Intended to be provocative, this book also inspires irritation and regret. It purports to reexamine American foreign policies between the Civil War and World War I, but nine out of eleven chapters fall between 1885 and 1900. These form a series of partly coordinated essays, some biographical, others loosely arranged around the revived expansionism of the 1890s and the Spanish-American War. The principal criterion of emphasis seems to have been the availability of little-used source materials. Thus we have an account of Stephen B. Luce’s contribution to the modern American navy and another on the propaganda activities of William L. Scruggs, along with revisionist accounts of the Cleveland and McKinley administrations. Some chapters would have made good articles by themselves. Others are obviously building blocks in a major architectural scheme.
Just what scheme the authors had in mind is never quite apparent. They indicate that they do not always agree with earlier writers, but they fail to clarify their points of difference or offer any overarching interpretation of their own. Whatever one may think of the writings of Julius Pratt, Ernest May, Walter Lafeber, and Howard K. Beale, at least one usually knows where they stand. Anyone hoping to challenge them should confine himself frankly to details and miniatures or go through the agonizing process of synthesis himself. Grenville and Young have done a little of both.
In the central chapters dealing with the 1890s their principal message seems to be that the diplomacy and international interests of the United States were unduly subordinated to party politics. This thesis is hardly novel and certainly not limited to the late nineteenth century. The authors criticize Cleveland sharply on this count and do much to rehabilitate McKinley, especially in his handling of the Cuban crisis. (Unfortunately they destroy the cumulative effect of this partial synthesis by interjecting a largely irrelevant essay on Henry Cabot Lodge.) They are oddly erratic in their treatment of episodes, devoting much space to Cleveland’s decision not to annex Hawaii and almost none to Harrison’s better-known (and one would think equally vulnerable) encouragement of the Hawaiian Revolution. Similarly there is much attention to American relations with the administration of José M. Balmaceda in Chile before the Baltimore incident but less to the incident itself—presumably because the authors feel that they have little to add to existing accounts.
The irregularity of emphasis becomes most obvious in the last chapter, which recounts the developing connection between military strategy and foreign policy from 1900 to 1917, drawing largely on War and Navy Department sources. Here the authors have tried to boil down the complexities of Wilson’s attitude toward World War I into two paragraphs, containing such sweeping statements as: “Yet the President never wavered in the high objectives of his diplomacy through all the vicissitudes of the first three years of conflict, the dilemmas occasioned by the war policies of both sides, and the unfortunate but necessary position of compromise” (pp. 319-320). They successfully explode such generalizations about Cleveland; why should they advance them about Wilson?
The book’s lack of orientation is the more regrettable, because much of it is based on careful research in unmined materials which yield new facts and insights for the specialist. The essay on Scruggs is extremely revealing, and all other chapters contain fascinating vignettes: the Kaiser’s plan of attack on the United States, developed as early as 1899; the non-Rooseveltian background of Dewey’s attack on Manila; and many others. If the authors and their publishers had waited for the fruit to ripen, they might have had a book of major importance.
