Recognized, Not Merely Granted:
A note on Philippine Independence, Territorial Succession,
and the Business of One Word
Eighty years after July 4, 1946, the old classroom phrase still deserves correction. The Philippines was not simply “granted” independence by the United States. The documentary language used by the United States itself was more careful, more political, and more revealing. In the Tydings–McDuffie Act, in President Harry S. Truman’s Proclamation No. 2695, and in the Treaty of General Relations signed on July 4, 1946, the operative word was recognition. That choice was not decorative. It was a legal and diplomatic compromise between two incompatible truths: the United States had in fact exercised colonial sovereignty over the Philippines, but the Filipino claim to nationhood did not originate from American permission.
The distinction matters because nations are not corporations waiting for incorporation papers from a foreign registry. To say that America “granted” Philippine independence makes the United States appear as the author of Filipino freedom. To say America “recognized” Philippine independence acknowledges that Filipino nationhood had a prior history, a prior claim, and a prior political expression. That expression had already appeared in the 1898 Declaration of Independence, which declared that Filipinos had risen to recover independence and sovereignty and that the people of the Philippine Islands had the right to be free and independent.
Yet the correction must be made with discipline. The United States did not mean, in 1946, that it had never exercised sovereignty. Truman’s own proclamation recited that the United States had acquired sovereignty through the Treaty of Paris and had exercised jurisdiction and control for forty-eight years before withdrawing and recognizing independence.
The better formula is therefore this: Philippine independence was recognized as a national and diplomatic fact, while American colonial sovereignty was withdrawn and surrendered as a legal and administrative fact.
That is why “recognized, not granted” is powerful, but it must not become simplistic. The word “recognize” does not magically erase American conquest, colonial law, military government, economic dependence, or the postwar trade regime. It does, however, prevent the colonial story from presenting itself as charity. It tells us that July 4, 1946 was not the birth of the Filipino nation. It was the belated recognition of a claim that had already been made, fought for, constitutionalized, narrowed by empire, and then returned under terms shaped by the same empire that had once denied it.
The Filipino Claim Came Before the American Timetable
The Filipino claim to independence did not begin with the Commonwealth. It began with revolution. The Act of the Proclamation of Independence of the Filipino People in 1898 spoke in the language of recovery, not donation. It declared that the revolution sought to regain the independence and sovereignty of which the people had been deprived, and it proclaimed that the Philippines had the right to be free and independent.
This is the first reason “granted” is historically inadequate. A grant comes from a superior authority. A recognition acknowledges a claim already asserted. The 1898 Declaration did not ask Washington to invent a Filipino nation. It announced that a Filipino political community had constituted itself and had the capacity to perform the acts of an independent state: war, peace, treaties, alliances, commerce, and other acts belonging to sovereign states.
The Malolos Constitution deepened that claim. Its Article 1 declared that the political association of all Filipinos constituted a nation called the Philippine Republic. Article 2 declared the Republic free and independent. Article 3 stated that sovereignty resided exclusively in the people. These were not the words of a dependency waiting to be trained into existence. They were the words of a republic asserting political personality against an international order that chose not to hear it.
That silence was not accidental. The Treaty of Paris of December 10, 1898 was negotiated between Spain and the United States, not between Spain, the United States, and the Filipino revolutionary government. Spain ceded Guam separately and ceded “the archipelago known as the Philippine Islands” to the United States for twenty million dollars. The Filipino Republic, which had already proclaimed independence, was treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a state to be consulted.
In business terms, the United States acquired an asset from a seller whose title was already under revolutionary challenge. Spain sold what Filipinos claimed Spain no longer morally possessed. America paid for a colonial package while ignoring the political claimant already in possession of a national argument. The result was not a clean transfer of a passive territory. It was a hostile acquisition followed by war, legal rationalization, and long administrative control.
The Philippines Before the American Map: The Spanish East Indies Problem
There is another neglected dimension. The Philippines inherited by the United States was not simply the modern Philippine map. Before the American handover, Manila had been the administrative center of a broader Spanish Pacific world. The old Spanish East Indies included the Philippines as the main colony, but the imperial geography also connected Manila to Guam, the Marianas, the Carolines, and Palaos. Guampedia notes that after the Manila galleon trade ended, the Marianas remained an outpost of Spain’s Philippine colony.
