Manuel L. Quezon: The Government That Would Not Surrender

The showman statesman from Baler who built the Commonwealth, then carried a free Philippine government out through the Japanese blockade — from the tunnels of Corregidor to a submarine, exile, and death still holding the office.

The man from Baler

Manuel Luis Quezon y Molina was born on the 19th of August 1878 in Baler, then part of Tayabas and today the capital of Aurora province. His parents were Spanish mestizo schoolteachers of modest means. He went to Manila and studied law at the University of Santo Tomás. In 1898 his father Lucio and his brother Pedro were killed on the road near Baler. The true authors of the killing were long disputed, bound up in the turmoil of the revolution against Spain.

Quezon joined that revolution. When war came with the United States in 1899 he fought as a guerrilla and rose to major under General Emilio Aguinaldo in the hills of Bataan. After the surrender the Americans jailed him for six months on murder charges that were never proven. He came out, finished his law studies, and turned to politics.

The rise to power

He rose fast. In 1906 he was elected governor of Tayabas. In 1907 he and his lifelong friend and rival Sergio Osmeña built the Nacionalista Party, which would rule Philippine politics for a generation. From 1909 to 1916 Quezon served in Washington as Resident Commissioner, the Filipino voice in the American Congress. His charm opened doors, and he worked to win the Jones Act of 1916, which pledged eventual independence to the Philippines.

Back home he was elected to the new Philippine Senate and served as its president. Step by step he moved past Osmeña to become the country's first man. When the self-governing Commonwealth was created in 1935, under a constitution that gave the president wide powers, Quezon won the office easily.

The showman president

Quezon governed with flair. He loved luxury and fine silk, kept late nights at cabarets and poker tables, and made a public art of palabas, the theatrical showiness his people knew well. Behind the show was a real record. He pushed for the independence set for 1946, widened public schooling, backed land reform for peasants, won the vote for women, opened Mindanao to settlement, and began building a national language. He named his close associate General Douglas MacArthur field marshal of the young Philippine Army and gave him a baton of solid gold.

The office in a tunnel

By early 1942 the government of the Commonwealth was reduced to a tunnel. Quezon, his wife Aurora, their children, and part of the cabinet sheltered in the Malinta tunnel on Corregidor while the guns of Bataan sounded across the water. Quezon was gravely ill with tuberculosis, the disease that had followed him for years. The damp of the rock made it worse.

The question was not only whether the man would live. It was whether the government would live. If the president were captured, the enemy could show the Commonwealth as finished and press its own puppet state as the only Filipino authority. So the decision was made to move him. The aim was simple: keep a free Philippine government standing on free Philippine ground for as long as any remained.

Sick and embittered by the lack of American reinforcement, Quezon made a hard proposal early in 1942 — that the United States grant immediate independence so the Philippines could declare itself neutral and be spared further ruin. President Roosevelt refused. The fight would go on.

In those same weeks Quezon signed an order paying 500,000 dollars from Commonwealth funds into the personal account of General MacArthur, with smaller sums to his staff, in recognition of his service as field marshal from 1935 to 1941. To Quezon it was utang na loob, the debt of gratitude a Filipino repays. The payment stayed secret for nearly forty years and is debated to this day.

Out through the blockade

At midnight on the 19th of February 1942, Quezon and his party boarded the submarine USS Swordfish off Corregidor. On the surface at night the boat ran fast. By day it slid under the sea. It carried the president of the Philippines out through the Japanese blockade and set him down in the still-free southern islands. The Commonwealth had not surrendered. It had not dissolved. It had simply moved.

From the south, on the 28th of February, Quezon spoke to the people by radio. He asked them to keep faith — in the Commonwealth that had not died, and in the promise of return. Radios were watched or forbidden in the occupied towns, yet the words traveled the way words travel in the islands, from those who heard to those who had not.

The long road to exile

The journey did not end in the Visayas. The party moved by boat and by car across the southern islands — through Negros, through Misamis, up to Del Monte in Bukidnon — one step ahead of the enemy's advance. From Del Monte, aircraft carried the president to Australia in March 1942, in the same days General MacArthur made his own escape. From Australia Quezon went on to the United States. By May 1942 the government of the Commonwealth was seated, in exile, in Washington.

Exile was not rest. Quezon kept the Commonwealth a recognized government among the Allies, argued the Philippine cause at the highest tables, and signed the country into the United Nations declaration of 1942. He held the office as a living claim — proof that the nation had a government of its own, waiting to come home.

The death of a president

He did not come home. The tuberculosis that worsened in the tunnels of Corregidor never let go. On the 1st of August 1944, Manuel Quezon died at Saranac Lake in New York, a town where people went to try to heal from the disease. He was sixty-five. Vice President Sergio Osmeña took up the office and the flag. Ten weeks later the ships stood off Leyte, and the return Quezon had promised began. The president who called for faith did not live to see it kept.