Elastic, electric, Manuel Quezon is a sort of Beau Brummel among dictators. Here is an
extraordinarily engaging little man. The prankishness of Quezon, the rakish tilt to the brim of his hat,
his love for the lights of pleasure as well as the light of power, his dash and roguery, the spirited
elegance of his establishments all the way from the yacht cruising on Manila Bay to the refulgent
pearls - so luminous they seem - cruising on his shirtfront , combine brightly to indicate a character
straight off Broadway or Piccadilly Circus, a lighthearted playboy among eastern statesmen.
But such an interpretation would express only a fraction of the complex truth. Mr Quezon, the first
president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, is a great deal more than a playboy. He is full of
nerve - and nerves. He is one of the world's best ballroom dancers; also one of the world's supplest
and hardest-boiled practical politicians. He loves cards and alcohol; also he loves his country and his
career. He likes to laugh - even at himself-but he is a genuine revolutionary, as much the father of his
country as Kamal Ataturk. The history of the Philippine Islands in the twentieth century and the
biography of Manuel Quezon are indissolubly one.
When Quezon was a boy of eighteen or so he returned to his native village in the north, feeling
himself a grand cock of the walk with his newly gained academy degree. Both of his father and
mother were school teachers. His father took him to see the chief authority of the village, a local
priest who had come there while Quezon was away at school. The tradition in those days was that
anyone visiting a priest must kiss his hand. The priest was a very fat man who sat with one leg
sagging over the arm of a chair. He extended his pudgy hand for the boy to kiss, not otherwise
moving. So young Manuel grasped and shook the hand instead of kissing it. Sensation. The priest
begged Quezon's father to punish him for his irreverence. Young Quezon bided his time. He
discovered that the priest was having a liaison with a girl in the village. Quezon became acquainted
with her himself and then paraded the main street-with the priest's handkerchief stuck jauntily in his
pocket!
At about the same time he came in conflict with the other source of authority in the village. He
quarreled with an officer of the civil guard over another girl. He managed to insert himself in the girl's
place at a rendezvous with the officer, knocked him down, and fled. It was a bitterly serious offense
then to assault a Spanish officer. Quezon was caught, arrested and sentenced to imprisonment. But
the authorities chose to mask the real reason for the quarrel, not caring to mention the female
element; they justified Quezon's arrest merely by asserting that he was a revolutionary-which was
untrue. He had scarely heard of the Filipino independence movement at this time. He began to get
interested in it. The affair gave him the idea that the revolutionaries-no matter what their politics-must
be nice people.
These two anecdotes, lost in years and trivial as they may seem to be, were important. Quezon
would have become a revolutionist anyway, since it is his nature to expand and rebel, but this early
conflict with authority sharpened him for the struggle to come, told him with irresistible pressure on
which side be belonged.
Anecdotes about Quezon are abundant. Yet they do not build up into a legend. There is nothing hazy
or mythological about him. He is an exceptionally concrete and compact man. He has a genius for
directness, and also for the unexpected.
His nephew, training to be a cadet in an army preparatory school, was one of a group recently
convicted of a hazing offense. Quezon is an enemy of nepotism- indeed it is rule in the civil service
that no two relatives may work in the same office-and he expelled the entire group of cadets,
nephew included. His wife pleaded with him; Quezon was adamant, asserting that the punishment
must be a lesson to the army as a whole. A month later, he gave the cadets a chance to get their
commissions after all, by serving for eighteen months as privates. Once, the nephew was on guard
duty at Malacaņang palace, the residence of the president. Quezon heard that his wife was secretly
feeding the lad in the palace kitchen. He ordered her to stop this, or else feed the entire two hundred
privates in the guard.
He is exceptionally impulsive and generous. Once when Malacaņang was being restored he noticed a
workman who didn't seem to be the ordinarily type of Filipino laborer. Quezon talked to him, found
that he was a student out of a job, and gave him clerical work inside the palace. The next day the
whole working crew struck and asked for the same kind of easier work.
Nothing daunts him. Crossing the Atlantic once he taught the ship's orchestra to play the Filipino
national anthem by tapping out the tune with one finger on the piano-though he hadn't touched a
keyboard for years-and though Paderewski was a fellow passenger and startled onlooker!
