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(More customer reviews)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.
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The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War
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