The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Chapter 2

The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests

Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)

1999

2. Constructing Power: Cultural Transformation and Strategic Adjustment in the 1890s ₁
Edward Rhodes, Rutgers University

A little over a century ago, the American republic abandoned its traditional, defensive military posture and set out to acquire the naval tools that would permit it to intervene politically and militarily on the world stage. This remarkable historical case of strategic adjustment poses a considerable theoretical challenge for students of international relations and American politics. It is, as this chapter demonstrates, extraordinarily difficult to identify changes in American interests—national, bureaucratic, or domestic—or in threats to them that would account for this dramatic change in policy.

But if the empirical analysis presented in the following pages is correct— if Realist, bureaucratic politics, and domestic politics explanations of strategic adjustment are simply inconsistent with the facts of the 1890s—how then can we explain the radical transformation we observe and, more generally, how are we to understand the phenomenon of strategic adjustment? The critical lesson of the 1890s, this chapter concludes, is that strategic adjustment reflects a reconstruction of the cultural and cognitive landscape, not necessarily a response to change in the physical or political one. Strategic adjustment occurs not because of shifts in the pattern of interests and power or in the structure of political institutions, but because of changes in how individuals in society visualize their world, their society’s mission in that world, and the relationship between military power and political ends.

This chapter argues that the American decision in 1890 to compete militarily with the imperial European powers proves explicable only in terms of a revolution in American culture and cognitive structure. This intellectual revolution was stimulated by the failure of traditional American beliefs about the nature of the American state and about war to fulfill key cultural and cognitive functions in the face of the extraordinary social challenges of the late 1880s. The construction of a new navy in the 1890s reflected the construction of new beliefs that could serve these fundamental cultural and cognitive roles. Only by viewing strategic choice as a manifestation of core political beliefs, and by recognizing the dramatic reconstruction of the cognitive and cultural landscape necessitated by the disintegrative pressures at work in traditional American society in the late nineteenth century, can the departure from historical “republican” security policy be explained.

This understanding of strategic choice and change has two critical implications for how we think about the adjustment process currently underway. In the first place, a careful historical examination of the 1890s raises serious doubts about the predictive power of the theoretical explanations which have generally been employed to inform discussions of anticipated American post-Cold War behavior. Examinations of international power distributions, of bureaucratic interests, and of domestic political alignments are unlikely to cast much useful light on how the American state will choose to pursue security in the new century. At the same time, and perhaps more helpfully, this chapter’s analysis suggests the utility of understanding strategic choice as a reflection of belief structures whose content functions to provide socially unifying and individually empowering cultural myths and institutions. Viewed from this perspective, it becomes possible to see America’s current strategic adjustment process as a logical reflection of the reconstruction of American political culture occurring in response to today’s social and economic dislocative pressures. As in the 1890s, how the American state chooses to deal with its external environment will depend on the interlocking images of the citizen, state, outside world, and war that come to dominate the American imagination, and these in turn will reflect the challenge of finding meaning and creating order in a “multicultural,” postindustrial society.

The Case

Historically, the American republic’s Navy had been charged with three missions. First, in peacetime the U.S. Navy would represent American commercial interests abroad. U.S. warships would patrol overseas “stations,” cruising waters frequented by U.S. flag commerce to provide protection from piracy, to discourage insult to American citizens, and, where necessary, to open ports to American vessels and trade. Second, in wartime the republic’s Navy would attempt to protect American ports and commercial centers from bombardment or seizure. If successful, this “first line of defense” against invasion—really a seaward extension of coastal fortifications—would guarantee a military stalemate by preventing an imperial power from doing serious harm to the American people. Third, in wartime the U.S. Navy, possibly assisted by privateers, would harry the adversary’s commerce and raid his coasts. Such actions were not expected to be decisive, but they would impose costs on the enemy, making continuation of the stalemate obtained by coastal defense unacceptable and thereby coercing the adversary to seek peace. Against weaker neighbors—like Mexico or the Confederacy—this wartime strategy of coastal protection and commerce raiding would be applied in reverse: the Navy would transport an army of invasion which would achieve a decisive political victory by seizing the adversary’s sovereign territory and destroying the opposing society’s will or ability to fight on. While these decisive terrestrial operations were underway, the Navy would protect American commerce and attempt to impose pressure on the adversary’s society by denying it economic intercourse with the world.

