Philippine Independence
The Philippines became independent on 4 July 1946, on the American national holiday and by American statute. The timetable had been set before the war. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 provided for a ten-year commonwealth and then independence, which is unusual among colonial powers and is largely explained by American farm and labour lobbies wanting Filipino sugar and Filipino workers excluded rather than by anticolonial principle. The Japanese occupation intervened, and the country the Americans handed back was destroyed. Manila had been fought over street by street in February 1945 and was among the most damaged cities of the war, with some 100,000 civilians killed in a month; over a million Filipinos died in total. Independence came with conditions attached. The Bell Trade Act tied the peso to the dollar, kept Philippine exports in the American market on quota, and required a constitutional amendment giving American citizens equal rights to exploit natural resources and operate public utilities — parity rights, passed by a Congress from which several elected left-wing members had been excluded. The Military Bases Agreement of 1947 gave the United States twenty-three installations on ninety-nine-year leases, including Clark and Subic Bay. The Huk rebellion, of peasants who had fought the Japanese and then found the landlords restored, ran to the mid-1950s. The bases stayed until the Senate voted them out in 1991. Independence Day was moved from 4 July to 12 June in 1962, which was a comment. Filipinos also fought for the United States in enormous numbers and were then written out of the pension. The Rescission Act of 1946 declared that Philippine service did not count as active American service, and the surviving veterans received a partial payment in 2009.
- Year: 1946 CE
- Category: Political
