The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War [Hardcover]

James Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 2009

In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name.

In 2005, a century later, James Bradley traveled in the wake of Roosevelt's mission and discovered what had transpired in Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Beijing and Seoul.

In 1905, Roosevelt was bully-confident and made secret agreements that he though would secure America's westward push into the Pacific. Instead, he lit the long fuse on the Asian firecrackers that would singe America's hands for a century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Theodore Roosevelt steers America onto the shoals of imperialism in this stridently disapproving study of early 20th-century U.S. policy in Asia. Bestselling author of Flags of Our Fathers, Bradley traces a 1905 voyage to Asia by Roosevelt's emissary William Howard Taft, who negotiated a secret agreement in which America and Japan recognized each other's conquests of the Philippines and Korea. (Roosevelt's flamboyant, pistol-packing daughter Alice went along to generate publicity, and Bradley highlights her antics.) Each port of call prompts a case study of American misdeeds: the brutal counterinsurgency in the Philippines; the takeover of Hawaii by American sugar barons; Roosevelt's betrayal of promises to protect Korea, which greenlighted Japanese expansionism and thus makes him responsible for Pearl Harbor. Bradley explores the racist underpinnings of Roosevelt's policies and paradoxical embrace of the Japanese as Honorary Aryans. Bradley's critique of Rooseveltian imperialism is compelling but unbalanced. He doesn't explain how Roosevelt could have evicted the Japanese from Korea, and insinuates that the Japanese imperial project was the brainstorm of American advisers. Ironically, his view of Asian history, like Roosevelt's, denies agency to the Asians themselves. Photos, maps. One-day laydown.(Nov. 24)
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From Booklist

Bradley’s first books, Flags of Our Fathers (2000) and Flyboys (2003), were sensationally popular World War II combat stories. His new one, about U.S.-Japanese diplomacy in 1905, represents a departure. Asserting a causal connection between diplomatic understandings reached then and war 36 years later, Bradley dramatizes his case with a delegation Theodore Roosevelt dispatched to Japan in the summer of 1905. Led by Secretary of War William Taft and ornamented by the president’s quotable daughter Alice, it sailed while TR hosted the peace conference between victorious Japan and defeated Russia. As he recounts the itinerary of Taft’s cruise, Bradley discusses attitudes of social Darwinism and white superiority that were then prevalent and expressed by TR and Taft. They modified their instincts, Bradley argues, in dealing with nonwhite Japan, and secretly conceded it possession of Korea. This is what Bradley asserts was a prerequisite to Pearl Harbor in 1941, a dubious thesis when the tensions of the 1930s stemmed from general Japanese aggressiveness, not its control of Korea per se. Bradley does fine on 1905 but falters when predicting the future. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (November 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316008958
• ISBN-13: 978-0316008952
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.6 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (230 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #91,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #85 in Books > History > Asia > Japan

More About the Author

I was born in Wisconsin surrounded by a loving family of ten and loved swimming in cold lakes. When I was a boy I read an article by former president Harry Truman recommending historical biographies for young readers. His reasoning was that it was easy to follow the storyline of someone's life, and they would absorb the history of the times on the journey. History soon became my favorite subject and I have been an active reader all my life.

When I was thirteen years old I read an article by James Michener in Reader's Digest which I paraphrase: "When you're twenty-two and graduate from college, people will ask you, 'What do you want to do?' It's a good question, but you should answer it when you're thirty-five." Michener went on to write that his experiences wandering the globe as a young man later inspired his works on Afghanistan, Spain, Japan and other places.

When I was nineteen years old, I lived and studied in Tokyo for one year. I later brought my Japanese friends home to Wisconsin. My father, John Bradley, had helped raise an American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima and had shot a Japanese soldier dead. My dad warmly welcomed my Japanese buddies.

I traveled around the world when I was twenty-one, from the U.S. to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, England and back to the United States.

At twenty-three I graduated with a degree in East Asian history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

For the next twenty years I worked in the corporate communications industry in the United States, Japan, England and South Africa.

In my late thirties I took a year off to go around the world again. On this trip I made it to base camp on Mt. Everest and walked among lions in Africa.

My father died when I was forty years old. My search to find out why he didn't speak about Iwo Jima led me to write Flags of Our Fathers and establish the James Bradley Peace Foundation.

Flags of Our Fathers went on to be a bestseller and a movie, but few saw its potential at first. In fact, as this New York Times article documents, twenty-seven publishers turned the book down over a period of twenty-five months. This difficult and humbling birthing process inspired my live presentation Doing the Impossible.

In 2001 a WWII veteran of the Pacific revealed to me that the U.S. government had kept secret the beheading deaths of eight American airmen on the Japanese island of Chichi Jima, next door to Iwo Jima. After researching their deaths, I informed the eight families and the world of the unknown facts in my book second book Flyboys. (One flyboy got away. His name was George Herbert Walker Bush.)

