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Summary
Summary
The bestselling author of Overthrow and The Brothers brings to life the forgotten political debate that set America's interventionist course in the world for the twentieth century and beyond.
How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide. Sometimes we burn with righteous anger, launching foreign wars and deposing governments. Then we retreat--until the cycle begins again.
No matter how often we debate this question, none of what we say is original. Every argument is a pale shadow of the first and greatest debate, which erupted more than a century ago. Its themes resurface every time Americans argue whether to intervene in a foreign country.
Revealing a piece of forgotten history, Stephen Kinzer transports us to the dawn of the twentieth century, when the United States first found itself with the chance to dominate faraway lands. That prospect thrilled some Americans. It horrified others. Their debate gripped the nation.
The country's best-known political and intellectual leaders took sides. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst pushed for imperial expansion; Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, and Andrew Carnegie preached restraint. Only once before--in the period when the United States was founded--have so many brilliant Americans so eloquently debated a question so fraught with meaning for all humanity.
All Americans, regardless of political perspective, can take inspiration from the titans who faced off in this epic confrontation. Their words are amazingly current. Every argument over America's role in the world grows from this one. It all starts here.
Author Notes
Stephen Kinzer is the author of The Brothers , Reset , Overthrow , All the Shah's Men , and other books. An award-winning foreign correspondent, he served as The New York Times 's bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua and as The Boston Globe 's Latin America correspondent. He is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and writes a column on world affairs for The Boston Globe . He lives in Boston.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Acclaimed journalist Kinzer (The Brothers) spotlights the domestic discord and clamor over America's imperial ventures at the dawn of the 20th century. After a century of continental expansion, the U.S. encountered the opportunity to expand overseas by capturing Spanish colonial possessions and other territories and peoples within its reach. The nation plunged into arguably "the farthest-reaching debate" in its history with political and intellectual giants contesting "the imperial idea" to determine America's place in the world and in history. Expansionists proclaimed benevolent intent and a civilizing mission while touting the economic benefits of conquest; anti-imperialists recalled America's anticolonial origins and condemned imperialist violence and brutality. The former largely triumphed, as the U.S. soon controlled Cuba and annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines in a swift series of subjugations. In Kinzer's gripping narrative, the egotistical Theodore Roosevelt emerges in his aggressively hypermasculine fashion as the most outspoken expansionist, while Mark Twain embarks on the "least-known phase of his career" to resist the violent drive toward empire. Kinzer ably conveys the passion and ferment of this brief period, situating this grand debate in the context of U.S. foreign policy history and convincingly arguing that the imperial/anti-imperial dichotomy remains a dominant feature of the American psyche. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Despite Kinzer's scholarly approach, this book is about nothing more than the standard conflict between American interventionism and isolationism (anti-imperialism) going back to, and hardly going beyond, the Spanish-American War. The prolific author of The Brothers, about the Dulleses, has selected TR and his nemesis Twain to personify one dimension of this conflict, but not really. Though Teddy Roosevelt is portrayed, at length and scathingly, as a warmonger, Twain, though he periodically enters the picture, is a far lesser character here. The hero, really, is immigrant Carl Schurz, and the imposing cast of characters includes Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan (who is portrayed almost as critically as Roosevelt), Henry Cabot Lodge, and newspaperman William Randolph Hearst (the war's primary instigator), and President William McKinley. The True Flag is well written and adequate history, just not quite what it suggests it is.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMERICA'S TURN FROM isolationism to foreign interventionism, often attributed to World War II, was the result of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent American conquest of the Philippines. That is the thesis of the journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer in "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire." All foreign policy debates since 1898 have echoed the themes of that era, Kinzer asserts. "Only once before - in the period when the United States was founded - have so many brilliant Americans so eloquently debated a question so fraught with meaning for all humanity." On May 1, 1898, during the SpanishAmerican War, Adm. George Dewey's warships crippled the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines, a Spanish colony soon to become an American protectorate until after World War II. On Sept. 30, 1899, in a triumphal parade in New York City, the admiral passed under the Dewey Arch, which stretched across Fifth Avenue at 24 th Street. According to Kinzer, "It was modeled after the firstcentury Arch of Titus in Rome but was more ornate." But as American forces in the Philippines turned from liberators into conquerors, using torture techniques like "the water cure" and engaging in massacres of insurgents fighting for independence, even some of the architects of the intervention had second thoughts. President McKinley, who had ordered the conquest of the Philippines, speculated: "If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us." The Dewey Arch, initially built of plaster and wood, never became a permanent monument in New York City. Instead, Kinzer writes, "the