Commonwealth of the Philippines

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 15th of November 1935, a crowd of some 300,000 people gathered on the steps of the Legislative Building in Manila to witness something new in the world: a colonial territory setting a countdown clock on its own existence. The Commonwealth of the Philippines was born that morning not as a permanent arrangement, but as a measured, deliberate transition toward full independence. Ten years was the agreed timeline. the 4th of July 1946 was the promised date. Between those two points lay a government that was neither fully free nor fully governed from abroad, and the story of how it navigated that in-between space touches war, exile, language, land, and the meaning of sovereignty itself. How did a nation build its institutions while still legally belonging to someone else? And what happened when one of history's largest wars tore across its territory before independence could arrive?

• 2. Birth of the Commonwealth

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  Manuel L. Quezon, then serving as President of the Philippine Senate, was the central figure in shaping the terms under which the Commonwealth came into existence. When the United States Congress passed the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act in December 1932 with promises of independence, Quezon opposed it. The bill reserved military and naval bases for the United States and imposed tariffs and quotas on Philippine exports. President Herbert Hoover vetoed the act; Congress overrode that veto. But the Philippine Senate, led by Quezon, rejected it outright.

  What followed was the Tydings-McDuffie Act, also called the Philippine Independence Act, which Quezon helped negotiate. It established a ten-year transition period leading to full independence, with the date set for July 4 following the tenth anniversary of the Commonwealth's founding. A Constitutional Convention convened in Manila on the 30th of July 1934. On the 8th of February 1935, the new constitution was approved by a vote of 177 to 1. President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved it on the 25th of March 1935, and Philippine voters ratified it by plebiscite on the 14th of May 1935.

  On the 16th of September 1935, presidential elections were held. Among the candidates were former president Emilio Aguinaldo and Obispo Maximo Gregorio Aglipay of the Philippine Independent Church. Quezon and his Nacionalista running mate Sergio Osmena won, with Quezon capturing nearly 68% of the vote. When Quezon was inaugurated, he became the first Filipino to head a government of the Philippines since Aguinaldo and the Malolos Republic in 1898.

• 3. Building a Nation in Wait

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  From its first days, the Commonwealth government pursued policies that looked more like a sovereign state than a dependent territory. National defense came first. The National Defense Act of 1935 organized conscription across the country. Douglas MacArthur was named American Military Advisor, holding the rank of Field Marshal of the Philippines, a title that would disappear entirely from the Philippine military after 1946.

  The economy presented its own challenges, rooted in the Great Depression and dependent largely on agriculture. Products such as abaca, coconuts and coconut oil, sugar, and timber drove exports. Taxes from the coconut industry helped fund infrastructure and development. The naval base at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base, where U.S. Army aircraft had been stationed as early as 1919, also generated economic activity. Despite agrarian uprisings and global uncertainty, the economy recovered to pre-Depression levels before the war.

  Demographic reality shaped the government's understanding of what it was governing. A census taken in 1939 recorded a population of 16,000,303. By 1941, estimates put the number at 17 million, including 117,000 Chinese, 30,000 Japanese, and 9,000 Americans. English was spoken by 26.3% of the population according to that census. Cebuano was the most widely spoken native language, with more than 4.6 million speakers, followed by Tagalog at just over 3 million and Ilocano at roughly 2.3 million. Spanish, which had once been the prestige language, had already been overtaken by English by the 1920s and was spoken mainly by elites and in government by the Commonwealth era.

• 4. The Question of Language

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  In 1936, the National Assembly passed Commonwealth Act No. 184, creating the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa, or National Language Institute. Its membership was drawn from various ethnic groups and was initially headed by President Quezon himself alongside six other members.

  The task the Institute faced was immense. The 1935 Constitution acknowledged the country's linguistic diversity with a provision calling for the "development and adoption of a common national language based on the existing native dialects." After deliberations, the Institute chose Tagalog, the language of Manila and its surrounding provinces, as the basis for the national language. This was made official on the 30th of December 1937, in an executive order that became effective two years after its signing.

  In 1940, the government authorized the creation of a formal dictionary and grammar. That same year, Commonwealth Act 570 was passed, specifying that Filipino would become an official language upon independence. The choice of Tagalog was practical but not uncontested, given the millions of Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Kapampangan, and Pangasinan speakers across the archipelago. It would be many years before the language's usage became general across the population.

