Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
American Emperors
By Richard Poirier
Empire
by Gore Vidal
Random House, 486 pp., $22.50
This is the fifth novel in Gore Vidal's chronicle of American history. So far it runs from Burr (1973) to Lincoln (1984) and 1876 (1976), then on to Washington, D.C. (1967) and the onset of World War II. Empire covers the turn of the century, from 1898 with William McKinley's administration, to 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt, who came to office after McKinley's assassination in 1901, had reached the middle of his first elected term. Roosevelt had already helped set the course of American empire as McKinley's assistant secretary of the Navy. Presiding over the buildup of the American fleet, he was strongly persuaded by the views of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, author in 1890 of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, and of his friend Brooks Adams, whose Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) argued that political supremacy depended largely on the control of trade routes.
Review, 3128 words
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