Romulo, Carlos P. (Carlos Peña), 1899-1985

<p>Carlos Peña Romulo QSC CLH NA (14 January 1898 – 15 December 1985) was a Filipino diplomat, statesman, soldier, journalist and author. He was a reporter at 16, a newspaper editor by the age of 20, and a publisher at 32. He was a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, a general in the US Army and the Philippine Army, university president, President of the UN General Assembly, was eventually named one of the Philippines' National Artists in Literature, and was the recipient of many other honors and honorary degrees. He was born in Camiling, Tarlac and he studied at the Camiling Central Elementary School during his basic education.</p>

<p>Studying in the Philippines and the United States, Dr. Carlos Romulo became a professor of English at the University of the Philippines in 1923. Simultaneously, Romulo served as the secretary to the President of the Senate of the Philippines Manuel Quezon.</p>

<p>During the 1930s, Romulo became the publisher and editor of The Philippines Herald, and one of his reporters was Yay Panlilio. On October 31, 1936 Romulo and the other Boy Scouts of the Philippines (BSP) founders officially chartered the BSP in Commonwealth Act No. 111 authorized by President Manuel Quezon.</p>

<p>As the last Resident Commissioner from the Philippines, Carlos Peña Romulo helped lead the island territory through the brutality of World War II and into an independent future. A former journalist whose “Voice of Freedom” radio broadcast went live during some of the heaviest combat in the Pacific theater, Romulo was a tireless advocate for the commonwealth. A chief aide to General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific and a brigadier general in the Philippine army, Romulo was appointed to the House in the summer of 1944, where he helped secure Congress’s support in rebuilding the Philippines. Known as the “General” among his colleagues on the Hill, Romulo was a champion of global democratic reforms and later served as president of the United Nations General Assembly. In the House, Romulo pushed Congress to invest in the islands. “Mr. Chairman, when we are for a free Philippines as a part of this world government,” he told the Ways and Means Committee in 1945, “we are for a Philippines that is a product of the United States, that has the ideals of the United States, and that will be spreading the American gospel in the Far East[,] the spearhead so to speak of American democracy.”</p>

<p>Carlos Peña Romulo was born on January 14, 1899, to Gregorio and Maria Peña Romulo. The third of six children, Romulo grew up in a prosperous family in Camiling on the island of Luzon, about 100 miles north of Manila. He described his childhood home as a blend of “Malay and Spanish” influences. His grandparents lived across the street, “and there would be times as I grew,” he said, “that our town seemed like one large family group, for everyone seemed related to me in some fashion.” Outside his neighborhood, rice fields stretched far and wide. “I learned early that all we had had come to us from the land,” he wrote as an adult.</p>

<p>As a boy early in the new century, Romulo grew up amid a regime change in the Philippines. His father was a guerrilla fighter against American occupation forces after the War of 1898, and when U.S. troops reportedly hanged one of his neighbors at a nearby park, Romulo resolved to “hate [the Americans] as long as I lived.”</p>

ROMULO, Carlos Peña, a Resident Commissioner from the Commonwealth of the Philippines; born in Camiling, Tarlac Province, Luzon, Philippine Islands, January 14, 1899; graduated from the University of the Philippines, Manila, P.I., 1918; graduated from Columbia University, New York, N.Y., 1921; graduated from Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, Ind., 1935; faculty member, University of the Philippines, Manila, P.I., 1923-1928; journalist; secretary to Manuel L. Quezon, president of the Philippine senate,1922; member of the Philippine independence missions to the United States in 1921, 1924, 1928, 1929, 1933, and 1937; member of the board of regents, University of the Philippines, Manila, P.I., 1929-1941; secretary of information and public relations in the war cabinet of President Manuel L. Quezon,1943-1944; member of the Filipino rehabilitation commission 1944-1946; secretary of public instruction from October 1944 to February 1945; aide-de-camp to Gen. Douglas MacArthur at Bataan, Corregidor, and Australia; promoted to brigadier general in the Philippine Army in September 1944; appointed Resident Commissioner to the Seventy-eighth Congress, to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Resident Commissioner Joaquin M. Elizalde, and served until July 4, 1946, when the office of Resident Commissioner was abolished (August 10, 1944-July 4, 1946); appointed by President Manuel Roxas on July 9, 1946, as permanent delegate of the Republic of the Philippines to the United Nations; Philippines ambassador to the United States 1952-1953, 1955-1962; secretary of foreign affairs, 1949-1951; president of the United Nations General Assembly, 1949-1950; president of the United Nations Security Council in 1957; president, University of the Philippines, Manila, P.I., and concurrently secretary of education, 1962-1968; president, Philippine academy of arts and science, 1962; secretary of foreign affairs, 1969-1984; died on December 15, 1985, in Manila, Philippine Islands; interment in Heroes' Cemetery, Manila, P.I.