1898-1933: America's Colony

The Philippines become a reluctant part of a new empire.

America's involvement in the Philippines

started with a bang. On the morning of
May 1, 1898, an American flotilla
commanded by Commodore George
Dewey sailed into Manila Bay and,
without losing a single sailor, promptly
sank a Spanish squadron that was
anchored there. President William
McKinley would later admit that when he
first heard the news of the victory, he
"could not have told where those darned
islands were within 2,000 miles."
American troops pose victoriously on the
When the Spanish-American War ended ramparts of Manila, circa 1899. (photo:
in December 1898, Spain sold the entire Library of Congress)
Philippine archipelago to the United
States for $20 million. The Philippines had acquired a new colonial ruler. The
United States had acquired a colony the size of Arizona, located more than
4,000 miles away across the Pacific.

But in the purchase, the United States also had received control over ancient
Muslim sultanates still angry about the Spanish takeover centuries earlier. More
urgently, it confronted a separate Catholic nationalist rebel movement, led by
Emilio Aguinaldo. War soon erupted between the nationalists and the American
troops stationed in the islands. The outgunned Filipinos adopted guerilla tactics;
the U.S. army responded by rounding peasants into "reconcentration camps"
and declaring entire areas battle zones, in which no distinctions were made
between combatants and civilians. At least 4,200 American and 16,000 Filipino
soldiers are thought to have been killed in the fighting. Historians have debated
the scale of civilian deaths, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to almost 1
million.

Back in the United States, a newly formed anti-imperialist movement protested

the war as an act of criminal aggression against the Filipino people. But self-
described imperialists insisted that America had a duty to bring order and
civilization to what Indiana senator Alfred Beveridge called a "barbarous race."
As the senator insisted, "The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate
our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our duty in the Orient. We will
not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the
civilization of the world."
 Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901
and eventually pledged allegiance to the
United States. The Philippine-American
War was declared to be over a year
later, though Muslim fighters in the
southern Philippines continued to resist
until 1914.

To run America's new possession,

President McKinley implemented a policy
of "benevolent assimilation," under
which the United States would control
Filipino insurgents, led by Emilio Aguinaldo the Philippines temporarily while it
(seated third from the right), waged a oversaw the transition to self-rule and
guerrilla campaign to expel Americans from independence. The colonial
the islands. U.S. soldiers captured Aguinaldo administration, headed by future
in 1901. (National Archives)
president William H. Taft, set up local
governmental bodies and a system of
universal public education. But it did little to reform the land tenure system,
which gave a few wealthy landlords control over the rural areas where most
Filipinos lived.

Filipino nationalists suspected the United States of postponing independence

indefinitely while exploiting the islands' economic resources and using their
country as a military base. A 1910 editorial in a Manila journal summed up the
first decade of American colonial rule as "10 years of bitter deception."