After writing two books about WWII in the Pacific, I began to wonder about the origins of America's involvement in that war. The inferno that followed Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor had consumed countless lives, and believing there's usually smoke before a fire, I set off to search Asia for the original irritants. The result of that search is my third book, The Imperial Cruise.

I am working on my fourth book, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and China.

Above my desk are the framed words of James Michener:

"Just because you wrote a few books, the world is not going to change. You will find that you will go to sleep and awaken as the same son-of-a-bitch you were the day before."

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

151 of 162 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good theme, needs focus, February 4, 2010

By 

F. Mullen (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (Hardcover)

The Imperial Cruise has an important historical theme, but it suffers from a variety of distractions.

The theme is the role of Theodore Roosevelt in crafting early 20th Century US policy toward the Far East and how this contributed to the descent, more than a generation later, into war with Japan. It is a story of racial prejudice, diplomatic duplicity, presidential hubris, and unintended consequences. Told well, this would have been both great reading and instructive history. James Bradley, however, does not tell it well.

The problems are manifold, beginning with coherence. The title of the book suggests that it is the story of then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft's 1905 cruise to the Far East, and perhaps how that fit into the Asian policy objectives of President Theodore Roosevelt. Using the cruise itinerary to knit together geography and policy could have been a useful literary technique, but it turns out that the cruise is incidental to the book. When, after scores of pages on other topics, Bradley occasionally returns us to Taft and his cruise, it is as often to talk about the celebrity goings-on and romantic intrigues of Taft's traveling companion, First Daughter Alice Roosevelt, as it is to connect policy to facts on the ground. Alice Roosevelt was a very interesting person, but she belongs in a different book.

Then there's the matter of style. Bradley's prose is inappropriately informal, not in the mien of an historian. He regularly refers to Theodore Roosevelt as "Teddy," or, in at least one place, "Big Stick Teddy." He refers to Japanese as "Japs." Korea's competition with Japan is "keep[ing] up with the imperial Joneses," and Japan's and Russia's rapprochement after the Russo-Japanese war is "kiss[ing] and mak[ing] up." An occasional dip into such flippancy can be useful to a writer--to set a tone for a particular passage, for example--but Bradley uses it routinely. This is unserious writing.

One of the important elements of Bradley's thesis is the extent to which American racism at the turn of the 20th Century distorted Roosevelt's perceptions of Far Eastern peoples and led to grave historic consequences. There is a strong argument to be made here, but Bradley overworks it. Whole chapters are given over to describing American racial prejudice and moral obtuseness, for example, while in contrast Filipino insurgents were "freedom fighters," Japanese nationalists were "brave samurai," and the revolutionaries behind the Meiji Restoration were "founding fathers." It is fair for Bradley to go into detail on American racism, because it is important to understanding Roosevelt and his milieu. But the hagiographies to other races tend to detract from his thesis by making him sound highly prejudiced himself. A nod to balance and objectivity would have made the argument more convincingly.

There also seems to be an attempt in a part of the book to equate America's racism and imperialism of 1905 to America's overseas wars today. Speaking of US forces' capture of Manila, Bradley says, apropos nothing, "As with Baghdad more than a century later, Americans assumed that the fall of a capital meant control of the country." First of all, not true. (I was a war planner for Operation Iraqi Freedom. We explicitly discounted this assumption.) Secondly, Baghdad in 2003 had nothing to do with Manila in 1899, so the comparison serves no purpose except as an attempt to introduce the equivalence. To reinforce it, Bradley soon afterwards refers to a torture technique used by US soldiers in the Philippines as "water boarding," even though his own citations of contemporary accounts call it "the water treatment," "water cure," or "water detail," never "water boarding." Finally, Bradley refers to Roosevelt declaring "mission accomplished" in the Philippines, not as a quote from Roosevelt himself, but rather as an evident reference to the banner flown on USS Abraham Lincoln during President George W. Bush's appearance there in May 2003. Once these modern political erratics are introduced in the middle of the book, nothing further is made of them. It's almost as if Bradley wants to accuse America today of the manifest racism of a century ago but lacks the confidence to make the charge openly. If he wants to argue for that equivalence, then that too belongs in a different book.

Despite these shortcomings, there is much to learn from this episode of American history and Bradley's account of it. Many histories of this era glide over the influence of racism; Bradley makes it a central point. There indeed was widespread American racism at the turn of the 20th Century. It had broad cultural and--via certain interpretations of Darwin--"scientific" affirmation. It did influence many such as Roosevelt to approach Far East policy with a particular slant. And there are indeed philosophical and historical threads connecting American racism and expansionism of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries to Japanese racism and expansionism of the 1930s-40s. After the particular faults of Bradley's account fade over time, it is these notions that stay in the mind, and they are valuable cautions. Had Bradley approached this theme with more an historian's eye, he might have produced a work of greater influence and broader acclaim.

