| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.1

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

A Smaller, Purer America

LOVE, ERIC T. L. Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 245 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2900-5, $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5565-0.

In the 1850s, the shady American entrepreneurs William Cazneau and Joseph Fabens purchased a sprawling plantation in Santo Domingo. A decade later, the partners held controlling interests in the island's trade, shipping, banking, and manufacturing. Besieged by threats of a Haitian invasion and from political unrest within, the dictatorial Dominican president, Buenaventura Báez, welcomed Cazneau and Fabens as political allies. Consequently, in 1868-1870, Báez, Cazneau, and Fabens vigorously pushed for U.S. annexation of Santo Domingo. President U.S. Grant and Secretary of State William Seward enthusiastically embraced annexation owing to the island's timber and mineral wealth and its strategic value as a bulwark against European expansion in the Caribbean. Additionally, in the midst of Radical Reconstruction, Grant privately viewed Santo Domingo as a racial safety valve for African American resettlement, thereby preserving the United States as a "white" republic. However, Grant never mentioned race publicly when selling annexation to members of Congress precisely because race was such a combustible issue. And despite protracted executive branch lobbying, the Senate rejected the annexation treaty on racial grounds, arguing that the Dominicans were racially "unfit" for U.S. citizenship and that Santo Domingo's tropical climate made it unsuitable for white settlement.

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