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

New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. 2002. First Edition; Second Printing. Hardcover. Autograph; xxii, 562 pages; Clean and secure in original binding in very nice duatjacket. Inscribed and Signed on ffep "For Kay, / With much love. / Warren" Americans like to think they have no imperial past. In fact, the United States became an imperial nation within five short years a century ago (1898-1903), exploding onto the international scene with the conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and (indirectly) Panama. How did the nation become a player in world politics so suddenly—and what inspired the move toward imperialism in the first place?The renowned diplomat and writer Warren Zimmermann seeks answers in the lives and relationships of five remarkable figures: the hyper-energetic Theodore Roosevelt, the ascetic naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan, the bigoted and wily Henry Cabot Lodge, the self-doubting moderate Secretary of State John Hay, and the hard-edged corporate lawyer turned colonial administrator Elihu Root. Faced with difficult choices, these extraordinary men, all close friends, instituted new political and diplomatic policies with intermittent audacity, arrogance, generosity, paternalism, and vision.Zimmermann's discerning account of these five men also examines the ways they exploited the readiness of the American people to support a surge of expansion overseas. He makes it clear why no discussion of America's international responsibilities today can be complete without understanding how the United States claimed its global powers a century ago. PROVENANCE: Katherine "Kay" Winton Evans was a Washington writer and editor and with her husband political columnist Rowland Evans, Jr. a major figure in the social life of Georgetown, Washington, DC from the 1960s on. Mrs. Evans grew up in Minnesota outside Minneapolis on the shore of Lake Minnetonka; her father David J. Winton was president of the Winton Lumber Company. She graduated from the Putney School in Vermont and was a 1946 graduate of Vassar College, where she was editor of the Vassar Chronicle. After college she worked on the editorial page of The Minneapolis Times, and moved to Washington in 1948 where she met and married Rowland Evans, Jr., then a reporter for the Associated Press Washington Hill bureau. Mrs. Evans was on staff of Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and later for Senator Paul H. Douglas. In 1980 she became the managing editor of The Washington Journalism Review, a publication on the press and in 1983 became editor, a position she held until 1987. Mrs. Evans was a trustee for Vassar College for 15 years. Their home was the site of many memorable gatherings of influential and remarkable people from journalism, politics and general society over the decades from the 1960s to the 2000s. America's preeminence as a superpower has its roots in how corporate lawyer Elihu Root, naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan, U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary of State John Hay, and politician Theodore Roosevelt led the nation in articulating and shaping American imperialism. A career diplomat and a former ambassador to Yugoslavia, Zimmermann (Columbia Univ. and Johns Hopkins; Origins of a Catastrophe) argues that the "consequences right up to today" of American expansionism between the 1880s and 1910s "owes a great deal to" the five fathers of modern American imperialism. Part one comprises the biographies of these architects of an aggressive imperialist policy, and part two narrates mainly the war against Spain and TR's presidency. Zimmermann admirably presents complex individuals and their extremely complex historical era in a manner accessible to the layperson. This readable, richly detailed, scholarly work, based on primary and secondary sources, is rewarding to readers who want more than an introductory historical treatment of the origins of today's American foreign policy. Highly recommended! ; Signed by Author .