The New York Times / November 19, 2009 Books of The Times The Queasy Side of Theodore Roosevelt’s Diplomatic Voyage By JANET MASLIN
[review of: THE IMPERIAL CRUISE: A Secret History of Empire and War By James Bradley / Little, Brown & Company. $29.99.] James Bradley’s incendiary new book about Theodore Roosevelt is not really packed with secrets. Much of the material it discusses has long been hidden in plain sight. But Roosevelt biographers often subscribe to certain orthodoxies, and one of them is this: When Roosevelt made noxiously racist and ethnocentric remarks about Anglo-Saxon greatness, so what? He was just voicing the tenets of his time. “Nationalistic boasting was in fashion,” shrugs Douglas Brinkley’s nearly 1,000-page “Wilderness Warrior,” published this year. Mr. Bradley, the author of “Flags of Our Fathers,” does not simply cite Roosevelt’s egregious talk. He presents this much-ignored aspect of Roosevelt’s thinking with sharp specificity (“I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906) and then goes on to make a much more damaging point, angrily and persuasively connecting Roosevelt’s race-based foreign policy miscalculations in Asia. His thesis in “The Imperial Cruise” is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt’s presidency. “Here was the match that lit the fuse, and yet for decades we paid attention only to the dynamite,” Mr. Bradley writes. The flame to which he refers is Roosevelt’s secret diplomacy with Japan and his encouragement of Japanese imperialism. (“I should like to see Japan have Korea,” he once declared.) In a far-reaching book that also addresses Roosevelt’s misconceptions about Korea, Hawaii, China and the Philippines, Mr. Bradley places critical emphasis on the dangerous American-Japanese relationship that, he says, Roosevelt helped create. “Knowing a lot about race theory but less about international diplomacy and almost nothing about Asia,” he writes, “Roosevelt in 1905 careened U.S.-Japanese relations on the dark side road leading to 1941.” [for more, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/books/19book.html] Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company [Roosevelt's racism was indeed representative of his time. But having the President (not just TR but also Wilson and likely others) preach this crap helped create the rise of "scientific" racism & eugenics that may have peaked in the US during the 1920s. (This view was espoused -- in a somewhat diluted form -- by my late father, who was a teen during the last part of that decade.) These attitudes were of course a precursor of Nazism.] -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
