![Umschlagbild für The imperial cruise [Audiobook]](https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&client=charlottecofl&upc=&oclc=&isbn=9781600243950&issn=/LC.JPG "Umschlagbild für The imperial cruise [Audiobook]")
Verfügbar:*
Status | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Suche... Punta Gorda | Audiobooks | 359.4 BRA CD | Suche... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
Bestellt.
Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
James Bradley chronicles President Teddy Roosevelt's secret dealings with Asia's powerhouses and how his policies still impact the region today. In 1905, Roosevelt sent Secretary of War William Taft and his daughter Alice to collaborate with the governments of Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. As a result, Asia was divided, giving birth to the parties responsible for the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Korean War, and the communist revolution in China.
Zusammenfassung
In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Taft, his gun-toting daughter Alice and a gaggle of congressmen on a mission to Japan , the Philippines , China , and Korea . There, they would quietly forge a series of agreements that divided up Asia . At the time, Roosevelt was bully-confident about America 's future on the continent. But these secret pacts lit the fuse that would-decades later-result in a number of devastating wars: WWII, the Korean War, the communist revolution in China . One hundred years later, James Bradley retraces that epic voyage and discovers the remarkable truth about America 's vast imperial past-and its world-shaking consequences. Full of fascinating characters and brilliantly told, THE IMPERIAL CRUISE will forever reshape the way we understand U.S. history
Rezensionen (6)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Theodore Roosevelt steers America onto the shoals of imperialism in this stridently disapproving study of early 20th-century U.S. policy in Asia. Bestselling author of Flags of Our Fathers, Bradley traces a 1905 voyage to Asia by Roosevelt's emissary William Howard Taft, who negotiated a secret agreement in which America and Japan recognized each other's conquests of the Philippines and Korea. (Roosevelt's flamboyant, pistol-packing daughter Alice went along to generate publicity, and Bradley highlights her antics.) Each port of call prompts a case study of American misdeeds: the brutal counterinsurgency in the Philippines; the takeover of Hawaii by American sugar barons; Roosevelt's betrayal of promises to protect Korea, which "greenlighted" Japanese expansionism and thus makes him responsible for Pearl Harbor. Bradley explores the racist underpinnings of Roosevelt's policies and paradoxical embrace of the Japanese as "Honorary Aryans." Bradley's critique of Rooseveltian imperialism is compelling but unbalanced. He doesn't explain how Roosevelt could have evicted the Japanese from Korea, and insinuates that the Japanese imperial project was the brainstorm of American advisers. Ironically, his view of Asian history, like Roosevelt's, denies agency to the Asians themselves. Photos, maps. One-day laydown. (Nov. 24) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist-Rezension
Bradley's first books, Flags of Our Fathers (2000) and Flyboys (2003), were sensationally popular World War II combat stories. His new one, about U.S.-Japanese diplomacy in 1905, represents a departure. Asserting a causal connection between diplomatic understandings reached then and war 36 years later, Bradley dramatizes his case with a delegation Theodore Roosevelt dispatched to Japan in the summer of 1905. Led by Secretary of War William Taft and ornamented by the president's quotable daughter Alice, it sailed while TR hosted the peace conference between victorious Japan and defeated Russia. As he recounts the itinerary of Taft's cruise, Bradley discusses attitudes of social Darwinism and white superiority that were then prevalent and expressed by TR and Taft. They modified their instincts, Bradley argues, in dealing with nonwhite Japan, and secretly conceded it possession of Korea. This is what Bradley asserts was a prerequisite to Pearl Harbor in 1941, a dubious thesis when the tensions of the 1930s stemmed from general Japanese aggressiveness, not its control of Korea per se. Bradley does fine on 1905 but falters when predicting the future.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
Two books about Theodore Roosevelt's bellicose foreign policy. THESE are books about men who wanted a war. Or at least the next best thing: a state of intimidation, fear, anxiety and excitement, which would produce the fruits of war, foremost among them order and peace. But what these men got was not always what they yearned for. And the price was not what they were ready - or even able - to pay. One figure looms over all of them. Barking his commands and posing for photographers in his tailored military uniforms, Theodore Roosevelt was the very image of a war-loving martinet. Yet, improbable though it may seem, he was also the proud recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, Henry Kissinger also garnered one of these. But nonetheless it does take the breath away. Although neither of these fine books is meant to be exclusively about Roosevelt, he hovers over and inside them - just as he must have sucked all the air out of any room he entered. This is not only because of his martial manner and