QUEZONS

COMMONWEALTH: THE EMERGENCE OF PHILIPPINE AUTHORITARIANISM

Alfred W. McCoy


With his death that summer morning concludes Carlos Quirinos prize-winning biography
of Philippine President Manuel Quezon, his country lost a great man who would rank with Jose
Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, with Jose Burgos and Apolinario Mabini in the pantheon of immortal
heroes. Although seemingly over stated, Quirinos assessment of Quezons legacy reflects a
strong consensus of opinion among Filipino and foreign historians. The Commonwealth
Presidents first biographer, Sol Gwekoh, was even more lavish in his praise and organized his
chapters topically according to his subjects several virtues the heros soldier, the brilliant
prosecutor, the beloved employer, the uncompromising nationalist, the great leader, the
popular hero and idol, and the immortal Malayan. Announcing from the outset that he was
writing about the greatest Filipino of his generation, Gwekoh begins the biography:

Every nation has been endowed with men born to guide its course through different periods of
history America has had its George Washington and Abraham LincolnFrance its Napoleon
Bonaparteand the Philippines its Jose Rizal and Manuel Luis Quezon.

Such uncritical acceptance of Quezons heroic nature has contained for over forty years
since his death and survived several generations of historical assessment. A special edition of the
Philippine Historical Associations Historical Bulletin published in 1978, the 100th anniversary of
Quezons birth, contains nearly 400 pages of lavish praise and barely a word of even muted
criticism. More recently, the biography of Jose Yulo, Quezons close political ally, concludes with
a rhetorical question about the causes of democracys decline. In the Philippines, If there had
been more leaders of Yulos persuasion, leaders who might have exposed Yulos criterion for high
public morality could the old brand of democracy which Quezon and Yulo so arduously tried to
build have survived? In such analysis, Quezons only failure is his morality.

If every generation writes or rewrites history, then the uncritical acceptance of Quezons
heroism by Filipino historians is easily understood. After independence in 1946, biographers like
Gwekoh and Quirino sought to populate the historic landscape with proteans who could inspire
national aspirations, an enterprise given government support through the National Heroes
Institute. The survival of close postcolonial economic and strategic ties to the United States
revived the nationalist movement soon after independence and slowed any critical examination
of established national heroes by a later generation of historians. Quezons fiery anticolonial
rhetoric, his masterful manipulations of American administrators, and his insistence upon respect
for the Filipino still arouse admiration in a nation whose independence seems incomplete.

Although not so lavish in their praise, American historians have generally admired
Quezons leadership of the nationalist movement. Reflecting the regions postwar political
turmoil, American historians of Southeast Asia have, until recently, focused their analysis on
issues of nationalism and national liberation. In their studies of the colonial era, Ever a brilliant
politician, wrote Theodore Friend, the leading historian of Quezons era, as President of the
Commonwealth (1935-1941), he grew into a statesman with the courage to look outwards for
support, and inwards to correct his societys basic faults. In doing so, his nationalismnow
burned like a pilots lightilluminating for his people the leaders matured vision: above personal
and provincial interests - the interests of the nation.

Viewed within the context of the Philippine Independence movement, Quezon does seem
at least over the short term a skillful leader. Through his mastery of electoral politics in the
decade after the convening of the Senate in 1917, he established such unchallenged dominion
over the legislature that American colonials, notably Governor-General Wood, could no longer
play upon Filipino rivalries to maintain control. Although his vacillation and intrigues played an
ambiguous role in winning the ultimate independence legislation in 1933, Quezons bravado and
skill in manipulating American colonials may have played a role, subtle but significant, in
maintaining nationalist aspirations and building national self-confidence. As president of the
transitional Commonwealth (1935-41), Quezon seemed a dignified, competent executive who at
least avoided any scandal that might have checked progress towards independence. There is,
however, little published material on the Commonwealth to support even this judgement. With
the exception of a cursory and laudatory glance at his social justice program, the few historians
who have studied the Commonwealth focus on Quezons external relation his continuing
wrangles with American administrators and attempts to cope with the Japanese threat. Viewed
from the prism of a postwar perspective, most historians regard the Commonwealth as a brief
interlude overshadowed by the inevitability of war. In the words of Friend: Domestic progress
has ceased, a victim of external aggression.

As historians of the region have become less concerned with the traditional approach to
questions of colonialism and nationalism, emphasis has shifted from the ephemera of an external
anticolonial conflict to the continuity of internal development social, economic, and political.
While an earlier generation of Filipino and foreign historians admired Quezon for his masterful,
if ultimately, tragic, handling of external relations, they ignored his internal impact of Philippine
society. Analysis abounds of the seventeen years he led the national movement, but the record
is superficial if not silent about his domestic legacy, most importantly, the six years he
administered the Commonwealth. While American governors and school-teachers have long
since departed, electoral politics, whose dynamics he shaped more than any other single man,
and economic dependence of the United States, a question he failed to address, remain. If an
earlier generation of historians focused on the questions most pressing for their day war and
alien occupation might we not also address a question more relevant to our own time the
collapse of democracy and the rise of authoritarian rule?

If Quezon is admired for his skillful, even heroic leadership of the Philippine nationalist
movement for most of the American colonial period, should we not critically examine the
instruments he forged as his weapons in that struggle: political leadership and party politics?
Quezon was not only the leading advocate of national independence, he was the progenitor of a
system of politics and a style of leadership that has left an indelible imprint on the Philippine
state. By the effective end of the Commonwealth in 1941, Quezon had shaped the written and
unwritten constitution, set the standards of executive leadership, forged the terms of
postcolonial relations with the United States, fashioned a close link between provincial and
national politics, and selected for the next generation of political leaders. It was not until 1961
that presidential elections emerged from the influence of his hand-picked successors. Despite
the obvious importance of Quezons domestic legacy, critical reexamination of the internal
dynamics of the US colonial era is just beginning, logically enough with studies by Ruby Paredes
and Michael Cullinane of the first decade of Philippine national politics. With the exceptions of a
few traditional, externally oriented studies, the entire period in which the modern Filipino state
took shape, 1913 to 1941, is largely ignored.

In seeking a link of any sort between the postwar demise of democracy and the prewar
political experience, the historical record is not terribly revealing. We now have, thanks to
Paredes and Cullinane, illuminating portraits of the initial decade of national politics, then
detailed studies of the nationalist movemens anticolonial agitation to 1934, and then a gap. To
date, the only historian who has tried to link pre- and postwar politics in a single analysis is David
J. Steinberg. In his monograph, Philippine Collaboration in World War II, Steinberg argues that
the oligarchys wartime collaboration with the Japanese may well have fostered an infection
below the skin of the body politic which grew into a pervasive cancer that corrupted postwar
democracy. While the elites survival probably contributed to the mood of cynicism which has
been so pervasive since the war, the experience of belligerent occupation upset respect for
law which was not successfully restored after the war. Elsewhere, Steinberg has argued more
boldly that the oligarchys cynical collaboration and postwar scramble back to power was
somehow something of a stain on the cassock of postwar democracy. Implicit in Steinbergs
tentative thesis is the assumption that the prewar Commonwealth was a stable, corruption-free,
law-abiding State which, spared the shock of invasion and occupation, could have yielded a
promising democracy. In short, Steinberg seems to argue, at least by implication, that the
American democratic experiment was succeeding and the emerging Filipino elite could have built
a healthy Republic, had it been spared the war years.

Searching the record of an alternative thesis reveals only a single brief rebuttal. In an
introduction to Carlos Quirinos 1971 biography, UNESCO Chairman Alejandro R. Roces rejected
the commonly held assumption that prewar politicians were gentlemen and the postwar variety
scoundrels. Referring to the postwar system of junketeering, pork barrel pay-offs, and corruption,
Roces commented: What we have today for better or worse is not a departure but a
continuation of the Quezonian tradition.

A preliminary review of the recently released records of US agencies responsible for the
supervision of the Commonwealth, together with Philippine materials, indicates that the weight
of available evidence lends to credence to the Roces thesis. By 1941, Quezons Commonwealth
(1934-41) appeared to have many of the attributes of President Ferdinand Marcos martial law
regime (1972-81). Through manipulation of constitution and bureaucracy, both men sought,
above all else, to perpetuate their power, Quezon rather dexterously and Marcos more crudely.
Their relentless accumulation of power at the center spawned a regime characterized by
corruption and cronyism allies won government largesse and paid lavish gifts to their
presidents, opponents faced a punitive bureaucracy. Although Quezon accumulated his power
gradually and carefully, afraid to break the colonial rules and Marcos seized his by force, the
essential political dynasties of both regimes seem familiar. Through a reinforcing manipulation
of media, constitution, and government financial agencies, both gained near total control of
nominally autonomous areas of the State legislature, judiciary, economy, and local
government. Such power used without restraint together with their ultimate sanction as
Americas anointed reduced the elite opposition politicians to impotence. To slow the upsurge of
mass radicalism, both employed, with varying nuance, the rhetoric of nationalism and social
reform. Quezon promised social justice and Marcos proclaimed a revolution from the center,
but neither made a sincere effort to deliver. Although multinational banking loads gave Marcos
far greater funds than the US, coconut excise payments allowed Quezon both wasted the national
patrimony on nonproductive projects. Quezon lavished P900,000 from a budget of P50 million to
beautify Dewey Boulevard which passed along the shore where, a quarter century later, Madame
Imelda Marcos built her monuments to extravagance the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the
Folk Arts Theatre, the Philippine International Convention Center. If Quezon was the author of
the bases-for-aid barter which has shaped Philippine-American postcolonial relations, then
Marcos became its master when he played upon it to win massive US support to save his regime
from financial collapse after 1981.

The point of the comparison is not, however, to draw a point-by-point analogy between
the two regimes Marcos, Hitler, Quezon, Diktador! The similarities are only useful to the extent
that make us aware of the continuity of Philippine political history and highlight some essential
characteristics of the countrys modern dynamic. Without the trauma of World War II or the
dismal decades of postwar corruption, the Quezon Commonwealth had in the view of informed
contemporary observers, American and Filipino a natural impulse toward totalitarianism.
Postwar historians have depicted Commonwealth politics as a brief interlude overshadowed by
the immanence of Japanese invasion which somehow immobilized the regimes capacity for
action. Lacking the gift of historical prophecy, Quezon and his aides administered the
Commonwealth as if it would run full-term and yield a Republic. Contemporary records show that
Filipino political leaders devoted remarkably little of their energies to preparations for war and
instead concentrated on the accumulation and perpetuation of power until the day of the
Japanese invasion.