He is something of a scamp. Once, courting his wife, he arrived wearing a spray of orange blossoms.
She asked him why. He said airily,"Oh, I've just been married!" The poor lady burst in tears, so that
Quezon knew that she really loved him.
His approach is inveterately personal. When a political prisoner is arrested, which isn't very often.
Quezon usually talks to him himself. Once a prisoner had been arrested for making amateur bombs.
He was the driver of a carabao (buffalo) cart earning fifteen cents a day. Quezon said, "This is
ridiculous. No wonder, you are a bomb-thrower. No one can live on fifteen cents a day." And he
ordered his release.
His temper flashes quickly over little things. He may violently rebuke a secretary, and twenty minutes
later completely forget what the trouble was about. He likes to quote a saying of his father's: "Better
one day red than three days blue."
He is full of histrionics. His wife, intensely mobile features make him an excellent mimic and actor.
When he is bored or petulant, anyone who knows him well knows it instantly, because his thick
eyebrows shoot up, and his long and expressive nostrils twitch.
He is almost startlingly informal; he make his very informality dramatic. Saying good-by to his great
friend Roy Howard when Howard was in Manila last, he called alone at Howard's hotel, and simply
walked in unattended and unannounced. He takes guests out yachting; he drives them home to their
dwellings himself. But woe to anyone who abuses this unformality by wanton insult to the dignity of
his position. Swift and stinging rebuke came once to an American who, dancing at a party where
Quezon was a guest, slapped him on the shoulder with a gay "Hi, Manuel!"
He is very Latin and expensive with great affection for his own roots, his own past. In his home in
Pasay, a suburb of Manila, he has a large airplane photograph of the village where he was born,
marked: "Here I First Saw the Light of Day." In his official residence he has built up a veritable
museum of Quezoniana. Last year he was pleased beyond measure to recover at last a knife he lost
when he was captured in 1899 by American troops. But he was never been able to trace and find
the sword he sold for twelve pesos when the war was over.
Loyalty, gratitude are good political weapons, and Quezon knows it well. Dozens of friends, who
helped him in the early days have been rewarded with jobs or pensions. He held a man named
Antonio in such affection-Antonio fed and housed him when he was poor-that he adopted his name
as part of his own. He has great sympathies for the old and poor. When he was a young lawyer he
charged the poor no fees, and soaked the rich.
His wife told him recently, with considerable perturbation, that she had discovered their cook, whom
he greatly admired, to be a communist. Quezon went straight to the kitchen. He returned and told his
wife, "The cook is not a communist. If he were a duke, he would be for the dukes. But he's a cook,
and so he's for the cooks."
He likes to do things quickly. He got General Douglas MacArthur to come to Manila as his military
adviser and superintendent of the military establishment of the islands in five minutes of talk. He said
to MacArthur,"I want your answer to just one question: Are the islands defensible?"MacArthur
said,"Yes and Quezon offered him the job.
He seldom stands on ceremony and he always knows when it is wise to recede. Recently he stated
that Tagalog, his native dialect, should become the official language of the islands. Then it was
discovered that Tagalog did not contain enough of the technical vocabulary necessary to modern
government. So he dropped the idea without a murmur.
After his election to the presidency he called together the rich Manilans who had supported him and
paid for his campaign. "Gentlemen," he said in effect,"let there be no misunderstanding between us.
Of course I know, now that I am in office, that you do not anticipate any political favors. You have
contributed to my campaign, but surely you do not expect to derive profit from having done so. If
you should have such an assumption, you would be dishonoring yourselves, by suggesting that you
had attempted to bribe the President, and also myself, by suggesting that the President could be
bribed." The rich Manilans were too staggered to say a word.
Once, years ago in Washington, he was chatting with friends in the office of Secretary of War
Stimson. Stimson turned to him suddently: "Quezon, do you really want independence for the
Filipinos?" Quezon smiled and told the anecdote of the young Spaniard who always asserted that it
was his ambition to become bishop of the church. The Spaniard ended up happily enough as a
janitor for the church property. Quezon winked.
A superb politician, he knows all the approaches. Once a group of legislators wasn't doing the work
he expected of it. He announced, "I won't fire you, but if your job isn't finished by next Monday, I'll
write a letter to the newspapers under my own name denouncing you as incompetent." The job was
done by Monday.