This matters because the American-defined “Philippine Islands” was not a neutral geography. It was an outcome of imperial partition. The Treaty of Paris ceded Guam separately, ceded the Philippine archipelago under a bounded description, and left other Spanish Pacific possessions outside the American Philippine package.
Spain later disposed of the Carolines, Palaos, and the Marianas except Guam to Germany, while the United States retained Guam and the Philippines. The result was the fragmentation of the older Manila-centered Spanish Pacific order.
The Malolos Republic appears to have carried, at least formally and imaginatively, a broader view of the Philippines than the later American colonial map. Lists of delegates to the Malolos Congress include Ramon Arriola for “Islas Palaos,” and another entry, Alfonso Ramos, is likewise associated with “Islas Palaos.”
Manuel L. Quezon III has observed that the revolutionary mental map, through such representation, extended at least to Palau and perhaps to the wider Caroline Islands.
This should be handled carefully. It does not prove that Malolos effectively governed Palau, Guam, the Carolines, or the Marianas. It does not mean the First Republic possessed operational sovereignty over those islands. But it does show that the revolutionary imagination was not merely accepting the later American definition of the Philippines. It was working from the older Spanish-Pacific frame, where Manila had been the center and where “Filipinas” was not yet reduced to the exact post-1898 territorial settlement.
That makes the word “recognize” even more important. What the United States recognized in 1946 was not the full territorial imagination of Malolos. It recognized the independence of the Republic within the American-defined Philippine territory. In other words, recognition came after reduction. The Filipino claim began with a revolutionary republic and a broader imperial inheritance; the independence recognized by the United States was a narrowed state shaped by the Treaty of Paris, subsequent boundary arrangements, military realities, and American administrative convenience.
Malolos as a Balance Sheet of Sovereignty
The Malolos Constitution is often remembered sentimentally as Asia’s first republican constitution. It should also be read as a balance sheet of sovereignty. It identified the nation, located sovereignty in the people, separated church and state, defined citizenship, and created representative institutions. These are not small things. They are the grammar of a state.
For the purposes of the “granted versus recognized” debate, three provisions are especially important. First, Article 1 made the Filipino people the political subject. Second, Article 2 asserted freedom and independence. Third, Article 3 located sovereignty exclusively in the people. This constitutional order was not waiting for Congress in Washington to give it meaning. It already claimed meaning, even if international power denied recognition.
That is why the American act of 1946 cannot be narrated as a pure act of creation. The United States did not create a people. It did not create the historical consciousness of 1898. It did not create the Malolos claim that sovereignty resided in the Filipino people. What it did was defeat, govern, reorganize, educate, tax, police, and finally recognize a political community whose claim it had long postponed.
The American counterargument is straightforward: under the Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded the Philippines, and the United States acquired legal sovereignty. American courts reinforced this framework by treating the Philippines as a territory under congressional power. In Dorr v. United States, the Supreme Court described the Philippines within the logic of unincorporated territory, meaning the United States could govern it without fully incorporating it into the Union.
That argument cannot simply be dismissed. It explains why Truman’s proclamation could say the United States had acquired and exercised sovereignty before surrendering it.
But it is not the whole story. Legal sovereignty under imperial law is one thing; national legitimacy is another. The American state had the machinery of sovereignty. The Filipino nation had the prior claim to independence.
The word “recognize” allowed both stories to coexist. It did not force the United States to admit that its sovereignty had been void from the beginning. But it did prevent the final act from sounding like a discretionary donation. Recognition was the language of diplomatic acknowledgment. Grant was the language of imperial generosity. The former was historically defensible. The latter was politically convenient but morally misleading.
Ricarte, Rizalinas, and the Anti-Colonial Re-Naming of the Nation
The Revolutionary General Artemio Ricarte belongs in this discussion because he represents the stubborn stream of Filipino nationalism that never accepted the American settlement as final. Ricarte refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States and remained a symbol of revolutionary continuity long after many others had entered the American colonial order. A National Historical Commission marker describes him as one who did not recognize American authority and lived in Japan until the Pacific War.