This was, in its logic, the naval policy of a continental republic: without sea-going capital ships, the state could not hope to dominate distant waters, nor could it ensure that its overseas trade would not be cut off, as indeed happened during the Revolution and War of 1812. Such a policy assumed that the republic could afford to be denied the use of the oceanic commons. ₂ It reasoned that security was essentially a terrestrial matter: so long as American homes, industry, and domestic commerce were protected from enemy assault, the state was effectively performing its security function. Denying the adversary—presumably an imperial power, and therefore dependent upon the oceans—unhindered use of the oceanic commons through commerce raiding was a continental republic’s means of retaliating and thus compelling negotiation.

The forces required for this naval strategy were modest. Coastal warships of limited range and seaworthiness—like Jefferson’s fleet of in-shore gunboats or the monitors and heavily armored rams of the Civil War—would, in conjunction with land-based fortifications and harbor obstacles, protect American ports and littoral waters. Frigates or cruisers—warships able to operate independently on the high seas over relatively great ranges and for relatively long periods of time—would patrol overseas stations in peacetime and prey on foreign commerce during war. In this republican strategy there was no need for capital ships—“ships-of-the-line” or battleships—designed to operate in a fleet and to concentrate as much firepower as possible, presumably against a similar fleet, in a decisive naval battle such as Trafalgar. These were the tools of imperial powers, which needed to control the seas so that their access to colonial possessions, whose wealth was the empire’s lifeblood, would be secure and so that they could wage wars of aggression against each other.

In 1890, however, American naval policy abruptly reversed. “That year marked the onset of a revolution in doctrine which transformed the United States Navy from a loosely organized array of small coast defenders and light cruisers into a unified battle fleet of offensive capability.” ₃ The first suggestion of this revolution came in November 1889, when Benjamin Harrison’s newly appointed Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Tracy, submitted his first annual report to the President. In it, he challenged the entire logic of traditional American naval policy. The United States required a battleship fleet, Tracy asserted, able to destroy an adversary’s battle fleet on the oceans. Passive defense of the coasts and raiding against the adversary’s commerce did not constitute an acceptable strategy. Tracy’s justification for this shift was that

We must have the force to raise blockades....We must have a fleet of battleships that will beat off the enemy’s fleet on its approach, for it is not to be tolerated that the United States...is to submit to an attack on the threshold of its harbors. Finally, we must be able to divert an enemy’s force from our coast by threatening his own, for a war, though defensive in principle, may be conducted most effectively by being offensive in its operations. ₄

In sum, Tracy argued that the American republic required an offensive fleet of capital ships, able to wrest control of large reaches of the oceanic commons away from the imperial powers

To reach this end, Tracy called for a 15-year construction program to yield a twelve-battleship Atlantic fleet and an eight-battleship Pacific one. Although, in deference to traditional policy, Tracy’s annual report also called for the construction of twenty coastal defense monitors and twenty-nine more cruisers, the battleships were to receive priority in construction and Tracy’s lack of interest in the monitors and cruisers was apparent. In December 1889, in the wake of Tracy’s report, legislation was introduced to construct eight battleships (and, incidentally two monitors and three cruisers). ₅

In 1889 Tracy also authorized a naval advisory board, the McCann Board, and its findings, issued in January 1890, went much farther than Tracy’s annual report—or, as it developed, Congressional sentiment. The McCann Board recommended not twenty battleships, but thirty-five. If implemented and if foreign states did not respond, this program would catapult the U.S. Navy from twelfth largest in the world (directly behind such naval giants as Turkey, China, Norway-Sweden, and Austria-Hungary) to second place, behind only Great Britain. ₆ The board’s report dismayed Congress with its excessive requirements and imperialist tone, for a time jeopardizing hopes for any battleships at all. In the end, however, Congress made the jump, voting in its 1890 appropriations money for three “seagoing coastline” battleships, a direct departure from existing American policy.