Once Lloyd George said of De Valera: "he is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork." Quezon has
something of this defiantly fluid quality.
Don Manuel Luis Quezon Antonio y Molina was born in Baler, a small town on the island of Luzon,
on August l9, l878. His father was a Filipino schoolmaster, certainly not rich, but not desperately
poor, a member of the illustrado class; his mother, Molina by name, who also taught school, was
partly Spanish. Young Quezon was a bright lad, but lazy. As a schoolboy his nickname was
gulerato-bluffer. The family pinched itself to send him to Manila, eighty miles away, where he studied
first at San Juan de Letran, a junior college, and then at the law school of the University of Santo
Tomas. His studies were interrupted by the revolution against Spain in l898.
The Philippine Islands, discovered by Magellan in l52l, were forlorn and almost forgotten remnants
of the Spanish Empire. That Empire, corrupt and decadent, was governed by remote control from
Madrid, but most actual power was in the hands of the local Catholic Church plus a few Spanish
grandees and landowners. The Filipinos - about 9,000.000 of them then and perhaps l4,000,000
now - are in the main Malay by race, Christianized by Spain and with strong admixtures of Spanish
blood. They are an easygoing people, but they rose against Spanish oppression under the patriot
Aguinaldo, and were fighting a bloody and successful revolution when the Spanish-American War
broke out. America attacked Spain in Philippine waters, promising to help the revolutionaries. Then
America, victorious, took the islands over; Aguinaldo continued his revolt against the United States,
but he was captured in l90l, and the fighting fizzled out.
Young Manuel Quezon plunged melodramatically into this situation. He joined Aguinaldo, in a year
rose from private to major, and fought the Americans. Advancing under a flag of truce he was told
Aguinaldo had been taken and that the revolt was over. Quezon refused to believe this. The
Americans took him to Manila and showed him Aguinaldo in captivity with his own eyes. Quezon
spent six months in jail; his cell was a dungeon in the city walls near the southeathern gate, and not
more than a hundred yards from the Letran school he had attended. When fifteen years later he
returned to Manila from Washington with the Jones Law (which prepared the way for Philippine
independence) in his pocket, the gate was renamed Quezon Gate in his honor.
Quezon was furious at the United States when the rebellion collapsed. The insurrectionists who
fought with the Americans in the original struggle considered themselves betrayed. Out of jail,
Quezon was so angry that he refused to learn English. But he met an American officer, General
Bandholtz-the first American he had ever known well-and discovered promptly that Americans were
not Spaniards. Bandholtz said that Quezon must learn English and that he would pay Quezon,
instead of vice versa, to take lessons from him! Then Bandholtz was transferred from the islands;
Quezon dropped English, and did not take it up again until he become Philippine Commissioner in
Washington in l909, when he learned it with astounding speed.
Quezon's first years after the revolution were difficult. He resumed the study of law, while scratching
out a living at odd jobs. His father died, and he returned to Baler to settle the family estate; then he
began practice in Tayabas province. He was at once successful. Politics beckoned. He gave up his
job, at which he was earning $500 per month to accept a position as local fiscal or prosecuting
attorney, at $75. He got a national reputation almost at once by daring to prosecute a prominent
American lawyer for fraud; this was as early as l904, when it was almost unheard of for a youthful
Filipino to attack a foreigner. By l906 he had become governor of Tayabas; by l908, when he was
thirty, he was floor leader of the Filipino Assembly, and obviously the coming man.
