First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power

A century ago, Americans across the country—rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural—engaged in a grassroots debate over whether their country should acquire colonies and become a global power on the European model. Warren Zimmermann’s book examines American imperialism in this age, weighs its positives and negatives, and suggests that this history has relevance for our own age in which “American empire” is again controversial. The study centers on the “fathers of modern American imperialism” (p. 8): John Hay, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt. Together, these men theorized and executed a strategy of naval building and territorial acquisition that thrust American power southward into Latin America and westward into Asia. Between 1898 and 1903 the United States acquired a formal empire consisting of Guam, Hawaii, Midway, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Samoa, and signed protectorate treaties with Cuba and Panama. It established coaling ports for naval and merchant vessels across the Pacific and in the Caribbean Sea. The Panama Canal, Roosevelt’s proudest accomplishment, would link both halves of the country’s new transoceanic sphere of influence. Zimmermann’s book begins with a description of the careers and “elements of character” (p. 14) of its five central protagonists. They are all