Ricarte’s importance is not only military. It is also symbolic and constitutional. Philippine eLib lists a work attributed to Ricarte titled "Pangunang batas nang pamahalaang manghihimagsik sa Kapuluwang Rizal: na nagpapakilalang bansang may pamagat na Madlaang Rizal (Republica Rizalina)
. The very title is revealing: it imagines a revolutionary government in a “Kapuluwang Rizal,” or Rizaline archipelago, identifying itself as a nation under the name Republica Rizalina.
Later discussions of national naming also refer to Ricarte’s “Rizal Constitution” and the proposed use of “Rizaline Islands” and “Rizalines” for the country and its citizens. Whether one favors such a name or not is secondary. Its historical value lies in the refusal to accept “Philippines” as a colonial brand permanently fixed by Spain and then Anglicized by America.
Ricarte’s “Rizalinas” shows that the national question was not only about whether the United States would eventually leave. It was also about what the nation should call itself after empire. Names are not cosmetic. They are ownership claims. They say who has the authority to define the community. Spain gave “Filipinas.” America normalized “Philippine Islands” and “the Philippines.” Ricarte’s Rizalina project attempted to rename the nation after a martyr rather than a king.
And it also involves claiming not just the Philippines itself but the entire claims of the Spanish East Indies. Again, Palaos, Guam, Carolinas, among others in the Pacific under the jurisdiction of the Spanish crown was to be claimed by the Philippines itself.
This connects directly to “recognized, not granted.” A people that argues over its name is not merely waiting for administrative independence. It is struggling over authorship. The colonial state may control customs houses, courts, schools, military reservations, tariffs, and police power. But the nationalist movement contests the deeper asset: the right to say what the country is.
Ricarte’s later position on Hare–Hawes–Cutting also shows why a purely formal independence law could be distrusted. A study of Ricarte notes that he saw the bill as a sweetened measure that, beneath the surface, would strangle Filipino aspirations for genuine political and economic independence.
That criticism anticipates the larger problem of 1946: formal independence could be recognized while economic sovereignty remained constrained.
The Jones Law: Recognition Promised, Sovereignty Retained
The Jones Law of 1916 is essential because it already used the language of recognition. Its preamble stated that the purpose of the United States was to withdraw sovereignty over the Philippine Islands and recognize their independence once a stable government could be established. This is the earlier legal seed of the 1946 formula.
But the Jones Law also demonstrates the contradiction. It promised eventual recognition, yet it preserved American authority. The Governor-General remained appointed by the President of the United States and retained broad executive powers, including supervision, veto authority, and the power to act in cases of rebellion or invasion subject to the President’s authority.
The language was therefore both concession and control. It admitted that independence was the ultimate destination. It also insisted that America would decide when Filipinos were ready. This is the paternalistic logic of tutelary empire: the colonized are promised freedom, but the colonizer reserves the right to certify maturity.
From a business standpoint, the Jones Law converted sovereignty into a staged exit plan. America kept management control while announcing that, eventually, the enterprise would be turned over. But even that metaphor is inadequate, because a nation is not a subsidiary. The problem is precisely that empire treated the Philippines as an administered asset while Filipino nationalism treated it as a political community.
This explains why the word “recognize” became necessary. If America had said only “grant,” it would have strengthened the fiction that Filipino nationhood was a product of American instruction. By saying “recognize,” even while retaining control, American law conceded that the endpoint was not incorporation or permanent possession but independent national existence.
Hare–Hawes–Cutting and Tydings–McDuffie: Independence as Exit Contract
The Hare–Hawes–Cutting Act of 1933 was the first major statutory independence framework, but it was controversial because of the terms attached. Its purpose was to enable Filipinos to adopt a constitution, form a government, and provide for independence, yet its provisions were subject to acceptance by the Philippine Legislature or a convention. The act became a point of division among Filipino leaders because independence was not being discussed in the abstract; it was being negotiated through military reservations, trade terms, quotas, and transition rules.
The Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934 succeeded where Hare–Hawes–Cutting failed. Its Section 10 carried the revealing title: “Recognition of Philippine Independence and Withdrawal of American Sovereignty.” The law instructed the U.S. President, after the transitional period, to surrender American jurisdiction and recognize Philippine independence.
This structure matters. It does not say simply that the United States would “grant” independence. It identifies two linked acts: American withdrawal and Philippine recognition. Withdrawal describes what America had to do. Recognition describes what America had to acknowledge. The law therefore contains both the American legal view and the Filipino nationalist view in one statutory formula.