A complete analysis of Quezons Commonwealth would require at least a full length
monograph. By setting aside questions of defense, economic development, and social justice, we
can focus on Quezons political system, a subject central to this volume and Steinbergs thesis.
Under the Commonwealth, a system of clientelist politics that had been evolving for almost half
a century was institutionalized and perfected. It is not unreasonable to ask whether a national
political system that evolved through three decades of US colonial rule and was honed by Quezon
during the six years of his Commonwealth presidency may not have laid the framework for a
lasting political tradition.

As Commonwealth President, Quezon perfected a patronage system he had used for
eighteen years as Senate President to establish his dominion over Filipino politics. No longer
restrained by his distance from executive prerogatives, President Quezon soon erected an
interrelated, finely tuned clientelist system that reached from the municipio to Malacaang, to
the White House. Under the Tydings-McDuffie Act which established the Commonwealth, the
Philippine presidency was invested with powers similar to that of the American state governor.
Although Quezon could organize an army in principle, he could not arm or deploy it without the
consent of the US military authorities. Although he could visit a foreign nation to discuss trade or
future diplomatic relations, he had no more authority to conclude a treaty than the governor of
Rhode Island. In certain ways, he was even more disadvantaged. Unlike an American state
governor, the law placed a direct representative of the US president, the High Commissioner, to
serve as a guardian of American prerogatives and Quezons sole channel of communications with
Washington. In sum, the Commonwealth had a de facto domestic autonomy and only limited
informal powers beyond. Quezons only avenue of independent action was domestic politics and
it was here, not surprisingly, that he concentrated his efforts.

As Commonwealth President, Quezon was the first Filipino politician with the power to
integrate all levels of politics into a single system. At its base, Quezon devoted considerable
energies to the mastery of provincial rivalries, seeking always to maintain two equally balanced
factions at a peak of conflict that would allow his intervention and manipulation. Quezon once
confessed to an aide that 90 percent of his dealing with politicians involve the disposition of
patronage. At the center of national politics in Manila, Quezons main arm was to prevent any
threat to his authority by crippling any who dared to challenge and fomenting rivalries to prevent
any coalition of his would-be successors. He was very suspicious, recalled Quezons Floor
Leader in the first Commonwealth Assembly, Jose Romero, and he could see real or imagined
plots long before they started or even developed. Since most Manila politicians based their
power on provincial vote banks, Quezons involvement in local politics gave him the power to
topple most national figures who threatened him in any way. Thus, his control over local leaders
allowed him the means to control national politics, and both in turn strengthened his hand
against the US High Commissioner or his superiors in Washington DC.

 Using his monopoly over Filipino political power, Quezon could bluff or manipulate his
colonial superiors, a success that consequently reinforced his authority over Filipino politicians
who realized the futility of trying to compete for US support. American officials dealt with Quezon
grudgingly because they felt there was no alternative leader who could control the Filipinos; and
the Filipinos followed him in turn because they sense that there was no other politician who could
manipulate the Americans so well or win their imprimatur.

It was truly a system in symbiosis, operating, whether by instinct or design, with an
economy that allowed Quezons every move to reinforce his ultimate goal the accumulation and
perpetuation of power. It was not a system built without effort or free from restraints. By 1940,
Quezon had destroyed all elite opposition within and without the Nacionalista Party and
marginalized Pedro Abad Santos of the radical Frente Popular in Central Luzon. Since the only
real barrier to his unchecked authority remained the US High Commissioner, the spectacular
battles of late Commonwealth politics revolved about Quezons efforts to obviate his watchdogs
ill-defined authority.

Local Politics

Rivalries among the competing elite factions at the municipal level have been the
dominant aspect of Philippine local politics since the late nineteenth century. When the US
colonial regime gradually extended electoral politics from the municipality (1901) to the province
(1903) and the National Assembly (1907), fractional rivalries at the local level began to play a role
in national politics. As Senate President from 1917 to 1935, Quezon had manipulated local
factions to weaken his legislative rivals, all of whom had to maintain a provincial vote bank to win
reelection. In his memoirs, Quezons long-time ally, Jose Romero, recalls how the Senate
President used his power over an emerging institution, the Philippine National Bank (PNB), to
build a local base in 1919 for his eventual challenge to Sergio Osmeas party leadership three
years later.

Mr. Quezon had always been concerned that he might be badly defeated in the Visayas and
Mindanao (Osmeas territory) in the case of a split between him and Mr. Osmea. The late Senator
Villanueva was never an Osmea man and was one of the few Visayan leaders who could give Mr. Quezon
victory in his home province (Negros Oriental) Mr. Quezon insisted on his being adopted as candidate for
our senatorial district. It is said that he told the sugar people in Negros Occidental, who could have made
their own candidate win with their much larger voting population and fat campaign funds, that there would
be no crop loans for them if they did not support Don Hermenegildo (Villanueva). (The sugar industry was
then, as now, financed by the Philippine National Bank It was taken seriously enough to guarantee the
victory of Don Hermenegildo in 1919 and he was reelected in 1925.

Similarly, Carlos Quirino describes how Quezon used his knowledge of local rivalries to
win an ally in his struggle against Osmea over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting independence legislation
in 1932-33.

An incident Quezon had with Vincente Vera, the political leader of the southernmost Luzon
province of Sorsogon was typical of the way he secured followers. The Bicol Senator, a stubborn man who
cherished his political freedom gave a skeptical ear to Quezons blandishments.

Look here, finaly said Quezon. Your leading opponent for the leadership in your region is Jose
Surbito and hes an Osmea man. If you go over to Osmea, Ill take Surbito who, after all, is closely
related to Felipito (Representative Felipe Buencamino Jr., a close Quezon crony). So you might as well join
me because Im going to win this fight.

Vera had no alternative: Quezons words did not make sense, and that was how he became a
supporter of the Senate President.

 After his election as Commonwealth President in 1935, Quezons access to resources
increased markedly and he used them to intervene consistently in provincial politics throughout
the archipelago, a major innovation that made the national executive a key factor in local rivalries
for the first time. Through his monopoly over the disposition of both executive and legislative
patronage, President Quezon reduced opposition parties to impotence and blocked the rise of
any rivals within the ruling Nacionalista Party. By keeping evenly balanced municipal and
provincial factions in a state of tension, Quezon thus had the leverage to deny a rival reelection
and expel him from the National Assembly.

In forming his first Commonwealth cabinet in 1935, Quezon made several appointments
on the basis of their local factional implications. Determined to assure Vice-President Osmeas
continued subordination, the President appointed his key local rival in Cebu politics, Mariano J.
Cuenco, Secretary of Public Works and Communication. The millions of pesos involved in public
works projects was a good source of political patronage, explained historian Carlos Quirino. The
new Secretary would b e a popular man to all politicos.

When his Interior Secretary Elpidio Quirino dared to oppose Quezons choice for Speaker
of the Assembly, the President again used his national resources to influence the outcome of the
provincial election. Through former Senator Camilo Osias, Quezon selected an obscure Ilocos
Sur politician named Benito Soliven to run against Quirino in his home district and then instructed
Rafael Alunan, leader of the Negros sugar planters, to use the sugar blocks funds to guarantee
Solivens election by a two-to-one margin. Quirino was humiliated by his defeat and the lesson
was not lost on others who would challenge Quezon.

Since the 1935 Constitution required an incumbent president to step down after
completing his six-year term before becoming eligible for another, Quezon was forced to
maintain strict control over his would-be successors to preserve his options. Under the
Constitution, Quezon, should he wish to succeed himself, could either seek an amendment
allowing himself a second term or select a loyal successor who would support his reelection after
Quezon endured a six-year forced retirement. Either option required a strict control over both
the Legislature and his ambitious successors, factors that made Quezons involvement in sub-
national politics an imperative.

By 1940-41, Quezon had won a remarkable control over local politics and provincial
opposition to the ruling Nacionalista Party was reduced to impotence. In the December 1940
local elections, for example, the Nacionalistas won forty-one of forty-three provincial
governorships, and in thirty-four provinces the two principal contestants were both
Nacionalistas, the latter statistic evidence of the endemic intraparty factionalism that Quezon
used to such advantage. Among the 800 municipal mayors and several thousand councilors
elected, the Nacionalistas met serious opposition only in Pampanga Province where eight of the
twenty-one elected mayors were from the radical Frente Popular, and in Manila where six of the
ten councilors were affiliated with the conservative faction of the same opposition party. To
assist his party in Pampanga, Quezon had sent 200 Constabulary troopers and financed the
Governors use of armed special agents, a use of force that sparked much violence.

Through his term as president, Quezon increased his direct control over local politics by
the creation of chartered cities whose mayors and councilors became executive appointees.
Although Manila and Baguio were the only chartered cities when Quezon took office in 1935, he
had added ten more by 1941, allowing him direct control over the local administration for 8.1
percent of the population. As the US State Department officer at Manila noted, this figure
represented a large proposition of the most articulate and intelligent elements residing outside
the capital city of Manila. By rendering this sector politically impotent, the officer felt that
Mr. Quezon and his followers may be assured of increasing and continuing political power. Not
only would appointive city officials control municipal politics, they can influence in an important
degree provincial and national elections held in their cities.

Quezons personal control over the legislature was more direct and by 1941, nearly
absolute. Confronted in 1935 with a unicameral Assembly whose Speaker could potentially
challenge his authority, Quezon arranged the election of Representative Gil Montilla, a weak
politician who made the office ceremonial. The incumbent House Speaker, Quintin Paredes, a
powerful and ambitious leader, was exiled to the United States as Resident Commissioner. After
the 1933 Assembly elections, Quezon then reversed his opinion on the need for a ceremonial
Speaker and selected Jose Yulo, a freshman legislator who had won his seat in Negros through
Quezons determined efforts. Finding the unicameral Assembly insufficiently pliable, Quezon
initiated a constitutional referendum in 1940 to restore the Senate in the 1941 elections.

