The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War
James Bradley, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
387 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316014007
Summary
On the success of his two bestselling books about World War II, James Bradley began to wonder what the real catalyst was for the Pacific War. What he discovered shocked him.
In 2005, James Bradley retraced that epic voyage and discovered the remarkable truth about America's vast imperial past. Full of fascinating characters brought brilliantly to life, The Imperial Cruise will powerfully revise the way we understand U.S. history. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—1954
• Where—Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Wisconsin
• Currently—N/A
In his words
I was born in Wisconsin surrounded by a loving family of ten and loved swimming in cold lakes. When I was a boy I read an article by former president Harry Truman recommending that young people read historical biographies. He said it was easy to follow the storyline of a historical figure's life, and you'll learn the surrounding history on the journey.
When I was thirteen years old I read an article by James Michener in Reader's Digest which I paraphrase: "When you're twenty-two and graduate from college, people will ask you, 'What do you want to do?' It's a good question, but you should answer it when you're thirty-five." Michener explained that his experiences wandering the globe as a young man later inspired his books on Afghanistan, Spain, Japan and other places.
When I was nineteen years old, I lived and studied in Tokyo for one year. I later brought my Japanese friends home to Wisconsin. My father, John Bradley, had helped raise an American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima and had shot a Japanese soldier dead. John Bradley welcomed my friends to our home.
I traveled around the world when I was twenty-one, from the U.S. to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, England and back to the United States.
At twenty-three I graduated with a degree in East Asian history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
For the next twenty years I worked in the corporate communications industry in the United States, Japan, England and South Africa.
In my late thirties I took a year off to go around the world again. On this trip I made it to base camp on Mt. Everest and walked among lions in Africa.
My father died when I was forty years old. My search to find out why he didn't speak about Iwo Jima led me to write Flags of Our Fathers and establish the James Bradley Peace Foundation. (From the author's website.)
More
In 2000, Bradley published Flags of Our Fathers, written with the author Ron Powers, which tells the story of five U.S. Marines and a Navy corpsman, his dad Navy corpsman , John Bradley, raising the American flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima. In that book, which spent 46 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a film directed by Clint Eastwood, Bradley took infinite care to locate and speak with family and friends who actually knew the men depicted. In doing this, he received great praise for his realistic portrayals and bringing the men involved to life.
The book and the film is an in-depth look at those involved and their war-time service. Of the six men, Bradley's father John, PFC Ira Hayes, and PFC Rene Gagnon were the only ones to survive the battle. SGT Michael Strank, CPL Harlon Block, and PFC Franklin Sousley were all killed in action later on in the battle. Bradley tells the story in a before, during, and after format, and both book and film were well received upon their release. An impromptu speech Bradley gave at the Iwo Jima memorial was transcribed by Michael T. Powers in October 2000, and widely circulated on the Internet.
In 2003 he published Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. That book tells the story of an air raid that took place during the Battle of Iwo Jima, some 150 miles away, when U.S. warplanes bombed the small communications outpost on Chichi Jima. While Iwo Jima had Japanese forces numbering 22,000, Chichi Jima's forces numbered 25,000.
Nine crewmen survived after being shot down in the raid. One was picked up by the American submarine USS Finback. That one man was then-Lieutenant George H. W. Bush, who later went on to become the forty-first President of the United States. The other eight were captured as POWs by the Japanese and were executed and eaten, a fact that remained hidden until much later. Like Flags of Our Fathers, Flyboys also topped the New York Times Bestseller list when it came out.
In 2009, he published his third New York Times best selling book, The Imperial Cruise. The book concerns the 1905 diplomatic mission led by then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft and Alice Roosevelt, as well as the larger implications of President Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy, particularly with regard to Japan. The New York Times wrote that "The Imperial Cruise is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt’s presidency."
The book exposes the blatantly racist and exploitative policy of the United States in its attempt to extend its influence into the Pacific rim, acquiring Hawaii by conquest and the Philippines by purchase from the Spanish after ostensibly having entered the conflict to aid the Filipino freedom fighters. The American occupation was marked by torture and repression of the very people they had come to help. ("More" from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Bradley favors broad strokes and may at times be overly eager to connect historical dots, but he also produces graphic, shocking evidence of the attitudes that his book describes…if he brings a reckless passion to The Imperial Cruise, there is at least one extenuating fact behind his thinking. In Flags of Our Fathers he wrote about how his father helped plant the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II. In The Imperial Cruise he asks why American servicemen like his father had to be fighting in the Pacific at all.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
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.
Ronald Steel - New York Times Book Review
Engaging...this is a book to admire and, it must be said, to enjoy.
Boston Globe
For readers under the impression that history is the story of good guys and bad guys, and that Americans are always the former, this book could be useful medicine.
Rick Hampson - USA Today
[Bradley's] ingenious narrative thread is to track an across-the-pacific 1905 goodwill voyage by Roosevelt's emissaries....[his indictment of Roosevelt] raises tantalizing questions.
Gene Santoro - American History
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.
Publishers Weekly
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. —Bryan Craig, MLS, Nellysford, VA
Library Journal
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 territories-the protests of America's Hawaiian and Filipino "wards" notwithstanding-and 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Imperial Cruise:
1. Racism is a central theme in Bradley's book. In what way did racist perceptions on the part of President Roosevelt distort his foreign policy?
2. What were some of the academic and philosophical influences on Roosevelt's attitudes toward race?
3. Bradley writes, "One after another, white Christian males in America’s finest universities 'discovered’ that the Aryan was God’s highest creation, that the Negro was designed for servitude and that the Indian was doomed to extinction." In your opinion, does the fact that this thinking was common for the time exculpate Roosevelt and his contemporaries' belief in white supremacy?
4. Discuss the "Japanese Monroe Doctrine." For whose benefit was it proposed, and what was the rationale behind it?
5. What was Roosevelt's purpose in encouraging a Japanese takeover of Korea?
6. Ultimately, what were the consequences of the Japanese Monroe Doctrine? Over time, according to Bradley, how did it drive Japan's foreign policy goals?
7. Referring to the Russo-Japanese war, Roosevelt wrote to his son in February, 1904, that "I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, playing our game." What did he mean?
8. Why did Roosevelt push for Japan to forgo indemnity after the war? What precipitated the Tokyo riots When the Treaty of Portsmouth was announced?
9. Talk about the ways in which Bradley presents America as an imperialist power, particularly with regards to Hawaii and the Philippines. Is The Imperial Cruise persuasive in its vision of history repeating itself later in the 20th and 21st centuries?
10. Contrast Roosevelt's differing attitudes toward the Russian people and the Japanese. Why did he consider the latter "natural leaders"? What, in particular, did he admire in the Japanese culture? And why would Japan have been so eager to adopt Western values?
11. In your opinion, was Roosevelt deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize?
12. Were you surprised to learn that what we now refer to as "waterboarding" was used during Roosevelt's time? Does its long-term practice lend it legitimacy in your view...or not?
13. What if anything have you learned by reading The Imperial Cruise? Has it altered your view of Theodore Roosevelt or the history of American foreign policy?
14. Does Bradley make a convincing case for the long reach of Roosevelt's actions? Can Roosevelt be held responsible for the long-term unintended consequences of his foreign policy? Why...or why not?
15. The book has sometimes been criticized for its at times casual, almost flippant, and sarcastic tone. For you, does that style and tone detract grom Bradley's overall message? Or does it make his work more readable and engaging?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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