City Council decided that demolition was the only option and, as The New York Times reported, 'One morning the work lay on the ground in a hundred pieces.' " In the debate about the SpanishAmerican War and the conversion of the United States into a regional and global great power, the Anti-Imperialist League attracted most of America's leading writers and reformers. Some, like the German-American senator from Missouri, Carl Schurz, were veterans of the campaign against slavery. Others, like Jane Addams, were leaders of the woman suffrage movement and other contemporary progressive reform causes. Many Southerners opposed American control of Cuba and the Philippines as well, for fear that granting their nonwhite populations rights would undermine white supremacy in the United States. And the antiimperialists also included labor leaders like Samuel Gompers, who was concerned about the effect on American wages of immigration from the Philippines: "If these new islands are to become ours . . . can we hope to close the floodgates of immigration from the hordes of Chinese and the semisavage races coming from what will then be part of our own country?" Supporters of the annexation of the Philippines similarly tossed out various arguments, like access to Asian markets and the uplifting of the Filipinos themselves. Theodore Roosevelt, whose participation in the war against Spain in Cuba made him a celebrity and put him on the path to the vice presidency and then the presidency, denied that the Spanish-American War and the war in the Philippines broke with American history. In 1899 in a speech titled "The Strenuous Life," Roosevelt thundered at the anti-imperialists: "Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States." Roosevelt and the imperialists found their greatest nemesis in Mark Twain. Twain condemned all efforts by Western nations to carve up the non-Western world. Writing of the Boxer rebellion against Europeans and Americans in China, he declared: "My sympathies are with the Chinese. They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all of the foreigners out and keep them out for good." Twain's genius for satire showed in his widely publicized polemics for the anti-imperialist cause. In a 1901 essay for the North American Review, reprinted as a pamphlet by the Anti-Imperialist League, Twain said: "And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one - our states do it: We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones." But Kinzer is not content to retell the story of the controversy over annexation of the Philippines. He tries to promote an overarching theory of United States foreign policy, and he cites the former Marine Gen. Smedley Butler, who in the 1930s bitterly described his military service in the Philippines, Cuba, China, Haiti, Mexico and Central America as that of a "gangster for capitalism" and "a high-class muscleman for big business." Recycling the arguments of the venerable anti-interventionist tradition, Kinzer quotes figures like Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, who blamed commercial interests for American participation in World War I, and post-1945 advocates of close Soviet-American ties like Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson. In this way, the rich detail of Kinzer's account of the debate over American imperialism at the turn of the 20 th century gives way to a hasty revisionist account of United States foreign policy as a series of imperial follies, in which the wars of presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama whiz past. All of American foreign policy for more than a century is attributed to some vague mix of business greed and arrogant folly. Kinzer is free to make this case, but it should not have been tacked on to the conclusion of the book. His own account does not support the idea that business interests drove the United States to go to war with Spain and against the Filipino independence movement. Kinzer himself notes, "Businessmen as a class were at first reluctant to join the rush to war, but by midsummer many had been won over." Andrew Carnegie was a passionate anti-imperialist, and Mark Hanna, identified with the interests of big business and banking, despised Theodore Roosevelt and thought him dangerous. KINZER POINTS TO the Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge who, along with his friend Roosevelt, was one of the champions of what was called a "large" foreign policy: "With our protective tariff wall around the Philippine Islands, its 10 million inhabitants, as they advance in civilization, would have to buy our goods, and we should have so much additional market for our home manufactures." But this was an argument to be made for public consumption and hardly reflected Lodge's worldview. He was part of a group of mostly patrician neo-Hamiltonians, including Roosevelt and the naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, who sought to turn the United States into a great military power. They were not agents of American export lobbies. Kinzer omits any discussion of the turn-of-the-century rivalries between the United States and other great powers, in the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific. He does not even mention one of the most famous incidents of the war in the Philippines - the confrontation in Manila Bay between Admiral Dewey's American fleet and the German fleet under Adm. Otto von Diederichs in Manila Bay in 1898. But as the Cambridge History of Latin America tells us, "German-American rivalry was an important factor underlying the expanded role of the United States in the Caribbean-Central American region. The German admiralty did not hide its desire for bases in the Caribbean to control an isthmian canal, and to American leaders it seemed that the German-American naval confrontations that had occurred in the Samoan Islands (1888) and Manila Bay (1898) might be repeated much closer to home." Indeed, in 1903 the German admiralty devised Operations Plan III, which "envisaged the occupation of Puerto Rico . . . and the utilization of bases on the island to conduct a naval offensive against the United States." "The True Flag" works better as a history of polemics than as a polemical history. MICHAEL LIND is a fellow at New America and the author of "The American Way of Strategy."