181 of 213 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars U.S.-Japan relations, Baron Kaneko and President Roosevelt, November 27, 2009

By 

Ian C. Ruxton (Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (Hardcover)

I downloaded the Kindle edition of this book and right away read Chapter 8 on Theodore Roosevelt's flattering and self-interested secret proposal to the Japanese Government of a 'Japanese Monroe Doctrine' for Asia, in essence a private invitation to play the imperialist game which, as Baron Kaneko later lamented in a paper written in 1932, Roosevelt never admitted making or endorsed and took to his grave in 1919, despite promising to Kaneko in a farewell lunch at Sagamore Hill on September 10, 1905 that he would publicly announce it after he left office.

Other reviewers have pointed out that there is not much about the cruise undertaken by W.H. Taft and Alice Roosevelt in this book, and I feel it is mainly a convenient device to tell a tale which is really expressed in the sub-title 'A Secret History of Empire and War.' There are in fact two main narrative threads here: a rather gruesome and to many readers upsetting one about American imperialist ambitions and 'westering' colonization of the Pacific (Hawaii) and East Asia (the Philippines), and another to me more interesting one about U.S.-Japan relations. This review will focus on the latter.

James Bradley has done an excellent and well-researched job of presenting the history in detail of the exchanges between Kaneko and Roosevelt, though he seems unaware, or at least does not mention, that Kentaro Kaneko (1853-1942) had already met Theodore Roosevelt before 1904 through an introduction arranged by Harvard-educated William Sturgis Bigelow (1850-1926), the Bostonian collector of Japanese art. They first met in 1890 when Roosevelt was Head of the Civil Service Commission and Kaneko was returning to Japan via the U.S. after studying Western parliamentary systems in Europe, and the two Harvard men maintained an occasional correspondence - letters and Christmas greetings - thereafter. (See my translation published recently of Masayoshi Matsumura's Baron Kaneko and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05): A Study in the Public Diplomacy of Japan for further details.)

The idea of a 'Japanese Monroe Doctrine' influenced the Japanese Government leaders and encouraged them to follow America's example as their 'sensei' (teacher), yet it was surely not proposed for Japan's benefit, but for that of the United States. It made perfect sense at the time for Roosevelt to persuade Japan to keep the European powers (including 'Slavic' Russia) at bay and check their expansion into East Asia, while assuring the 'Open Door' in China for American commerce. And Japan was, of course, warned in clear language to stay away from the Philippines, America's largest colony. (Kaneko responded that Japan had her hands full with Taiwan, acquired in 1895 from China, and had no designs on the Philippines.) As Roosevelt wrote privately to his son in February 1904, Japan was "playing our game" and the Russo-Japanese War was in essence from his viewpoint a war by proxy.

It is thus quite ironic that Japan's victory over Russia which was widely celebrated in the U.S. as an underdog's triumph marked the high point in U.S.-Japan relations, and from that time they worsened steadily until World War II, having been generally good in the 50 years from Commodore Perry's arrival to open Japan in 1853. Roosevelt's clever and (for his purposes) useful idea of a 'Japanese Monroe doctrine' - first suggested to the Japanese by U.S. diplomat General Charles Le Gendre (1830-99) in the 1870s according to Bradley - was one lesson too many for the willing pupil Japan. The concept tragically and disastrously morphed over time into the uncontrollable juggernaut of Japanese militarism, beginning with the weak buffer state of Korea being abandoned to its fate by T.R. - one of which he apparently approved - and made a Japanese protectorate in late 1905, and from 1910 a full colony (see Ch. 12, 'Sellout in Seoul'). In effect the inventive mind of the President inadvertently sanctioned the creation of a Frankenstein which, as Mr. Bradley indicates, others had to confront and defeat subsequently. (But the line of causation is too long and thin to blame Roosevelt directly for Pearl Harbor, though I am not convinced the author is actually doing so. Was the Pacific War 1941-45 foreseeable back in 1905? Surely not!)

Theodore Roosevelt's publicly proclaimed admiration for Bushido, jujitsu and other aspects of Japanese culture as promoted by Kaneko, not to mention the superb training and remarkable courage of the army and navy, was doubtless in and of itself genuine, but it surely also had the useful result of helping to massage the egos of his Japanese guests, especially the intermediary Baron Kaneko. Interestingly, he wanted the Japanese to win, but not too overwhelmingly, and on August 23, 1905 he wrote confidentially to Kaneko suggesting that Japan should give up any claims to an indemnity in the forthcoming peace conference. When Japan did so and the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth brokered by Roosevelt were made public there were serious riots by a discontented and disappointed populace in Tokyo (80% of police boxes and two churches destroyed) and throughout Japan. The souring of friendly U.S.-Japan relations surely began at that point. (How many Japanese would have rejoiced at the subsequent award to Roosevelt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906?)