The significance of the events of 1889 and 1890 should thus be clear. For the first time in its history, the American republic seriously turned its attention to the possibility of controlling large expanses of the sea and to the task of attacking an imperial adversary’s naval forces. Abandoning a security strategy based on coastal defense and commerce raiding, the United States chose to become a blue-water naval power and undertook a large and expensive naval expansion centered on a capital-ship fleet built to rival, seek out, and destroy those of the European powers. The three Indiana-class battleships Congress authorized in the summer of 1890 were designed neither to protect American ports, like the old monitors still in service, nor to range the oceans individually, representing American commercial interests during peacetime and disrupting an adversary’s commerce in time of war. Rather, these warships were designed to dominate wide ocean areas by operating together as a fleet, able to meet an adversary’s fleet in line-to-line combat. In sum, “any resemblance between the Indiana-class battleships and earlier American warships was purely deceptive....The United States Navy... had discarded its earlier confidence in a ship peculiarly fitted to the American geopolitical position, the frigate, in favor of one conceived to meet the exigencies of great-power naval rivalry in European waters.” ₇ This embrace of a battleship navy and transformation in American naval strategy was essentially total. As Robert Albion observed, “For the next thirty years, new battleships dominated the annual discussions of naval appropriations. In fact, the 1890 conversion was so complete that, thereafter, it was difficult to get enough of the lesser types of ships to form a well-balanced Fleet.” ₈

The 1890 strategic adjustment was not reversed when the Republicans were voted out in 1892. Rather than returning to the traditional security policy it had pursued in its first term, the second Cleveland administration, and its new Secretary of the Navy Hilary Herbert, continued with the battleship program of the Harrison administration, adding five battleships to the four begun by the Republicans.

Subsequent administrations continued this battleship program and new naval policy. Throughout the period from 1890 to 1919, this shift from commerce raiders and coastal defenders to battleships was coupled with an enormous expansion of the resources devoted to naval construction. America rose from the ranks of minor naval powers in 1890 to second place among the world’s navies a quarter of a century later. ₉ By the close of World War I, this newfound navalism had transformed the United States and its Navy: at the time of the Washington Naval Treaties in 1922, the United States had a navy second to none, and the building programs of 1916 and 1919 promised to go even further. Had the United States completed these plans—an undertaking clearly within America’s economic capacity—only a major building program would have saved the Royal Navy from distinct inferiority. ₁₀

Four Alternative Explanations

A transformation of this magnitude, and of such sweeping historical importance, deserves an explanation. In an effort to develop some plausible understanding of this strategic adjustment, this chapter examines four contrasting accounts of state behavior.

Possibly the most obvious explanation of state behavior and strategic adjustment is the one offered by the Realist school: states are driven by their interests vis-à-vis other actors in the international system. They react more or less intelligently to external threats to national values—they acquire the types and levels of military power that will cost-effectively protect state sovereignty, national economic well-being, and social and political ways of life. Decisions regarding types and levels of military power follow directly from each state’s interests and objectives in the international system and its vulnerability or sensitivity to the actions of other states. Strategic adjustment reflects change in national interest or in international threat.

A second, perhaps more cynical, explanation is the bureaucratic one: while states are indeed driven by “their” interests, these interests are not national ones and states are not unitary actors. In this view, the key interests driving behavior are intrastate ones: state decisions regarding military power reflect the competing parochial interests of the various bureaucracies and intragovernmental players that compose the state. To predict the military capabilities a particular state will acquire it is necessary to examine the internal structure of state decisionmaking—who controls information, decision, and implementation; how, according the rules of the game, problems are factored and what action-channels have been established; what each participant’s interests are; and what standard operating procedures have been developed to protect and serve those interests. Strategic adjustment reflects changing bureaucratic interests or power relationships.