bellicose deeds, but also because he was such a paradox: a political reformer, a conservationist, a buffalo hunter, a prolific author, a militaristic liberal and, yes, a "war lover" if he thought it would achieve peace and order. His admirers were legion and sometimes surprising. The renowned Progressive newspaper editor William Allen White summed it all up when he wrote, "Theodore Roosevelt bit me and I went mad." Even the normally sober Walter Lippmann, who admired and later fell out with Roosevelt, confessed that he never quite ceased to be "an unqualified hero worshipper." Neither Evan Thomas, an editor at large at Newsweek, nor James Bradley, the author of "Flags of Our Fathers," suffers from this affliction. Indeed they both take Roosevelt to task for being, at times, a racist, a jingoist and a warmonger. They view him, fairly enough, from the perspective of a time very different from the one he lived in, which was a moment when the United States was just beginning to flex its muscles as a rising great power. We, by contrast, are at a stage when we nervously worry about our receding hairline and whether we still have the right stuff. War, as we are told, is hell. Except, that is, when it is noble, thrilling, profitable or simply convenient. But in a more innocent time, when the nation was younger and its people more credulous, and its soldiers stayed mostly at home, war was viewed as a great adventure. And never was a war so popular as the one that a band of influential Americans provoked in 1898 against Spain over the remnants of its decaying empire. Yet never did an American war, so casually begun and so enthusiastically supported, have such unforeseen and sweeping consequences. From that war flowed six decades of American economic and political control of Cuba, its acquisition of a military enclave called Guantánamo, the occupation of the Philippines (during which Americans used an interrogation technique very similar to waterboarding), a war with Japan for mastery of the Pacific, a protracted confrontation with the ancient civilization that Americans were instructed by their government to call "Red China" and the American devastation of Southeast Asia to "save" some Vietnamese from other Vietnamese. The late 19th century was a time when the United States, reunified after the traumatic blood-letting of its Civil War, was taking its place among the ranks of the major powers. The resources and restless energies of a continent-spanning nation had increasingly impressed a nervous world. Most important, a handful of influential men were ready to embark upon a great imperial adventure. These were the men who provide Evan Thomas with the title of his book "The War Lovers," and who James Bradley identifies in "The Imperial Cruise" as the architects of a new American empire in the Pacific. Together these two engrossing histories dramatize, from different perspectives, the critical events and powerful ambitions that toppled an old empire and changed the global power balance. Today, as that balance is being challenged by emerging Asian goliaths, the stories they relate, like the lessons they draw, could not be more relevant. The three major war lovers in Thomas's rousing tale - Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the press baron William Randolph Hearst - had differing motives but similar ambitions that war promised to satisfy. For the arrogant Lodge, who embodied "Brahmin coldness and snobbery," war against the crumbling Spanish empire would help achieve America's destiny to join the ruling powers of the world. For Hearst, whose sensation-mongering tabloid, The New York Journal, was locked in a press battle with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, war offered an opportunity to manipulate public opinion, gain prestige and advance his political ambitions. BUT neither of these men yearned for war more ardently than did Roosevelt. For him war was a means both to assert his own masculinity and to fulfill a national destiny. Although born too late to have fought in most of the wars to drive Indians from their historic lands, he found adventure in riding with Western cattle herders and bathing his hands in the blood of buffaloes. This ferocious competitor, in Thomas's words, "regarded sport, the more violent the better, as the next best thing to war." These three eminent war lovers may have been bold, but they were not foolhardy. With the wounds of the Civil War not yet healed, they wanted no fiery conflagration. Rather they sought what one of their band, the statesman John Hay, called a "splendid little war" they could be sure of winning. An alluring opportunity lay waiting 90 miles off the coast of Florida. There, a band of rebels were struggling to liberate the island of Cuba from the grip of Spain. For Lodge, the unrest in Cuba was a justification for American expansion and for Hearst a way to sell newspapers. In Roosevelt's case (for whom "just about any war would do"), Cuba offered an irresistible means for ego gratification, masculinity enhancement and self-promotion. With politicians pumping for action and journalists inventing tear-inducing atrocities, the nation was primed for war - just so long as it was thrilling, brief and involved little danger. The opportunity came in 1898 when the American warship Maine caught fire in Havana harbor. Congress, without bothering to determine the cause (which was probably an internal explosion), whooped through a declaration calling for