The War Lovers
Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
This national bestselling history of late 19th century American war fever is "compulsively readable . . . hard to forget and hard to put down."*
On February fifteen, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. Some in the United States greeted the event with more enthusiasm than alarm. Dismayed by the "closing" of the Western frontier, politicians Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge wanted to see their country exert its muscle overseas. The sinking of the Maine would provide the excuse they'd been waiting for, especially when newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst falsely announced in the New York Journal that Spain's "secret infernal machine" had destroyed the battleship.Meanwhile, the philosopher William James, Roosevelt's former teacher, and Thomas Reed, the powerful Speaker of the House, stood against what would become the Spanish-American War. At stake was not only sending troops to fight Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, but the friendships between these men.Now, bestselling historian Evan Thomas examines 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 today.
"[An] absorbing narrative of men who found duty or fulfillment or personal meaning in a war for empire." —*New York Times Book Review
"A complex and compelling book about a complicated chapter in our history, a moment we are too often distracted by outsized personality and huge technological and social progress. But it is a story we need to know." —Ken Burns
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
