Scale plays a major role. So does local politics.
To clarify one item: Both Hawaii and the Philippines were annexed in 1898. The difference is that the Philippines became fully independent in 1946, while Hawaii became a state in 1959.
The first point to consider: The Philippines are and were big. There are over 7,000 islands with a total land area of over 100,000 square miles (if you include territorial waters, that figure goes way up). The Hawaiian islands have a land area of less than 10,000 square miles.
In 1939, the Philippines had a population of 16 million, almost all Filipino. Hawaii, in 1940, had a population of about 420,000, a diverse mixture in which native Hawaiians made up only about 60,000.
The United States decided to set the Philippines on the path to independence in the 1930s. The population of the Philippines comfortably exceeded that of any state. For that matter, the population of the Philippines in 1939 handily exceeded most modern estimates for the total pre-Columbian population of Native Americans living in what is now the continental United States.
There was no real way to Americanize the Philippines within any reasonable timeframe. The West was mostly Americanized by settlement and a century-long series of wars with a total death toll of under 100,000. Some intermarriage and assimilation, but mostly Americans and a mixture of freshly-arrived European immigrants going west, being fruitful, and multiplying.
If the Philippines had been sparsely populated, it might have been attractive for American settlement… except for the fact that they are literally twice as far away, a distance that is decisively not trivial. Hawaii is much closer; it’s in an incredibly strategically important location for the United States. American adventurers, settlers, and corporations spent decades laying groundwork in Hawaii before the 1898 annexation of Hawaii. The Philippines, in the mean time, were a Spanish possession.
After the official annexation of both sets of islands, this difference continued to grow. Hawaii had a lot more intercourse with and population exchange with the United States than the Philippines.
Filipinos had been much more resistant to American rule from the start; the annexation of the Philippines in 1898 was immediately followed by a war as former allies turned on each other. Many in the Philippines wanted independence, and were as willing to fight the Americans for it as the Spanish.
When the Tydings-McDuffie Act was passed, it was clear that the Philippines would not be Americanized at any point in the near future, and that the only ethical course of action was Filipino independence. Hawaii, on the other hand, had a much less certain fate, a much smaller and more Americanized population, and an extremely strategic location. Hawaii was the key to defending American maritime trade in the Pacific.
Even so, Hawaii probably could have become independent after World War II if the residents of the island had wanted to become independent. For the most part, they did not. Hawaii’s residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of statehood in 1959; the territorial government had been petitioning for statehood since 1903.[1]
In spite of the irregularities involved with the original coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, Hawaii became a state quite willingly. There was no significant opposition to statehood in 1959, either among the whole population or even specifically among native Hawaiians.
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