The next twenty-five years were all variations on a single theme; the stubborn and wary campaign of
Manuel Quezon to achieve independence for his country. Battles with ill-health; spectacular junkets;
a local struggle for power with Senor Osmena, alternately his rival and running mate in Filipino
affairs-these were subordinate to the unchanging main current of his life. Two things helped Quezon
cardinally. One was the very considerable anti-imperialist sentiment in the United States which
steadily favored liberation of the islands on political grounds. The other was the sugar lobby in
Washington, which I will touch on later. Very early Quezon saw that the key to everything was
Washington. So he contrived to become Resident Commissioner there; a post which he held from
l909 to l9l7. He was an effective lobbyist. He helped arrange the appointment of the Pro-Filipino
Francis Burton Harrison as governor general in l9l3, and he was spiritual if not temporal author of the
Jones Bill in l9l6. He knew also that complete independence-too soon-might wreck the islands
economically; he had continually to plot a sinuous middle course. By l9l7 he saw that Manila was a
better strategic post than Washington; he became President of the Philippine Senate and as such the
first man of the islands. He had years of passionate struggle with General Wood, a governor who
reversed the Harrison policy; he ingratiated himself with other governors, cajoling, bluffing,
threatening. He dodged back and forth to Washington. Finally in l934 came the Tydings-McDuffie
Bill, which tentatively at least won the fight. The Philippine became a commonwealth of autonomous
status with complete independence promised in l946.
Quezon went to the country and won its first presidential election. His chief opponent, whom he
overwhelmed was old General Aguinaldo, who wanted independence without compromise and at
once, Quezon moved into Malacanan palace, and the Aguinaldo governor, now know as the high
commissioner, rented a house in town.
Quezon is sixty-one. He doen't look it. He lives hard still, and works a long and restless day. Usually
he is up at dawn, and he likes to entertain at breakfast. As chief executive of the islands he has to
face multitudinous administrative decisions; on anything important his is the final word. He reads the
papers carefully, and a clipping bureau in America sends him by weekly airmail a big packet of
news. He receives visitors in a comfortable airy room on the second floor of Malacanan decorated in
gamboge and orange. He has what seems to be a velvet swivel chair, and photographers snap
pictures of El President and his guest as they converse. Next day the photographers try to sell the
pictures to the visitors.
The President two or three times a week makes surprise inspections anywhere in Manila. Without
warning, without ceremony, he drops in at a local police station, a tobacco factory, a prison or any
government department; if all is not in order, the feathers fly. He likes to listen to grievances.
Sometimes he eats luncheon with workmen out in the yard.
He loves good clothes; the splendor and multiplicity of his shirts are famous. For his own dress he
has invented a semi-uniform of high russet riding breeches, a soft white shirt, and a high buttoned
military tunic with a high collar. But often he receives visitors informally, wearing a polo shirt open at
the neck. At home he wears native Tagalog dress, which he claims to be exceptionally comfortable .
If he ever lost his job he could make an easy living at cards. He is indisputably one of the best poker
players in the world. Lately he has taken up bridge, too, and like it even better than poker. Most of
his relaxation nowadays comes on his yacht, the Casiana, on which he cruises and dines when the
day's work is done. He got it, a bargain at a reputed price of l00,000 pesos ($50,000), from an
American oil magnate. He reads a good deal in a utilitarian way, especially when he wakes up,
restless, very early in the morning, but he is an impatient reader who finds it hard to finish books he
has begun. He plays golf a little and sometimes practices mashie shots in Malacanan garden. He likes
to ride, and is a tolerable horseman.
There is bar in the palace, and he asserts that he has never refused a drink, but in fact he drinks
rather little. At one reception at Malacanan that I attended, no alcohol was served at all . The
President likes to joke about liquor as he likes to joke about the ladies. Old photographs show him
with wonderful twirling mustachios over a jaw-breaking collar; he says he cut them off because they
tickled the girls too much. Once he said, " apropos of alcohol.
When I left Manila the doctors told me that I could drink nothing intoxicating. When I reached Java I
saw a doctor and he said a glass of beer would not hurt. So I drank beer from Java to Paris. In Paris
another doctor said, "You should not drink beer; wine is the thing." So I changed gratefully to wine.
Then a French specialist told me, "You should drink only champagne; it is the only drink for you." So
I drank champagne for a time. Then I reached the United States, and the physicians said, "Don't
drink wines or beer at all, but only whisky." So now, if I want a drink, all I have to do is decide
which physician I shall obey.
He is fond of good food, but of his trim figure too. Before he underwent a serious operation at Johns
Hopkins in l934, he asked for adobo, a highly seasoned Filipino specialty consisting of beef steamed
in venegar, then fried with garlic. The doctors wouldn't let him have it. He enjoyed his operation,
which was for gallstones, immensely; he dramatized every detail, and the newspapers in Manila
carried front page photographs of all the instruments the surgeons used. He said afterward, "All I
have is a thin red line that looks like a pin scratch, and I can say that it is even elegant."
