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Summary
Summary
On February 15, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. News of the blast quickly reached U.S. shores, where it was met by some not with alarm but great enthusiasm.
A powerful group of war lovers agitated that the United States exert its muscle across the seas. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were influential politicians dismayed by the "closing" of the Western frontier. William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal falsely heralded that Spain's "secret infernal machine" had destroyed the battleship as Hearst himself saw great potential in whipping Americans into a frenzy. The Maine would provide the excuse they'd been waiting for.
On the other side were Roosevelt's former teacher, philosopher William James, and his friend and political ally, Thomas Reed, the powerful Speaker of the House. Both foresaw a disaster. At stake was not only sending troops to Cuba and the Philippines, Spain's sprawling colony on the other side of the world-but the friendships between these men.
Now, bestselling historian Evan Thomas brings us the full story of this monumental turning point in American history. Epic in scope and revelatory in detail, The War Lovers takes us from Boston mansions to the halls of Congress to the beaches of Cuba and the jungles of the Philippines. It is landmark work with an unforgettable cast of characters-and provocative relevance to today.
Author Notes
Evan Thomas is the author of several bestselling works of history and biography, including The War Lovers and Sea of Thunder . He was a writer and editor at Time and Newsweek for more than 30 years, and he is frequently a commentator on television and radio. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in Washington, D.C.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
America acquired an empire in a fit of neurosis, according to this shrewd, caustic psychological interpretation of the Spanish-American War by well-known. Newsweek editor and bestselling author Thomas (Sea of Thunder). The book focuses on three leading war-mongers-Teddy Roosevelt, his crony, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose fanciful New York Journal coverage of the Cuban insurrection and the sinking of the USS Maine fanned war hysteria. Ashamed of their fathers' failure to fight in the Civil War, according to Thomas, these righteous sons trumped up a pointless conflict with Spain as a test of manhood, conflating the personal with the national. To Thomas they represent an American ruling elite imbued with notions of Anglo-Saxon supremacy over alien races and lower orders, but anxious about its own monied softness. As foils, Thomas offers Thomas Brackett Reed, the antiwar speaker of the House, and philosopher William James, who advanced an ethic of moral courage against the Rooseveltian cult of physical aggression.Thomas's thesis is bold and will undoubtedly be controversial, but his protagonists make for rich psychological portraiture, and the book serves as an illuminating case study in the sociocultural underpinnings of American military adventurism. 45 b&w photos, 2 maps. (Apr. 27) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Through the Spanish-American War of 1898, Thomas' newest history shows the pro-war stances of three historical figures (Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and publisher William Randolph Hearst) and the anti-war attitudes of two others (Speaker of the House Thomas Reed and philosopher William James). Attaining adulthood following the Civil War, each one developed some conception of war through America's living memories of that conflict, which Thomas refracts through the man's familial or social milieus. Whether or not TR's rage militaire was psychological compensation for a father who avoided combat in the Civil War, it certainly resonated with a public entertained by Hearst's yellow-press sensationalism. Embroidering the tenor of the times with prevalent attitudes of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy, Thomas has James comment, appalled, on the war fever of 1898 as his narrative ascends its crest of the Rough Riders' uphill charge in Cuba. Survivors such as TR, however, were exhilarated by the battle's test of their bravery and their nation's vitality, all emblematic of a historical zeitgeist that Thomas well captures with his customary fluidity.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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 Review
As war fever with the Spanish over Cuba reached its height in the late 1890s, the work and influence of three men--Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst-- contributed to a war hysteria that led to military interventions in Cuba and the Philippines. Newsweek editor Thomas (Robert Kennedy: A Life, CH, Jul'01, 38-6406) reveals how these men and other elitists often acted in concert--and individually--after the sinking of the Maine to ensure that war occurred. Speaker of the House Thomas Reed and some others resisted the rush to war. As an unsung hero for peace, Reed stood against a tidal wave of jingoism and expansionism (lest anyone label it imperialism) as the US entered the modern era of colonial acquisition. The Spanish American War may be thought of as a prelude to the other wars waiting in the wings; to Thomas, the war with Spain "was a harbinger, if not the model, of modern American wars ... [with] eerie parallels to the invasion of Iraq." The sinking of the Maine, national security, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and a contrived weapons-of-mass-destruction issue have much in common. Read this thoughtful book along with Joshua David Hawley's Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness (CH, Feb'09, 46-3443). Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. P. D. Travis Texas Woman's University
Kirkus Review
A dynamic examination of America's rush into the Spanish-American War. On Feb. 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion destroyed the U.S.S. Maine off the coast of Cuba, killing more than 250 American crewmen. Though the cause is still unknown, many in the United States, including some powerful political figures, wanted a wareven one waged on false pretenses. Longtime Newsweek editor Thomas (Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 19411945, 2006, etc.) focuses on three men who were especially eager: Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley; Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, and Roosevelt's close friend; and William Randolph Hearst, the wealthy publisher. The author ably sketches the personalities of all three men and the hawkish beliefs that they, and a large part of the American public, shared. They saw the United States as the world's protector, a nation that had a moral right to intervene in other countries' affairs, or even seize other countries' territory. Thomas also profiles two major dissenters: the powerful, dovish Speaker of the House Thomas Reed, who lost his best friend in the Civil War, and philosopher William James, who viewed the country's policy of foreign conquest as a betrayal of the American value of self-determination. The author goes beyond politics as well, delving into the psychology of his principals. Roosevelt's preoccupation with violence and physical toughness were certainly related to his warlike policies; Lodge's reserved manner disguised a fierce determination; Hearst's hawkishness seemed inextricably linked to his desire to boost circulation numbers. Thomas wisely keeps these engaging figures front and center, and his multifaceted portraits lend the book a sweeping, almost cinematic quality. A lively, well-rounded look at politics and personalities in late-19th-century America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Rather than provide a strict history of the Spanish-American War of 1898, Thomas (asst. managing editor, Newsweek; Sea of Thunder) focuses on a half-dozen major players, including two who opposed it. Thomas has done yeoman research on America's first war after the Civil War (with the underlying influence of that war on the men in this story a leitmotif). The personal and political relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge takes up much space. A third character is media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who stirred popular war support through his yellow journalism. The main foil to these three imperialists was the powerful speaker of the house, Thomas Reed, who was eventually doomed by the frenzy that Hearst and others had whipped up. William James, the philosopher, and William McKinley were the proverbial men caught in the middle-James ambivalent about action heroes and war and McKinley a typical politician who caved to public opinion. VERDICT While most Spanish-American War histories focus on the military angle, this engaging book humanizes the conflict by also providing useful insights regarding the political and academic leaders of the time, allowing the war to resonate with later American adventures abroad and with the dilemma of reconciling American ideals with a new global world. Highly recommended.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