The statute did not deny that the United States had sovereignty to surrender. In fact, it explicitly referred to American possession, supervision, jurisdiction, control, and sovereignty. But it also avoided making independence sound like a discretionary favor. The Philippine government to be acknowledged was the government instituted by the people under the constitution then in force.
This was the genius and ambiguity of the language. America retained the legal theory of acquisition from Spain. Filipinos retained the moral theory of national self-determination. “Recognize” became the bridge between them.
Truman’s Proclamation: The Compromise Becomes Ceremony
On July 4, 1946, Truman’s Proclamation No. 2695 converted the statutory formula into a public act. The proclamation recited the American claim of acquired sovereignty, acknowledged American jurisdiction and control for forty-eight years, and then declared the withdrawal of American rights over the territory and people of the Philippines. It also recognized the independence of the Philippines as a separate and self-governing nation.
This is why a careful historian should not pretend the proclamation was an admission that America had never ruled. It plainly says the opposite. But it also uses recognition as the final diplomatic act. That is the point: America did not simply say, “we grant.” It said, in effect, “we withdraw what we have exercised, and we recognize what now stands.”
The Treaty of General Relations repeated the same structure. It was designed to provide for the recognition of Philippine independence and the relinquishment of American sovereignty. Article I stated that the United States withdrew and surrendered its rights of possession, supervision, jurisdiction, control, or sovereignty, while also recognizing the independence of the Republic.
The treaty’s protocol was equally direct: the treaty existed for the purpose of recognizing Philippine independence and maintaining close relations between the two governments. Thus, the word was not a speechwriter’s flourish. It appeared in statute, proclamation, treaty, and protocol. It was the official vocabulary of exit.
The ceremony of July 4 therefore had a double meaning. For America, it was the orderly liquidation of formal colonial sovereignty. For Filipinos, it could be read as belated acknowledgment of a claim dating to 1898. For postwar diplomacy, it became a demonstration that the United States could retreat from formal empire while presenting itself as a supporter of self-government.
Self-Determination and the Postwar World
The timing also matters. The Tydings–McDuffie timetable preceded the United Nations, so the UN did not create Philippine independence. But by 1946, the postwar world had made colonial rule more difficult to defend. The United Nations Charter placed equal rights and self-determination of peoples within the purposes of the organization.
This international setting gave the United States an incentive to present Philippine independence as proof that it was not merely another old empire. The United States could tell Asia, the new United Nations system, and the decolonizing world that it had recognized an Asian republic. That was useful diplomacy.
But the irony remains. The United States had denied the First Republic, fought Filipino independence forces, built a colonial state, and then decades later used recognition to demonstrate liberal anti-imperial credibility. The same power that suppressed the original claim became the power that ceremonially acknowledged the later state.
This is why “recognition” was also reputation management. It allowed the United States to reposition itself in a postwar world where colonialism was becoming bad language. The act was legally real, diplomatically important, and morally overdue. But it was also useful to American self-presentation.
The Economic Ledger: Independence With Strings
This writeup must not stop at flags and proclamations. Sovereignty is also a balance sheet. Who controls trade? Who controls currency? Who controls natural resources? Who controls bases? Who controls access to capital and reconstruction funds? If July 4, 1946 recognized independence, the economic arrangements surrounding it constrained that independence almost immediately.
The Philippine Trade Act of 1946, commonly known as the Bell Trade Act, required close economic alignment with the United States. A State Department memorandum explained that the Act provided for eight years of free trade followed by twenty years of declining preferences, along with quotas and other trade controls. More controversially, the Act required constitutional amendments allowing American citizens and enterprises to engage in activities such as mining and public utilities that had been reserved for Philippine citizens.
This is the postcolonial contradiction. The Republic was recognized, but its economic sovereignty was immediately negotiated under conditions of dependency. The country had been devastated by war. Reconstruction money, market access, and trade preferences were urgent. The United States had leverage; the Philippines had need. The result was formal independence under a framework that preserved American economic advantage.
This does not nullify independence. It complicates it. A country can be legally independent and structurally dependent. It can have a flag, president, constitution, and diplomatic personality while still operating under economic terms shaped by its former colonizer. That is why “recognized, not granted” should not become empty triumphalism. The recognition was real. The constraints were real too.
