David Nasaw, 'First Great Triumph': The Empire Builders nytimes.com
[ A review of FIRST GREAT TRIUMPH
How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.
By Warren Zimmermann. Normally, I'd be tempted to post this elsewhere. Excerpt: ]
What may be most remarkable about these remarkable men, at least from our perspective, is that all of them were ''intellectuals and thought of themselves as such.'' Roosevelt was the author of 38 books, Lodge 27; Hay was the co-author of a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and the author of volumes of poetry and a best-selling novel, ''The Breadwinners''; Mahan's books and articles on naval and military history won him election to the presidency of the American Historical Association in 1902; Root, a highly successful corporate lawyer before entering government service, became an expert in international law afterward.
Zimmermann wisely resists making heroes -- or villains -- of his central characters, though he does show a partiality to Hay and Root, the least arrogant and the most humane of the five in their treatment of America's new overseas possessions and peoples. Both also had sparkling senses of humor, which Zimmermann delights in displaying. When the 325-pound William Howard Taft, who as colonial governor in the Philippines reported to the secretary of war, informed Root that he had recovered from illness and ''had just taken a long horseback trip into the mountains . . . Root, always fast with a quip, cabled back: 'Fine. How's the horse?' ''
Roosevelt, who plays the leading role in the story, is portrayed the least sympathetically. Though Zimmermann admires his ''enormous capacity for work,'' his ''extraordinary mental and physical toughness'' and his use of diplomacy as president, he has disdain for Roosevelt's ''near-hysterical warmongering over Cuba in the 1890's,'' his ''idiotic assertions that America needed a war'' to establish its greatness in 1898 and his relentless campaigning for the Medal of Honor after a total of two weeks' combat experience in Cuba. That President Bill Clinton in 2001 posthumously awarded the medal to Roosevelt, when Roosevelt's own contemporaries felt obligated to deny it to him, is noted without comment. . . .
Reflection on our imperial past and the history of our relations with the rest of the world may well be in order at this moment in our national history. Warren Zimmermann has provided us with an excellent place to begin. |
