Mlk Paper

Before the Philippines were even considered being annexed there were some debate on whether or not to annex them. The people that were for annexing the islands argued that there were business interests in thoughts of new markets and fields of investments, the United States wanted to become an empire and so they wanted to expand more. USA, especially, didn’t want to lose these islands to Japan or Germany.But some people did argue against annexing the islands. One of the biggest things that stood out was that the islands were 6,000 miles away from the Pacific Coast. Another reason that people argued against this was that some senators thought that annexation was a violation of American tradition and this lead other people to follow them. Since the senators had power.
There were some problems though with the annexing of the Philippines. One problem was that fact that there were 7,100 islands in the Philippines. The total population of those islands was 7.5 million people. Collectively, the islands consisted of 43 different ethnic groups and 87 different languages. This made it harder to obtain the various islands because of the large amount of people and the vase amount of different languages.One of the decisive battles of the Spanish-American War took place in the Philippines and set the stage for the Philippine-American War. U.S. Navy Commodore George Dewey defeated the Spanish navy in Manila Bay in May 1898. This defeat hurt Spain. Soon, however, the U.S. was locked in battle with Filipinos seeking national independence.
The Filipino fight for independence had begun before the U.S. arrived. In 1896-97, a group of Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo fought a war for independence, which ended in a truce. Filipino rebels retreated to Hong Kong, and in 1897 Dewey met with Aguinaldo there. Dewey knew that if war with Spain came, the U.S. Navy might need Filipinos as land-based allies. A U.S. war ship took Aguinaldo back to the Philippines in early 1898. Armed struggle resumed, and soon the Filipinos controlled most Spanish centers. By May the Filipino army had surrounded Manila, but the U.S. ordered them to stay out of the capital.
In June 1898 Aguinaldo proclaimed the Republic of the Philippines and asked for U.S. support, but both the U.S. and Spain ignored this proclamation. By August Spanish forces in Manila had surrendered – to the U.S. In December 1898, the U.S. and Spain signed a treaty and Spain sold Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the U.S. As the U.S. announced its annexation, a skirmish erupted between U.S. and Filipino troops; the Philippine Republic declared war to defend its independence.
An examination of United States Indian policy during the nineteenth century reveals a clear pattern of colonialism toward Native Americans This essay will suggest that this policy served as a precedent for imperialist domination over the Philippines and other islands occupied during the Spanish-American War. Historians are divided over the origins of United States imperialist sentiment--whether the nation "stumbled" into empire, followed manifest destiny policies from the Mexican War, or annexed islands in a search for commercial markets. However, there seems to be a mistaken consensus, at least among many diplomatic historians, that the United States did not have a tradition of holding alien peoples as colonial subjects before 1898.
That the Indian precedent has been ignored is perhaps testimony to the treatment Native Americans have received from historians. Rather than being considered as independent peoples, Indians have been so closely associated with the early frontier that they have been largely ignored as a factor in later American diplomatic history. There has been a tendency to stereotype Indians as a "vanishing race," especially after the passing of the frontier. 1 On the contrary, the demographic reality is that American Indian population has continued to grow during every decade since 1890 and in specific ethnic groups the population rebound occurred even earlier. 2 This fact perplexed American policy-makers, who were supposed to oversee the continual decline of their "vanishing" charges and who had to decide what status these peoples would hold within the United States political system. That decision was not immediate, but was only gradually formed through the nineteenth century.