Ricarte’s warning about a bill that could appear to promise independence while weakening genuine political and economic freedom becomes relevant here. Whether one agrees with all of Ricarte’s later choices or not, the structural concern was valid: independence without economic room to maneuver can become juridical sovereignty with limited developmental autonomy.
The Counterargument: Why Some Still Say “Granted”
Those who say “granted” are not without legal materials. The United States did acquire the Philippines from Spain under the Treaty of Paris. It did govern the islands through congressional statutes, executive authority, courts, and colonial administration. The Jones Law itself preserved American sovereignty while promising eventual recognition. And Truman’s proclamation recited acquisition and forty-eight years of American jurisdiction.
From that perspective, independence was “granted” because the United States held and then relinquished legal control. In a narrow administrative sense, this is understandable. A colonial power that possesses jurisdiction and then gives it up may describe its act as a grant. Even some American documents and summaries use that language.
But the problem is that “grant” is incomplete and politically loaded. It describes the colonizer’s administrative act but erases the colonized people’s prior claim. It treats independence as something descending from imperial discretion rather than something demanded by national struggle.
The better view is to distinguish mechanics from legitimacy. Mechanically, the United States transferred and surrendered governing authority. Diplomatically, it recognized independence. Historically, it acknowledged a nation whose claim had preceded American rule. Morally, it gave up what it should not have held against Filipino self-determination in the first place.
Thus, “granted” is not wholly false as shorthand for the American legal act. But it is inferior as history. It is too colonial in tone, too generous to the former ruler, and too dismissive of 1898. “Recognized” is the more accurate word because it is the word the law itself used, and because it better reflects the continuity of Filipino nationhood.
Quezon, Ego, and Political Necessity
Was “recognize” chosen to appease leaders like Quezon and Osmena, or the-ever growing separatist demand for self-determination? It likely served that function, but it should not be reduced to personal ego. Quezon was not merely asking for a flattering word. Filipino leaders were negotiating the dignity of the national claim within a legal structure controlled by Washington.
The Jones Law had already promised recognition after stable government. Tydings–McDuffie repeated that recognition formula. Truman and the Treaty of General Relations carried it into final effect. The repetition shows that “recognize” had become the acceptable diplomatic vocabulary for an American exit that would not humiliate Filipino nationalism.
This was not merely semantic appeasement. It was political settlement. Filipino leaders could tell their people that independence had been recognized, not donated. American officials could tell their public that the United States had fulfilled its promise and responsibly withdrawn. Both sides received language they could use.
That is how negotiated exits work. They do not only transfer authority. They manage narratives. The colonizer wants credit for leaving. The colonized wants recognition that it had the right to be free. The word “recognize” performed both tasks.
The Territorial Reduction of the Filipino Claim
The Spanish East Indies dimension sharpens the argument. If the First Republic’s political imagination included Palaos and perhaps the wider Carolines, then 1946 recognition was not merely late. It was also territorially narrowed.
The United States and Spain drew the legal boundaries through the Treaty of Paris. Guam was separated. The rest of the Marianas, the Carolines, and Palaos entered a different imperial trajectory involving Germany, Japan, and later American trusteeship.
The modern Philippines became the successor not to the full Spanish East Indies, but to the portion of that world defined by American acquisition and subsequent settlement.
This does not mean the present Philippine state should revive claims to Palau, Guam, the Marianas, or the Carolines. That would be historically careless and politically irresponsible. Those peoples have their own histories, identities, and modern political statuses. The point is not revanchism. The point is historical clarity.
The Philippines of Malolos was not simply the Philippines of the American colonial map. The Filipino revolutionary state thought in terms of succession from a broader Spanish-Pacific world. The American settlement narrowed that world into the Philippine Islands as Washington chose to acquire and administer them. When America later recognized independence, it recognized the state within that narrowed frame.
That is why the phrase “recognized, not granted” should be expanded: recognized, not granted; narrowed, not invented.
Recognition, Republic, and the Cost of American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism often presents U.S. empire as reluctant, benevolent, temporary, and pedagogical. In the Philippine case, this mythology is difficult to sustain without heavy editing. The United States acquired the islands through a treaty that excluded Filipino representatives, fought a war against Filipino independence forces, governed the archipelago as an unincorporated territory, and retained decisive powers while promising eventual freedom.