Quezons greatest triumph, the 1941 elections, demonstrated the extent of his control
over the Legislature and its supportive subnational politics. At the Nacionalista Convention in
august, despite some grumbling in private over their emasculation, the delegates accepted
Quezons list of the twenty-four senatorial candidates without a single dissenting vote. While
Lower House representatives were still chosen by provincial conventions more remote from
executive control, under Quezons constitutional amendment the senators ran at-large on a
national ticker that uprooted them from independent regional bases and thus made them
beholden to executive patronage. Power in the new bicameral Legislature was to be balanced
between a Lower House chosen from autonomous local party conventions and an Upper House
whose members were, under Quezon at least, de facto presidential appointees.

The US State Department reported that in making his Senate selections, Mr. Quezon
appears to have been strongly influenced by his choice of candidates by the boundaries of the
twelve senatorial districts which existed prior to the establishment of the Commonwealth
government. In short, there was a fundamental shift in the center-regional power balance under
the new Legislature. Although Quezon had uprooted the new Senate from its regional base to
render it an extension of his executive authority, he still used regional loyalties to insure election
of his hand-picked candidates. The strategy was successful and all twenty-four of his nominees
were elected to the Senate in November 1941. The extent of Quezons control over the
Nacionalista Senate ticket was shown by his selection of Manuel Nieto, described in a State
Department report as the man who for many years has been in fact his bodyguard and procurer
of women. After one Manila newspaper columnist compared Quezons choice to Emperor
Caligulas appointing his horse to the Roman Senate, Nieto accepted the nomination on the
understanding that he would resign it, which he did a week after the party convention.

In the November 1941 national elections, Nacionalistas won ninety-five of the ninety-
eight Assembly seats. Party control was stricter and local factionalism less pronounced than in
the 1940 gubernatorial elections since only twenty-six Nacionalistas were elected in party free
zones together with seven more who ran as rebel candidates in defiance of Quezon. The State
Department explained that the degree of victory is due to the impregnability of the party
machine achieved by various devices such as that of block voting for a party ticket, an innovation
in the 1941 elections.

Quezons Influence in the Iloilo Province

 The depth of President Quezons involvement in provincial politics has escaped notice by
every historian, this writer included, who has dealt with the Commonwealth era. During three
years of doctoral research on Iloilo provincial politics of the 1930s and 1940s, I discovered only
fragmentary evidence of Quezons involvement, even in the Presidents own papers. Recently
released State Department reports from Manila in 1940-41 combined with extant primary and
secondary sources now allow a more complete portrait of the close relationship between local
factions and the Commonwealth presidency.

Judging from the large percentage of free zones in the provincial elections of 1940 and
the lesser number in the 1941 national elections, Iloilos bitter intraparty factional struggles were
in no way exceptional. As in most economically advanced regions in the late 1930s, Iloilos
provincial politics was shaped by an endemic contest for control of the Nacionalista party by a
kaleidoscopic array of rival factions. In the 1940 local elections, Iloilos contenders for the
provincial government were two coalitions of urban and rural factions. The incumbent Governor
Tomas Confesor was a tempestuous populist whose base lay in the provinces third Assembly
district, a rural area on the western fringes of Iloilos central plain that he had long represented.
His major ally was Dr. Fermin Caram, an influential Iloilo City politician and physician whose
supporters included the head of the regions largest labor union.

Opposing the Confesor-Caram coalition was a similar urban-rural alliance. The most
professional of the provinces politicians, Representative Jose C. Zulueta maintained an efficient
machine in the first Assembly district along Iloilos southern coast that had returned him to the
Assembly without fail since 1922. His ally of the moment was an urban faction controlled by
Eugenio and Fernando Lopez, the citys leading entrepreneurs who owned its largest newspaper,
only airline, and major provincial bus company. Stung by Governor Confesors refusal to lower
bridge tolls for their largest investment, Panay Autobus, after he had won with their support in
1937, the Lopez brothers worked with Zulueta to build what seemed an invincible coalition to
support their gubernatorial candidate in 1940, an unexceptional sugar aristocrat named Timoteo
Consing. Through their Manila allies, Secretary Manuel Roxas and President Quezon, they
secured an official Nacionalista endorsement for their candidate.

Although a native of neighboring Capiz Province on the northern coast of Panay Island,
Secretary Roxas maintained a small retinue of active Iloilo City politicians and often played a
critical role in the provinces politics. As a major national figure and one of the three leading
contenders to succeed Quezon, Roxas had to cultivate a vote bank in his ethnolinguistic region
to use as currency in his political maneuverings. He seemed to define the three provinces of
Panay Island as his particular territory, a decision that brought him into frequent conflicts with
Governor Confesor.

A survey of Roxass outgoing political correspondence from March 1935 to March 1941,
the bulk of the Commonwealth era, reveals the effort he devoted to maintaining his regional
assets. Of the 336 extant carbon copies, 75 letters, or 22 percent, dealt with patronage matters
in Roxass home region, a remarkably high proportion for a major national figure. Most are about
minor services to constituents P5.00 for municipal fiesta tickets, recommending supporters for
jobs, gaining admission to Manilas tuberculosis hospital, or negotiating placements in the
bureaucracy. Perhaps by force of habit, Roxas continued to intervene in even the most petty of
local disputes in Capiz Province after his election as President of the Republic in 1946. From his
office at Malacaang Palace in November 1947, for example, he wrote a close follower in New
Washington, Leon Magalit, ordering him to insure that the municipal mayor not persecute his
political enemies by denying one Cirilio Laserna a license for the usual concession for fish corral
in Malibo (village), New Washington (Lots 1 and 2). Two days later, he wrote the Capiz governor
to insure that the concession for a river-crossing ferry be awarded to the current licensee, the
brother of our friend Tagoy del Rosario. Similarly, he played an active role in selecting mayoral
candidates in even rather small towns. Indicative of his close ties to Iloilo City faction, nine of the
fourteen congratulatory telegrams Roxas received on his 1947 wedding anniversary, a difficult
and intimate commemoration in his household, came from his Iloilo supporters.

During his term as House Speaker from 1922 to 1933, Representative Confesor did his
utmost to harass Roxas in an effort to destroy the man who stood in his way as political leader
of Panay. Although Roxas had also clashed with Representative Zulueta, the depth of his enmity
toward Confesor was such that he readily joined Zulueta in a coalition against the Iloilo Governor.

While Governor Confesor had won a landslide victory in 1937 with the support of a unified
Nacionalista Party and the Lopez brothers financial interests, his 1940 rebel candidacy was
perhaps the most controversial that year and captured the imagination of the Manila press as a
David-and-Goliath battle between a lone populist and the nations political establishment. By late
October, Quezon had fourteen unresolved intraparty disputes among the forty-three
governorships. In its monthly political report for October, the US Departments Manila officer
summarized Quezons role:

Rival Nacionalista aspirants for governorships in many instances begged President Quezon to step
in and settle disputes by giving his official blessing to one or another contestant, thereby assuring the
election of the chosen aspirant. This President Quezon consistently refused to do publicly However, Mr.
Quezon was very busy behind the scenes. For example, he made one trip to Occidental Negros and two
trips to Iloilo during the month under review, obviously in connection with the bitter struggle in these two
places between the Nacionalista factions.

As the Iloilo campaign intensified into bitter accusations among party rivals, Quezon
accelerated his efforts at mediation. During one of his visits to Iloilo, Quezon offered Confesor a
national administrative post if he would withdraw. But pressured by his wife and a petition from
all the mayors outside Zuluetas first district, Confesor refused. In early November, Quezon called
both candidates to Manila for a conference and suggested they withdraw for the sake of the
party. Neither accepted the offer and both returned to campaign by further escalating the verbal
warfare. Two weeks after the first Manila conference, Quezon again called Confesor to Manila
but the stormy petrel still refused to withdraw. Expanding his attacks beyond local rivals,
Confesor wrote a bitter letter to the Manila newspapers charging that Secretary Roxass
political future as President Quezons successor was now at stake in the Iloilo elections. Confesor
then filed administrative complaints against Roxas-Zulueta appointees among the provinces civil
servants and elaborated upon his anti-Roxas theme in subsequent speeches. Responding to the
attacks, Roxas personally campaigned against Confesor in early December.

In a violent election on 10 December, Confesors supporters countered the money and
power of their rivals with a show of armed force. On election eve, the Governor defied Quezons
direct orders and transferred municipal police out of two towns in the first district to reduce the
chance of frauds in Zuluetas stronghold. On election day, several trucks of armed men from
Confesors home town of Cabatuan arrived in Zuluetas home town, Oton. After a brawl between
rival gangs, police arrested twenty-five Cabatuan residents. In a neighboring town, the pro-
Zulueta mayor murdered a Confesor leader in a brawl. Accompanied on election day by
bodyguards armed with .45 automatic pistols, Confesor motored to the town of San Joaquin in
Zuluetas territory, entered two polling places, and engaged in a shoving-shouting match with
local police and precinct captains who were reportedly tolerating systematic frauds.

 To the surprise of all, Confesor won an impressive victory over the combined forces of
President Quezon and the Zulueta-Lopez-Roxas factions defeating Consing by a wide margin of
6,000 votes 51,602 to 45,353. The Manila Tribune gave Confesors unexpected triumph front
page coverage and he was hailed as a politician of courage. Several weeks later, the State
Departments Manila officer reported that one Nationalist [sic] contestant in the recent
elections (Tomas Confesor, Governor of Iloilo) is about to be disciplined for persisting in running
for election (successfully) contrary to the wishes of Mr. Quezon.

Quezon acted quickly indeed to arrange Confesors punishment. Responding to a report
from Iloilos Assistant Provincial Fiscal, in fact his close political follower, Zulueta filed charges
against Confesor for electoral law violation in San Joaquin several days after the elections, saying
I do not want it interpreted that I filed charges for personal vengeance. After a preliminary
hearing in January 1941 when Confesor was cross-examined at length by Zulueta, the Governors
trial started in early May. From the outset Quezon tried to shape the outcome of the trial and
personally telephoned Manilas leading attorneys, ordering them to refuse Confesors case.
Denied access to the best counsel by Quezon, Confesor finally retained a lawyer then too junior
to merit the Presidents attention: future Senator Lorenzo Taada. This was accomplished
through the influence of the Iloilo Governors long-time patron, Colonel John Stevenor, founder
of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company. Realizing that Confesor was actually guilty
as charged of carrying a loaded .45 pistol into a polling place, Taada focused on the technical
aspects of the trial and the political bias of the witness. On June 25, the Judge ruled Confesor
innocent, and his followers mounted a massive victory parade in the streets of Iloilo City.