A third alternative is the domestic-political account: states are driven not by their own autonomous interests but by the interests of dominant or competing societal groups. In this view, states are the tool of domestic interests, not the master; they are agents, not principals. Strategic adjustment is dictated by changes in interest or relative power of various social actors. ₁₁

What these three answers have in common is their emphasis upon interests as the motivator of behavior. Where they differ is in their level of analysis: whose interest is the state serving? Are the rational and self-interested players in this game states, bureaucratic actors, or domestic groups? Is strategic adjustment a logical reflection of the structure of the international system, of the state, or of the domestic society?

By contrast, the fourth explanation considered in this chapter approaches the puzzle of choice from an entirely different perspective. It abandons the presumption that political behavior is based in any clear or deterministic fashion on interests, at any level of analysis. Rather, this fourth, cultural- cognitive explanation starts from the recognition that state policies have not only international, bureaucratic, and domestic roots but intellectual ones as well.

Beliefs, as distinct from interests, critically influence the shape of state decisions. Political behavior, in this account, is rooted not in interests but in ideas: it is the expression of core political beliefs—beliefs that serve critical cultural and cognitive functions. Like religious beliefs, political beliefs provide individuals with an intellectual framework that permits them to maintain cognitive consistency, acquire and structure information parsimoniously, and engage in effective ego defense; at the same time, again like religious beliefs, these political beliefs permit societies to develop stable institutions, assign property rights (including those to be retained by the collectivity), resolve disputes authoritatively, and overcome dilemmas of collective action. Substantial shifts in state behavior, like the one witnessed in 1890, are a consequence of the failure of core political beliefs to serve these functions effectively and the construction of alternative beliefs that logically imply a different mode of behavior. As Michael Shafer has argued, in treating foreign policy it is necessary to recognize that “where you stand depends on what you think.” ₁₂ Nonevolutionary strategic adjustment in this view is a product of ferment not in the material world but in the cultural and cognitive ones: changes in the world of ideas, unrelated to changes in the world of objective interests, result in major shifts in the types and levels of military forces states maintain.

Cultural-cognitive explanations of state behavior are thus rooted in the observation that, because of the cognitive operation of the human mind and because of the impact of cultural norms and institutions, beliefs exert a major impact on behavior. Beliefs represent typically unchallenged organizing presumptions about positive or normative matters—that is, relatively fixed presumptions individuals make about others, about values, and about causal relationships in the world in which they operate. These presumptions not only dictate what kinds of information about the environment the individual will regard as relevant and therefore seek but also imply appropriate responses to environmental stimuli. As Alexander George has observed,

in order to function, every individual acquires during the course of his development a set of beliefs and personal constructs about the physical and social environment. These beliefs provide him with a relatively coherent way of organizing and making sense of what would otherwise be a confusing and overwhelming array of signals and cues picked up from the environment by his senses....These beliefs and constructs necessarily simplify and structure the external world.... Much of an individual’s behavior is shaped by the particular ways in which he perceives, evaluates, and interprets incoming information about events in his environment. ₁₃

Three further observations are, however, necessary. First, as noted, a cultural-cognitive account of behavior presumes that changes in the way decisionmakers perceive, evaluate, and interpret incoming information may result in sharply changed behavior, without—or despite—changes in the actual environment. Thus, while behavior is a reaction to environmental stimuli, changes in behavior do not necessarily imply that a change in environment has occurred. Although, given the nature of cognitive processes and cultural institutions, political belief structures will tend to remain unchallenged and will be examined, discarded, and replaced only in response to unusual circumstances, in a long-run context both beliefs and the environment must be regarded as variable.

