“The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898”, by Evan Thomas

 

496 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316004121

The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 by Evan Thomas is a history of the Spanish-American War, that late-19^th Century conflict that earned the United States Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines (for $20 million) while guaranteeing the independence of Cuba (the McKinley Administration also used the war as a pretext to annex the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. So there’s that, too). As an account of this splendid little war, The War Lovers succeeds admirably, with the unseemly “rush to empire” put on full display, along with the motivations of the principle movers and shakers. This is where Thomas’ book is best, as his history of the war doesn't even start until Chapter 15.

Until then, we get deep background on each of the men who sought to restore American manhood through a spot of war: thus, we get a proper psychological portrait of William Randolph Hearst, the American businessman, newspaper publisher and politician (and inventor of Fake News); Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the American statesman, politician, conservationist, naturalist, writer and Rough Rider, who left the comforts of his job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to rough it but good in war; Henry Cabot Lodge, the American Republican Senator and historian from Massachusetts and a member of the prominent Lodge family; Thomas Brackett Reed, or “Czar Reed”, American Representative from the State of Maine and Speaker of the House and an opponent of the war; William James, American philosopher and psychologist, considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19^th Century and one of the prominent James’ clan.

But for all that, Thomas’ portrayal of his protagonists is rather flawed, with his portrait of Roosevelt being particularly cutting and incomplete; his treatment of Hearst is better, strangely, considering that this provider of Fake News is most to blame for this conflict. Those on the other side – that would be Harvard Professor William James and Speaker of the House Thomas Reed – come across as suckers ripe to be rolled and are found wanting as compared to Roosevelt and Hearst. The most compelling sections, though, are his accounts of the war itself. Many other books have covered the same ground, but Thomas takes us through the haphazard organization of the Army, its chaotic trip to Cuba and the bumbling battles of Las Guasimas and Kettle Hill with admirable verve and detail. The only drawback is his glossing over the Filipino-American War, a topic where his connections to current events are more pertinent.