Taft Commission

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Taft Commission ( Tagalog Komisyong Taft ) is called the Second Philippine Commission in the Philippines, set up by US President William McKinley on March 16, 1900 . It should implement the proposals of the Schurman Commission and establish the first civil colonial administration. After Taft returned to the USA, it was only called the Philippine Commission . It worked until the Philippine Autonomy Act came into force in 1916 and the commission was replaced by the Senate of the Philippine Legislature . This in turn was replaced in 1935 by the Parliament of the Commonwealth of the Philippines , the Commonwealth Congress .

The commission initially consisted of five members; the future President of the United States William Howard Taft , who became the first civil governor general on July 4, 1901 and held the chair until January 31, 1904, was appointed first chairman . Other members of the commission were Henry Clay Ide , Luke Edward Wright , Dean Conant Worcester and Bernard Moses . The task of the commission was to build up a civil administration, to promote the economic development and the association of the Philippines as a US colony, to establish a free public education system and to promote land reform. In order to establish a civil colonial administration, 157 laws were passed from September 1900 to July 1901. This reorganized the administration of the provinces and municipalities, constituted the civil judiciary , including a Supreme Court, enacted a civil code, established a public service and laid the foundations for the development of a police force. After the passage of the Philippine Organic Act in July 1902, the number of members increased further and more and more Filipinos were appointed to the commission. This formed the upper house of the two-chamber legislature . The House of Commons formed the Philippine Assembly , whose first election took place on July 30, 1907. The first Filipino advisors to the commission were Cayetano Arellano , Benito Legarda , Florentino Torres and Trinidad Pardo de Tavera , who later also became members of the commission. Gregorio Araneta became the Philippines' first Minister of Justice in 1902. In 1904 the commission commissioned Felipe G. Calderon to draft the first civil penal code.

Since 93% of the land in the Philippines was state-owned by 1902, the commission opened the land to private investors from the United States. She sold land to American agricultural companies to set up plantations for tobacco , industrial hemp and sugar cane . At the same time, Taft negotiated with the Vatican and the Spanish monastic orders and bought these 1660 km² of land for 7.2 million US dollars . The intended land reform was to give every Filipino the right to 16 hectares of arable land; however, this reform was never fully implemented. In 1909, the US Congress passed the Payne Aldrich Tariff Act ; this provided for agricultural products from the Philippines, such as rice, sugar and tobacco, to be imported duty-free into the USA. The Underwood Tariff Act passed in 1913 lifted all restrictions on exporting products duty-free from the Philippines to the USA. These measures tied the Philippines directly into the US economy, so that in 1920 already 70% of the Philippines' exports went to the US and 65% of the imports came from the US.

The most lasting element of the work of the commission was the establishment of a public education system in which every Filipino was guaranteed free access to education. There were primary schools set up, which provided for a free school through fourth grade. This laid the foundation for the Philippines to have a literacy rate of over 95% by the beginning of the 21st century .

Web links

literature

  • Golay, Frank H. (1997). Face of empire: United States-Philippine relations, 1898-1946. Ateneo de Manila University Press. ISBN 978-971-550-254-2 .
  • Morgan, Howard Wayne (2003). William McKinley and his America. Kent State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87338-765-1 .