In its Monthly Political Report, the US State Departments officer described Quezons
close involvement in the Judges decision.

Regardless of the degree of guilt involved, observers were of the opinion long before the decision
was rendered that President Quezon did not intend to punish Mr. Confesor by going to such lengths as
having him found guilty but that the President, wanting future political support of Mr. Confesor, would feel
that the trial ending in acquittal would be sufficient punishment to serve the Presidents purposes.

The Court reached a decision several days prior to public announcement of Governor Confesors
acquittal. It is reliably reported that the delay was due to the fact that President Quezon, having read the
decision and disapproving of some of the phraseology, spent some time rewriting it, a procedure that is, to
put mildly, extra-legal. It is also reliably reported that immediately after being informed of the decision,
President Quezon called Governor Confesor, thinking thereby to obtain the Governors good-will and his
support in the coming elections.

Factional infighting and Quezons machinations continued through the legislative
elections of November 1941. Elected to the National Assembly in 1940 by election, Dr. Caram
authored a petition attacking Zuluetas appointment of councilors in a newly created municipality
as not only prejudicial to the Province of Iloilo but to the democratic principles which inspire our
government. On 25 August 1941, factional fissures in Iloilos Nacionalista Party widened when
Confesor formed the Tigbatas group and unilaterally announce a state of candidates for the
pronvices five Assembly seats.

In an apparent effort to end Confesors rebellion, President Quezon subverted his faction
with generosity. Only a few weeks after Confesor announced his independent ticket, the State
Departments officer explained how one of President Quezn, with the assistance of Vice
President Osmea, persuaded Confesor to become Acting Manager of the National
Cooperatives Administration, making it possible thereby to offer Dr. Caram the Acting
Governorship of Iloilo. After his appointment, Dr. Caram withdrew as the insurgent candidate
for Iloilos second district seat, thus assuring the election of the Lopez factions nominee. The
State Departments interpretation is supported by Dr. Carams own postwar account of the
events.

Factional warfare continued up to election day in November requiring Malacaangs
constant attention. Typical of the intensity of the conflict was the struggle over the appointment
of 112 day laborers on the Anilao-Dingle road project in Central Iloilo. Angered that the District
Engineer, Gil Mallare, a civil service appointee and Zulueta partisan, was accepting only laborers
nominated by Representative Zuluetas local Assembly candidate, Anilao Mayor Benjamin Buyco,
a Confesor partisan, protested to Governor Caram. During an on-site inspection of the road works
in October, Mayor Buyco drew his revolver and had to be restrained by Governer Caram from
shooting the project foreman. After learning that all but 15 of 112 workers were Jose Zuluetas
appointees. Caram suspended work on the road and wired President Quezon about his decision.
Five days later, on 11 October, Interior Secretary Francisco Zulueta, Joses brother, answered on
behalf of the President and ordered that work should be resumed. On 16 October, the local
representative Victoriano Salcedo, running for reelection against a Zulueta client, wrote Quezon
pleading for his intervention since the road foreman had ordered his applicants to abandon me
and required the approval of his rival so they might be accepted on the job.

Quezon apparently went through the motions of an impartial mediation. Several days
after Representative Salcedos complaint, a Malacaang investigator arrived in Iloilo and
Engineer Mallare denied that his foremen had served as Zulueta faction election inspectors.
Although the Public Works Department submitted a report to the President admitting Engineer
Mallares partisanship toward Zulueta, Quezon took no action.

Governor Caram evidently protested President Quezons inaction on the road dispute by
temporarily supporting the oppositions Assembly candidate in the second district against the
official Nacionalista nominee, Lopez faction ally, Oscar Ledesma. In mid-October, Quezon
dispatched Vice President Osemea to Iloilo to mollify Governor Caram. When Osmea promised
to facilitate construction of the Iloilo Provincial Hospital, one of Dr. Carams pet projects, the
Governor announced his full support for the Nacionalista candidate.

As Quezon had seemingly planned, the 11 November congressional elections were a
disaster for the Confesor-Caram faction. Although he spent a week stumping the four districts
where he had candidates, Confesors rhetoric failed to turn the tide against the massive
patronage released in favor of the official ticket. Instead of counting four of the Iloilos five
representatives as his allies as he had done in January, Confesor emerged from the November
elections with none. Elected Governor of Iloilo in December of 1940 because of popularity
created by his courageous refusal to withdraw his candidacy in the ace of insistence on the part
of Mr. Quezon, commented the State Departments Manila officer, his subsequent succumbing
to Quezonian blandishments evidently disgusted the voters, with the result that his faction was
defeated. As the same officer had explained a month earlier, Quezons appointment of Confesor
as Director of the Cooperatives administration was one of the Presidents standard tactics for
controlling party insurgents: One of President Quezons familiar strategies to bring to heel an
insufficiently pliant member of the Nacionalista Party is appointment to a lucrative post. The
strategy usually ends recalcitrance.

Iloilos provincial politics at the close of the Commonwealth era were hardly democratic
ideal that the folk and historical imaginations might have assumed. As Quezon played upon
factional rivalries to maximize his influence, the level of violence escalated, the bureaucracy
became politicized, and partisanship overshadowed major issues. Indeed, the 1941 Iloilo
elections displayed all the negative attributes that so troubled postwar Philippine democracy
systematic fraud, armed thuggery as an electoral tactic, mass violence, and murder. All were
ignored by a central government willing to sacrifice the integrity of the electoral process to
procure results. The executive seems to bear a substantial, if indeterminate, share of
responsibility for the malaise. Preoccupied with the political objective of the moment, Quezon
himself showed little respect for the integrity of law. When it suited his purpose, he interfered in
the judicial process and ignored his own executive regulations. The judiciary and bureaucracy
were so thoroughly politicized by 1941 that one can question whether the respect for law whose
loss Steinberg attributes to the war, had indeed survived the prewar Commonwealth.

The opening months of World War II in Iloilo were eloquent testimony to the violence and
the instability of prewar provincial politics. Little more than a month after factional tension had
peaked for the November 1941 elections, the Japanese invaded Luzon and the Battle of Bataan
began. In the months following the Japanese Occupation of Panay in April 1942, Tomas Confesor
organized a civil resistance government staffed exclusively by his prewar factional followers.
Instead of putting aside parochial enmities in the face of invasion and enemy occupation,
Confesors resistance government devoted its first months to settling scores with their factional
rivals. From 12 July to 5 October 1942 a period of eleven weeks Confesors officials were
responsible for the murder of seven prominent Luzon faction leaders in Iloilo. Most of the killings
involved rival municipal politicians in towns scattered across the length of the province. In
northern Iloilo, the resistance Deputy Governor Benjamin Buyco, the prewar Anilao mayor
restrained by Governor Caram from shooting the road foreman, murdered a Zulueta faction
leader in July 1942. Although Buyco claimed that the victim was collaborating with the Japanese,
the postwar courts were convinced that the killing was politically motivated and sentenced Buyco
to prison.

Governor Confesor himself was personally involved in the execution of two key Zulueta
leaders from San Joaquin, the site of the 1940 electoral violation Iloilo City Police Chief Amando
Perlas and Provincial Board Member Jesus Diez. Although the two had no contact with the
Japanese and had been active in the organization of guerrillas affiliated with the Zulueta faction,
Governor Confesor ordered their arrest in September 1942 on suspicion of collaboration with the
enemy. After his subordinates concluded a detailed interrogation about their role in mounting
the electoral case, their patron Zulueta had failed against Confesor, the resistance Governor then
ordered their execution on grounds of collaboration with the Japanese. Although Confesor was
indicted for their murders after the war, he managed to barter his support for President Quirinos
1949 election campaign to win dismissal of the charges.

Executive Politics at the Center

Although the instruments and tactics were different, President Quezons aims in his
provincial and national maneuvers were the same the perpetuation of his power. Like most all
politicians of his era, Quezon rose from provincial roots and instinctively understood the
importance of a local base in the survival of a national politician. Hence, his assiduous study of
provincial politics was an extension of his more obvious manipulations at the center. While his
involvement in the provincial feuding shifted the balance in regional-national political power
toward the center, his style of executive administration became a model for postwar Philippine
presidents.

Since Quezon never resigned himself to retirement, he did not acquire the dispassion or
the long-term perspective of a national statesman. Determined to extend his tenure, Quezons
every move was designed somehow to complement his short-term political imperatives the
diminution of potential successors and continuing concentration of power. In his quest for power,
most notably his amendments to the constitution, Quezon ignored the precedents he might be
setting for a more ruthless future Philippine president.

As Commonwealth President, Quezon simply refined a system of patronage that he had
developed as Senate President since 1917. Through force of personality and judicious use of
government regulatory and financial agencies, Quezon placed himself at a junction of interaction
between the State and the private corporate sector. As described by historian Friend and
biographer Quirino, he cultivated a coterie of the countrys richest American, Spanish, and
Filipino businessmen. In return for government contracts, loans, or regulatory intervention,
Manilas millionaires made large donations to Quezons Nacionalista faction and generous gifts
to the President himself. When the Commonwealths advent in November 1935 threatened the
gold mining leases of Judge John Hausserman, the wealthiest of American colonias, Quezon
used all his influence in the closing hours of a reluctant Assembly to force passage of a special
law granting the American millionaire ownership of his Benguet mines. House Speaker Quintin
Paredes convinced legislators by telling them it was our duty as loyal followers to redeem the
pledge made by President Quezon, recalled the bills opponent Jose Romero. This kind of
argument was irresistible to a House so fanatically loyal to President Quezon. In so doing,
Quezon violated the intent of the new Commonwealth Constitution which limited foreigners to
fifty-year mining leases.

