Why did the US promise the Philippines independence?

Answer 1

The US acquired the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898. That war was egged on by the newspapers of the day, the Hearst and Pulitzer chains of newspapers in many cities, inflaming the people of the US to war fever with daily stories detailing the alleged atrocities of the Spanish colonial masters in Cuba. There had been an on-again off-again independence movement in Cuba for thirty years or so, aided by US citizens making a profit smuggling in guns to these rebels. Cuba was the last remaining Spanish colony in this hemisphere. Cuba had also been coveted by some in the US for an even longer period of years, who wanted to add Cuba as a US possession. So when the war was finally made a reality, Congress passed the Platt Amendment forbidding the US government from retaining Cuba as a US possession. The US government at the time was under a Republican Administration, and this was Republicans of the faction that favored "expansion", which was the preferred term in the US for Imperialism, because the people of the US did not like to think of themselves as being the same greedy grasping sort of people as the Europeans, who were busy at that very time carving up Africa into colonies, and making inroads into China and Asia. So, after what one Republican in the McKinley Administration called a "splendid little war", Spain was ejected from Cuba, which then according to the Platt Amendment had to made "free", although its freedom basically amounted to US overlordship. There was nothing in the Platt Amendment concerning Puerto Rico, or the Philippine Islands, however. So, to this day, the US still has Puerto Rico, the people of which island were made US citizens in 1917. In the Philippines the US had received help from the Philippine Independence movement in 1898, to beat the Spaniards there and eject them from this colony that Spain had held for more than 300 years. These Filipinos quite naturally expected that they would also be granted their freedom immediately. They were aware of the existence of the "anti-imperialist" movement in the US. These were people who thought their American nation had absolutely no business going into the sordid, greedy arrogance of acquiring an Empire, given that the US itself started as rebelling colonies fighting for their own freedom from a colonial master. These anti-imperialists believed that the US acquiring colonies and overseas possessions (such as Hawaii, "annexed" around the same time, at the behest of and to better secure a favorable business environment for the Dole Pineapple Company) was a complete and total betrayal of the original honorable principles of the US, regarding personal freedom and self-determination. The Filipinos hoped that the anti-imperialists in the US would be able to carry the day, and persuade their fellow citizens to remain true to the original ideas of America. Sadly, this proved not to be the case. The US offered excuses, such as that for three centuries the Spaniards had done nothing to educate the Filipinos, there were more than one thousand islands in the group and around one thousand different languages or dialects spoken there, and in these disunited and uneducated conditions the US could find no one to whom the government of the Philippines could be entrusted. Another excuse for retaining the Philippines was that if the US did grant the Philippines immediate independence in 1898, another of the colonial powers, such as Japan, Britain or Germany, would certainly immediately swoop in and make the Philippines a colony, and this was probably true enough. So for three years the US fought a little remembered war against the Filipino patriots seeking their own independence, a war replete with atrocities and massacres. And after that was brutally more or less won there was the Moro Insurrection, requiring more slaughter of Filipinos, these being the Muslim inhabitants of mostly the more southern islands. The real reason the Republicans so loved their new colony was that they thought it was going to secure, along with Hawaii, the path to Asia for trade, which they coveted, in their lust for commerce. But these horrific slaughters of Filipinos and this grotesque abomination of the US possessing colonies never set well with all the people of the US. By the 1930s the Philippines had been granted "Commonwealth" status, with a plan for eventual independence, which was forestalled by the Japanese invasion of December, 1941. The Japanese, expansionist militarists that they were in 1941, and completely unashamed of their desire to dominate all their neighbors, would probably have invaded the Philippines in any case, but the reason they invaded when they did was because they were a US possession, and there were US air and naval bases in the Philippines, from which US forces could sally forth to interfere with Japanese plans for conquest. By now many Republicans, as usual completely unaware of their own hypocrisy, were "isolationists", wanting the US to stay out of world affairs, and wanting the opposite of whatever the Democratic Administration of Roosevelt wanted. So the US was drawn into WWII as a direct result of the Imperialist Republican greed for Empire of the 1890s, which got the US possession of Hawaii and the Philippines, possession of which was the reason Japan attacked US forces in those places on December 7, 1941. Most Republicans are still too stupid by far to this very day to appreciate the irony.