An adopted Filipino

This Holy Week we turn to inspirations for becoming better human beings. A good place to look is the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation, which turns 50 this year.

As the nation marks the 51st death anniversary of President Ramon Magsaysay, we remember the individuals who over the years became recipients of the award set up in his memory.

The award is unique in this country in that the awards body does not solicit nominations complete with resumés and samples of one’s work. Some awards bodies even ask for application fees!

The Magsaysay foundation does its homework, conducting extensive interviews, studying a potential awardee’s work without his or her knowledge, and abiding by a long-standing set of criteria for integrity, selfless public service and excellence in one’s field in choosing the year’s winners.

Many of the choices were controversial; several were barred by their governments from coming here to collect their prizes.

Some winners also later lost the virtues that qualified them for the awards. But many in the growing list of awardees are clearly deserving and serve as inspirations for others.

*  *  *

One of them, the first Ramon Magsaysay awardee for journalism, literature and the creative communication arts, has an enduring legacy in the Philippines. 

The awardee, who shared his prize with Indonesia’s Mochtar Lubis in 1958 at the launching of the awards, was one of the few non-Asian recipients of what has been described as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize.

Robert McCulloch Dick was a Scotsman whose father’s early death in Edinburgh left the family impoverished. At 19, he moved to the United States, where he worked his way through college, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from Park College in Missouri in 1899 at the age of 26.

Dick found a job in a weekly periodical in New York. But one day his hair started falling off because of a previous severe case of typhoid, and he was advised to take a sea voyage.

So he sailed for five months and ended up in Hong Kong where, nearly broke, he was told there were no writing jobs available. But he was advised that there were openings for English-speaking journalists in the Philippines.

So Dick set sail for Manila, on a ticket advanced to him by the manager of a British shipping company because he didn’t have enough money for the fare.

He arrived here in October 1900, while the Americans were still chasing Emilio Aguinaldo and his revolutionary government from Central Luzon to the Cordilleras. Dick became a reporter for the US-owned Cablenews-American.

In 1902 he transferred to the Manila Times, at the time American-owned, where he coined “Juan de la Cruz” as a generic reference to the Filipino when he was a court reporter. The term stuck.

He rose to become an editor, earning P550 a month when the exchange rate was P2 to $1. When new management came in and cut his pay to just P50, he quit.

He found opportunity in an English-language magazine that the American publisher had closed down. For the princely sum of P1, Dick became the owner of a magazine: the weekly Philippines Free Press.

Setting up shop on the second floor of a building in Escolta, Manila — a ritzy address at the time — the first issue under Dick came out on Aug. 29, 1908.

*  *  *

Business was bad; Dick’s P8,000 in savings soon disappeared. He used a worktable as a bed. He borrowed P2,000 and then another P1,000 — boy, publishing was cheap in those days! – but that money also ran out.

Into the foundering business an American soldier-turned-teacher appeared, bringing advertising savvy that kept the magazine afloat. An army soldier at 16, Theo Rogers arrived in Manila in 1899, at the start of the war. He was a teacher working under the Bureau of Education when he was hired by Dick as business manager.

For the next decades the Free Press flourished and the partnership endured. Records of the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation credited Dick for putting out a publication that “stood for democratic education, Philippine independence and, meanwhile, good government by the American administrators. It could be counted upon for integrity and independence of view.”

His publication encouraged Filipino writers in English with prizes for short stories and poems, and he paid well even for unsolicited articles. He also trained Filipino journalists in English.

Ramon Magsaysay Foundation records noted that Dick, “while encouraging his staff to be crusaders and expose venalities… at the same time admonished them: ‘Be truthful. Be fair. Be accurate in your facts. When you have come to enjoy attacking people, it is time to stop.’ ”

Dick was once nearly deported for his criticism of the frequent absences from Malacañang of the US governor-general at the time, Francis Burton Harrison. Intercession by Manila Times publisher Alejandro Roces saved Dick.

The Free Press became a symbol of opposition to Japanese expansionist plans in Asia. When war broke out, the Japanese shut down the publication and threw Dick and Rogers into the dungeons of Fort Santiago, where Dick suffered from edema, ulcers, asthma and lumbago.

The Free Press reopened in 1946, and Dick, already 73, had to start all over again. Dick commuted daily by bus and jeepney to his Malabon home. From a pre-war circulation of 30,000, the number went down to 12,000. By 1955, circulation had reached 100,000.

His publication continued its brand of journalism, abiding by Dick’s creed: “The people can never be wrong.”

Dick described himself as a “Scotsman by birth and Filipino by adoption.”

*  *  *

At the necrological service for Dick in September 1961, Roces’ son Joaquin “Chino” Roces declared:

“R. McCulloch Dick left for us a heritage. It is not a formula for making money fast; it is not a prescription for getting close to the powers in the government. Those who accept it will be accepting a burden to carry the burden of the journalist’s duty to the people.”