Let's start with Theodore Roosevelt, a rising politician in 1898 whobemoaned the apathy of American affluence for softening the pioneer spirit ofwestward expansion. For Roosevelt there wereno more frontiers to explore, and like Alexander the Great, he wept thatthere were no more empires to conquer. We needed another war, thoughtRoosevelt, and what better place to look than the Caribbean?With Cuba under thedomination of a rapidly declining Spain,clearly a war with Spainwas the answer.
Young Roosevelt was loud and boisterous, but rather foppish underneaththe bellicose front. Even more pretentious and elegant was his close friend andmentor, Henry Cabot Lodge, a young Massachusettssenator. Both were high born and well educated. The third member of thedramatis personae was the genius of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst,whose newspaper empire could change public opinion on the flip of a coin in anage of little corroborative investigative reporting. Hearst was amoral,pretentious and unscrupulous, with a high-pitched voice that could be quiteintimidating when backed by his mother's millions. He was not yet the suavetycoon of Citizen Kane. Nor was he afriend of Roosevelt's, but a war would makegood copy.
The author develops deliciously satirical portraits of these three,aghast at their pompous arrogance. How whimsical is the destiny that determinesthe course of history, Thomas implies. He makes the period's overblownpatriotism, the jingoism, seem ideologically quaint and unintentionallyhilarious, despite the horrendous consequences.
There were other characters. Thomas Reed, the formidable speaker of theHouse, was a close friend of Roosevelt and Lodge but did not share their viewsof the inevitability of expansionism or America's “Manifest Destiny,” theunspoken rationale of bringing truth to the oppressed and, of course, inferiorpeoples within our hemisphere. White Anglo-Saxon superiority was a given formost, but Reed was doubtful. The great psychologist, William James, Roosevelt's teacher at Harvard, is one of the only sanevoices of the period. He deplored war, realizing that man's nobler instinctswere often subterfuge for darker motives, deeply concealed and unexplored. Healso deplored prejudice against “alien, inferior and mongrel races.” Howhistory might have been altered had the impetuous Rooseveltbeen more influenced by his mentor.
Thomas wisely leaves it to the modern reader to draw comparisons betweenthe early-20th-century posturing of America's “indomitable supremacy”and the cynical foreign policies of our own period. Thomas avoids the easyconclusion of viewing turn-of-the-century imperialism as the beginning of atragic continuum of misguided international efforts. His book is atongue-in-cheek look at the flip side of history.