• 5. Land, Debt, and Unrest

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  Beneath the formal architecture of the Commonwealth ran a serious fracture. Tenant farmers across the Philippines carried grievances that had accumulated for generations, rooted in a sharecropping system that locked families into debt and a population boom that made already strained circumstances worse.

  The Commonwealth government launched an agrarian reform program, but it struggled against persistent clashes between tenants and landowners. One of the sharpest expressions of this conflict came through the Sakdalista movement, led by Benigno Ramos. The movement called for tax reductions, land reform, the breakup of large haciendas, and an end to American ties. In May 1935, before the Commonwealth had even formally launched, Ramos's uprising in Central Luzon claimed around a hundred lives.

  The Hukbalahap, whose name derives from a Tagalog phrase meaning "People's Army Against the Japanese," emerged later from this same agrarian tension. By the time of the Japanese occupation, the Huk had mobilized roughly 30,000 armed men and exercised control over much of Central Luzon. They fought against the Japanese, but also against other non-Huk guerrillas, which complicated their relationship with the broader resistance. Quezon, meanwhile, had taken steps toward a different kind of humanitarian action: in cooperation with U.S. High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, he facilitated the entry of Jewish refugees fleeing fascist regimes in Europe into the Philippines, and promoted a plan to resettle them in Mindanao.

• 6. War, Exile, and Occupation

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  Japan launched its surprise attack on the Philippines on the 8th of December 1941, beginning with an invasion of Batan Island. Manila was declared an open city to prevent its destruction, and Japanese forces occupied it on the 2nd of January 1942. Filipino and American forces fought on the Bataan Peninsula, on Corregidor, and on Leyte before the final joint surrender in May 1942.

  Quezon and Osmena were escorted from Manila to Corregidor. On February 20, Quezon, his family, and senior government officials were evacuated by submarine. They eventually set up a government-in-exile at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., where they participated in the Pacific War Council and joined the Declaration by United Nations. Quezon's health deteriorated; he had tuberculosis and spent his last years at a "cure cottage" in Saranac Lake, New York. He died on the 1st of August 1944, and was initially buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His remains were later moved, first to the Manila North Cemetery in 1979, and then to Quezon City within the monument at the Quezon Memorial Circle.

  Japan installed a rival government called the Second Philippine Republic, headed by Jose P. Laurel. It was described in the sources as very unpopular. General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed on Leyte on the 20th of October 1944, joined by Philippine Commonwealth troops in other amphibious landings. Fighting continued in remote areas until Japan's official surrender, signed on the 2nd of September 1945, in Tokyo Bay. The human toll was devastating. Estimates put Filipino war dead at one million. Manila suffered extensive damage when Japanese marines refused to vacate the city despite orders from the Japanese High Command.

• 7. Independence and Its Conditions

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  Sergio Osmena became president on Quezon's death and returned to the Philippines with MacArthur and the liberation forces. After the war, he restored the Commonwealth government and continued the push for independence. When the 1946 presidential election came, Osmena declined to campaign, telling voters that forty years of honest and faithful service spoke for itself. Manuel Roxas won with 54% of the vote and became the first president of the independent Republic of the Philippines.

  Roxas served as the last president of the Commonwealth in a transitional period that lasted from the 28th of May 1946, to the 4th of July 1946. He worked with a reorganized Congress, which had been reorganized on the 25th of May 1946, with Jose Avelino as Senate President and Eugenio Perez as House Speaker. On the 3rd of June 1946, Roxas addressed a joint session of Congress to describe the serious difficulties facing the incoming republic. On June 21, he returned to urge acceptance of two laws passed by the U.S. Congress on the 30th of April 1946: the Philippine Rehabilitation Act and the Philippine Trade Act. Both passed, but under contentious circumstances. Elected members of Congress from the leftist Democratic Alliance and some Nacionalistas were denied the right to take their seats, which meant they could not vote against the measures.

  The Philippine Trade Act, also called the Bell Trade Act, tied Philippine economic policy to continued American preferences even after independence, and receiving war rehabilitation grants was conditioned on accepting it. The 1935 Constitution remained in effect after independence until 1973. The rank of Field Marshal, created for MacArthur in the Commonwealth period, was never revived in the Philippine military.