Quezons wealthy backers were lavish in their support. Andres Soriano of San Miguel
Corporation extended Quezon a P65,000 loan and Joaquin Elizalde of Elizalde y Cia P45,000 on
similarly generous terms. The Philippine Sugar Association contributed amounts up to P50,000
to the Party regularly during the 1930s. Individual planters with large crop loans from the
Philippine National Bank (PNB) were expected to make regular contributions to Quezons wing
of the Nacionalista Party as well. When PNB debtors contributed only P20,000 in July and August
1940, for example, Nacionalista leaders considered this a poor showing and suggested that
Quezon exert pressure on the heavier debtors of the bank for more substantial donations. And
pressure he did. At a birthday party for his son, Quezon asked the wealthy entrepreneur Vicente
Madrigal: Don, you have a gift for the education of your godson? When Madrigal wrote a
cheque for several thousand pesos, Quezon returned saying: Is that the value you place on our
relationship? Madrigal then signed a blank cheque.

All were rewarded for their generosity. Joaquin Elizalde became the Commonwealths
Resident Commissioner in Washington DC. Vicente Madrigal was nominated for the Senate in
1941; and the sugar industry remained the chief beneficiary of the governments financial and
diplomatic resources. When Sorianos leadership of Manilas Falange, the Spanish fascist party,
jeopardized his liberty and property with the approach of World War II, Quezon, over a storm of
public protest, invested him with Philippine citizenship and appointed him Finance Secretary to
allow his escape with the exile government after the Japanese invasion.

Their largesse provided Quezon with invaluable assets in his accumulation of power. His
onerous demands upon almost all of the archipelagos cash rich not only yielded an ample
political capital but just as importantly denied funds to the opposition both inside and outside
the Nacionalista Party. During the Pro-Anti battle over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act in 1932-33,
these donations allowed him, as is well known, to acquire control over a newspaper chain. With
contributions of P71,450 from the wealthy Spanish mestizo element by October 1933 and
monthly donations of P10,000 from the Chinese community, Quezon was able to hire a
remarkable range of supporters including radical peasant leader Patricio Dionisio of the pro
Japanese Tanggalan Society; Amado Castro, head of the communist affiliated tenant union;
Kapatiran Magsasaka, at P100 per month; and Jaconto Manahan, another Kapatiran leader, P150
monthly. Quezon became the main source of national campaign funds for his party, using his
capital to restrain insubordination among the Nacionalista oligarchs. The punishment of
Secretary Elpidio Quriino by the funding of his local rival in the 1938 Assembly elections is but
one example.

Barred form succeeding himself at the end of his six-year term in 1941, President Quezon
took office in 1935 as a lame-duck. Confident in Quezons impeding political demise, his would-
be successors began maneuvering for power Vice President Osmea, former House Speaker
Manuel Roxas, ex-Speaker Quintin Paredes, and Justice Secretary, Jose Yulo. If Quezon were to
exercise real authority and retain sufficient power to win a second term, he would have to hobble
his rivals. Speaking at a Quezon commemoration in 1953, Senator Claro Recto, the
Commonwealth presidents close follower, recalled Quezons tactics:

It is about time that we scrap the legend that Quezon was a sincere and frank, brutally frank,
politician. It was the silliest, shallowest judgement even passed upon the great man Quezon was a
successful politician precisely because he was a master of political intrigue. He knew how to excite, envy,
distrust, ambition, jealously, even among his own loyal followers. Many a garden of Eden was lost to the
unwary politicians that inhabited them because of the serpents he let loose and nurtured there. He played
Roxas against Osmee, Yulo and Paredes against Roxas. Sumulong against Montinolathe Alunan group
and the plantanores (sugar planters) against the Yulo group; the centralistas (sugar millers) in the sugar
industry dominating by means of the loan-giving and loan-denying power of the Philippine National Bank.

Quezons control over leading legislators was not confined to financial or factional
leverage. Behind the statesmanlike image they projected from the podium, Quezon and his
politicos shared a private machismo ethos of womanizing, gambling, and drinking. Such activities
may have played an important role in establishing male bonding and ordering the hierarchy
among the Nacionalista leaders. Although Quezon enjoyed these vices, they did not dominate
him as they did others. Knowing the vulnerabilities of his fellows from their common indulgence,
Quezon exploited the intimacy to dominate weaker men. The appointment of Representative
Tomas Oppus of Leyte to a key post in the 1935 Assembly illustrates Quezons manipulation of
the machismo. Wary of the potential power of the unified Committee on Appropriations, the
most important in the unicameral Assembly, Quezon selected Oppus since they were close
personal friends, compaeros de amiga. Whether for winning, wenching, or gambling.
Biographer Quirino uses this anecdote to explain why Quezon entrusted Oppous with such a
critical post.

Tommy, as everyone called him, frequently approached Don Manuel (Quezon) for a touch = he
was perennially short on funds. One day, he asked for a loan of a thousand pesos.
Caramba, said el Presidente, I just gave you five hundred pesos last week.
This time I need it for a set of false teeth, replied Tommy, opening his mouth with his fingers to
show gaps in his dentures as wide as the grand canyon of Colorado.
Pueta youve caught some disease. Oppus was notorious for a certain method of dalliance
with the fair sex.
But, seor Presidente, what can yhou expect when you take all the good ones and leave me
nothing but the worst!
Tommy Oppus got his thousand pesos without further discussion.

Similarly, Quezon played upon the weakness of House Speaker Quintin Paredes to win his
tacit compliance to demotion and de-facto exile to the United States as Resident Commissioner.
A brilliant and ambitious politician. Paredes had a strong claim to the Speakership in the new
unicameral Assembly. Quezon was concerned about investing a potential successor with such
legislative power and decided to appoint a weaker man as a mere presiding officer. In a 1970
interview with biographer Quirino, Paredes himself related with a grin how the maneuvering
was done in typical Quezonian legerdemain fashion.

Don Quintin [Paredes] had become infatuated with an American divorcee, and had shocked Manila
society by having her as his partner at the official reception given by legislators to the Commonwealth
officials. Why have an elderly woman like that for your friend, when there are younger and more beautiful
ones in the States? asked Commissioner Frank MurphyPerhaps Don Manuel [Quezon] had confided to
Murphy his desire to relieve Don Quintin; at any rate[he] found the suggestion irresistible. When the
Ilocano [Paredes} demurred that the salary and emoluments of office were relatively small, Quezon
promptly remedied the deficiency.

The lavish style of cronyism at the center seems to have been founded, at least in part,
by corruption and conflict of interest. In 1940 for example, the US State Department officer
investigated the escalating expenditures for two new chartered cities, Quezon and Tagaytay.
Since neither population nor economic benefits could explain the high costs, the officer
concluded that the profit motive was the key factor in the creation of the two cities.

Without going into detail as to how profit is obtained by the politicians and their friends concerned
it may be stated that the chief methods are reportedly as follows:
(a) The land which now forms Quezon City was purchased for a few centavos a square meter by certain
politicians and their friends who had prior knowledge of the Governments intention to create the city,
and this land has not greatly increased in value;
(b) The Peoples Homesite Corporation was created to administer the development of the city, and its
membership involves some of the same people involved in the land purchase; and
(c) The Santa Clara Lumber Company, whose personnel is identified with members of the Homesite
Corporation, obtains any contract on any public project in Quezon City it desires. (The activities of Santa
Clara Lumber Company are within the law as, when it submits a bid, the bid is lower than the bid of
competitors, in fact unprofitably low. However, after the Homesite Corporation has awarded the
contract, it alters the plans of the project, thereby freeing the Santa Clara Lumber Company from the
necessity of confining itself to its original estimates.

Until further research is done, there is only inconclusive evidence that Quezon himself
may have profited personally from the land speculation in the new capital city. An inventory of
his conjugal assets in 1930 showed no land holdings in Quezon City, which was not chartered
until October 1939 but did not indicate that his main investments were in real estate speculation
financed by close political allies. After his death in 1944, Quezons estate of P309,000 contained
P78,300 worth of land in Rizal and Quezon City, the largest single asset in the inventory. Under
its charter, Quezon City came under the Presidents direct administration and its mayor at the
time, these allegatiors were made was Tomas Morato, a close Quezon crony from his home
province of Tayabas. Regardless of ethics of the project, its economics were open to serious
question. Although Commonwealth finances were hovering on the brink of collapse and key
military and economic programs were starved for want of funds, President Quezon inaugurated
Quezon City. He was apparently unwilling to leave his immortality to chance, and laid the
cornerstone for a grand capitol building budgeted at P15 million, about 25 percent of the
Commonwealths annual budget. In his report on the economy, the State Departments officer
commented that neither the expenditure nor any other proposed expenditure in connection
with the creation of Quezon City has any real economic value for a country which is essentially
poverty-stricken.

In his pursuit of power, Quezon established the precedent that the incumbent president
can amend the constitution to extend his own term of office. The original 1935 Constitution
provided for nonconsecutive, six-year presidential terms in a conscious attempt to discourage
degeneration into a South American style democracy. As his forced retirement loomed in 1940,
Quezon convened a secret committee of the countrys leading politicians Roxas, Yulo, Recto,
Paredes, Jose Abad Santos to weigh the consequences of amending the constitution to extend
his term. After Dr. Jose P. Laurel spoke against touching a comma of the constitution, the
committee of nine voted five to four against amending the presidential term. Quezon, as we
know, ignored their report. In his letter on the amendments to the White House in July 1940, US
High Commissioner Francis Sayre argued that Quezon had created a precedent for dictatorship.

It can be argued that the extension of the Presidents term from six to a possible eight years
increases the power of one who may be dictatorially inclined and thus under conditions such as prevail here
might endanger democracy. The worst feature of this provision is that it is made applicable to the term of
the President now in office. To change the constitutional provisionin such a way that the term of the
existing President can thereby be prolonged is to create a precedent of exceeding danger to democracy; for
such a precedent opens the way for any strong president who desires to become a dictator to prolong his
tenure of office indefinitely. (Emphasis added).

By the time the Commonwealth was established, Quezon no longer faced any serious
threat from elite opposition parties. His accumulation of power and cooperation of their leaders
no longer left them with significant resources. Even so, he used the powers of the State to harass
them. In late 1934 as General Emilio Aguinaldo prepared his campaign for the Commonwealth
presidency against Quezon, Agriculture Secretary Eulogio Rodriguez Sr., a close Quezon ally,
suddenly discovered the Generals arrears on a twenty-year-old government loan for the
acquisition of a former friar estate in Cavite Province. In one of the very few instances of prewar
land reform, Secretary Rodriguez summarily stripped Aguinaldo of all but 344 hectares and then
distributed the bulk to his tenants.