Cuban independence. Roosevelt, seizing that chance, assembled a troop of adventure seekers he labeled the Rough Riders, donned a uniform tailored for him by Brooks Brothers and headed for battle with a gaggle of journalists and photographers. The demoralized Spaniards soon laid down their arms and sailed for home. Excluded from the surrender ceremonies, Thomas pointedly notes, "were the Cubans, the people for whom the war had been fought." The destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor, Feb. 15, 1898. Although Congress had declared that Cuba would be independent, it also passed the Platt Amendment in 1901 giving the United States the right to intervene whenever it pleased. "Inevitably," Thomas writes, "a ruling class tied to U.S. commercial interests re-emerged, and racism, always deeply rooted, worked its poison in Cuban society." Sixty years later Fidel Castro, leading his victorious rebels into Santiago, drew on bitter memories in declaring "this time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will be consummated." The war set in motion a series of events that changed the map of Asia and ultimately led to a great war halfway around the world. Roosevelt, in his post as assistant secretary of the Navy during the war for Cuba, took advantage of his superior's absence and dispatched an American armada across the Pacific to attack the outgunned Spanish fleet in Manila harbor. When the Americans landed to take control they encountered fierce resistance from Filipinos fighting for independence. Rather than leave the islands, President McKinley declared that there was nothing to be done but to "take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them." The Filipinos, who had long since been converted to Catholicism, continued their struggle for independence. During the bloody effort to control the islands, some 4,000 Americans and about 200,000 Filipinos died in battle, along with perhaps another 200,000 civilians who perished from disease in relocation camps. During the pacification the Americans learned, and liberally used, the "water treatment" to extract information from prisoners. In his absorbing narrative of men who found duty or fulfillment or personal meaning in a war for empire - and of other men, like William James, who feared that such a quest would rot the nation's soul - Thomas has illuminated, in a compulsively readable style, a critical moment in American history. This is a book that, with its style and panache, is hard to forget and hard to put down. Roosevelt also looms over Bradley's provocative study of a little-remembered "imperial cruise" that, in his view, set the stage for World War II in the Pacific. Seizure of the Philippines, combined with the forced annexation of the Hawaiian Islands at the behest of naval strategists, American missionaries and sugar barons, had given the United States an enormous interest in the balance of power in Asia. Roosevelt moved to enhance that interest in 1905, Bradley tells us, when he sent his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, on a disguised diplomatic mission to Asia. Promoted as simply a good-will gesture, the "cruise" was designed to mask negotiations of secret accords that would allow Japan to expand into Korea and China, thereby providing a barrier to Russian expansion on the Asian mainland. Convinced, as he said, that "Japan is the only nation in Asia that understands the principles and methods of Western civilization," Roosevelt concluded that the emperor's kingdom should be the "natural leader" of Asians and the protector of American strategic and economic interests. Thus it was that Taft served as the midwife to secret agreements that had the effect, Bradley argues, of subjecting Korea to Japanese domination for the next four decades. In Bradley's caustic words, "at the behest of London and Washington, the Japanese military would expand into Korea and China to civilize Asia. Later generations would call it World War II." Roosevelt had never foreseen that America's search for order and opportunity in Asia, set in motion by the seizure of the Philippines, would later lead into a terrible war between the United States and Japan for control of the Pacific. In the decades since his death Theodore Roosevelt has suffered many detractors, and with considerable justification. Yet he was also a great domestic reformer, a trust-buster and a conservationist. What is fascinating about Bradley's reconstruction of a largely neglected aspect of Roosevelt's legacy is the impact that his racial theories and his obsession with personal and national virility had on his diplomacy. Engrossing and revelatory, "The Imperial Cruise" is revisionist history at its best. Perhaps, as Bradley writes, the history of the 20th century would "be different if the American Aryan had not made the Honorary Aryan his civilizing surrogate in Asia." But in statecraft, what is viewed as "national interest" invariably trumps moral qualms. And it is worth pondering that if Roosevelt were alive today he might, like Nixon and Kissinger, have surprised both his admirers and detractors by putting his bets on a rising China as the "natural leader" of Asia. War, we are told, is hell. Except, that is, when it is noble, thrilling, profitable or simply convenient. Ronald Steel is an emeritus professor of international relations and of history at the University of Southern California, and the author of "Walter Lippmann and the American Century."