But what he likes most of all is a junket. His political pilgrimages have carried him all over the world,
and nothing is lacking to make the journeyings impressive. El
Presidente travels with a flash and a flourish. Special trains, mass meetings, speeches are in order,
and the entourage is huge. Usually Quezon takes with him a doctor, two or three secretaries, a
military aide and a half dozen hangers-on. He has learned more than one lesson from the politics of
the United States; he is a junketeer par excellence and his expense accounts are wonderful to
behold.
In Manila Quezon goes from place to place in a big Chrysler Airflow with special glass which
impedes the view inside. Contrary to report it is not armored or bullet proof. But there is a small
revolver in the side compartment which contains writing materials, cigarettes, and the like. It bears
license plate No. l.
He wanted to attend the coronation of George VI of England during his European trip in l937, but
the British foreign office didn't know quite what precedence to give him, and informally persuaded
the Americans to ask him not to go. On this trip, he had planned to go to Ireland and Denmark, also
the U.S.S.R., to study agrarian problems; time cut his itinerary short. In Germany he saw Schacht,
but not Hitler. On the way he visited Cuba and Mexico; for the Mexican President Cardenas he has
terrific admiration.
About Mussolini Quezon once said, "He talks loudly but everyone can rely upon him to do the right
thing." About Hitler: "That's not my idea of a leader." The President calls himself "almost a
communist" except that he believes in the right of private property. But he also believes that the
government has the privilege of curbing the right of private property "if and when public good
demands it."
His wife, whom he adores, and who has considerable influence over him, is his first cousin. Her
name was Aurora Aragon; he eloped with her to Hongkong in l9l8 after an interrupted boyhood
romance. She is a pretty and cultivated woman, and a good Roman Catholic. When they were in
Mexico she told her husband that perhaps she might skip going to church for once, if church-going
should embarrass his conversations with Cardenas; the President replied that she could
blankety-blank well go to church any time and any place she chose. The Quezons have three
children, Maria Aurora, who is eghteen, Zenaida, seventeen and Manuel Jr, twelve.
Donna Aurora doesn't pay much attention to politics-her hobbies are orchids, her collection of dolls,
and her two thousand books -but she did contribute something to the woman suffrage movement in
the islands. Quezon was lukewarm on the issue, and, hoping to forestall it, arranged a compromise
providing that suffrage should come if 300,000 women voted for it within a year. No one thought
that 300,000 women could be found who would vote. But Mme, Quezon plunged into the campaign
and the votes were found Quezon was uneasy, because most women voters are in the hands of the
priests, whom he thinks have enough power already.. But he did not want to oppose his wife's
wishes.
Quezon and Paul V. McNutt, the present high commissioner, are not intimate friends, but relations
between the governments are quite correct. Quezon hoped that another man would be appointed
and that in any case he should be consulted on the appointment; McNutt's name was rushed through
before Quezon got to Washington, and for several days he sulked, refusing to call on McNutt until
Roy Howard smoothed the matter, over, Quezon says that nowadays he likes to see McNutt in
order to get away from the local politicians. He records that his friendship with him was cemented by
a poker game, in which both were winners - Quezon, however, by a bigger margin.
The McNutt toast story set tongues wagging on several continents. What really happened was this.
When McNutt arrived on the islands the Japanese Consul General gave him an official dinner, at
which the first toast was to the Emperor of Japan, the second to the President of the United States,
the third to President Quezon, the fourth (after rather a long pause) to High Commissioner McNutt.
The next day McNutt wrote a private and confidential memorandum to the consular corps asking
that this procedure be henceforth corrected, since officially he, as representative of the President of
the United States, outranked Quezon. He didn't want a scandal; he was as embarrassed as was
Quezon when the story got out, which it did when the Japanese tipped off the newspapers.
Some time later, asserting his prerogative to be consulted in all international matters, McNutt asked
that correspondence between the various consuls and Malacanan be routed, as was correct, through
him. The Japanese sought to get around this by using the telephone instead of writing.