Second, beliefs cannot be regarded—or disregarded—as pure superstructure. ₁₄ Beliefs cannot simply be reduced to interest. Because of the cognitive character of the human mind, they cannot be treated as the intellectual manifestation of material relationships or interests. Just as religions have an internal logic of their own that transcends the immediate instrumental interest of any of their adherents, so too do political beliefs. And, rather than reflecting the power of various interest groups, the influence of beliefs— political or religious—reflects their ability to permit individuals to overcome key cultural and cognitive problems and to impose an acceptable order on social relationships and intellectual processes. ₁₅

Third, as this implies, individuals’ political beliefs are not constructed in a vacuum but within a larger cultural framework. In this context, they represent a shared understanding of normative and positive issues, an understanding that serves as the foundational intellectual basis for social and political institutions and interaction. Thus, while no two individuals will ever share precisely the same set of beliefs or personal intellectual constructs, within any given society or body-politic at any given time we would expect to find either a hegemonic set of core political beliefs or a struggle for hegemony taking place. ₁₆ Around these beliefs institutions form and on the basis of these beliefs and institutions interaction occurs.

The implications of this cultural-cognitive account are simple: to understand the choices states make in the acquisition of tools of violence and means of providing security it is necessary to understand dominant political images of the state and of war. These images do not exist in isolation: they are deeply grounded in political culture and serve important cultural and cognitive needs. They are constructed by societies at times of crisis in a functional process aimed at overcoming fissiparous tendencies inherent in social groups. They are closely tied to the historical myths that are employed to facilitate self-identification and self-definition and are important in binding the nation together, in creating in-group/out-group distinctions, and in legitimizing social relationships. These images play a key role in defining the central rules of societal interaction, such as the appropriate boundaries or extent of state activity, and may be important in justifying specific state institutions or defining the essence of particular state organs. Given these functions, these core political images are likely to be reexamined only when the continued viability of the political society has been called into question.

While this cultural-cognitive theory suggests that the external environment is indeterminant in its impact on behavior—that reactions to the external environment depend on how that environment is conceived or “constructed” in a given cognitive and cultural framework—it does not exclude the possibility that existing economic or political realities may establish physically binding constraints on choices and action. Japan in the 1940s, for example, could not outbuild the United States militarily regardless of the beliefs of its leadership about the desirability of doing so.

More fundamentally, this cultural-cognitive theory recognizes that political beliefs are socially constructed—that is, are constructed in the context of the day’s social problems and struggles. Obviously, beliefs tend to be deeply held, to be resistant to information that would tend to discredit them, and to be chosen for their simplicity, elegance, familiarity, and cognitive and cultural utility, not on the basis of scientific or rational tests of accuracy. But the social context within which political beliefs are constructed and exist necessarily implies that significant changes in material realities that yield social crisis may stimulate a reappraisal of beliefs and that, when core beliefs have been challenged, these realities may lend strength to one competing set of beliefs over another. In other words, material-world traumas that destroy the perceived legitimacy of the society’s implicit political contract generate a demand for new cultural institutions and influence the attractiveness of alternatives. Thus, for example, massive economic change (such as industrialization or the urbanization of economic activity) that threatens existing familial and social patterns, the incorporation or reincorporation of dissimilar populations into a society, and war (even successful war, if it demands unusual sacrifice on the part of particular members of society) are all likely to threaten a political society and to generate a need for new cultural myths and and other institutions. Associated with such social dislocations, we would expect to see an intellectual competition among various new ideas and images, continuing until opinion coalesces around a set of beliefs that provides a cognitively consistent and parsimonious structure meeting the cultural needs of the society.

Each of these four theoretical approaches—Realist, bureaucratic, domestic politics, and cultural-cognitive thus offers quite distinct explanations of strategic choice and yields quite distinct predictions about when, and what type of, strategic change will occur. Realism suggests that strategic change is a response to changes in international threat; bureaucratic models suggest it is a response to organizational imperatives or changes in the balance of bureaucratic interests and power; domestic politics accounts point to shifting patterns of domestic interests; and cultural-cognitive explanations draw our attention to changed constructions of beliefs. Which if any of these, though, is consistent with the actual events of 1890?

