The Imperial Cruise
James Bradley
 The book centers on the diplomatic mission of the SS Manchuria sent by President Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of 1905. On board was the largest diplomatic mission delegation in U.S. history, including some of the highest profile political figures of the time. They included Secretary of War (and future President) William Howard Taft; Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Roosevelt; her future husband, Congressman (and later Speaker of the House) Nicholas Longworth; along with 29 other members of the House and Senate, and their wives; and an array of additional high-ranking military and civilian officials. After his initial description and introduction of the SS Manchuria's voyage, the author explores brief excerpts of the history behind the period's American domestic and foreign policy, elaborating on its influence, motivation, and consequences, specifically in regard to American-Japanese, Sino-Japanese, and Russo-Japanese relations. More broadly, Bradley explores his contention relating to how deep-set WASP"White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" - In 1906, Roosevelt wrote: "The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests of alien lands." - Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise - p. 25. . biases and racially deterministic philosophies fueled and undergirded virtually all U.S. foreign and domestic policy-making in that era pertaining to U.S. relations with other nations and to populations of other racial, cultural or religious heritages. This included virtually all peoples of non-Teutonic Anglo-Saxon descent, and resulted, for example, in the slaughter of more than 250,000 Filipinos during the U.S. colonial take-over of the Philippines. It is Bradley's contention that the actions of one Roosevelt, and the diplomatic cruise in the summer of 1905, lit that fuse that would doom more than 100,000 U.S. military to die in the Pacific theater decades later under another Roosevelt in the 1940s. Through what Bradley describes as their "bumbling diplomacy", he describes how Teddy Roosevelt and his emissary Taft turned previously friendly Japanese sentiment, against the United States.