Great question, friend!

The United States was deeply invested indeed in the Philippines during the turn of the twentieth century. Kristin L. Hogan strongly asserts that congressmen and politicians (especially Theodore Roosevelt, for instance) maintained their self-image and their belief in their own manhood through the Philippine-American war and the colonization of the islands. Roosevelt thought colonization would prove America could still do a "real man's" important work--as he said, "we respect the man who goes out to do a man's work, to front difficulties and overcome them." (145) He thought subduing and uplifting the Philippines was the sort of trial that made a nation stronger.

The rhetoric of uplift further buttressed white America's self-image. Roosevelt also claimed that the white peoples of the world would justify their existences and prove their glory by spreading the fruits of their civilization to their little brown brothers. Hogansan also mentions that many imperialists, like Beveridge, portrayed Filipinos as "childlike" or "feminine" and implied it was America's responsibility to "safeguard" them and guide them upwards until they were ready for "independence" (not before, of course--see pages 150-158).

This is, of course, not to say that the U.S had no pecuniary concerns in its colonization of the Philippines. As Matthew Jacobson has demonstrated in Barbarian Virtues, Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century were deeply, deeply anxious about the prospective fall of industrial capitalism due to lack of demand, and thus desperately sought out new markets for their products, most notably in China. Dr. Jacobson contends that American colonization in the Philippines (and other places, in fact) had less to do with interest in the countries themselves (though this was certainly a factor) than in how they could be used as "stepping-stones" for the markets of China (Barbarian Virtues, pp. 7, 41, 43). Now, things didn't really play out like this IRL, but that's a story for another day :)

So yes, I think it's fair to say that the US was invested in the Philippines to a high degree, at least ideologically and politically. As to what lasting effects it had on that country? A lot! First, as Alfred M. McCoy notes in his book, Policing America's Empire, the Philippine-American war was pretty bloody, around 200,000 civilians died there as a result of it (p. 5). McCoy argues further that the U.S helped reduce the amount of warfare between various ethnic groups in the area, but also set up an extensive system of surveillance, subverted religious and labor reform movements, and propped up the elites in ways that would make democratic government harder to implement in the future (I really recommend giving his book at least a general skim). Sharon Delmendo in The Star-Entangled Banner asserts that America even influenced the sorts of people Filipinos would consider national heroes; she claims Jose Rizal was promoted by American authorities because he was most convenient for their imperial agenda (Chapter 1).

So yes, the U.S had quite a lasting effect on the institutions and infrastructure of the Philippines, often in negative ways, though out of intentions that might strike us as misguided and paternalistic today, rather than outrightly malicious.

Sources Cited:

Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale University Press, 2000)

Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2001)

Alfred W.McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)

Sharon Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines (Rutgers University Press, 2004)