Book Review

At the opening of the American century Theodore Roosevelt believed that keeping alive the barbarian virtues of manliness, vigor, and savage audacity was essential to the success of the nation's civilizing mission in the world. Without trace of irony or hint of contradiction, the future president argued that "civilization's" uplifting virtues could not be brought to the globe's nonindustrialized "waste spaces" without the application of healthy doses of barbarism and savagery. Using Roosevelt's paradoxical dichotomy as a thematic guide, Matthew Frye Jacobson seeks to correct what he contends are two lapses in America's national memory—"one regarding immigration, the other, imperialism." He contends that, for Americans to overcome their amnesia and better understand their nation's history, they must realize that empire and immigration were "two sides of the same coin," both of which were "generated by the same economic engines of industrialization" that transformed late-nineteenth-century America into a major world power and global economic colossus. The connection between immigration and overseas expansion, according to Jacobson, was a symbiotic relationship because cheap and abundant foreign labor was required to keep the factories humming and, conversely, foreign markets were needed to absorb the economy's surplus production.

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