Empire (1987)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Gore Vidal

"T.R." and "The Chief" Get the Vidal Treatment

(Theodore Roosevelt): "Your press incited--incites--violence and class hatred. Do you deny that?"

W.R. Hearst: "I don't deny or affirm anything. Do you understand that? I'm here at your request, Roosevelt. Personally I have no wish to see you at all., anywhere, ever--unless of course , we share the same quarters in hell. So I must warn you, no one says 'Do you deny' to me, in my country."

"Your country is it?" Roosevelt's falsetto had deepened to a mellifluous alto. "When did you buy it?"

from "Empire", Random House, 1987.

Gore Vidal's "Empire" , which chronicles the years roughly between 1898 and 1906, is a historical novel about the launch of the United States into creating an overseas empire, at the expense of the declining Spanish hold over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Those who are familiar with Mr. Vidal from his other novels, essays or still frequent radio and television appearances, know that this grand old man of letters has quite a sharp wit. He also takes a rather jaundiced view of the men and women of power in past and present America. "Empire" is no exception.

The two main characters are Caroline and Blaise Sanford, a fictional set of wealthy half-siblings. Blaise goes into the publishing game as a very junior partner with the very real William Randolph Hearst, the man who was the most famous practitioner of sensationalistic "Yellow Journalism".

It is Vidal's contention--and he is not alone in this--that Hearst did a great deal to bring American public opinion toward war with Spain in the Spring of 1898. (It helped that an American battleship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana Harbor on February 15 of that year, killing over two hundred sailors.)

His half-sister, who feels cheated out of her fair share of the family estate left by her late father, manages to purchase a small Washington daily, The Tribune. Though these two characters, Vidal leads us into the corridors of power in William McKinley's Washington and in the press headquarters of Hearst, the man who invented the way the modern mass media invents issues for the public to get vexed over and demand whatever the publisher might like them to demand...war, for instance, and the swelling of patriotic pride that leads to long overseas wars and dominion over far -off lands and distant peoples who mean us no harm.

What makes this historical novel of war stand out from other specimens of the kind is that it does not have any chapters set in combat, unlike the two greatest historical novels in Vidal's "American Chronicle" series, "Burr" (1973) and his masterpiece, "Lincoln" (1985). The "action" takes place almost solely in New York (the media capital of America even then), on the floor of the Democratic and Republican conventions of that time , in the White House and the near-by fashionable home of the great historians Henry Adams (grandson and great-grandson of Presidents) and his friend, the writer and statesman John Hay.

Hay is another important figure in the novel---a direct link to the Civil War since he was once one of two personal aides to President Lincoln throughout the four plus bloody years of that Administration. In the story, Hay is a dying man who serves as Secretary of State for McKinley and, after his assassination by an anarchist in 1901, for his successor, the vibrant, mercurial and complex Theodore Roosevelt.

Empire" is a wonderful book for fans of American History who don't mind eschewing the triumphalism of American power that you would find from other novelist or historians more in tune with "Teddy" Roosevelt as the embodiment of image of the great man on the face of Mount Rushmore.

Indeed, fans of Theodore Roosevelt will no doubt be disappointed that Vidal concentrates so much on "TR"s weaker points, from a modern perspective--promoting American power and not being a 1960's style liberal when it comes to corporate "trust-busting" and economic regulation. Almost no mention is made of Roosevelt's mediation of the Russo-Japanese War (for which he won the Nobel Prize) and his greatest legacy to the people of the United States
a century later: setting aside 150 million acres of timber-lands for posterity, plus doubling the number of national parks and monuments. It is as a conservator in the truest sense that we owe a debt to our first 20th Century President. But,in Vidal's defense, "Empire" is not about legacies but about power for power's sake--one of the writer's favorite themes--and the spread of American hegemony over faraway nations. Some readers may find that issues familiar in our own times.

TR was a leader of his time and all nations that aspired to greatness, from the USA to the major European powers and Japan did much the same in this era. W.R. Hearst, "The Chief", is the real villain of the novel and in real life, and, thankfully, he never manipulated the nation as a whole to entrust him with control of the White House.

One interesting note from "Empire": the Oval Office/West Wing part of the White House was built during the first term of Roosevelt's administration. The centerpiece of power at the Executive Branch was originally a a glass hot house conservatory that past Presidents like McKinley used as a informal meeting place. Vidal has done his homework so well that you feel he had to be there personally to get all the hundreds of other details a scene just right. All in all, a worthwhile read that might inspire you to read other sources on a vital era.