Roosevelt meanwhile stressed Japan's many positive gains to Kaneko (withdrawal of Russian troops from Manchuria, a lease of the Liaodong peninsula, control of the Southern Manchurian railway, Korea and half of Sakhalin), but also probably shrugged his shoulders and blamed the Japanese leaders for raising the expectations of the Japanese people too high in the case of the indemnity. He may have had a point, since - as Sir Ernest Satow observed from Peking - the Japanese army had not captured enemy territory of sufficient importance (e.g. Vladivostok) which was the usual basis for an indemnity. However, Sergei Witte the chief Russian negotiator outwitted Komura Jutaro at Portsmouth by asking publicly the hypothetical question "If we let you have the whole of Sakhalin, will you still demand an indemnity?" To this Komura replied that Japan would under no circumstances give up the indemnity, which made him seem intransigent in the eyes of the American media. (Thus for Japan, military victory was followed by diplomatic defeat as ten years previously in the Triple Intervention of April 1895 after the Sino-Japanese War, and this only further stoked Japanese resentment and created a time bomb with a long fuse.)

By the way, I should have preferred the author to use "Japanese" rather than the abbreviation "Jap", when using his own - or Roosevelt's - words outside quotations, likewise "Theodore" rather than "Teddy" which seems over-familiar for a historian, albeit an amateur one. The author's frequent use of the term "Aryan" also carries unfortunate and inescapable Nazi resonances, but 100 and more years ago ideas of 'Yellow Peril' originating in Europe were dominant and Caucasians generally feared Asian immigration, especially to California. (There is indeed much ugly and open racism in the early part of the book in quotations and cartoons, and also some stomach-turning accounts of massacres and torture in the Philippines. This inevitably will turn off some readers.) However, these are minor stylistic points and the book is generally an excellent and informative read!

Ian Ruxton, author of 'The Diaries and Letters of Sir Ernest Mason Satow (1843-1929), a Scholar-Diplomat in East Asia'

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor Writing - Poor History, February 4, 2010

By 

Stephen Hart (Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (Hardcover)

'The Imperial Cruise' by James Bradley provides some insight into the imperialist policies of late 19th Century America - particularly those of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt #in particular# and William Howard Taft.

The book's title itself is somewhat misleading.

'The Imperial Cruise' refers to a diplomatic mission to the Far East in 1905 led by William Howard Taft, then Secretary of War, accompanied by, among many others, Roosevelt's daughter Alice. After substantial discussion of Alice, her position in the Roosevelt family and as darling of the pop culture of the time, Bradley virtually discards her as a key character. Other than brief mentions of her attendance at various lunches and dinners she becomes a non entity, leaving us to puzzle why so much is made of her early in the book.

Although the cruise might have served as a focal point for Bradley to build his narrative around, reference to it slips and slides randomly and purposelessly into and out of the narrative as the author time warps the reader back and forth between selective snippets of historical events occurring roughly between 1850 and 1906.
These include a brief history of the Opium Wars fought between Great Britain and China #including the remarkable conclusion that 'Queen Victoria stands as history's largest drug dealer'#; the American Government's mistreatment of Chinese immigrants during and after the building of the Transcontinental Railroad; the annexation of Hawaii; the Philippine War; the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904; the Sino-Japanese War; the Russo-Japanese War.

None of these are covered in anything but summary fashion and the only common thread throughout this book is the endlessly repeated accusation of 'Aryan Supremacy' as being the reason d'etre behind every facet of Far East policy during the period.

Bradley describes at length the horrors inflicted on the native Filipinos during the Philippine War. In doing so, he underlines the point made by author Brian McAllister Linn in his definitive study 'The Philippine War 1899-1902' that 'popular histories summarize the Philipine War in a few cliches - the water cure, civilize 'em with a Krag, kill everyone over ten, reconcentration camps - all of which convey an overall impression of a conflict characterized by brutality and atrocities.'

Bradley's surface summarization of that complex conflict seems only included as an opportunity to anecdotally further his conviction of the evil inherent in Roosevelt's U.S. Far East foreign policy.

Bradley's ultimate conclusion is that secretive discussions held between Japan's emissaries and Theodore Roosevelt, conducted without the knowledge or consent of Congress, directly resulted in the absorption of Korea into the Japanese sphere of influence, World War II, the rise of Chin