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Successively a provincial governor and Territorial Assemblyman, in 1909 Manuel Quezon made his first trip to Washington as Resident Commissioner. He had no vote in Congress, but he had a voice. That voice soon reached William Atkinson Jones of Warsaw, Va. Representative Jones had been to Manila with the first great Congressional junket in 1905, led by Secretary of War Taft. About the only tangible result of that trip was the betrothal of Representative Nicholas Longworth and Alice Roosevelt. But eight years later, the Democrats took over in Washington and Mr. Jones became Chairman of the House Insular Affairs Committee. With Manuel Quezon at his elbow. Chairman Jones wrote the act which gave the Islands a bicameral Legislature, a Cabinet of six, of which five had to be Filipinos, and promised to set them free at the earliest possible moment. That moment had to wait until the Democrats ruled Washington again.
In the intervening 19 years Manuel Quezon spent most of his time rocking his political weight back and forth between two positions: whether to demand independence at once or take it when the U. S. was ready to give it. He electioneered alternately on this pair of platforms, depending on the mood of the voters. That Manuel Quezon always picked the right side is testified by the fact that he was the one and only President of the Philippine Senate.
During these busy political years, Manuel Quezon gained a wife, four children, a valuable political ally in the person of Sergio Osmena (now Vice President of the Commonwealth), the Grand Mastery of the Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of the Philippine Islands, the presidency of the Nationalista Consolidado Party which runs the Philippines almost as Tammany used to run New York City, the presidency of Manila Railroad Co. and Manila Hotel, a trusteeship in the University of the Philippines and a membership in the Wack Wack Golf Club. He has also earned the esteem of thousands of Nationalist Filipinos who address him respectfully as "Don Manuel" and hail him as the Father of His Country.
Don Manuel once expressed his own Nationalist philosophy (1921) as follows: "We [Filipinos] are like, let us say, a young married couple starting out in life. A mother-in-law is helping run their establishment. She may be a perfectly admirable woman, kind, generous, affectionate, wise and the best cook on earth, but the young household does not want her. . . . A block down the street, or across the river, the household thinks of her with profound affection and regard . . . but it does not want her forever stirring the pot and dominating the bill of fare."
19 Guns. The British, who claim to know most about bossing "natives," lifted a disapproving eyebrow when it became known that the U. S. was going to let the Filipinos keep house independently. White prestige in the Orient would be definitely lowered when a brown man replaced a white man in Malacanan Palace. One pre-inaugural problem was whether brown Manuel Quezon was to get a 21-gun salute to white Frank Murphy's 19, ultimately solved by giving them both 19.