The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire by Stephen Kinzer (review)

Since at least the early nineteenth century, Americans have debated what the role of the United States should be in the world. Should the young republic keep to itself and serve as a model for other nations to follow or should it actively seek to influence events in other countries in the name of transforming the globe in its image? In his new book, The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer examines how Americans debated this central question at the dawn of the twentieth century. The author of several books on U.S. interventions abroad, including the well-known examples of CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Kinzer is well-versed in the long history of U.S. global involvement, for better or worse, since its "rise to world power" at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Kinzer, however, the "great debate" over U.S. imperial expansion following the Spanish-American War in 1898 "was the farthest reaching debate in our history" (p. 2).

After making such a bold claim in the book's introduction, what follows is mostly a well-worn tale. The United States went to war in 1898 nominally to help Cubans gain independence from the tyrannical Spanish Empire. While most Americans saw that intervention as being for the sake of humanity, a handful of reform-minded north-easterners—southerners are almost completely absent from Kinzer's account—worried that the humanitarian intervention in Cuba could lead the United States down the wrong path. Of course, they were right, and a handful of men—led by Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt—planned to use the intervention in Cuba to advance their goal of turning the United States into a global power player. Once Lodge and Roosevelt pushed President William McKinley and later a two-thirds majority in the Senate to give their blessing to overseas imperial expansion, the United States annexed another Spanish colony, the Philippines, and ultimately fought a long war to subjugate the Filipinos. In less than a year, the United States had turned from a liberator to a conqueror. Opponents of this cruel turn, calling themselves anti-imperialists, rose up against the government. Kinzer, like others who have written on this topic, focuses on a handful of well-known anti-imperialists: industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, German émigré turned political activist Carl Schurz, and, of course, Mark Twain. Curiously, considering his name is in the book's subtitle, the acerbic writer from Hannibal, Missouri, is largely absent from the text. Undoubtedly Kinzer's publisher believed including the names Roosevelt and Twain in the book's title would draw a larger audience.

Although he claims (in the acknowledgments) that the book is based mostly on primary sources, it is largely a synthetic work with a few quotations from major newspapers sprinkled in. Kinzer relies heavily on the work of prior historians of the "great debate." As a result, he makes no original argument and the book makes no major historiographical contribution. Then again, that is not the point. It is meant for a general readership, and, in that sense, it is very successful. Kinzer is a great storyteller, effortlessly moving between different characters in different settings. In fact, the book's final chapter alone is well worth the price of admission. "The argument that the United States intervenes to defend freedom rarely matches facts on the ground," Kinzer concludes. "Many interventions have been designed to prop up predatory regimes. Their goal is to increase American power—often economic power—rather than liberate the suffering" (p. 248). The book could easily be used in a modern U.S. history survey course; it would help undergraduates (or anyone who can vote for that matter) better understand the long string of U.S. interventions in Latin...