Book Review: The Imperial Cruise

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James D. Bradley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Was this a retelling of the cruise? That would have made a good book.
Was this a balanced re-evaluation of Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy? That would have made a good book too.

But it was neither. And both.

It retold the cruise but not in enough detail to make it interesting.

It re-evaluated Roosevelt but lacked the sophistication to make the re-evaluation impactful.

It was like reading high school IB student's IA; full of heady ideas that are over-footnoted but not scholarly. Also full of that idealism one often finds in young people who have not yet come to terms with the idea that there is no black and white in history; there is only gray.

I dog-eared a lot of pages, though. But that's because I was either checking up on his facts (often inaccurate) or tagging Bradley's immature prose (things like calling Roosevelt "Teddy" or Taft "Big Bill" when he was attempting to excoriate them which, of course, weakened the power of his argument)

Bradley's implied thesis is valid; Roosevelt was racist and his ideas about other ethnicities informed his foreign policy.

But Bradley's stated thesis is a stretch; Roosevelt is responsible for World War II in the Pacific because he gave Japan permission to become an imperial power then didn't follow through with supporting them after the Russo-Japanese war.

Yes, Japan was frustrated that they won the war but failed to get reparations from Russia, a sting that reminded them of when they won the first Sin0-Japanese war and then Russia, France, and Germany took away the land they gained.

Yes, Roosevelt was part of the negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese war (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize) but to lay the entire blame of World War II in the Pacific on that moment is high-school-level folly. Again, history is not black and white; it's gray. Certainly, Roosevelt's interactions with the Japanese in the early 1900s contributed to the Japan's growth into a militaristic and hungry imperial power, but that is only one swath of black contributing to the gray of the whole story.

The main problem with this book is that Bradley started with his mind already made up and an agenda to prove.

In his afterword he writes;
"Theodore Roosevelt wrote, 'Peace may only come through war.' In my lifetime the United States has benevolently spent trillions of dollars trying to prove that erroneous notion. In the twentieth century, America extended its military to Asia. Now it's time to work on the human links between cultures. For the past ten years, the James Bradley Peace Foundation and Youth For Understanding have sent American students to live with families overseas. Perhaps in the future when we debate whether to fight it out or talk it out, one of these Americans might make a difference."

Scholarly historians should not have an agenda, however laudable that agenda may be.

And it's a shame, because a scholarly re-evaluation of Roosevelt and the racial attitudes of his generation is sorely needed in our 21st century world.

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