Context is everything when stepping back from fiction
As I understand it, the new Quezon film includes two political showdowns, one in the 1920s (Quezon v. Osmeña and the Filipinos vs. Leonard Wood), and the 1935 presidential campaign (the first such contest in our national life). I thought a timeline and some readings will help provide context to anyone curious to learn more.
I. Why there could only be one: 1921-1931
This first timeline is on the 1920s, focusing on Quezon’s parting political ways with Aguinaldo (who gave up his position as elder statesman to wade into the murky waters of politics) and the first showdown between Quezon and Osmeña over national leadership.
A capsule of the controversies of the era: the answer to understanding the Quezon-Osmeña confrontation is one of the times that very closely aligns with the present. Case in point, we have lived through unipersonalista (what Osmeña and his kind of leadership was accused of being, in 1922) versus collectivista (what Quezon said defined his alternative style of leadership in that year of political fracture): “unipersonalism” was, in fact, the accusation made by that old-time Letranite Vicente Sotto III against Francis Escudero, when he said Escudero ran the senate like a dictator, issuing commands without consulting his colleagues; and Sotto’s cure –a senate-by-caucus– is fundamentally the collectivist approach to successful senatorial management pioneered by Quezon and practiced by the more adept of his successors to the present.
This is a fundamental difference in political –even institutional– leadership and of course a question that will cause a re-alignment when it becomes a campaign issue.
Diving even deeper into the topic, the background both to the Quezon-Osmeña split and Quezon-Wood collision, was a lame-duck message by Woodrow Wilson to the US Congress, that the Filipinos were ready for independence (fulfilling the condition set out in the Jones Act of 1916 which made the question of Philippine independence a matter of when, and not if). The Republicans naturally were upset by this and sent a mission headed by two ironclad imperalists, William Cameron Forbes (of Forbes Park fame) and Leonard Wood (who’d recently lost the bid to be the Republican nominee for president).
The Wood-Forbes Mission seized, among other things, on the Philippine National Bank and allegations of mismanagement and blamed it on the Filipinos; and because of his leadership style, Osmeña proved vulnerable on this score.
To add to this, it was also the moment when an institutional confrontation between the House, which Osmeña led, and the Senate, which Quezon led, came to a head. In 1916, when Quezon came home after securing the Jones Law, he advised Osmeña to move to the Senate because the focal point of power for the Filipinos would shift there: Quezon knew this having served in the US Congress as resident commissioner. Among other things, the Senate would have the excluse American-style power to confirm or reject cabinet appointments by the Governor-General.
What was Wood’s point of view? Thoroughly Republican –government has no business being in business– diametrically opposed to the Filipino view which was (as a Philippines Free Press editorial once put it) we could not forever be “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” that the state must invest in the necessities of a modern economy: banking, manufacturing, credit and so on. Wood’s predecessor, the Democrat-appointed Francis Burton Harrison, had set up a Council of State where Filipino leaders sat with the Governor-General to decide on these things. Wood wanted out on the basis of the report he co-authored which insisted Filipinos were, to put it mildly, incompetent: the Filipino response boiling down to how to you gain competence if you’re not allowed to practice?
Returning to the Quezon-Osmena split:
Osmeña, still thinking in terms of European institutions, insisted the House as the larger and more basic body, was the more important body and so an inevitable clash was just waiting to happen. Here, an important, larger-than-the Philippines question comes up. Personal ambition aside, which is a given for all politicians, why this insistence on there being only one undisputed leader for the Filipinos? If the imperial agenda since Rome has always been divide-and-conquer, the only way around this is to form what the Communists call a united front. There is a reason the entire region –Singapore and PAP, Malaysia and UMNO, Indonesia and PNI, Filipinos and NP, India and the Congress Party– gave birth to monolithic, ultradominating, single-leader dominated, parties that drowned out all others: it was the fundamental requirement if the colonial power was going to meet its match. The Filipino flavor to this is that like the Japanese, our politicians prefer surface unity while dividing internally into factions, and it’s a rare and tough bird who can keep a firm rein on all this.
In the end, Osmeña had to accept the new reality and, in their confrontation, he gave up the House and ran for the Senate to challenge Quezon –and lost (meaning, he was elected senator but lacked the votes to become senate president). Confronted by the rise of a third party, the two then reconciled once the question of leadership had been conclusively settled by the elections.
