Kinzer’s The True Flag locates the origins of this anti-imperial tradition in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and argues for its continued relevance to public life today. One could not ask for a timelier argument ... Such was the birth of the American empire. As Kinzer shows, its advocates created a foreign policy at odds with national political tradition and with the supposed sanctity of such ideals as the consent of the governed ... The True Flag captures the tragic impact of American hubris at home and abroad. The anti-imperialists had correctly feared the effects of empire on American political life—the concentration of unchecked power in the executive branch, the corrosive impact of secrecy on public debate, the insulation of decision-making in unapproachable bureaucratic hierarchies.
...[a] lively and very readable reconstruction of one of American history's most consequential debates ... As a veteran newsman, Kinzer is particularly attuned to how national events play out in the public forum. His book is an assembly of contending voices —congressmen, editorial writers, the comic newspaper character Mr. Dooley. Sometimes, a dozen or more voices sound on a single page. The effect is sometimes choral rather than dramatic, but Kinzer maintains his narrative thread with a professional knack for compression and capsule summary ... Kinzer's subtitle, 'Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire' is a bit misleading. Twain passed the early years of the debate in Europe and doesn't enter the story until Chapter 9 of Kinzer's 11 chapters ... Does the Constitution follow the flag? True Flag doesn't answer that question, but it vividly illustrates its endurance in American politics.
Kinzer portrays both men as patriots, thinkers, and, in many cases, self-promoters. But while Roosevelt saw colonialism as 'Christian Charity,' Twain saw Christendom as 'a majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood' ... Indeed, the Roosevelt who emerges from these pages, like the one increasingly portrayed in American letters, is less the philosopher than the pugilist ... There are many fine elements in this book, including the delicious detail that Secretary of State John Hay was having an affair with Lodge’s wife as the two men were conferring on the Philippines treaty.
Kinzer is not content to retell the story of the controversy over annexation of the Philippines. He tries to promote an overarching theory of United States foreign policy ... In this way, the rich detail of Kinzer’s account of the debate over American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century gives way to a hasty revisionist account of United States foreign policy as a series of imperial follies, in which the wars of presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama whiz past. All of American foreign policy for more than a century is attributed to some vague mix of business greed and arrogant folly. Kinzer is free to make this case, but it should not have been tacked on to the conclusion of the book ... Kinzer omits any discussion of the turn-of-the-century rivalries between the United States and other great powers, in the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific ... The True Flag works better as a history of polemics than as a polemical history.
Kinzer gets a bit carried away in his last chapter, 'The Deep Hurt,' a potted survey of the interventions and invasions launched by the United States in the century-plus since 1898. It’s more sermon than history, and most readers will already be well aware of the author’s examples from their own memories or previous reading. What Kinzer does extraordinarily well, however, is to remind us how easily the pivotal decisions — the treaty vote, the Supreme Court case and others — could have gone the other way.
...an important and lucid analysis of what he rightly calls 'the mother of all debates' in the history of American foreign policy ... Kinzer is an incisive historian of American foreign policy, and he argues convincingly that America remains confused and divided over the relative merits of the two approaches to foreign intervention exemplified by this conflict. However eloquent the partisans of colonial overreach, however, the moral and historical facts converge on a single conclusion. In the words of Mark Twain, 'There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.'”