Realist Explanations

Realist accounts of strategic adjustment focus on shifts in national interests and international threats. At least four superficially plausible Realist explanations for the 1890 revolution in naval policy can be identified. The first two posit that strategic adjustment was made necessary by changing military realities that either endangered American territory directly or generated an increased threat to the hemisphere. The second two point to the economic rather than military realm, positing changing American economic interests or changing threats to those interests.

1. Strategic adjustment was made necessary by a growing or changing military threat to the territory of the United States

Perhaps the most obvious potential explanation for why the American republic suddenly altered its naval policy is that it faced a heightened security risk. In such an account, expanding the Navy and altering it to mirror those of the European imperial powers represented an effort to ensure the security of the American people from foreign invasion or depredations.

Unfortunately, such an explanation simply cannot be squared with the facts of the situation. As Russell Weigley bluntly concludes: “An invasion of the United States by a European power was out of the question.” ₁₇ The security of American territory from military assault was rendered virtually total by geography and the day’s technology, regardless of the weakness of American naval forces or the choice of American naval policy. Indeed, the combination of geography and technology meant that even American ability to conduct coastal commerce was probably reasonably safe. “There was... no threat to American security from overseas, and none was rationally conceivable....Steam power and dependence upon coal so limited the range of warships that no great power, not even Britain with her Canadian bases, could have maintained a close blockade of the War of 1812 type or risked a large-scale invasion of America.” ₁₈ And if the problem of operating a fleet so far from home were not enough, potential aggressors faced a political obstacle as well: “the tensions within the European state system accompanying the transformation of the Prussian Kingdom into the German Empire precluded the diversion of any large European force to the Western Hemisphere anyway.” ₁₉

Indeed, if we assume that naval policy was shaped by the need to protect the American nation from European imperialism, a dispassionate examination of the changing military realities of the late nineteenth century might well lead us to expect the atrophy rather than offensive expansion of American naval power. The American state’s need to compete with European states in naval armament in order to secure American territory was declining for at least four reasons.

First, somewhat ironically, the European naval arms competition had the effect of rapidly reducing the scale of any potential foreign threat to the United States. European navies were becoming specialized to compete with each other, with the consequence that their ability to threaten American interests was greatly diminished. As noted, the move from wind to coal limited the range and endurance of enemy warships. At the same time, increasing cost and sophistication limited European navies’ numbers, while the quickening pace of technological change further reduced the size of any aggressor’s force by reducing the lifespan of warships. The danger of attack or close blockade was not simply remote: it was vanishing.

Second, demographic trends further reduced the danger of an imperial assault on the American republic. Population growth and westward territorial expansion of the United States reduced the republic’s vulnerability to coastal forays and increased the required size of an invading army. The days of the early nineteenth century, when small British armies, operating from the sea or from Canadian bases, could hold the American people hostage, were becoming increasingly distant.

Third, changes in military technology reduced an invader’s ability simply to live off the land. In 1774, 1812, 1848, or even 1864, armies could cut loose from their logistics and operate deep in enemy territory: by the 1890s this was simply not a plausible alternative. The rise of mass armies, coupled with increased ammunition requirements, meant that an imperial power could not even threaten to campaign away from supply bases. Given the size of the American continent and the difficulty of trans-Atlantic supply, logistical problems made the notion of invasion increasingly ludicrous.

Finally, U.S. economic development ensured increasing military self-sufficiency: while the United States would indeed pay an economic price if it were denied access to the world, unlike the Confederacy in 1861 it would still be able to forge and support the instruments of war. As the nineteenth century (and America’s industrial revolution) progressed, military action short of invasion posed less and less of a challenge to the American republic’s long-run security.

In sum, the old double-barreled wartime policy—coastal defense to guard against a naval coup de main and raiding to impose costs on an imperial adversary—made eminent sense in the 1890s; indeed, it made even better sense than in earlier periods. More to the point, given the state’s responsibility to plan for the future, these trends clearly seemed likely to continue. Each passing year promised to leave the territory and people of the republic more secure from imperial aggression. Even the threat that inflamed the public’s imagination in the 1890s—the danger that a powerful enemy warship might descend suddenly on the American coast and bombard, or threaten to bombard, a great American city—did not demand a change in policy: construction of newer, more heavily armed and armored coastal monitors, dispersed along the coast so as to be always on guard, would meet this imaginary threat.