After the establishment of the Commonwealth, Quezon suddenly faced a new threat from
the rise of radical peasant parties in Central Luzon. Under US colonial rule, the Nacionalista
Partys anti-American rhetoric appealed to mass nationalism and made support for the partys
leaders, notably Quezon, seem an imperative. When independence was assured in 1935,
however, peasant leaders felt free to turn their constituents towards class-based parties.
Evidently responding to the growing influence of the coalesced Communist-Socialist parties,
Quezon proclaimed his social justice policy in February 1939, promising to lift the yoke of
oppression long borne by the Filipino masses. Although historians have lavished praises upon
Quezons policy, it now appears an almost transparent attempt to recapture an ideological
consensus lost with the granting of independence.

After little more than a year of populist gestures and overtures to the revered Socialist
leader Pedro Abad Santos, Quezon abandoned his social justice program for a militant
anticommunism. The key legislative battle over the issue came in early 1941 when landlord
legislators introduced a bill to repeal the Rice Share Tenancy Act of 1933, a rather moderate law
which was the major social justice legislation of the American era. Despite his promises to lift
the yoke of oppression, Quezon lent his support to the reactionary bill and consequently, it
passed the Assembly without difficulty. On 22 June, the day the bill was to become law,
Malacaangs Executive Secretary told the press that the President would not veto it. At the last
hour, however, Quezon apparently decided that repeal of the countrys only social justice
legislation was bad politics in a n election year and reluctantly vetoed the bill. Indicative of his
decisive shift to the right, Quezons veto message admitted his initial support for the bill and
attacked peasant radicals in strong terms that endorsed the bills conservative aims.

The tenancy bill was but one move in an escalating government attack on the peasant
parties that seemed headed toward a violent confrontation when the war intervened. On 31
May, the President had placed all seven Central Luzon provinces under Constabulary control, the
most extensive use of paramilitary forces since Macario Sakays revolt of 1905. On 15 June, Labor
Secretary Leon Guinto addressed twenty to thirty thousand members of Governor Sotero
Baluyuts antiradical society in Pampanga, mainly strike-breakers and hacienda guards,
encouraging them to destroy the socialism that creates abuses and praising them as the man
who will deliver a death blow to socialism. Four days later, President Quezon himself made
disparaging references to Filipino socialists and communists in his Loyalty Day address.

Responding to these attacks in a public address, Socialist leader Pedro Abad Santos said
that workers can expect nothing from President Quezon because he is also a landlord His so-
called social justice is a farce. Reviewing the six years of Commonwealth government, Abad
Santos denied that workers were now freer or more prosperous: On the more contrary, the
workers and peasants enjoy less freedom and are subjected to more oppression than under the
former American rule, while the living and working standards of the masses have sunk to the
bottom of destitution and starvation. Blaming Quezon personally, Abad Santos said that he is
surrounded by sycophants and henchmen who abuse the power the Malacaang master
delegates to them to further their own personal and political interests.

Three weeks later, the government moved beyond rhetoric when some one thousand
worker delegates from Central Luzon met in Manila to form the Legion of Quezonian Socialism
dedicated to total war against local communists and fascists. Conference resolutions included
censure of Filipinos adhering to Soviet communism and those whoattack the administration
of President Quezon. In October, only four weeks before the 1941 national elections, Abad
Santos withdrew as presidential candidate of the radical Frente Popular charging systematic
harassment. In his letter of withdrawal, the Socialist leader explained that under existing
conditions, it is futile to remain as a candidate for any position. In the November elections, his
party suffered sharp reverses and all its Assembly candidates were soundly defeated by the
Nacionalistas.
Viewed in retrospect, Quezons social justice policy seems not a rhetorical flourish
proclaiming government intervention on the side of the poor, but a rhetorical feint masking State
repression of the radical peasant movement. After coopting the radical rhetoric of social justice
in 1939, Quezon moved systematically to destroy the independent peasant organizations in
1940-41: repeal of existing tenancy legislation; paramilitary repression; inflammatory antiradical
rhetoric; harassment of peasant political parties; and finally, formation of an official national-
socialist party to battle the left for loyalty of the mass.

Philippine-American Clientelism

President Quezons apparent monopoly on American political patronage was an
important element in his dominance over Manila politics. Despite the elevation of a Filipino
president to Malacaang Palace, clientelist ties between senior American and Filipino officials
remained a significant factor in Philippine politics. The creation of the Commonwealth did,
however, produce major changes in the dynamics of clientelist ties.

Although the Tydings-McDuffie independence act transferred most of the powers of the
colonial governor-general to an autonomous Commonwealth president during the ten-year
transition to independence, American sovereignty remained. Until independence in 1945,
President Quezon would have powers that were , in strict legal terms, no greater than those of
an American state governor. While Quezon could initiate all manner in domestic legislation,
subject to the approval of the US president, he could not conduct his own foreign relations to
take full control over national defense. Unlike an American state whose autonomy was protected
under the US Constitution, the Commonwealth was subject to constant oversight by the US High
Commissioner, the personal representative of the US President. Although Washington was
reluctant to intervene Commonwealth affairs, the threat remained and was by itself a compelling
reason for Quezon to mind his American patrons.

There were, moreover, major areas of Philippine national policy, trade, and defense that
required continuing negotiations with the United States. At the Commonwealths creation in
1935, the Philippines lacked both the money and means for its own defense. Writing their
Washington superiors in March 1934, the commanders of the US Navy and Army forces in the
Islands warned that the tremendous strides made in the art of warfareand the spectacular rise
of Orange [Japan] as a military powerhave combined to make defense of Manila Bay and
Corregidor futile with the forces available. Arguing that a statement of National Policy
concerning the defense on the Philippine Islands is a matter of primary importance, they urged
that the United States either provide adequate forces for their defense or declare their de facto
neutralization by withdrawal of almost all US forces.

Since the United States refused to take either course, the Philippine Commonwealth was
caught in a cruel trap. The presence of a weak US garrison incapable of defending the country
was still sufficient to provoke a Japanese attack. Quezons solution to the dilemma was to hire as
his military advisor the US Armys retiring Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur. Using the
Philippine governments limited budget, MacArthur planned to build a large reserve army strong
enough to serve as a deterrent to invasion.

The development of an independent economy was the other main problem that
confronted the Commonwealth. By 1935, the Philippine economy and government revenues
were totally dependent on duty free access to the US market, a privilege that was to be gradually
withdrawn over the ten-year life of the Commonwealth. In 1934, the president of the leading
American trading firm in Manila Horace Pond, calculated that the present government revenues
of P56 million would shrivel only to P13 million once the US market closed. Indeed, by 1938 the
US Governments transfer of its excise collections on Philippine coconut imports, a completely
voluntary act, was providing about one-third of the Commonwealths revenues. The sugar
industry, which absorbed over 50 percent of the countrys banking capital, sent 100 percent of
its exports to the United States and was barred by its inefficiency from competing in the world
market. Faced with a massive task of economic conversion, Quezon and his advisors sought their
solution in an extended, perhaps permanent, preferential trade relationship with the United
States.

Trade and defense together with Americas approval of the Commonwealths internal
administration were the substantive issues that serve as the foci of Philippine-American political
interactions. Although Americas role in Philippine politics remained, the clientelist dynamics now
changed markedly from the colonial era. The US withdrawal had placed some distance in the
relationship and depersonalized the dyad. While an American governor-general could intervene
directly in Philippine politics by shifting his patronage from one party to another, Washington no
longer had such leverage over President Quezon. In the first decade of colonial rule, War
Secretary Taft could destroy Federalista leader T.H. Pardo de Tavera by shifting American
patronage to the rival Nacionalistas. Thirty years later, Quezon won the Commonwealth
presidential elections with a party machine unreceptive, if not hostile, to American interference.
Convinced that Quezon was the only Filipino leader capable of effecting their disengagement
without undue difficulty, American officials were not interested in considering alternatives.

Moreover, the shift from colonialism to quasi-independence had given Washington ample
leverage to protect its few remaining interests. Once the date for independence was set and the
Commonwealth transition safely underway, the Philippines were no longer an immediate
American dependency or political concern. Under colonial rule, US responsibility for the stability
of the Philippines and reliance upon a Filipino elite to maintain it gave the Nacionalistas through
their capacity to withhold Filipino cooperation a certain leverage over American administrators.
American colonials had to make the government function and could not do that without men like
Quezon. The transfer of limited sovereignty to the Commonwealth denied Filipinos that leverage.

After 1935, President Quezon had very few levers to pull when dealing with Washington.
The Philippines were considered a strategic liability in a war with Japan and the Navy no longer
wanted its bases. Philippine products competed with US domestic industries and were no longer
welcome. But the Tydings-McDuffie Law did allow one possible source of patronage when it
transferred the Philippines from the War Department to the executive branch. Denied a
governor-general or a cabinet secretary as a bureaucratic patron in Washington, Quezons only
possibly tactic for winning concessions was to appeal directly to the US Presidents sense of moral
responsibility for the future welfare of the Islands. Changes in the law thus forced Quezon to
adopt a new rhetoric. Instead of the moving anti-American speeches of the colonial era, he
appealed to the US Presidents sense of moral responsibility for the Philippines. Hence, the
language of the special relationship was born.

Unfortunately for Quezon, the Tydings-McDuffie Law also provided an American High
Commissioner to serve as the US Presidents personal representative in Manila and sole channel
of communication between Malacaang and the White House. If the US President were to
become Quezons patron and the Philippines protector, then the High Commissioner would have
to be pushed aside.

Under the Commonwealth, there was incessant struggle between President Quezon and
the US High Commissioner whether he was the amiable Michigan politician Frank Murphy
whom Quezon really liked or the aloof diplomat Francis Sayre who he despised. In his battles
against the High Commissioner, Quezon used a variety of tactics. In defense matters where lines
of authority were muddled, Quezon played his client MacArthur against Commissioner Murphy,
using the retired Chief of Staffs contacts to deal directly with the US Army. In matters of trade,
Quezon avoided dealing directly with Commissioner Paul McNutt by winning President
Roosevelts support for a joint executive commission, the Joint Preparatory Committee on
Philippine Affairs. Finally, Quezon neutralized Commissioner Sayres opposition to his domestic
legislation by dragging him into public debate and beating him at bureaucratic infighting with his
superiors.

