Customer Reviews

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War

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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.

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'

Even though I am a student of history for over 45 years I had never had this material presented in this way--it is excellent and should be a required read at the college level

I enjoyed Bradley's "Flags of Our Fathers", but this book is not history, but rather a sharp edged attack.

Bradley makes this a vitriolic, personalized attack on Roosevelt and Taft. There is no doubt that racial views and prejudices impacted the view of the world in the 1900s, but the focus on that is all consuming to Bradley. Highly unbalanced, this work makes sweeping and unsustainable claims. A 1905 Chnese trade boycott sparked the nationalism that led to the Chinese revolution. 2008 Muslim terorist attacks in the Philipinesare a result of Roosevelt and Taft's policies over 100 years before.

Bradley bogs the book down with repeated example's of racist thinking - no example is too far removed from the subject of the book to be excluded.

There seems to be a vendetta against Roosevelt - Bradley seems almost gleeful in recounting family tragedies that happen well after the alleged scope of the book. Recounting Roosevelt's grandaughter's (born after his death) troubled life and possible suicide 48 years after TR's own death is just mean spirited.

I would like to learn more about the voyage and what went on, but this book is not the place to learn.

I am 68 yrs old and have been an American History buff since high school. I do not recall a book on American history that I started that I did not finish, whether I agreed with its contents or not. That is until I got into The Imperial Cruise. It is not history; it is a screed by a writer that has a problem with how our country developed in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. To suggest that our presence in the Pacific led to WWII in the Pacific, the Korean War and communism in China is not sustainable by factual history. One could just as easily argue that if we had not developed a presence in the Pacific, it would have become a pond for China and Japan to control for centuries and that the World would look much different today. Both assertions are speculation , equally inaccurate.
But the real problem with this book is that the author judges, and comments on events and society of one hundred years ago, based on current standards. That is not reporting history, it is pontificating. His anger and contempt for TR and anything or any body white and American , in that era comes through loud and clear. So clear that one quickly concludes that they are not reading the history of an event, but rather a rant. And that is when I put the book down.

I am only about 100 pages into this book, and I am trying to finish it, really I am. But enough already... I GET IT! Mr. Bradley considers TR a racist driven only by racist motivations. He repeats this claim OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. Oh yeah, TR's daughter Alice is going on a cruise, it is mentioned once or twice. Its like driving a nail with a 16 pound sledgehammer, it may get the job done, but is serious overkill. Save your money. What a disappointment, I really enjoyed Flyboys and Flag of our Fathers.

This author clearly has an axe to grind - and his worldview colors his presentation to the point of lessening the impact his book could have if all (or indeed even some) of the bad deeds attributed to Roosevelt and Taft have some basis in fact. Instead, Bradley can't seem to decide if he is presenting the "society" aspects of the cruise and his focus on Alice, or the events he claims have been hidden from view for a hundred years. The focus on Alice only proves the point that celebrity is more interesting in the moment (and is not a new phenomenon)than the difficult work of governing. It can't seriously be argued that she had more than a minor impact on world events.

On the other hand, William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt had a far-reaching impact on world events, yet the author never gets beyond the superficial (as evidenced by the continued use of nicknames when referring to Taft and Roosevelt - the nickname for Taft apparently the author's invention, and the use of a nickname for Roosevelt that was popular with the public in his time but one Roosevelt apparently detested). There is no doubt that each of these men was a product of their time - but then, who isn't? But there is little to be gained by wishing such men had viewed the world through our prism rather than theirs. People did awful things to each other during the period covered by this book. People continue to do awful things to each other today. Are things better today and are the differences between people accorded more respect now than 100 years ago? We would surely like to think so - but the James Bradley's of 100 years from now will look back on our time and likely find ample evidence that such is not the case.

In addition to the author peppering conclusions from "modern day scholars" throughout the book, several supposed facts were voiced opinions of politicians and journalists of the time who were in opposition to Roosevelt. Newspapers back then were even more notorious than today's media for forwarding their own adopted political agendas. Yet the author repeatedly uses newspaper headlines and political speeches taken out of context to make his points. Which would be minimally acceptable if he provided both points of view, which he does not.

From Bradley's wording throughout, the reader gets a feeling of seething animosity and anger towards early 20th century America. The venom was so thick at times that I had to literally put the book down and return to it later. Bradley was clearly offended by the history of American expansionism and early 20th century racial morality, but he fails to put it in the perspective of common social behavior througout the world during that era. Most Americans were rural farmers with no intelligence of the world like we do today. Roosevelt merely reflected the culture and understandings Americans had of themselves at that time. Even so, contrary to what I can only describe as the author's amazing fantasy, the American people of the early 1900s were not hell-bent on exterminating all the non-whites from here to the caucuses (p.29, paragraph three). Their racial beliefs back then were ignorant yes, but they were not uniquely so.

It seemed to me from the opening of the first pages that Bradley had a point to make (which was mostly a hatchet job on TR) and sought to find the facts that would match his pre-determined conclusion, which is fine for a novel but not so much for nonfiction.

For a more honest and well written account of American imperialism during the turn of the 20th century, I would point to BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION by Stuart Creighton Miller. Miller is completely factual about the ugly side of America's approach in the Pacific during the Philippine-American War, including it's racial bigotry and the brutality of guerrila warfare on both sides, but Professor Miller's work is written without a politically correct ax to grind.

Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903

I usually don't quit on a book, but I had to on this one. I kept waiting for the author to get to the point (The Imperial Cruise), but when he changed subjects, location, etc. for the umpteenth time (from the cruise members in China to prejudice against Chinese railroad workers and Chinese in general in California), I'd had enough. While much of the book has footnotes, many of the most inflammatory statements are not footnoted, leaving ne to believe these are the author's opinion. It seemed to me that the author has a serious axe to grind and while much of the book may be fact, the disjointed nature of the text and the lack of subject continuity turned me off. I'm just glad I didn't buy the book and had only gotten it from the library.

James Bradley appeared at a book signing at the MARINES MEMORIAL HOTEL in San Francisco last month. I had read his two previous books, enjoyed them, so attended this function. It was interesting that he only covered the cruise portion in his remarks in San Francisco. If you read the prologue portion you will get most of what he said in San Francisco. He made this book appear to be a detailed telling of this cruise in 1905.

I then read the book. I kept waiting for the cruise to be fully fleshed out. It never was. The book was chopped up and made to make Roosevelt and Taft look devious and evil. I did hang in there and finish the book....unlike others, but it was still not a good effort by Bradley.

I think he needs to return to Iwo Jima.