THE CURRENT month of August is being commemorated as “Lung Month” in honor of the late Manuel Luis Molina Quezon, the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth. It was in this month (Aug. 19) when he breathed his first breath in 1878 and breathed his last (Aug. 1) due to tuberculosis in 1944. TB was an incurable, fatal disease at that time.
We remember Quezon for his famous quotation: “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by the Americans.” While many of our countrymen today would disagree because of the autocratic way President Rodrigo Duterte runs this country, that’s beside the point.
Quezon said those words in defiance of the “racist policies” of Leonard Wood, the United States’ governor-general in the Philippines during the incumbency of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Such open display of bravado against a foreign power made him a folk hero.
While the aforesaid quotation is very familiar, many do not know that Quezon delivered that message before the United States Congress in May 1910 when he was resident commissioner of the Philippine Assembly. Our country having been colonized by the US, he was clamoring for Philippine Independence.
Moreover, Quezon was hoping to melt contrary opinion in the homeland. Some people were wishing for annexation of the Philippines to the United States – just like Hawaii.
Of course, he could have been personally motivated. That early, Quezon was hoping to be President of the Philippines.
By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt became the President of the United States in 1933, the majority of Filipinos had shown solidarity behind Quezon’s clamor for self-rule. The US government agreed to a transitory Philippine commonwealth under the supervision of an American high commissioner.
I have not forgotten what I heard about Quezon in school, whether good or bad.
I remember my grade four teacher admonishing us, “Don’t be like Quezon. He was a lazy student who disliked doing his homework.”
But she was quick to add that when the revolutionary forces of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo declared revolution against the Spanish regime in 1898, “Quezon was among those who bravely took up arms.”
After the Spanish-American war, Quezon resumed his law studies at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.
In 1903, Quezon passed the bar examination and set up practice in his birthplace at Baler, Tayabas (now Quezon Province).
He gave up private practice to assume the post of provincial fiscal of Mindoro and later of Tayabas. In 1906 he was elected provincial governor.
In 1907, Quezon ran for the Philippine Assembly under the Nacionalista Party and won. In 1916 he was elected to the Senate, and soon became its president.
In 1933, a bill providing for the future independence of the Philippines, the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Bill, passed the US Senate. Quezon opposed the new law because “America would still hold military and naval bases in the Philippines even after the latter’s independence, and, moreover, export duties regulated in the law would destroy both industry and trade.”
Quezon led a mission to the United States to work for a bill that would eventually be passed as the Tydings-McDuffie Law, providing for Philippine independence in 1946.
In September 1935, Quezon was elected President of the Philippine Commonwealth, with Sergio Osmeña as vice president.
In November 1941, President Quezon was reelected. When the Japanese forces occupied Manila in 1942, he and his Cabinet fled from the Philippines and set up an exile government in Washington in May 1942. He died in Australia on Aug. 1, 1944, a year before the liberation of the Philippines. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
