Notes on CPR and Georgetown

Georgetown University Professor Erwin Tiongson delivered the following as part of his remarks on the occasion of launching his book, Philippine-American Heritage in Washington, DC, on March 29, 2023, at the Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University.

Ambassador Carlos P. Romulo received an honorary degree from Georgetown University during the college graduation of his youngest son, Bobby, on June 16, 1960.

Who was Carlos Romulo?

He was a remarkable human being who had an extraordinary career in international affairs—the kind of career, I think, that many SFS students aspire to have. And there is a sense in which it seemed that he did everything. He was a journalist in the 1930s and won the Pulitzer Prize. He was Philippine Resident Commissioner, a nonvoting member of US Congress. He became a World War II General. After the war, when the Philippines became fully independent, Romulo became a young nation’s leading diplomat. He served under seven Philippine presidents. He was one of the signatories of the UN Charter. He was President of the fourth UN General Assembly and President of the UN Security Council—three times, according to the Washington Post. He wrote numerous books. He lived in Washington for many years.

His life, in many ways, also embodied the transformation of the Philippines over the 20th century and the country’s complex relationship with the US. Romulo was born around the turn of the century, in 1899, just days before the outbreak of the Philippine-American War—a little-known war that, by some accounts, cost as many as 200,000 civilian lives. (The US and the Philippines might be allies, but its complex relationship, as others have said, was “forged in fire,” in bloodshed and violence.) Under the US colonial government, Romulo was taught by American teachers known as the Thomasites, the precursors of Peace Corps volunteers. Later he became a government scholar and studied in the US, an early version of the Fulbright. He experienced racism. He fell in love at Columbia and was engaged to be married to an American woman. William Howard Taft—US President and later Supreme Court Justice and was Romulo’s mentor—essentially told Romulo it was a bad idea and to break off the engagement. Romulo moved back to the Philippines, brokenhearted, became a journalist. And you know the rest, all the way to Romulo becoming the chief spokesperson of a newly independent country.

I counted at least three official visits to Georgetown over several years around the 1950s. He was the guest speaker at the 1953 John Carroll dinner. Romulo gave the Gaston Lecture in 1959. He was the university’s commencement speaker in 1960.

Some years ago, I met a man, an American, who was present at that Gaston Lecture. He said it was life-changing. As he listened to Romulo at Gaston Hall, he decided that he himself would become a diplomat. And he did become an ambassador and had a distinguished career serving in Latin America and in Southeast Asia.

I think about that a lot, how a speech given here at Georgetown essentially shaped an entire life. But maybe it’s not surprising. Romulo was a gifted speaker, powerfully eloquent.

At the San Francisco UN Conference in April 1945, Romulo got up on stage and spoke.

Picture this scene: A World War II general about to address a room full of diplomats. Romulo had just returned from the Philippines. The country had been liberated, but at a tragic cost of numerous lives. In Manila alone about 100,000 people had died. In that conference room full of diplomats in 1945, they were at the cusp of creating something new, a new global institution now approaching its 80th year. And then Gen. Romulo spoke.

He said, “Let us make this floor the last battlefield.”

I think about that line a lot, and what it took to say it—all the deaths and destruction that came before it, the weariness and exhaustion at the end of a global war, the hopes and longing of a people.

On a more personal note, I grew up surrounded by people who admired Romulo. Hector and I have a first cousin, practically our brother, who was named after Romulo. My grandfather, who never finished more than a year in college, but was remarkably well-read, often quoted Romulo. My grandmother—who had no more than grade school education, but, along with my mother, taught me how to read—also admired Romulo.

When I first arrived in the US to study in New York in the 1990s, as I paid for my meals and my other needs, I received coins as change. I learned their names. A nickel is 5 cents. A dime is 10 cents. And so on.

And then I remembered something my grandfather told me when I was a child.

For context: Romulo was not the tallest man. He was just a little over five feet tall. (No offense to anyone here.) In the 1950s, when the representative of the Soviet Union called Romulo “just a little man from a little country.”

Romulo said the Soviet delegate was right about Romulo’s height and the size of his country. But Romulo also said, “It is the duty of the little Davids here to fling pebbles of truth between the eyes of blustering Goliaths—and make them behave.”

On another occasion, my grandfather told me, Romulo was at a banquet in the US surrounded by tall people. Someone asked, as a thinly veiled insult, “How does it feel to be among giants?”

Romulo said – “I feel like a dime among nickels.”

My grandfather laughed as he told me that. It is remarkable, because I don’t think I have any other memory of my grandfather laughing.

Many years later, while holding coins in a country 10,000 miles away, at the beginning of a new life, I thought I finally understood what that meant. Its literal meaning, but also what it must have meant to my grandfather—who never finished college, who was in poverty for a significant part of his life, who certainly never traveled to New York, or anywhere outside his country, who pretty much never left our rural hometown, who lived his life in quiet dignity, and likely saw in Romulo an eloquent “every person” who spoke for him. My grandfather’s own hopes and aspirations, his defiance, his resilience, his pride—maybe all of these things—are in that brief line.

That is what the book is about.

It’s about Philippine-American history. It’s about my cultural heritage, a heritage I share with many of you in this room. It is a complicated heritage— with heartbreak and violence, dignity and grace, at the heart of it. It’s about places in Washington, and their ties to this heritage. It’s about people who once inhabited these places and their lives continuing to unfold, long after they are gone.

And all the research that went into it is also deeply personal and, in a very real sense, about lives of my family members unfolding—remembering my grandfather’s words from so many years ago, and as though hearing them, again, for the first time.

I previously shared this with people: In the trenches of Washington’s archives, there have been many astonishing finds. And sometimes, the biggest shock has been the shock of recognition.

And in the trenches of these same archives, I will keep looking for the remains of our cultural inheritance, for traces of home, and for that photograph of Romulo standing next to a globe at the Walsh Building.