Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The US Occupation of the Philippines

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

The Philippines is one of the largest countries in the world. With a population of 115 million people, it is the 14th largest country in the world in terms of population.  However, for a period of 48 years, it was a colony of the United States. That half-century was one of the most important in the history of the Philippines. It saw two major wars, profound social and cultural changes, and laid the foundation for full independence.  Learn more about the period of American occupation of the Philippines and how it changed both countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Philippines is one of the largest countries in the world. With a population of 115 million people, it's the fourth largest country on earth in terms of population. However, for a period of 48 years, it was actually a colony of the United States. That half century was one of the most important in the history of the Philippines. It saw two major wars, profound social and cultural changes, and laid the foundation for full independence. Learn more about the period of American occupation of the Philippines and how it changed both countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have

gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The United States went through a very brief phase of trying to become a colonial power. And by that, I mean they actively wanted to acquire territories outside of North America to run as colonies, not just generally stick their nose in other people's business. By very brief, I pretty much mean the presidency of William McKinley.

McKinley isn't high in the list of presidents that most people think of, but he was elected president twice, even if his second administration was cut down by assassination. and a lot happened while he was president. Almost all U.S. territories outside of the North American continent were acquired during the McKinley administration. Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, American Samoa, very briefly Cuba, and the subject of this episode, the Philippines. The Philippines is the outlier in the list of territories I just mentioned.

Its size and population were several times greater than everything else put together. The United States wasn't even looking to annex the Philippines when they went to war with Spain. They were more concerned about Cuba. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay, and this victory paved the way for U.S. involvement in the Philippines. When the opportunity arose to take the Philippines, the McKinley administration grabbed it. The Filipinos had been fighting against the Spanish for centuries. Now that the Spanish were out, the last thing that they were, wanted was for them to be replaced by some other country. On June 12, 1898, Filipino revolutionary

leader Emilio Aginaldo declared Philippine independence from Spain. However, all the other parties involved in this conflict simply ignored it. At the Treaty of Paris in 1898, which ended the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded the Philippines, along with Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States for $20 million. After signing the treaty, President McKinley announced a policy that that he called benevolent assimilation. In his proclamation, he said, quote, finally it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines,

by assuring them in every possible way that the full measure of individual rights and liberties, which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. End quote. This policy of annexing territories was not universally accepted in the United States. A group known as the Anti-Imperial League lobbied to stop ratification of the treaty which annexed the Philippines. Their argument was that the United States was a colony itself that fought a revolution for its independence,

so it shouldn't be in the business of doing the same thing to other people. One of the vocal opponents of the treaty was the author Mark Twain. He wrote in the New York Herald, quote, I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not redeem. It should, it seems to me,

be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talents on any other. their land. End quote. The treaty was ratified in the U.S. Senate by one vote. As soon as the war with Spain was over, another war with the Filipino revolutionaries began.

The Philippine-American War began on February 4, 1899. The opening battle was the Battle of Manila, which was also the largest battle in the war. And it started with American private William Walter Grayson firing shots at Filipino soldiers. The war was far. larger than the Spanish-American War in terms of casualties on both sides. Over 200,000 Filipino civilians were estimated to have died, mostly from famine and disease, with 4,200 Americans and and 16,000 Filipino combatants killed. The Americans captured the aforementioned Filipino leader Emilio Aginaldo in 2001, which weakened the Filipinos, and the conflict was declared over in 1902,

but there were still skirmishes by guerrilla fighters for years afterwards. In the middle of the war, the Americans moved from military to civilian control of the Philippines. The military governor was General Arthur MacArthur, the father of the future general Douglas MacArthur. The new civilian governor was the future U.S. President William Howard Taft. The Americans took a different approach to their administration of the Philippines than the Spanish. The Spanish administered their colonies in a top-down fashion, while the Americans, Americans attempted to incorporate Filipinos into the territory's administration. Much of this policy change was prompted by President McKinley's assassination and Teddy Roosevelt's

ascend to the presidency. Roosevelt famously opposed the U.S. annexation of Cuba and also was not surprisingly in favor of Philippine independence. He stated in 1901, quote, We hope to do for them what has never been done for any people of the tropics, to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of really free nations. End quote. When I said the U.S. experiment with colonialism was short-lived, just three years after it took

control of the Philippines, the wheels were already in motion for Philippine independence. But it didn't happen immediately. Rather, it occurred through a series of phases. The first phase was the 1902 Philippine Organic Act. The Organic Act officially established the Philippines as an unorganized U.S. territory and marked the end of the Philippine-American War. The Act established a democratically elected Filipino Legislative Assembly, known as the Philippine Commission, which would be seated in 1904. It also had a Bill of Rights, the separation of church and state, and the creation of two non-voting

representatives to the United States Congress. And if any of that sounds familiar, it's not dissimilar to the situation under which most U.S. territories operate today. The changes from Spanish to American control resulted in political changes as well as significant cultural changes. The primary cultural institution in the Philippines was the Catholic Church, which was closely aligned with the Spanish governing authority. The church wasn't abolished, but it no longer had any official standing. A host of American nonprofit groups established operations in the Philippines, the religiously affiliated Salvation Army and YMCA, as well as the Lions, Kiwanas, and Rotary Clubs. Educational educational reforms were instituted, including instruction in the English language.