Choice Review
"Does intervention in other countries serve our national interest and contribute to global stability, or does it undermine both?" Journalist Kinzer's timely consideration focuses on the 1898 Spanish-American War and the resulting guerrilla war to defeat Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino freedom fighters. Interventionists such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, and William McKinley saw the need for overseas markets for surplus US goods made possible by the nation's increasing industrial output. Opponents, such as Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, George Hoar, and Jane Addams opposed US expansionism, focusing on the Declaration of Independence, which allows all people the right of self-determination. The expansionists carried the day, denying the Filipinos the opportunity to write a constitution and form a government. Kinzer argues that the events in the Philippines set the US on its path to becoming the world's policeman, and he is compelling. Though he clearly sides with the non-interventionists, a preferable term to isolationists, he presents a well-reasoned, balanced account of the events that ultimately led the US into Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Compelling reading for all. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University
Kirkus Review
A timely work on the vociferous sides taken over the Spanish-American War of 1898and how that history relates to the ongoing debate regarding American imperialism.In this engaging, well-focused history, Kinzer (The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World, 2013, etc.), a former New York Times bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua and Boston Globe Latin America correspondent, plunges into the heated conversations in Washington and the tabloids over American expansionist designs on Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam at the turn of the 19th century. During a "ravenous fifty-five day spasm" in the summer of 1898, the United States "asserted control" over these far-flung nationstotaling 11 million peopleby handily defeating the Spanish fleet and thus acquiring rather suddenly an overseas empire. Was this even constitutional, and had not founder George Washington himself warned against "the mischiefs of foreign intrigue"? Using the excerpts of speeches and editorials, Kinzer skillfully extracts an immediate sense of the heated debate that gripped the country, centering around the jingoist triumvirate of Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the consummate Washington insider; Theodore Roosevelt, who became Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then vice president; and the powerful publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, proprietor of the New York Journal. While the first two gave powerful, persuasive speeches on the need to extend "national authority over alien communities" and offer the U.S. urgent new markets, Hearst acted as the "mighty megaphone" for the imperialist message, especially when the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor gave the casus belli to attack Spain. Rather late in the game, Mark Twain, who was traveling abroad and saw firsthand President William McKinley's racist American policy of "benevolent assimilation," emerged as an effective advocate for anti-imperialism, as did Andrew Carnegie and (conflictedly) William Jennings Bryan. In the last chapter, Kinzer astutely brings the debate from the turn of the century to the present. A tremendously elucidating book that should be required reading for civics courses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Does the U.S. flag represent liberty or conquest? Kinzer (The Brothers) recounts how Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt justified overseas expansion, engineered the Spanish American War, and finagled U.S. domination of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Without ignoring U.S. continental expansion, he argues that this momentous shift in U.S. foreign policy initiated the rancorous, ever-relevant debate over America's role in world affairs. Anti-imperialists, including William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers, argued that imperialism contradicted America's mission to defend liberty, warning that the nation's lust for power, territory, markets, and resources signaled the downfall of the republic itself. Kinzer's final chapter briefly covers the roller coaster of U.S. intervention and retreat from Roosevelt's presidency to the present and points out the acrimonious consequences-abroad and at home-of promoting American interests without fully analyzing diverse positions. He also discusses the legacy of the anti-imperialists, and suggests that there's still time to alter our approach to "solving" global problems. VERDICT This straightforward treatment of America's struggle to define its international posture is essential for readers at all levels as we continue this debate and wonder, "Why don't they like us?" [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]-Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.