Yet Roosevelt and supporters of the Spanish-American War believed they were liberating oppressed peoples, and they were. Roosevelt is labeled a “bucktoothed,” “hyperactive” “warmonger,” while Twain and other anti-imperialists are “freethinking” and “enlightened.”

The True Flag makes it clear whom his heroes and villains are. “Roosevelt,” Kinzer writes, “came to embody America’s drive to project power overseas,” while “Twain believed Roosevelt’s project would destroy the United States.” This book uses Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt as the main exponents of the anti-imperialist and imperialist camps. Kinzer’s argument hangs on that modifier “overseas,” as if acquiring territory in the Pacific and the Caribbean, on the one hand, is somehow different from acquiring the Louisiana Territory, Florida, Texas, and what was once northern Mexico, while stretching America from “sea to shining sea,” on the other. The annexation of Hawaii, according to Kinzer, was “the first time in its history” that Congress would “endorse the seizure of an overseas territory.” This was “a radically new idea of what America could and should be,” in Kinzer’s assessment. Kinzer contends that “as the 20th century dawned, the United States faced a fateful choice…whether to join the race for colonies, territories and dependencies that gripped European powers.” He concludes that Americans chose the path of empire “with astonishing suddenness in the spring of 1898” by annexing Hawaii, and then taking Cuba and the Philippines from Spain. He’s right about this, but he’s wrong about when America gave in to its imperialist “instincts.” Washington, argued for restraint.Stephen Kinzer opens his latest book, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, with an enduring, important question: “How should the United States act in the world?” Before offering his answer, he argues that “Americans are imperialists and also isolationists… Both instincts coexist within us.” Roosevelt’s opposition, composed of public intellectuals and business leaders, such as Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Booker T.

In his book, the author reports that President Theodore Roosevelt along with his supporters, such as William Randolph Hearst and Henry Cabot Lodge, proposed imperial expansion, with their sights set on the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. T18:29:47-05:00 Stephen Kinzer talked about his book The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, in which he recounts the public debate over American foreign policy at the turn of the 20th century.

The true flag book