Quezon has a fabulous number of friends all over the world. In Manila those closest to him are
probably his secretary Jorge Vargas, who is his man-about-politics, and his aide-de-camp Major
Manuel Nieto. Nieto is the Bruckner of the regime, the confidential bodyguard. He knows all the
secrets; when Quezon went on the operating table at Johns Hopkins, he dictated to Nieto the letters
that were to be opened only in the event of his death. Nieto, a fine athlete and boxer, was in the
tobacco business before taking his present post. Also close to Quezon are the four Elizalde brothers,
of an old and distinguished Spanish family who took out Filipino citizenship recently. They are very
rich; the four compose their own quite good polo team. Another person close to the President is
Adong, the seventy-year-old Chinese body servant who goes with him everywhere, who has been
with him forty years, and who sleeps on a bench outside the master's bedroom.
Like most good American politicians Quezon gets on nicely with newspaper men. Once he promised
Dick Wilson, Manila correspondent of the United Press, some letters of introduction to friends in
China; he was suddenly stricken with appendicitis and actually while being wheeled to the operating
theater he saw Wilson in the hall, and remembered to call a secretary to tell him not to forget the
letters. His press conferences are quite informal. Ninety percent of what is said is off-the-record.
Once the correspondents asked him about a matter in connection with his personal religious history.
Quezon couldn't remember a date exactly. He reached for the phone, telephoned his wife, and got it
from her.
No one knows with certainty who will succeed Quezon when his six years are concluded in l94l.
Resolutely, the President has stated that he will take no second term, which indeed is forbidden by
the new constitution.. One obvious candidate is Vice-President Osmena, who, incidentally, is partly
Chinese in origin as Quezon is partly Spanish. Another is Manuel Roxas, a lawyer for the sugar
interest and former speaker of the assembly, who like Osmena has a checkered career of affiliation
and opposition to Quezon. Another is the present minister of the interior, Elpidio Quirino, dictatorial
in tendency, whom the President finds useful, but who is said to be rough and too anxious for the
job. Insiders say that another possibility is Judge Teofilo Sison, who was a good secretary of the
interior and chairman of the inauguration committee when Quezon became President.
Quezon's religious history is curious. He was, of course, born a Roman Catholic, but he was not
confirmed until he was fourteen, although the usual age is three or four. Then he joined the revolution
and became a Freemason, when Masonry, forbidden by the Spanish regime, was a symbol of the
independence movement. He rose to be a thirty-second degree Mason, but was reconverted to
Catholicism in l928 after two decades of apostasy. His wife strongly wanted him to reenter the
church for the sake of the children. He was ill with tuberculosis; he took communion when he thought
he might be on his deathbed, but only-a typical enough Quezon touch-after saying he would refuse to
believe in miracles. He is a Catholic, like everything else, on his own terms.
Stories to the contrary notwithstanding, Quezon is not particularly rich. His salary is only 30,000
pesos ($l5,000) per year, and he needs every cent of it. He was always an easy spender; after
several years of successful law practice in l905, he made a great ceremony of giving a friend all the
money he had saved-four dollars! He has some real estate, but he is no millionaire.
One could list many of the sources of Quezon's
power. For instance he is indisputably the best orator in the islands in any of three languages. English,
Spanish, or Tagalog. His considerable charm, his patriotism, his executive capacity, his curious
combination of American characteristics, like aggressive practically, plus a Latin heritage of
suppleness and adroit facility in negotiation, all contributed to his career. But his knack of getting
along well with both rich and poor, with the miserably fed peasants of the countryside as well as the
Spanish millionaires in Manila, is probably his single most valuable characteristic, according to the
best informants in Manila. The masses adore him, because he give them something. The rich like him
too. By using both he has built up an irresistible machine.
The question of independence is alluringly complex, even if we do not touch upon the question
whether or not the Filipinos are capable of self-government. Early in l939 the situation provided one
of the most attractive paradoxes we shall find in all this long tour of the East. It is that Manuel
Quezon, having devoted the whole of his life to Philippine independence, isn't so sure that he wants
it; it is that the people of the Philippine Islands, after forty years of agitation which have brought them
to the threshold of nationhood, are increasingly alarmed that they are going to get-what they asked
for.