Choice-Rezension
Popular writer Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers, 2000) traces the roots of Japanese-US antipathy to Theodore Roosevelt's race-based diplomacy--"the match that lit the fuse" of the bomb that exploded at Pearl Harbor. After exploring Roosevelt's mind-set that rendered him incapable of understanding Asians, Bradley uses the 1905 Asian cruise of Secretary of War William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's daughter, Alice, and 30 members of Congress as a lens to examine US relations with Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, China, and the Philippines. In the book's most novel portion, he describes social events that reflected the strict separation of the races. Bradley also weaves together diplomatic events to provide a provocative thesis: during the four-month cruise, Taft negotiated, on Roosevelt's behalf, a series of secret treaties highly favorable to the Japanese, whom Roosevelt "anointed ... as Asia's civilizer" because they had become Westernized and thus, he thought, were superior to their neighbors. Indicative of Bradley's interpretation and style, the penultimate chapter, "Sellout in Seoul," explains how "Big Bill" Taft rejected pleas from Emperor Gojong of Korea and Roosevelt "green-lighted Japanese imperialism." Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. J. C. Bradford Texas A&M University
Kirkus-Rezension
The story of a forgotten diplomatic excursion inspired by Theodore Roosevelt's bigotry. Bradley (Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, 2003, etc.)who wrote about his father's experience at Iwo Jima in Flags of Our Fathers (2000)examines a little-known effort by Roosevelt to manipulate the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War and extend the Monroe Doctrine to Asia by encouraging Japan to act as a proxy for the West. In the summer of 1905, a party that included Secretary of War William Taft and Roosevelt's rebellious daughter Alice set sail on the ocean liner Manchuria to their Pacific destinations of Hawaii, Korea, Japan, China and the Philippines. At the time, the voyage captured the public imagination. However, Taft was charged with an agenda that included maintaining dominance over American territoriesthe protests of America's Hawaiian and Filipino "wards" notwithstandingand promoting Roosevelt's dream of an "Open Door" in Asia. Bradley argues that the mission was a result of the president's adherence to a crackpot philosophy of "Aryan" racial superiority. "Like many Americans," he writes, "Roosevelt held dearly to a powerful myth that proclaimed the White Christian as the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder." In Roosevelt's mind, this excused American brutality in subduing Filipino insurgents, and it furthered his public image as a wise Western warrior. However, the president made a major intellectual blunder when he decided the Japanese could be considered "Honorary Aryans," due to "the Japanese eagerness to emulate White Christian ways." This, coupled with his contempt for the Chinese, Filipino and Hawaiian peoples, inspired him to play nation-builder, with disastrous consequences. Bradley asserts that Taft and Roosevelt violated the Constitution by offering Japan a secret deal, characterized as a "Monroe Doctrine for Asia." Arguably, Japanese pique over America's unwillingness to acknowledge this subterfuge fueled their expansionist dreams and pointed the way toward the Pearl Harbor attack. A rueful, disturbing account of a regrettable period of American imperialism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal-Rezension
Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers) has written a compelling book on a forgotten diplomatic mission. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt sent Secretary of War William Howard Taft on a cruise to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea, a diplomatic mission that also included Roosevelt's daughter, Alice. The mission was to solidify a secret U.S.-Japanese agreement to allow Japan to expand into Korea and China, with the irrepressible Alice distracting reporters. This agreement, resulting in the Treaty of Portsmouth, ultimately helped spark not only World War II in the Pacific but the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the Korean War. Bradley describes Taft and Roosevelt as firm believers in the White Man's Burden: since Japan embraced Western culture, Roosevelt wanted it to spread that culture to the rest of Asia. However, their policies backfired because anti-American feelings grew in China, the Philippines, and Korea as America turned its back on these countries, while America and Europe did not check Japanese aggression. Ultimately, Bradley reminds readers in well-cited detail of Roosevelt's often overlooked racist attitudes. Bradley's writing style will appeal to the general reader, with its good mix of letters, newspapers, and sound secondary sources. VERDICT Anyone interested in American history will want to read this book, especially those who want background on the foreign policy of this first sitting President to win the Nobel peace prize. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/09.]-Bryan Craig, MLS, Nellysford, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
