About the Author
James Bradley is the author of Flags of our Fathers and Flyboys. He is the president of the James Bradley Peace Foundation that sends American high school students to study in China and Japan.
WW Comments: I listened to the CD version of this non-fiction book which pulls apart the positive legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and brings us back to the blatant racism that existed at the turn of the last century.
From Wikipedia: The Imperial Cruise is a non-fiction book authored by James Bradley, the son of one of the men who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima. In the book, based on extensive research and newly discovered archival materials and photographs, Bradley sheds new light on the history of American political affairs in the Pacific during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and a surrounding a secret diplomatic/Congressional mission to Asia conceived by Roosevelt which would affect United States involvement in Asia for generations. The material also covers a wide array of other cultural factors that loosely relate to this, the largest diplomatic delegation ever sent to Asia in U.S. history.[2] The book asserts that Roosevelt's diplomatic mistakes constituted the original encouragement for the Japanese imperialism that ultimately backfired on the United States and led to the war in the Pacific,[3] and acted as a catalyst in the fomentation of many subsequent events in Asia, including the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Korean War, and even the current state of U.S.-Asia affairs today in the 21st century.[4]
Synopsis
The book centers on the diplomatic mission of the SS Manchuria sent by President Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of 1905. On board was the largest diplomatic mission delegation in U.S. history, including some of the highest profile political figures of the time. They included Secretary of War (and future President) William Howard Taft; Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Roosevelt; her future husband, Congressman (and later Speaker of the House) Nicholas Longworth; along with 29 other members of the House and Senate, and their wives; and an array of additional high-ranking military and civilian officials.[5]
After his initial description and introduction of the SS Manchuria's voyage, the author explores brief excerpts of the history behind the period's American domestic and foreign policy, elaborating on its influence, motivation, and consequences, specifically in regard to American-Japanese, Sino-
More broadly, Bradley explores his contention relating to how deep-set WASP[6] biases and racially deterministic philosophies[7] fueled and undergirded virtually all U.S. foreign and domestic policy-making in that era pertaining to U.S. relations with other nations and to populations of other racial, cultural or religious heritages. This included virtually all peoples of non-Teutonic Anglo-Saxon
It is Bradley's contention that the actions of one Roosevelt, and the diplomatic cruise in the summer of 1905, lit that fuse that would doom more than 100,000 U.S. military to die in the Pacific theater decades later under another Roosevelt in the 1940s.[9] Through what Bradley describes as their "bumbling diplomacy", he describes how Teddy Roosevelt and his emissary Taft turned previously friendly Japanese sentiment, against the United States.[10]
Critical reception
The Imperial Cruise has received mixed reviews since its release. Writing for the The New York Times Review of Books, Janet Maslin noted that "The Imperial Cruise is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt's presidency". At the same time, she chided the book, which favors "broad strokes and may at times be overly eager to connect historical dots"[11]
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