A word on background. The Tydings-McDuffie Act provides an interim period until l946 in which
the United States retains certain rights in the islands, and is responsible for their defense. America is
to give up its military bases in l946, though the question of naval bases is left open. Until ll946,
American law controls matters of tariff, immigration, debt, currency, and foreign trade. In l946, all
this is cut off. The country becomes the Philippine Republic and swims-or sinks-alone. The theory
behind the Act was to provide a ten-year transition during which the islands could learn-to swim.
Now there are several points of view among Filipinos in regard to independence. Some outright folk
like Aguinaldo want unconditional independence at once. They call Quezon a trimmer. Some would
like a "Permanent Commonwealth," i.e., the status quo extended in perpetuity in the form of
something resembling Dominion Status.. There are some who stand by the Tyding-McDuffie Act.
And there are the Retentionists, who do not want independence at all, though they are not often hold
enough to say so outright. Among Retentionists are the reactionary clergy, who fear social revolution
when the islands are left to themselves, and the sugar interests, who know that they will no longer sell
sugar profitably to the United States-and sugar is by far the most important item in the economic life
of the islands -when it becomes a foreign commodity and must pass an American tariff wall. At
present Filipino sugar enters the United States duty free.
The Tydings-Mcduffie Act provides that beginning in l940 the Filipinos will be charged a five percent
export tax on sugar, rising five percent per year until a full tax of twenty-five percent is reached by
l946, so that the economy of the islands may adjust itself to the loss of the free American market. No
one knows what future revenue will be. No one can dare to estimate future programs of public
work, national finance, and the like, planning of which ought to begin to-day.
In essence the struggle for Filipino freedom is a struggle between two competing spheres of sugar
interests. This is basic fact.
American sugar, and Cuban sugar which is controlled by New York finance, want the islands to be
independent, so that Filipino sugar will have to pay duty in America and enter the American market
at a severe and possibly fatal handicap.
Filipino sugar fears full independence. It prefers the status quo, so that it may continue to flourish by
free entry into the American market, which will be lost when the islands become a foreign state and
have to climb a tariff barrier.
Thus an odd situation; American interests tend to support the liberation of the Philippines, whereas
Filipino interests tend to prefer the present situation, i.e., their own servitude. Patriotism? But the
Filipinos say that real patriotism is to avoid independence if its result is suicide. Seventy-two percent
of Philippine trade is with the United States; sixty percent of this is sugar.
American imperialism has never been as tenacious or grasping as European imperialism; the United
States is not a one hundred percent imperialist power. The Filipinos know this, and are grateful. If
you ask a Filipino why almost no one harbors deep or passionate resentment against the United
States-as a Arab, say, may harbor resentment against an Englishman-he will say that, first, America
was a veritable fairy godmother compared to Spain, and second that America has always been
willing to clear out.
Immediately after Quezon's inauguration a curious thing occurred. The President took Roy Howard
for a cruise on the Casiana. When Howard returned he wrote an obviously inspired story-this was in
l935!-to the effect that the "dream of Philippine Independence was fading." If Quezon, having just
won his fight, was indicating by this that he hadn't wished to win it, he might justly have been accused
to monstrous hypocrisy. But probably the story was a ballon d'essai to sound out political opinion in
the United States; Quezon didn't want America to cut the Philippines adrift too soon.
In l937, Quezon took the uttermost opposite line. He came to Washington and asked for complete
independence at once. He said:
The Philippines have been assisted economically and schooled politically by the United States for
almost forty years. No people in history, coming under a foreign flag, have ever been treated so
generously . . . We are as competent to govern ourselves now as we can possibly be eight year's
hence . . . . Under actual test the terms of the Independence Act are proving surprisingly capable of
creating irritation. One high commissioner, even if of the highest character, if lacking in sympathy
could create a most unfortunate clash . . . . One (American) Congress. Consequently, as long as we
are bound by the present Independence Act which we have no power to alter, the Philippines will
continue to be at the mercy of every self-seeking group of lobbyists capable of log-rolling a tariff or
commercial quota to our disadvantage.
Also Quezon must have feared that President Roosevelt might be succeeded by a Republican
Administration in l940, which might repeal the Tydings-Mcduffie Bill.
This was in early l937, By l939 the situation had changed again. Reason: the Japanese campaign in
China.