The first battle in this bureaucratic war came over Quezons defense program. After his
appointment in 1935, General MacArthur proposed the formation of a Swiss-style citizens army
and, with Quezons support, won an appropriation which increased the military expenditure from
6.8 to 21.8 percent of the budget. Without approval from any American authority, MacArthur
began negotiating directly with the US Army for massive arms purchases. The bureaucratic
skirmish began in January 1936 when the War Departments General Embick notified States Far
Eastern Division that MacArthur had telegrammed the Chief of Staff soliciting sale by the War
Department to the Philippine Government of 4,500 Browning guns and 400,000 rifles. For
reasons not fully explicit, General Embick felt such undesirable and State concurred.

In May, High Commissioner Murphy joined battle against the MacArthur plan with a
detailed forty-one page memo marshalling an array of arguments against the Commonwealths
defense program. Angered that both he and local US military commanders were not consulted
and were virtually ignored, Murphy complained that MacArthurs military mission is apparently
free to communicate and negotiate on behalf of.[the Commonwealth] Government
independently of the High Commissioner. Murphy recommended in the strongest possible
terms that MacArthur be placed under the joint control of the High Commissioner (himself) and
Commander of the US Armys Philippine Department.

Ignoring completely the Philippines need for an independent defense capability, Murphy
claimed that the arms sales posed a serious threat to US control over the Islands. The supply of
400,000 rifles and 4,000 Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs) to Quezon would inaugurate a
significant change in conditions and Philippine-American relations. Philippine forces would
outnumber the US Army in the islands and could threaten the security of the United States
military and civil authority. Over the long term, such powerful Philippine forces placed major
restraints upon US policy options. The existence of a well-equipped and superior military
forceeven though insufficient against a determined attack by a first class military power might
present a serious practical obstacle to [US military] intervention, might amount to practical
nullification of the right. For these reasons, Murphy urged that the amount of arms furnished
to the Commonwealth Government should be carefully restricted, in order that effective
authority of the United States Government should not be subject to any uncertainty or doubt.

Commissioner Murphys apocalyptic memo eventually set off alarm bells in the US State
and War departments. In July, Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre wrote the Secretary that
Murphys memo had described a situation of extraordinary gravity. From other sources Sayre
learned that 75,000 rifles were already en route to Manila, enough to supply a Philippine Army
that would greatly outnumber the US garrison of 10,500 men, of which only about 4,000, I
believe, are American. In addition to the approach to the War Department for arms, the
Filipinos are negotiating with private arms manufacturers andhave told the Connecticut
firmthat if the firm does not take favorable action they may turn to Japanese or other firms.
Sayre concluded with a dire warning that the situation is of such utmost gravity and concern so
vitally and directly the State Department that Murphy should be supported when he meets with
President Roosevelt on his visit to Washington next week.

The consensus for Murphys position built gradually. In September, four months after the
High Commissioners original memo, a State Department officer again reviewed the situation and
urged that action be taken since the Philippine defense program is one which may be highly
prejudicial to the interests of the United States. Two weeks later, Secretary of State Cordell Hung
wrote the Acting Secretary of War that the Philippine defense measures were inextricably
interwoven with some of the vital problems of our Far Eastern policy. Since Philippine foreign
relations remained an American prerogative, Secretary Hull insisted that the rapidity of
accumulation of armament be stopped until its implications for Americas underlying Far
Eastern policies could be studied.

The sensitivity of defense matters made a decisive Quezon victory on the arms issue
impossible. Judging from the strong, even panicked tone of American reaction to his purchase of
light arms, Quezon would probably have met evasion or denial if he had solicited even the 75,000
rifles through the proper channel of the High Commissioners office. By playing his client General
MacArthur against his nominal patron Murphy, Quezon secured an initial shipment of 75,000
rifles through the informal US arms blockade, enough for his initial training program and a minor
victory in the context of colonial reactions.

In dealing with Philippine-American trade relations, a second major area of concern,
President Quezon had far less room for maneuver. Under strong pressure from powerful
domestic interests, the US government was progressively reducing the Philippines preferential
import duties to zero over the ten-year life of the Commonwealth. Since his only avenue to
revision of these terms was through the White House, Quezon interceded with President
Roosevelt in 1937 to convene a special executive committee to reexamine Philippine-American
trade relations, the Joint Preparatory Committee on Philippine Affairs. With the instincts of one
socialized into colonial clientelism, Quezon attended the first meeting and suggested that the
Philippines might be willing to give military and naval bases to the United States in exchange for
preferential trade relations. Representing the United States, Assistant Secretary Sayre replied
that there would be no bargaining since the committees function was to frame a plan
whereby the Philippines could wean itself of the preferences in the American market with the
least dislocation of its national economy. Without Quezons further assistance, the committee
deliberated for months before recommending measures to blunt the sudden severance of
preferential trade. Sayres refusal to deal or bargain, to enter into a clientelist relationship,
would greatly complicate his dealings with Quezon when he became US High Commissioner two
years later.

President Quezons heated public disputes with High Commissioner Sayre in 1940-41
restored something of the personal quality to clinetelist relations not seen since the end of
colonial rule. While Murphy had maintained his public amity with Quezon as he vented his private
enmity towards MacArthur, Sayres clash with Quezon was personal and public. Convinced that
Quezons growing authoritarianism posed a genuine threat to the future of Philippine democracy,
Sayre was determined to use the vestiges of American power to slow the progress to dictatorship.

Appointed High Commissioner in late 1939, Sayre appears to have maintained a surface
cordiality until mid-July 1940 when President Quezon made a series of moves seemingly hostile
towards democracy. On 18 June, Filipinos had voted in a national plebiscite to approve the
constitutional amendments, extending Quezons term of office from six to eight years and
reestablishing the Senate, measures that aroused Sayres concern. Only four weeks later, on 15
July, Quezon introduced the Emergency Powers bill into the Assembly allowing himself
exceptional authority in times of crisis. The following day, in a formal address at the University of
the Philippines, he declared that opposition parties and individual liberties were two
democratic fetishes that must be discared. When Commissioner Sayre defended the role of
opposition parties in a democracy, Quezon replied: We, the Filipinos, have to do our own
thinking and learn from the lessons of contemporary history or bust.

On 25 July, in a letter to President Roosevelt on the subject of the constitutional
amendments, Sayre warned that the provision for the proposed Senate points in the direction
of a dictatorial or oligarchical control of government rather than of democracy and the extension
of Quezons term would create a precedent of exceeding danger to democracy. Shifting from
democratic principles to clientelist politics, Sayre concluded by advising Roosevelt that his veto
could discredit Quezon politically and would strike a blow at his political power. Recommending
that approval be withheld for four or five months, Sayre explained that you have an available
power over President Quezon which, if you so desired, could be used with great effect. On 2
August, Sayre telegrammed Roosevelt requesting instructions to pressure Quezon into
withdrawing his Emergency Powers bill. Sayres move against Quezon on this bill received a
setback when Roosevelt responded: I do not wish to embarrass President Quezon on this
matter As a compromise, Roosevelt allowed Sayre to caution Quezon on the use of these
powers.

Sniping exploded into a frontal assault when news of Commissioner Sayres opposition to
the constitutional amendments leaked into the Manila press. As Sayres memorandum of 25 July
opposing the amendments made its slow progress through the State and Interior bureaucracies,
the High Commissioner suffered considerable criticism for his handling of Quezon. On 27
November, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, responding to a call from Quezons old friend Justice
Frank Murphy, wrote President Roosevelt a personal letter urging him to affirmatively support
the Philippine Legislature and President by approving the amendments immediately. As a
friendly gesture, Ickes further suggested that the President advise Speaker Jose Yulo, in
Washington on a mission for Quezon, that the amendments would be approved. Typical of the
muddled administration of Commonwealth affairs in Washington, the Philippines had recently
been transferred to the Interior Department, perhaps giving Secretary Ickes cause to build his
authority by undercutting Sayre. For whatever reason, the Interior Department began leaking
documents in a way that created serious problems for Sayre. Only a day after Ickes wrote this
letter to the White House, the Manila newspapers carried a dispatch from the United Press
Washington correspondent with remarkably accurate details of its contents. According to the
State Departments Manila officer, Filipinos viewed the report as an intentional leak designed
to please Mr. Quezon and to discredit the High Commissioner.

Two days after news of Roosevelts formal approval reached Manila, Quezon issued a
statement saying that the US President was, in fact, strictly circumscribed in his veto powers and,
as a progressive and liberal sympathetic to the Philippines, had approved the amendments as
a matter of course. Deftly Quezon gave the issue a clientelist cast with himself the winner of
Roosevelts patronage and Sayre the loser. On 6 December, High Commissioner Sayre told a press
conference that the power of the US President to veto Philippine legislation was in no way
circumscribed. Rising form his sickbed three days later, Quezon convened his first press
conference in some weeks to denounce Sayres views as those of a notary public in some small
Philippine village.

Reacting to news of the two press conferences, the Interior Departments Director of
Territories prepared a memo for Secretary Ickes on 10 December commenting that was
deplorable that the High Commissioner should allow himself to be dragged into a press
controversy. In an implicit comment on proper tactics for a colonial patron, the Director blamed
Sayre for failing to strike a patron-like posture.

Mr. Sayres predecessors, both Governor General and High Commissioner, who have been more
successful in their dealings with the Filipinos, have, even if openly attacked, refused to make public
statements in reply. There is nothing to be gained from such controversies which delight the Filipinos and
it impairs the prestige of the High Commissioner as the Presidents representative when he engages in
them.

On 12 December, only a day after this memorandum reached Secretary Ickes desk,
banner headlines in the Manila newspapers heralded a United Press Washington reported that
administration circles associated with Philippine affairs had prepared a memorandum critical
of High Commissioner Sayre. I scarcely need to suggest that the publication of this report,
commented the State Departments Manila officer, together with its implications, encourage
Mr. Quezon in his striving for increased powersat the expense of American authority, and
confirms the impression among Filipinos that American officials in Washington have been
successfully manipulated by Filipino leaders. Consequently, support of Mr. Quezon by the
Filipino people is strengthened. Similarly, Speaker Yulo had gained prestige several weeks
before when Filipinos thought that approval of the amendments by President Roosevelt was
largely due to the weight of Mr. Yulos presence in Washington and of his ability to influence
officials there. Since the Commonwealth President was trying to advance Yulo as his successor
to restrain Osmea and Roxas, the earlier press leak from Washington had, in the owrds of the
State Department officer, played directly into Mr. Quezons hands.

