Serge Ricard (Sorbonne Nouvelle), author of Theodore Roosevelt: principes et pratique d'une politique ÈtrangËre (Aix en Provence, UniversitÈ de Provence, 1991), wishes to take: "Another Look at Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire."

In the Spring 2000 issue of Diplomatic History, Lewis L. Gould has contributed a "feature review" of William N. Tilchin's book Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).⁽⁶⁹⁾ Gould's review of Tilchin's excellent book is unnecessarily condescending, patronizing, and snide, and it either misrepresents or overlooks most of the contents and main arguments of TR and the British Empire.⁽⁷⁰⁾ I have the utmost respect for Lewis Gould's admirable scholarship but cannot help feeling that on this occasion he has treated a fellow scholar most unfairly.

Gould, who has published widely on Theodore Roosevelt, though not, to my knowledge, on his diplomacy, devotes well over half of his review to identifying and locating for the author's benefit collections that Tilchin never visited. But historians know that historical scholarship is to a large extent a cumulative enterprise, and that they are not obliged to reinvent the wheel each time, though they are aware they should always make peace with their predecessors. In this instance, there exists an abundance of secondary literature on TR and Anglo American relations (authored by Howard K. Beale, David H. Burton, Bradford Perkins, and a great many other scholars) which has drawn heavily from Gould's list of "neglected" manuscript collections. Tilchin obviously has studied this secondary literature with great care and great skill, has made exemplary use of it in writing TR and the British Empire, and has thus incorporated extensively, albeit indirectly, into his book manuscript sources about which Gould lectures him rather superciliously. For example, Tilchin does deal satisfactorily with TR's interactions with the Britons Cecil Spring Rice and John St. Loe Strachey, notwithstanding Gould's erroneous implication that he does not. In addition, Tilchin has utilized very effectively the voluminous Theodore Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress and important document collections housed at the National Archives and the Public Record Office, along with many significant printed primary sources. Visits to the collections enumerated at length by Lewis Gould would have been of relatively marginal value to Tilchin's project - although such visits would undoubtedly have yielded some additional bits of corroborating evidence. As a matter of fact, TR and the British Empire rests on "meticulous archival and manuscript research," to quote Richard H. Collin's laudative comment in the International History Review.⁽⁷¹⁾

What was Tilchin's project anyway? Gould's review says precious little about it. The purpose of Tilchin's study was to combine an intellectual diplomatic history and a traditional narrative diplomatic history of Theodore Roosevelt, with a primary emphasis on Roosevelt's thoughts on and dealings with issues involving Great Britain and her empire. Tilchin undertook to build on the substantial body of earlier work on TR and Anglo American relations and to author a more thorough and systematic treatment than had been provided heretofore. The end product of Tilchin's effort is extremely impressive - "a near definitive statement of Anglo American relations from 1901 to 1909," as David Burton (a foremost authority on the subject of TR and U.S. British relations) has put it in the Journal of American History.⁽⁷²⁾

Gould regrettably fails to present the major themes of TR and the British Empire (cf. the author's preface, pp. xii xiii). Tilchin's highly revealing discussions of Roosevelt's thinking on British imperialism and of the president's handling of various important diplomatic episodes are not even addressed by Gould. For example, Roosevelt's brilliant hands on management of the Alaskan boundary dispute, richly related by Tilchin in chapter two, is not given any real attention. The same can be said about Tilchin's eye opening accounts of TR and Britain and the Russo Japanese War, the Moroccan Crisis, the Newfoundland fisheries question, and the U.S. Japanese immigration racism crisis. Roosevelt's deft cultivation of an Anglo American partnership through personal relationships, another central theme of Tilchin's book,is also missing from the review. Instead, Gould curiously presents as "the core" of the book Tilchin's detailed description and analysis of the Jamaica incident of 1907, which Tilchin puts forward in part III as "an excellent window on the condition of the Anglo American relationship by 1907 and on Theodore Roosevelt's perspectives on that relationship" (p. 166). Gould actually approves of Tilchin's reconstruction of the complicated diplomacy of the Jamaican affair, but he totally distorts the author's clearly explained purposes for providing a comprehensive treatment of this incident (see especially pp. xiv, 117).

Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire is a remarkable book. It is very carefully researched, exceptionally well written, and replete with important insights on TR and Britain. Moreover, because such a large percentage of TRs diplomatic forays involved Britain to one degree or another, Tilchin's book constitutes one of the widest ranging and most compelling assessments of Roosevelt's presidential statecraft ever published. It is indeed highly complimentary of Roosevelt's statesmanship, and admittedly with good reason: even the severest critics of the 26th president pay tribute to it. Readers of DH are encouraged to set aside a somewhat misleading review and to give themselves an opportunity to enjoy and to benefit from a very enlightening first rate work of scholarship in the field of U.S. foreign relations.

     ⁶⁹DH, Spring 2000, 341 344.
     ⁷⁰It is rare that a book reviewed in both the American Historical Review and Diplomatic History is described more fully (whether favorably or unfavorably) in the former, but this is such a case. See the review of TR and the British Empire by Lloyd Ambrosius, AHR, December 1998,1709 1710.
     ⁷¹International History Review, December 1998, 1000.
     ⁷²JAH, September 1998, 726.