The date: July Fourth. A new nation celebrates its independence from the world’s most powerful empire. But this time, the location was Manila, the year was 1946 and the empire in question was the United States.
And yet, most Filipinos won’t be marking today’s anniversary as a national holiday. Why?
Because for the Philippines, independence from the United States didn’t bring full national sovereignty. Economic and cultural connections — and, most significantly, military ties — bound the two nations long after the independence ceremony. They still do.
Challenging three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, Filipinos first declared their independence on June 12, 1898. That day, leaders of the Philippine Revolution gathered in the city of Cavite, where Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the country’s freedom from Spain. At a time when the United States and Spain were at war, and when empires such as Germany and Britain had an eye on the vulnerable territory, Aguinaldo demanded for the Philippine Republic a “dignified place in the concert of free nations.” The revolutionaries knew of America’s struggle a century earlier, and hoped the United States would support their bold claim to freedom.
They chose their words carefully. Much like the Continental Congress had done in Philadelphia in 1776, the declaration’s signers pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and … our most sacred possession, our honor” to the cause. They asked American officials for “protection” from Spain, and even invited Commodore George Dewey, waiting offshore in Manila Bay in command of the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Squadron, to the day’s events. Dewey declined, on the grounds that June 12, a Sunday, was his “mail day.”
Two months later, American forces invaded. Four years of brutal war suppressed the Philippine independence movement. Aguinaldo surrendered to U.S. forces in March 1901. For the next four decades, a country that had declared its freedom from empire in 1776 suppressed the independence of another. American colonial schools taught Filipino children about George Washington while they erased the history of the Philippine Revolution.
During World War II, Japan invaded and then occupied the Philippines, making the promise of freedom elusive. In October 1943, the Japanese military government granted independence to its conquered territory with the aim of luring Filipinos out of America’s orbit and into their own. Aguinaldo even came out of retirement to raise the flag of a new puppet regime. Filipino guerrillas in jungles and cities continued fighting. A massive 1944 American reinvasion — touted as “liberation” — pushed out the Japanese, but also devastated the country’s fields and factories.
In the aftermath of the war, the U.S. Congress selected July 4, 1946, as the date it would grant the Filipino people independence. Gen. Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines to announce “the end of empire.” But Philippine independence came with strings attached.