Manuel L. Quezon, Filipino soldier, lawyer, and politician, 2nd President of the Philippines (d. 1944)
Manuel Luis Quezon y Molina, (Spanish: [maˈnwel ˈlwis kesoɲ i moˈlina], Tagalog: [maˈnwel ˈluwis kɛson]; 19 August 1878 – 1 August 1944), also referred to by his initials MLQ, was a Filipino statesman, soldier and politician who served as president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1944. He was the first Filipino to head a government of the entire Philippines (as opposed to the government of previous Philippine states), and is considered to have been the second president of the Philippines, after Emilio Aguinaldo (1899–1901), whom Quezon defeated in the 1935 presidential election.
During his presidency, Quezon tackled the problem of landless peasants in the countryside. His other major decisions include the reorganization of the islands' military defense, approval of a recommendation for government reorganization, the promotion of settlement and development in Mindanao, dealing with the foreign stranglehold on Philippine trade and commerce, proposals for land reform, and opposing graft and corruption within the government. He established a government-in-exile in the U.S. with the outbreak of World War II and the threat of Japanese invasion.
It was during his exile in the U.S. that he died of tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York. He was buried in the Arlington National Cemetery until the end of World War II, when his remains were moved to Manila. His final resting place is the Quezon Memorial Circle.
In 2015, the Board of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation approved a posthumous bestowal of the Wallenberg Medal upon President Quezon and to the people of the Philippines for having reached out, between 1937 and 1941, to the victims of the Holocaust. President Benigno Aquino III and then-94-year-old Maria Zenaida Quezon Avanceña, the daughter of the former president, were informed of this recognition.
Scholars have also described Quezon's leadership as a 'de facto dictatorship' (Pante, 2017) and that he was "the first Filipino politician to integrate all levels of politics into a synergy of power", having removed his term limits as president and turning the Senate into an extension of the executive through constitutional amendments (McCoy, 2017, p. 13).