The flamboyant MacArthur, former chief of staff of the United States Army and now a Philippine
Field Marshal, believes firmly that the Filipinos, even if absolutely cut off from America, could defend
themselves. General MacArthur has a battery of technical reasons to support his claim. The Filipino
general staff agrees with him. For one thing they say that air power would not be effective against the
islands, and that an infantry invasion is hardly possible. The Filipino army is training 40,000 recruits a
year, and is turning into a good fighting force. But the islands have little of the industrial equipment
upon which modern war depends. They have no navy, and to assert that they could alone withstand
a major war seems childish. A war would be a disaster.
Very much in the islands have genuine fear of Japan. They think that if America goes, Japan will
come in.
There is a close-knit and powerful Japanese colony in Davao, perhaps l5,000 in all, growing
hemp-and possibly trouble.
In July l938, Quezon made a sudden brief holiday visit to Tokyo. He had been there several times
before, and the Japanese do their utmost to be nice to him. Quezon denied hotly a story to the effect
that he sounded out official opinion in regard to Japanese intention toward the Philippines. Japan, he
said, was willing after l946 to adhere to an aggreement neutralizing the islands, according to former
pronouncements of policy. Yet it would be an insult to Mr. Quezon's very active intelligence to
suggest that he does not know that Japan is hungry for just the sort of loot the riches of the
Philippines, including very large gold deposits, provide.
One can be sure that Quezon has heard of Czechoslovakia. He will not be caught and squeezed out
like Dr. Benes.
One can be sure at least of one thing; if the islands are alone, Quezon will make the best terms with
Japan that he can get.
Politically the Philippines are an advanced democracy, at least in theory; economically they are still in
the feudal age.
Spain left its ugly heritage. Industry is largely in the hands of a few Spanish aristocrats; the land is
held largely by great landowners or by the Church. Less than one-fifth of one percent of the
landowners own twenty-one percent of the total arable land. They give staggeringly lavish parties in
Manila; their tenants pay the taxes; the peasants starve. In one district in central Luzon ninety percent
of the land is owned by two percent of the people. The landless proletariat numbers ten percent of
the total population. Agrarian wages may be as low as fifteen cents a day. The church has vast
properties, some gained by gifts or purchases through the title, some donated by the penitent.
Quezon has begun cautiously a program of breaking up the big estates. He would like, as he says, to
"complete the revolution," and abolish feudalism; he must move very slowly. He promises much. But
he is roughly in the position that President Roosevelt would face if, attacking Wall Street, he knew
that all his cabinet and perhaps seventy percent of his majority were Wall Street men. Quezon
knows that to make a real revolution he must destroy feudalism. i.e., the power of the Church. This
he can do only by destroying himself too.
Opposition to Quezon is feeble. In l935, a group known as the Sakdalists staged an uprising, and its
leader, Benigno Ramos, fled to Japan. Nowadays a Popular Front embracing everyone from
communists to the "national socialists" of Aguinaldo has been organized to combat the President, but
it has not got very far. One dissident leader of consequence is the liberal head of the Philippine
Independent Church, Bishop Aglipay. The popularity of Quezon is great-and carefully nurtured-and
no real opposition leader is in sight. In the last election Quezon won every seat. There is not a single
opposition deputy.
Indeed, members of the Popular Front do not dislike or oppose Quezon, whom they regard as the
father of the country, as a man or a leader; they simply want him to modify his policy. Their
complaints are that he has created a bureaucratic dictatorship; that he controls not only the
executive, but the judiciary, the army, the legislature, the entire complex of government; that he is
afraid of the Church and the big landowners; that his economic program is too slow. They do not
want to replace Quezon; they want to swing him to the Left.
Quezon was profoundly impressed by Roosevelt and Cardena in l937; he returned to announce a
kind of New Deal for the islands under the name of the "Social Justice" program. This, he
announced, gave expression to a "distributist" philosophy, a middle path between capitalism and
socialism; he said that it was the duty of the government to use every means it had to force the
distribution of wealth so that the rich would be less rich and the poor less poor. "I do not believe," he
said, "that any one can earn a million pesos by his brain alone. If that is communism, then I a a
communist." He inaugurated a minimum wage for government employees (one peso per day). and
set about a new tax program.
Thus Quezon at sixty-one. Perhaps a tongue is in that roguish check. The next few years will tell.