This series of interventions led to the Spanish-American War between April 21 and Aug. 13, 1898, and the decisive American military victory that followed. However, instead of recognizing the newly-declared First Philippine Republic, the United States purchased Spain’s former island colonies in the Treaty of Paris for a total of $20 million. After this betrayal of trust, the leaders of the republic declared war against the United States, their former ally.
What followed was brutality that remains largely erased from American historical memory. During the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), an estimated 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 to 1 million civilians died before the United States declared the conflict over. Even then, from 1902 to the mid-1910s, revolutionary movements proliferated against the new occupying power. As historians have argued, the Philippine-American War may very well not have ended in 1902, but rather took on a new name: counterinsurgency.
In 1934, amid a wave of anti-Filipino racism on the U.S. West Coast, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which capped migration from the Philippines into the continental United States at 50 people a year, even though the country was under U.S. rule.
In exchange, the Philippines would become a commonwealth, a provisionally self-governing nation for 10 years, before being granted full independence. The following year, in the presence of American and Filipino colleagues, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ratified the 1935 Constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth, modeled after the U.S. Constitution. During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines in 1942, another violent period of colonization declared by an imperial power under the guise of liberation. After evacuating in March 1942, Gen. Douglas MacArthur — who had served as the military adviser to the Commonwealth of the Philippines — invaded the island of Leyte in October 1944. By January 1945, the United States occupied Manila once again, and reclaimed their Southeast Asian military and economic outpost.
These wartime aims previewed American-Philippine foreign relations in the immediate decades after the war. After World War II, on July 4, 1946, the United States granted independence to the Philippines. But the legacies of prior American involvement in the archipelago did not disappear. Various economic treaties guaranteed that, in exchange for American financial support for postwar redevelopment, the Philippines would allow U.S. companies and citizens rights to the islands’ natural resources, as well as free use of military zones on the archipelago. In effect, despite formal independence, the Philippines remained a neocolony of the United States.