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268 8 The Conley Case O    J 17, 1923, Senator Manuel Quezon led five Filipino cabinet secretaries, all attired in formal dress, up the grand staircase into Malacañang Palace for a historic confrontation. Waiting for him at the head of the stairs was Governor-General Leonard Wood, splendidly outfitted in his fulldress U.S. Army uniform. Somewhat nervously, Senator Quezon read aloud his group’s letter announcing their resignation en masse to protest the governor’s control over even the “smallest detail” of government. “This policy recently culminated in an unfortunate incident which shocked public opinion in this country ,” Quezon said, “when you . . . reinstated a member of the secret service of the City who had been legally suspended from office.” In turn Wood dismissed these charges as “unsupported by evidence and unworthy of the attention of serious minded men.” After accepting their resignations, the governor placed U.S. combat forces in the Philippines on full alert. Throughout this high political drama, nobody mentioned the name of the secret service officer in question. For he was, as all Manila already knew, Detective Ray Conley, the catalyst for the most protracted political crisis in forty years of U.S. colonial rule.1 This controversy had started quietly six months before when Manila’s Mayor Ramon Fernandez recommended that Detective Conley, then head of the police vice squad, be dismissed for allegedly taking bribes from gambling joints. When Governor-General Wood rejected this recommendation after months of wrangling , Quezon denounced the unpopular decision and rode the tide of public opinion to become his country’s preeminent political leader. Over the next four years Quezon used this issue to challenge the governor-general’s authority while Wood countered the attacks by circulating compromising information, collected through the colonial police, about his political enemies. By symbolizing the American regime’s selective enforcement of its own laws, the Conley case would ignite the passions of the Filipino nationalist press, assure the ascendancy of the Nacionalista Party, and prepare the electorate for major political change.2 The conflict arose primarily from the ambiguity of Conley’s role as an American policeman enforcing vice laws on prominent Filipinos. By the early 1920s the Manila’s Police was still serving as both the moral guardian and mailed fist of alien rule, contradictory roles that were resolved pragmatically, on the street, by corruption that turned police officers into informal protectors of illegal gaming and other crimes. In a colonial context this resolution was politically volatile, stirring the indignation of Filipino politicians and journalists whose reportage aroused an electorate increasingly intolerant of American hypocrisy. While the conflict did not seriously threaten U.S. rule, it was a serious challenge to the terms of that dominion. If we strip away the hyperheated rhetoric on both sides, this controversy was the final showdown between rearguard Republican attempts to slow Filipino progress toward self-rule and a liberal Democratic policy of Filipinization to prepare the islands for full independence. In considering the Conley case, historians have usually focused on the highstakes political confrontation between an American governor and a Filipino senator . But in retrospect this great scandal, reflecting the power of Manila’s low life to shape high politics, began and ended with the city police.3 Just as constabulary brutality in Cavite had sparked a legitimation crisis in 1905, so Manila police corruption precipitated this even larger crisis in 1923. Republican Restoration The Conley case gained its tempestuous force from an ongoing struggle between the Filipino legislature and American executive during the long transition to national independence. Under President Woodrow Wilson’s liberal policy, Washington had promoted Filipino self-rule by appointing a sympathetic governorgeneral , Francis Burton Harrison, in 1913 and three years later granting Filipinos full legislative powers under the Jones Act. Beginning with a preamble that for the first time promised eventual independence, this de facto colonial constitution abolished the old Philippine Commission, created the bicameral Philippine Assembly , and delineated the broad powers of the U.S. governor-general. But Harrison ’s personal failings as an administrator and moral exemplar tainted his legacy and jeopardized these political gains. When Republicans won back the White House in 1920, they set about reclaiming their lost Philippine colony, exposing the malfeasance of the Harrison regime, discrediting its innovations, and reinvigorating executive authority in the hands of an assertive governor-general. After several years of simmering quietly The Conley Case 269 [3.15.202.4] Project MUSE...

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