Word: sugar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Spanish land grants, many of them dubious, which gave a few favored families a stranglehold. Free trade with the U.S. had given the Philippines the bloom of apparent health, but it was a hectic flush: the islands were not prepared to stand on their own economic feet. The sugar kings and wealthy traders had prospered, but thousands of tenant farmers were left in discontented peonage. The seed of freedom had sprouted, but the soil of order on which freedom must grow had been neglected. Above all, in setting a target date for independence so far in advance...
Navajo Indians are in demand as workers in the sugar-beet fields of the West, for, unlike braceros (from Mexico), they are not protected by treaty regulations. Navajos are cheap; they keep their mouths shut and they do as they are told. When the season ended at Burley, Idaho, a Navajo beet picker named Kee Chee dumbly obeyed orders to get his family on a chartered bus for the long ride home to New Mexico-even though it meant taking his sick, seven-month-old daughter out of a hospital at nearby Bear River City, Utah...
Principal crops: rice (more of which has to be imported to eke out the local supply), abaca (the famous Manila hemp), copra, sugar, corn, tobacco. The seasons: hot (March through June), rainy (July through October), cool (November through February). In the hot season, the government itself picks up & leaves Manila, settles down in the mountain city of Baguio (pop. 29,262), which is the official summer capital...
...Filipinos had left their nipa huts and tethered carabaos, their paddies and abaca fields, copra sheds and sugar centrals to cast their votes in a free election. After five years of catching their shirttails and mashing their fingers in the machinery of democracy, imported and installed for them by the U.S., the Filipinos had demonstrated that they were learning how to operate...
Mixed Motives. In the 1920s, the U.S. was already talking of giving "our little brown brothers" their independence-for a variety of motives. Powerful U.S. interests (sugar, tobacco, dairy, cottonseed and peanut oil, the West Coast labor unions) objected to the rivalry of cheap Filipino products and cheap Filipino labor. They were joined by U.S. liberals who squirmed when Filipinos quoted U.S. doctrine back at them-i.e., that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. The U.S. gave the Philippines partial independence in 1935, and set the date of complete independence...