Passport Application, 1919

Carlos Romulo’s passport application. June 24, 1919.

In September 1919 a twenty-one-year-old Carlos Romulo registered as a student at Columbia University in New York City. With a total enrollment of 22,608 students, it was the biggest university in the world in “the biggest of all cities in the world.”[1]

“Since grammar school I had wanted to see America, and my interest had grown more intense with the years. My father had often told me that he would manage somehow to send me there. ‘Someday you are going to America,’ he had said many times.”[2]

But Carlos made it over on his own. He was chosen to study foreign trade service as a government-sponsored scholar.[3] He had long envied the pensionados – the best and the brightest Filipinos who’d received funding to study in the United States – and now he was one of them.

Aboard a Japanese ship he set off his very first journey overseas “blazing with ambition and hope.”

[1] Letter to his grandfather. Original in Spanish. September 14, 1919.

[2] I Walked with Heroes.

[3] He graduated from Columbia in 1921 with a master’s degree in Philosophy.