The Boy from Baler
THE GOOD FIGHT (336 pp.)--Manuel Luis Quezon--Applefon-Century ($4).
Riding about the pitiful ruins and damp, weedy shambles of recaptured Manila, G.I. jeep drivers used to refer to the Kweezon Bridge, Kweezon Boulevard, etc. However they mangled the name, sharp, dapper, bantam-sized Manuel Luis Quezon, (rhymes with stays on), late President of the Commonwealth, left his mark on the Philippines.
When he died (of tuberculosis) at Saranac Lake, N.Y., in August 1944, he was to U.S. eyes the First Filipino in more senses than one. Among his countrymen he had critics who deplored his dictatorial ways, but to thousands of other Filipinos he ranked with the great patriots. The Good Fight is Quezon's autobiography. Earnest, mild in its verdicts, limited in range but now & then surprisingly revealing, it is his profession of faith in the U.S., his story of how a boy from the out-of-the-way Luzon barrio of Baler, Tayabas Province, rose in the world.
Head Start. Born in Luzon in 1878 to a Tagalog father and a mestizo, (mixed Spanish-Tagalog) mother, he had something of a head start--both his parents were schoolteachers. Their salary was ample: $6 a month each. Their home was a typical thatched nipa hut on stilts, with chickens scratching and hogs grunting in the mud beneath the ladder leading up to the door. Manila in those days was a full week's journey away, over what are still wild, jungle-covered mountains.
In 1909, at 31, Quezon arrived in Washington as Resident Commissioner to the U.S. from the Filipino people. In 1942, as President of the Commonwealth, he arrived there again, head of a government in exile 9,000 miles from home. The first news of the attack on Pearl Harbor had reached him at Baguio, the Philippine summer capital. While he was still at breakfast, Jap planes were overhead. For two months, from crowded quarters in one of Corregidor's bombproof tunnels, Quezon followed the slow squeeze of Mac-Arthur's army down the rugged peninsula of Bataan.
Quezon's Problem. Forty years earlier, a young guerrilla under Aguinaldo, Quezon himself had surrendered on Bataan to U.S. forces. According to one of the most candid chapters in The Good Fight, this veteran of another Bataan defeat soon decided that the situation under MacArthur was hopeless. At one point he asked himself whether "any government has the right to demand loyalty from its citizens" if it could no longer protect them. At another he considered giving himself up to the Japanese--not, he protests, out of disloyalty but because, in a way he never makes clear, he thought he might thus "solidify the opposition of the Filipinos" against the invading Japanese. Finally, to halt the "possibly useless sacrifice" of Filipino life and property, he proposed in February 1942, that both U.S. and Jap forces be withdrawn and the Philippines "neutralized" and declared wholly independent.
This proposal was approved by the Philippine Cabinet and forwarded to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt replied that the Philippines would be "defended by our own men to the death," whatever the Filipinos themselves might do. The effect of this reply, says Quezon, was "overwhelming. . . . When I realized that [Roosevelt] was big enough to . . . place the burden of the defense of my country upon the sacrifice and heroism of his own people alone, I swore to myself and to the God of my ancestors that as long as I lived I would stand by America. . . ."
Delayed Threat. Quezon's The Good Fight was ready to be published in October 1944--but was delayed because of the protests of Sergio Osmena, who became President on Quezon's death. Osmena protested that its publication might "assist" the Jap war effort or cause "unrest" among the Filipinos. Some of Quezon's friends have seen political motives in this attitude, noting that while The Good Fight speaks in generally friendly terms of Osmena, it gives higher praise to Manuel Roxas, Osmena's victorious rival in the 1946 presidential campaign.
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