From Friend to Foe: Quezon and Aguinaldo, 1921-1931
II. From enemy to ally to enemy to renconciliation: 1931-1941
This second one covers the first Quezon-Aguinaldo reconciliation when they both opposed Osmeña-Roxas over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act; the second Quezon-Aguinaldo fight, for the presidency in 1935; and their final reconciliation in 1939-1940.
A word on the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Pro and Anti fight, which was a case of human ambition and differing political perspectives. The Great Depression made the time right for securing Philippine independence, and with Quezon very ill at the time, it made his previous subordinates consider the exciting possibility it was their moment; and they secured a law. Dilemma for Quezon: where was he in this achievement of their collective life-long dream? Here the question of politics and strategy enters the picture. Ambition for all politicians is a given.
But what, as an American scholar put it, is leadership? What it requires obviously (but not so obviously to the non-political) is a followership. But what do both leaders and followers need? A shared cause.
Here Quezon identified three weaknesses in the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act: the first was one crystal clear to anyone who had lived through the Filipino-American War and the time since: the law would allow the continued presence of American army bases in the Philippines. Quezon therefore had an issue that resonated at least with the older generation: how could there be independence if the same force that had crushed the First Republic, would remain permanently encamped in Fort McKinley, easily exercising veto power over any Filipino government?
Second, Quezon belonged to the generation of legislators who had opposed free trade with America in the early 1900s, an opposition which failed, so that by the 1930s, the Philippines was utterly dependent, economically, on sugar, coconut, etc. These products were a fundamental reason the Americans wanted to let the Philippines go: Cuban sugar, American beetroot, all opposed Philippine sugar and similarly, for oils from the Philippines.
The HHC as it was, would immediately cut off the preferential tarrifs for the Philippines leading to immense economic disruption to accompany independence. Obviously this terrified not just the hacenderos and millers but the entire business community. Third, at this maximum moment of opportunity, Quezon argued that the Filipinos were being too accomodating and not insisting enough on their own national interest and could do better if they bargained better knowing the Americans well as Filipino leaders did, by then. So he had the basis for a campaign against it.
The result was a national debate at all levels so intense and widespread it even included Rafael Palma as a political casualty in U.P. As in 1922, the showdown was in two arenas: first, a challenge to submit resignations to the Senate and the House –what in parliamentary terms is known as a vote of confidence– which Quezon won and Osmeña and Roxas lost; second, as a plebiscite in the form of the results of the legislative elections.
Here, the ferocity of the public debate was so intense, the former opposition, the Democratas, splintered: one part went to Osmeña-Roxas (OsRox, the pros or pro-HHC) and the rest to Quezon and the antis (anti-HHC). Quezon won this overwhelmingly. The legislature then had a mandate to reject HHC and send Quezon to negotiate a better law. Those he beat were being disingenous –and those repeating the observation betray their ignorance of lawmaking– when they say it (Tydings-McDuffie) was virtually the same law (as Hare-Hawes-Cutting) except for a change in a few words.
What were those words? First, limiting the American military presence after independence to naval bases (no one though of air forces yet at the time) and no army bases and significantly, the negotiations to be conducted after, and not before, independence; second, for the economic provisions governing the two countries to be subject to longer negotiations between the Filipinos and the US government; and third, diluting, to the extent it became ambigious (and thus beneficial for the Filipinos) the powers of the High Commissioner who would represent the US government after the abolition of the post of Governor-General. Not, by any means, cosmetic changes as the negotiations for both the bases after independence, and the economic adjustment negotiations of 1937 during the Commonwealth, would show.
The second act would have been the period during which the Constitutional Convention was doing its work, and the Sakdal Uprising, up to the ratification of the 1935 Constitution, a time for the proposing of candidates and the exploration of coalitions (Quezon and Osmeña would coalesce as coalition candidates: the Nacionalistas would not reunite until 1938; Aguinaldo’s coalition was composed of the Veterans of the Revolution, the organization he headed; the Filipino Fascists under Cornejo; and others, and very pointedly his coalition formed a party that called itself the National Socialist Party). Here, their reconciliation ended, as Aguinaldo prepared to contest the presidency..
The enmity continued even after the winners were proclaimed, reaching perhaps the worst point in 1938, when the National Assembly revoked Aguinaldo’s pension. until the Quezon-Aguinaldo reconciliation became official in 1941. Thereafter, the reconciliation held, even during the war, and after Quezon’s death, when Aguinaldo faithfully attended ceremonies in honor of Quezon and received the Quezon Service Cross from President Magsaysay in 1956.
From Campaign to Reconcilation: A Timeline, 1931-1941
III. Pictures about a picture
Finally, just some fun with old pictures.