2. Strategic adjustment was made necessary by increased military threat to regional security interests

Even if the republic’s territory were safe, though, perhaps strategic adjustment was required because of heightened imperial involvement in the Caribbean that threatened America’s long-standing commitment to the Monroe Doctrine. Again, however, it is difficult to square such a hypothesis with the facts. To be sure, plans for an isthmian canal did indeed generate popular concerns about the Caribbean and Pacific approaches to such a canal and worries about great-power meddling close to U.S. shores. And in the late 1890s, in the worsening of German-American relations in the wake of the Spanish-American War, German war-plans were briefly expanded to include an option for attacking Puerto Rico or Cuba as a means of pressuring the United States. ₂₀

No serious threat to American security interests in the Caribbean basin ever developed, however. Contrary to Mahan’s warnings, construction of an isthmian canal offered no real danger of substantially increased European interest in the region: given the width of the Pacific, the direct route from Liverpool (or Hamburg or Cherbourg) to India and China still passed through Suez, not Panama. Nor, given the European balance, was there ever a significant risk that a serious threat to the Monroe Doctrine would develop, despite occasional imperial shows of force. The notion that any of the European great powers, with the exception of Great Britain, would have stationed a major fraction of its navy in the Caribbean was patently absurd, particularly given the declining economic importance of the region. ₂₁ Put simply, Britain was not going to allow European imperialism in Latin America, a region in which she had established major markets—and Britain had the wherewithal to prevent such imperialism.

Further, if the naval revolution of 1890s were a rational response to concerns, however implausible, about imperial meddling in the Caribbean and Latin America, we would expect to see two developments that we do not, in fact, observe. First, we would expect to find the acquisition of Caribbean bases receiving a priority similar to that of naval construction. But though Harrison and his Secretary of the Navy, Tracy, did engage in clumsy attempts to acquire a base at the Mole St. Nicolas in Haiti in 1889&-;91 and at Samana Bay in Santo Domingo in 1891–92, these efforts divided the administration and (unlike in the construction of the battleship fleet) lacked substantial public and Congressional support; the one base site that was easily available in 1890, the Danish Virgin Islands, was not pursued. The second Cleveland administration, even while continuing the Harrison administration’s construction program, made no effort to acquire a Caribbean base. ₂₂ Second, if fleet construction were a response to perceived imperial threats to the Americas, we would expect to see serious planning for war, specifically against Germany, which was typically identified as the most probable violator of the Monroe Doctrine. This, however, was not the case: there was no linkage between construction and plans and, as Herwig and Trask note, “the United States of America did not draw up an official war plan against Germany until 1913.” ₂₃

Of course, even while European imperialism in the Americas was improbable, the danger of British meddling remained. As the 1895 Venezualan crisis illustrated, U.S. and British interests, though for the most part congruent, were not always identical, and the possibility of a clash existed. But if fear of British threats to U.S. security interests were the motivation for strategic adjustment, then the naval revolution of 1890 was distinctly and self- evidently counterproductive. Of all potential adversaries, Britain was by far the most sensitive to a policy of commerce raiding and (given the size of her own battle fleet and the implications of losing command of the seas) the least likely to be intimidated by the construction of capital ships. ₂₄ In the short- or medium-run, the British could quickly and easily neutralize the American investment in battleships by stationing a superior force in Jamaica or Bermuda (or even by “Copenhagening” the American fleet— destroying it preventatively); should the European situation preclude the diversion of naval forces away from home waters, a temporary loss of control over the American reaches of the North and South Atlantic would in no way compromise fundamental British security requirements. In the long run, of course, a major American build-up might compel a British reaction, as the German construction program did. But given the dependence of the American economy on British markets, a strategy of deliberately challenging Britain to an open-ended arms race not only offered little immediate leverage but also risked substantial costs if Britain retaliated commercially. Constructing a battleship fleet thus might well provoke Britain even though it was unlikely to intimidate her.