The language of recognition partly backtracked from that exceptionalism. It admitted, at least implicitly, that the Philippines was not simply an American-made dependency graduating from colonial school. It was a nation whose independence had to be acknowledged.
Still, recognition also served American exceptionalism by allowing Washington to claim the moral high ground in decolonization. The United States could say it had done what European empires refused to do. It could present Philippine independence as proof of democratic tutelage. But that story becomes less flattering when one remembers 1898, Malolos, the war, the narrowing of the old Spanish-Pacific geography, and the economic arrangements attached to independence.
The more honest view is not that America gave freedom. It is that Filipino nationalism forced the question of freedom to remain open until America could no longer avoid answering it.
The Correct Historical Formula
A historically correct civic lesson should say something like this:
"The Filipino people proclaimed independence in 1898 and constitutionalized their republic at Malolos. The United States, through the Treaty of Paris and subsequent colonial rule, denied that claim and exercised sovereignty over the Philippine Islands. Filipino leaders, revolutionaries, politicians, intellectuals, and communities kept the independence claim alive. In 1946, the United States withdrew and surrendered its colonial sovereignty and recognized the independence of the Republic of the Philippines."
That formulation is better than “America granted us independence.” It is also better than the oversimplified claim that America’s use of “recognize” proved that the Philippines had been legally independent all along. The truth is more complex: the Philippines had a prior national claim, but America had actual colonial power. July 4, 1946 resolved the formal contradiction by ending the latter and recognizing the former.
This is the difference between legal control and historical legitimacy. America had the first from 1898 to 1946. Filipinos never surrendered the second.
Why This Still Matters
Words shape political memory. If children are taught that independence was “granted,” they may learn gratitude where they should learn vigilance. If they are taught only that it was “recognized,” without understanding colonial control, they may learn slogan instead of history. The task is to teach both: the United States ruled, but it did not author Filipino nationhood.
The phrase “recognized, not granted” therefore remains useful, but it should be sharpened. It should not be used as a romantic shortcut. It should be used as an entry point into the deeper story: 1898, Malolos, the Spanish East Indies, the Treaty of Paris, the Philippine-American War, the Jones Law, Hare–Hawes–Cutting, Tydings–McDuffie, Truman’s proclamation, the Treaty of General Relations, the Bell Trade Act, and the unfinished business of economic sovereignty.
The national lesson is not merely that America used the word “recognize.” The lesson is that Filipino independence had to be recognized because Filipinos had already asserted it. The United States controlled the timetable, but it did not create the nation. It controlled the legal transfer, but not the moral origin. It narrowed the territorial frame, but did not invent the political community.
In the end, July 4, 1946 should be read as a negotiated recognition of a long-denied claim. The American act was real, but it was not original. The Filipino claim was original, but it had been denied by force and law. Recognition was the compromise word that allowed the empire to leave without confessing too much and allowed the nation to stand without pretending it had been born only that morning.
So the correction stands: recognized, not merely granted. But the fuller correction is stronger: The Philippines was proclaimed in 1898, constitutionalized at Malolos, reduced by imperial partition, administered by the United States, recognized in 1946, and economically constrained afterward. Independence was not an American gift. It was a Filipino claim that America finally had to acknowledge.
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References
Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista. (1898). Philippine Declaration of Independence. In The Laws of the First Philippine Republic. National Historical Commission.
Hare–Hawes–Cutting Act, Pub. L. No. 72-311, 47 Stat. 761 (1933).
Jones Law / Philippine Autonomy Act, Pub. L. No. 64-240, 39 Stat. 545 (1916).
Malolos Constitution. (1899). Political Constitution of the Philippine Republic.
Ricarte, A. (n.d.). Pangunang batas nang pamahalaang manghihimagsik sa Kapuluwang Rizal: na nagpapakilalang bansang may pamagat na Madlaang Rizal (Republica Rizalina). Philippine eLib catalog record.
Treaty of Paris, United States–Spain, December 10, 1898.
Treaty of General Relations Between the United States of America and the Republic of the Philippines, July 4, 1946.
Truman, H. S. (1946). Proclamation 2695—Independence of the Philippines.
Tydings–McDuffie Act / Philippine Independence Act, Pub. L. No. 73-127, 48 Stat. 456 (1934).
United Nations. (1945). Charter of the United Nations.