We don't know about Don Sergio Osmeña

It’s a holiday in Cebu today as it is the 131st birthday of former Commonwealth President, the late Don Sergio Osmeña Sr., one of the greatest Filipinos who ever lived and still the only Cebuano who became President of the Philippines. For many years, Cebuanos have fondly called Don Sergio as the “Grand Old Man of Cebu”, but after reading books about Don Sergio, we learned that his exploits happened when he was a very young man. He just happened to have lived a long life, which is why most of us who were growing up in the 50s thought of him as the Grand Old Man of Cebu.

I learned a lot about the life of Don Sergio when the late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Marcelo “Celing” Fernan asked me to join the Cebu Newspaper Worker’s Foundation (CENEWOF) in 1980. One of our annual activities was the holding the Don Sergio Osmeña Memorial Lectures from 1980 to 1992 with very important speakers who taught us about the qualities and traits of Don Sergio that made him a great man. While we have already stopped having the Osmeña Memorial lecture, we can still read books about the life and times of Don Sergio Osmeña, Sr.

When my father passed away in 1979, I got the two volume biography of Don Sergio Osmeña Sr. authored by Vicente Albano Pacis (which he bought in Alemar’s for only P48). It is a treasure trove for historians who should read not only the history of Don Sergio, but also the history of the birth of the Philippines as a nation of which Don Sergio played a major role. While we’ve written a lot about Don Sergio Osmeña, there are still a lot of things that most Cebuanos do not know about the greatness of the man and the history behind him.

All Filipinos Pres. Manuel L. Quezon’s famous phrase, “My loyalty to my party ends where my loyalty to my country begins.” This was said during the launching of the Nationalists Collectivist Party in the Manila Opera House. But former UN Secretary General Carlos P. Romulo who wrote the foreword of the Osmeña biography noted, “Incidentally as a newspaperman, I saw Osmeña the following day (after Quezon made that famous remark) and he said to me, ‘I have always held that loyalty to party is part of the larger loyalty to country. They are not contradictory but supplementary. But Quezon is, of course, free to think in the way he does.’”

Don Sergio and Manuel Quezon were classmates and barkadas in Letran. Their paths always crossed. They complimented each other and debated many times on opposite sides of issues. But when Don Sergio was chosen as the Speaker of the Assembly (at a very young age of 29) it was Manuel Quezon who nominated Osmeña to that historic position.

In his preface, biographer Vicente Albano Pacis said this of Don Sergio, “In 1907 at the age of 29, he burst upon the Philippine national scene to become the official leader and spokesman of the Filipinos. He was soon also acknowledged the best interpreter to his people of America’s presence and purpose in the Philippines.

More than anyone else, American or Filipino, he wedded Filipino nationalism and American “Imperialism” together into a movement that directly resulted in the world’s first negotiated and peaceful Independence of a colony from a colonial power. Philippine Independence became the prototype of the general world decolonization that followed World War II.”

Frankly speaking, until I read that part of Osmeña’s biography, I did not realize that his noble deed had in effect changed the world!

One thing I wanted to look for was Don Sergio’s commonality with his friend, my grandfather Don Jose Avila, aside from their being Cebuanos. One of them is their ability to speak English. My grandfather was the son of a Spanish Friar Fr. Manuel Rubio Fernandez, Parish Priest of Carcar who finished the present church. Because of the shame and scandal in the family, my grandpa was sent to St. Joseph’s College in Hong Kong and learned to speak English with a British accent.

According to his biographer, Don Sergio apparently learned to speak English from a very famous personality, Ms. Josephine Bracken! Yes, the Irish wife of our National Hero Dr. Jose Rizal, who apparently re-married a Cebuano businessman Don Vicente Abad and brought her out of exile in Hong Kong to live in Cebu. It was then that she gave special English lessons to Don Sergio Osmeña. Author Vicente Albano Pacis though, declared that he didn’t really learn much from her except to read in English. These are just a few rare highlights that we got from Don Sergio’s life and times whose legacy continues to live on 131 years after he was born. If it were up to me, Cebuano students should be made to read a book about Don Sergio Osmeña Sr.