The U.S. sponsored the construction of bridges and hospitals. The urban planner Daniel Burnham visited the Philippines and created a plan for the development of Manila. The U.S. purchased 166,000 hectares, or 410,000 acres of land from the Catholic Church, and then sold parcels back to Filipino citizens in a program modeled on the Homestead Act in the United States. They also established a land title system to track land ownership. While the land reforms had good intentions, most of the land ended up going to large landowners and not small farmers. The elections promised for the Philippine Commission actually ended up taking

place in 1907 and not 1904. The next step on the road to Philippine independence was the Jones Law, or the Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916. The Jones Law replaced the Organic Act of 1902. It replaced the Philippine Commission with a formal Congress, with a Senate and the House of representatives and gave this legislature more power than the commission. Perhaps most importantly, the Jones Law explicitly promised future independence to the Philippines. In 1932, the Hare-Haw's Cutting Act was passed, which set a particular time frame for Philippine independence. American farmers were one of the groups inside the U.S. were the biggest supporters of Filipino independence. Because the Philippines was a territory of the United States, cheap sugar was imported into the

U.S. which undercut the price of American sugar farmers. The act was passed by overriding a veto from President Herbert Hoover. The final step before full Philippine independence came with the Tidings-McDuffey Act of 34. The Tidings McDuffey Act superseded the Jones Law and had several important provisions. First, the vague promise of independence was replaced with a firm timetable setting a date of independence of July 4th, 1946. Second, the Philippines was established as a Commonwealth. The term Commonwealth doesn't really have any official meaning under U.S. law. Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands call themselves Commonwealths today,

but then again, so do Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In the case of the Philippines, Commonwealth status established a democratically elected president, a unicameral legislature, which eventually became bicameral, and a Supreme Court made up of exclusively Filipinos. Finally, it established Tagalog as the national language. At the time, Tagalog was actually just the dialect spoken around Manila. The Philippines government would have almost full authority in all domestic affairs, with the United States continuing to control foreign affairs.

In 1935, Manuel Cuisan became the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. The Commonwealth government was intended to be the transitional government that would prepare the country for full independence. However, there was a massive roadblock on the path to independence. On December 8, 1941, the Philippines was invaded by Japan. The island's defenders lasted only a few months, eventually retreating to the Batan Peninsula. The subsequent surrender of the Filipino and American forces

was covered in a previous episode on the Baton death march. On December 24, 1941, President Cuisin and his family, along with the vice president, Sergio Osmania, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and other senior officials fled Manila for the island of Corrigador. From there, they were taken south to Mindanao, then to Darwin, Australia, and eventually to Melbourne. From there, they took a ship to San Francisco and a train to Washington, D.C., where they set up the Philippine government in exile. Before the evacuation, the Philippines legislature passed an Emergency Powers Act that granted the president exceptional powers to handle the crisis.

In Washington, President Cuisan represented the Philippines in signing the Declaration by United Nations, which was the formal document that established the Allies during the war. This document, despite the name, was not the establishment of the United Nations organization that took place after the war. On October 14, 1943, Japan created a puppet government in the Philippines that they called the Philippines Republic. The president of this republic was Jose Laurel. The Republic declared war against the United States and the United Kingdom. When American forces landed in the Philippines, Laurel and members of the government ended up fleeing to Japan. President Cuisan developed tuberculosis and died in August 1944 in the United States.

Laurel was later held in prison and was to be put on trial before he was given a full pardon. On October 20, 1944, General MacArthur, the former Field Marshal of the Philippines Army, landed with U.S. forces in the island of Lacey. By February 1945, Manila had been recaptured after a month of fierce fighting, but at great cost with much of the city destroyed. When the war ended in 1945, the date of independence that had been previously set was kept. In the Treaty of Manila, signed on July 4, 1946, the United States relinquished all claims on the Philippines and recognized the Philippines as an independent country. Today, the former ties between the United States and the Philippines can still be seen in both countries. The Philippines has one of the highest percentages of English speakers in Asia, although almost everyone speaks it as a second language.

In the United States, Filipinos are one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, especially in Hawaii, and California. Tagalog is the fourth most spoken language in the U.S. after English, Spanish, and Chinese. The United States' occupation of the Philippines only lasted 48 years and for about about four of those, Japan actually occupied it. However, for the Philippines, the path to independence from first contact with Europeans, took over 400 years. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where everything everywhere, Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server.

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