122
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #230,665 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★☆☆☆☆
Poorly researched with agenda-driven hate America conclusions
In addition to the author peppering conclusions from "modern day scholars" throughout the book, several supposed facts were voiced opinions of politicians and journalists of the time who were in opposition to Roosevelt. Newspapers back then were even more notorious than today's media for forwarding their own adopted political agendas. Yet the author repeatedly uses newspaper headlines and political speeches taken out of context to make his points. Which would be minimally acceptable if he provided both points of view, which he does not.
From Bradley's wording throughout, the reader gets a feeling of seething animosity and anger towards early 20th century America. The venom was so thick at times that I had to literally put the book down and return to it later. Bradley was clearly offended by the history of American expansionism and early 20th century racial morality, but he fails to put it in the perspective of common social behavior througout the world during that era. Most Americans were rural farmers with no intelligence of the world like we do today. Roosevelt merely reflected the culture and understandings Americans had of themselves at that time. Even so, contrary to what I can only describe as the author's amazing fantasy, the American people of the early 1900s were not hell-bent on exterminating all the non-whites from here to the caucuses (p.29, paragraph three). Their racial beliefs back then were ignorant yes, but they were not uniquely so.
It seemed to me from the opening of the first pages that Bradley had a point to make (which was mostly a hatchet job on TR) and sought to find the facts that would match his pre-determined conclusion, which is fine for a novel but not so much for nonfiction.
For a more honest and well written account of American imperialism during the turn of the 20th century, I would point to BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION by Stuart Creighton Miller. Miller is completely factual about the ugly side of America's approach in the Pacific during the Philippine-American War, including it's racial bigotry and the brutality of guerrila warfare on both sides, but Professor Miller's work is written without a politically correct ax to grind.
Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903
December 2009 · Books