Obviously stung by the leaks and Quezons attacks, Commissioner Sayre wrote Roosevelt
on 13 December asking for his intervention. Instead, the US President responded in terms both
soothing and critical. Despite President Quezons somewhat impulsive disposition which can
occasionally make him difficult, Roosevelt expected his High Commissioner to tolerate a
constant succession of pin pricks that will be trying to the soul.

When the Commonwealth needed additional defense funds from Washington in April
1941, the two antagonists engaged in another revealing round of clientelist politics. In his
telegram to the Interior Department on 4 April, Sayre did not dispute the need for funds and
urged their approval. Demonstrating concern over his weak position in Manila politics, he asked
that the defense aid be placed under the joint control of the Philippine and American military
commanders with himself designated as the mediator. More importantly, all future
communications from the White House to Malacaang should be routed through Sayres office
with a suggested opening line designed to depersonalize the Quezon-Roosevelt dyad: Please
inform President Quezon (or even better, The Commonwealth Government).

The following day, President Quezon telegrammed Secretary Ickes directly, avoiding the
High Commissioners office, to make a similar plea for defense funds. In an obvious move to win
a Washington patron and undercut the High Commissioner, Quezon added that Sayre seems to
be lacking of that sympathy which have been accustomed to expect from those who have
represented the United Statesbeginning with Governor General Taft down to the predecessor
of the present High Commissioner. Since Quezon may well have suspected that Ickes was the
source of those very useful press leaks, it was logical overture.

As disputes over defense preparation escalated through October, Quezon transformed a
testimonial dinner for Sayre into a demonstration of clientelist loyalties. Almost the entire
Commonwealth cabinet boycotted the affair on Quezons order, and only those with
independent political base could attend. Vice President Osmea, the most powerful of the
Presidents rivals, defied Quezons suggestion that he boycott. Ex-Secretary Manuel Roxas,
always ambivalent toward Quezons authority, attended but allowed the President to redraft his
speech on behalf of the Filipinos. Reconciled with his patron Quezon after months of tension,
General MacArthur absented himself for a sudden inspection of his troops in Baguio. This
incident, the last before the Japanese invasion two months later, illustrates the clientelist, rather
than racial, character of politics at this level under the Commonwealth. In a ritual test of loyalties,
Osmea, Quezons peer Filipino rival, could defy the Commonwealth president; but General
MacArthur, Quezons pawn in his match against Sayre, could not.

An obscure and surprising relationship illustrates the continuing importance of colonial
clientelism under the Commonwealth. As Quezons antiradical campaign and his battles with
Sayre intensified throughout 1941, an extraordinary patron-client bond developed between
Laurence E. Salisbury, the US Foreign Service officer assigned to the High Commissioners office,
and Pedro Abad Santos, head of the Communist-Socialist coalition. Although an apparent
ideological mismatch, their close alliance was a natural one within the Commonwealths
clientelist politics.

Evidently, a New Deal liberal with a strong commitment to social democracy, Salisbury
was soon disenchanted with Quezons style of power politics. After many years of service in Japan
and China, Salisbury was assigned to Manila in January 1940 as an observer attached to the High
Commissioners office. During his first months in Manila, he was sympathetic to Quezon.
Reviewing the controversial constitutional amendments in June 1940, he expressed no strong
reservations about the extension of President Quezons term and described him as the most
capable leader among the Filipinos. It was Quezons attacks upon democracy in mid-July that
antagonized Salisbury. In his Monthly Political Report, Salisbury noted that the Presidents
trend towards totalitarianism and criticized the wave of reactionary social legislation that
Quezon was sponsoring to strip workers of their few rights the eight-hour work day, the right
to strike, and the right to withhold land rent during a tenancy dispute. By August, Salisbury was
so concerned about the trend toward totalitarianism indicated by Quezons concentration of
powers that he, like High Commissioner Sayre, urged considerations of formal US intervention
in defense of democracy. Thereafter, Salisbury became sharply critical of the regimes
performance: Colonel Manuel Nieto, Quezons procurer of women, rewarded with an
appointment as chairman of the National Tobacco corporation; crony corruption in the
development of Quezon City; trends indicating that President Quezon is constantly and
successfully making himself a dictator; and, Quezons 9 December attack on Sayre as a studied
outburstclearly showing his hatred of any authority greater than his own.

As the Commonwealths antiradical repression began to erode his electoral and union
base among Central Luzon, peasants in June 1941, Socialist leader Abad Santos approached
Salisbury to offer a classic clientelist entente. In his four-page Memorandum, Abad Santos gave
a friendly warning that Quezon and his fellow fascists will, in the event of war, turn against
the Americans and cooperate with the enemies of the United States. Since the regime had
business connectionswith Spanish Fascists, Falagists, Japanese and were no longer assured of
the American market, Quezon and his men are secretly negotiating with agents of Axis
governments. The radical Frente Popular, by contrast, would never side with Japan or any of
the Axis powers. With his clear understanding of colonial clientelism, Abad Santos offered a
America a bargain. His minimal proposal was for an understanding, or an alliance, to frustrate
any attempt of the Quezon government to betray our people and our country, together with the
interests of the United Sataes. Better still, he suggested that the United States withdraw its
patronage from Quezon and install a Frente Popular government to protect American interests.

If a popular government, representing the workers, peasants and landlords, could be set up in the
Philippines, American interest would be safer..A popular government would maintain a sort of open door
for the benefits of the people. It could enter into agreement on free and equal basis with the United States
for the mutual protection of the interest of the two countries. But if the Quezon government or another of
the same elements continue in power, we are certain that they will deliver the country to the Japanese, for
the present ruling class cannot hold its power and privileges without the support of a strong foreign power.

As a liberal, Salisbury was intrigued by the offer but as a realist he realized its impossibility.
In his covering letter to the State Department introducing the Memorandum, he described Abad
Santos as a leading liberal who was head of the Socialists, and not the Communists. The writer
of this dispatch has met Mr. Santos a number of times and regards him as superior to most
Commonwealth officials in honesty, integrity, and patriotism. Through a detailed ten-page
analysis of the Quezon regime, Salisbury showed that there was substance to Abad Santoss
allegation of fascist sympathies. Manilas wealthy and powerful Spanish community was strongly
pro-Franco and the Catholic Church had a strong Reactionary influence upon the ruling Filipino
class. Doa Aurora Quezon, the First Lady, frequently interfered in politics at the behest of
Catholic dignitaries and is now bringing pressure to bear within the government, on the behest
of the Catholic Archbishop, to take stronger measures against politically organized tenant
farmers in Central Luzon in order to assist the large landowners.

In an interview following presentation of the Memorandum, Salisbury questioned Abad
Santos on his plans to implement this anti-Quezon understanding with American representatives.
He said for the time being all that he desired was a channel (meaning the writer of this dispatch)
through which the views of his group might reach American authorities.

 The channel began to operate. Six weeks later on 17 July, Socialist leader Abad Santos and
Communist Party chairman Crisanto Evangelista called upon US High Commissioner Sayre to
express the loyalty of their parties to the United States. Despite Commonwealth allegations that
they were disloyal to the United States, their followers would fight to defend the Philippines in
the event of invasion. When Sayre asked if they had any request to make of US officials, Abad
Santos replied that he and his party wished only to have the moral support of the American
authorities. Although Sayre explained that he could not interfere with the Commonwealth
government, he concluded the interview by thanking the radical leaders for the assurance that
in the event of troubles, the Government of the United States could depend upon the loyalty of
Mr. Santos and his followers.

When President Quezon began lobbying the United States for a massive loan to bail out
the war-troubled sugar industry, Abad Santos, showing considerable clientelist acumen, again
used the channel. On 15 September, Salisbury reported to Washington that Abad Santos had
offered considered opposition to the sugar loan, claiming it would not benefit peasants and
would strengthen reactionary planters whose inclinations are basically inimical to Americas
best interest. Twelve days later, Salisburys report was given a favorable if guarded endorsement
by the State Departments Office of Philippine Affairs. It is suggested that before any final action
is taken with regard to monetary assistance to the sugar industry, wrote the desk officer, a
thorough canvassing of the possibilities should be undertaken andthe High Commissioner asked
to make recommendations from the Philippines. The High Commissioner was, of course, Sayre
Salisburys superior, Quezons enemy, and Abad Santoss prospective ally. For a Socialist whose
discourse dealt with the materialist impersonalities of class and capital, Abad Santos showed skill
as clientelist politics. When Quezon, strengthen by Washingtons patronage, sought to destroy
Abad Santoss mass peasant base, the Socialist leader sensibly sought his political survival by the
cultivation of an American patron.

Conclusion

Although the Salisbury-Abad Santos relationship has no significant impact on the progress
of Philippine history, it nonetheless reveals the continuing importance of clientelist ties between
Filipinos and Americans under the Commonwealth. Although generally treaded in isolation,
Philippine-American interactions, even at the highest levels, were integral to Filipino domestic
politics. Indeed, politics at the provincial, national, and colonial levels were elements in a single,
interacting system. None can be understood in isolation. The consummate political rationalist,
Quezon appears to have devoted an equal effort in 1940 to the manipulation of Governor
Confesor, Secretary Roxas, and High Commissioner Sayre. As Quezon himself no doubt
understood, control over one required control over the others.

Considering Commonwealth politics in a broader analytical context, it seems that our
models of clientelist politics, particularly in a colonial context, need some revision. In writing
about the Philippines and Southeast Asia, Carl Lande and James C. Scott traced chains of patron-
client dyads from their rice roots in the villages to a regional or national capital but no further.
As should be clear from politics in the Philippine Commonwealth, these dyads do not end in the
capital of Manila, but extend to the metropolis, Washington, and involve national patrons in
clinetelist relations with powerful American leaders who, in turn, become their patrons. In
understanding Southeast Asian clientelist systems, analysts of these external patron-client ties
would seem necessary before we can fully understand the internal working of domestic policies.