

By October 1946 they had settled into what would be their home for the next fourteen years. In sharp contrast to their lives on the run from the Japanese, DC was safe, tranquil, and downright luxurious. An article from The Sunday Times (October 3, 1948) offers a glimpse into what it was like:

The Romulos own one of the loveliest homes in Washington, D.C., which they acquired during the stress of the housing shortage immediately after the war. It was the difficulty of getting a suitable apartment that inspired Virginia Romulo to buy a house. The General was in London at the time of the sale and simply received a three-letter cablegram “House bought love” signed Virginia.

A rare shot of the whole family on their front porch. I’m guessing this was taken in the Spring of 1947.

 

Lola Virginia transformed the basement of the house into “the Philippine room,” where this family portrait (with Greg and Bobby) was taken. The painting in the background was created by Galo B. Ocampo (1913-1985), who was considered one the Philippines’ most distinguished postwar artists, along with Manansala, Joya, Tabuena, Zobel, and others.

He disclaims any credit for the improvement or the décor of the house, giving all of it to Mrs. Romulo, for her wise selection in buying the furniture and the furnishings and her doggedness and perspicacity in hunting up bargains and critical items at the time were none too plentiful.

She spent many weary days shopping around Washington and Baltimore to furnish the three-story white house on Garfield street, but she has been more than amply repaid for her trouble, for she now reigns over one of the best appointed homes in the U.S. capital today, and she does it in an effortless, charming way, as if she had a corps of servants to help her instead of just one capable Filipino maid, who does the washing and waiting at the table, one Filipino cook (Pedro) who lives in his own house, and one Negro chauffeur who doubles as butler when the Romulos entertain, which is quite often.

The house is unfenced, giving extra spaciousness to the yard. All around it grow zinnias in deep reds, yellows and pink; cosmos and other flowering plants which are easy to grow. The beauty of the Romulo garden is that in spite of its lack of a fence, the beautiful blooms remain on the stem until they dry up and no one, but absolutely no one, ever dares to take away one little flower from the patch. There are no children to ask for a flower for teacher, nor are there covetous hands that reap what others planted with loving concern.

The Romulos acquired 3422 Garfield Street, Washington, DC, during the housing shortage after the war (If you look closely at this photo, a tiny figure on the left of the house looks like CPR in uniform.).

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

4 Comments

« Other Entries