By contrast, possession of a significant force of commerce raiders offered a realistic hope of imposing naval pressure on Britain. To the degree, therefore, that conflict with Britain was regarded as a real possibility, we would expect to see construction of a specialized force of raiders. Indeed, historically this is exactly what we do see: war-scares with Britain prompted raider construction. In the 1860s, when Anglo-American tensions were high, the United States responded by developing the remarkable high-speed commerce-raider Wampanoag—and when Anglo-American relations improved with the resolution of the Alabama claims, the Wampanoag was first modified for peacetime station-keeping and then discarded. ₂₅

Further, had fear of British activity in the Americas been the motivation for strategic adjustment, however misguided, in 1890, we would expect that as Anglo-American entente developed the new naval policy would be reexamined or abandoned. Yet this was not the case. In the wake of the Spanish- American War, Anglo-American relations improved dramatically and, with the conclusion of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and the rise of the Anglo- German arms race, British presence in the Caribbean declined. But rather than slackening, work on the U.S. battle fleet not only continued but accelerated.

3. Strategic adjustment was made necessary by increasing overseas economic interests which demanded overseas political expansion

This third Realist explanation for the strategic adjustment of the 1890s argues that American national economic interests were driving the United States to acquire an overseas empire and that it therefore needed to acquire an imperial-type navy, like those of the European powers, which would enable it to control key stretches of the ocean between metropole and colony.

This explanation fails on two grounds. In the first place, there was no burst of export activity or interest in exports in the 1880s. Overall, America prospered in the 1880s—GNP and per capita GNP rose impressively—but this prosperity was not being driven by foreign trade.

In the second place, America’s overseas economic interests did not require and indeed were likely to be threatened by efforts at overseas political expansion and by increases in U.S. politico-military power created by the naval revolution of 1890. Half of America’s exports went to Britain: these could only be jeopardized by an American naval program that Britain would naturally assume was directed at it. Equally to the point, American exports to the third world were protected by British free trade policy: America was positioned to play the opportunist under British hegemony—a hegemony that the United States had no interest in undermining or threatening. Nor did the United States have an interest in acquiring colonies of its own: as the second most efficient economy in the system, U.S. industry was sufficiently competitive that it could operate successfully in the free-trade environment created by Britain. Finally, to the extent that American trade was expanding in the late nineteenth century, the focus of interest was Latin America, where Britain had already opened markets. ₂₆

These realities were recognized at the time. The American business community had little interest in expanding foreign markets: it was the government, notably under Harrison and his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, that had to take the lead in stimulating interest. ₂₇ Business interests were consistently anti-imperialist until the Spanish-American War created a fait accompli. Economic prosperity in the 1880s and 1890s was seen as demanding peace, not overseas expansion. Though controversial, there is much to support Julius Pratt’s thesis that “the rise of an expansionist philosophy in the United States owed little to economic influences.” ₂₈ Indeed, it is instructive to note that after acquiring Cuba and the Philippines, America’s only significant colonies, the United States very quickly began trying to figure out how to dispose of them rather than how to turn them to economic profit. Whatever popular sentiments for overseas expansion may have existed, these sentiments were not reflections of material interests, nor did they result in an appetite for colonies that would have explained a decision to build an imperial-style fleet. ₂₉

4. Strategic adjustment was made necessary by increasing threats to U.S. overseas economic interests

Perhaps, though, the root of strategic adjustment was not an economically based interest in colonies but a changing international climate that was undermining an acceptable status quo, closing overseas markets, threatening existing American overseas economic interests, and forcing the United States to construct a navy to defend these interests.

Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the politico-military threat to America’s principal overseas markets was not expanding. British commitment to free trade remained strong during this period, effectively guaranteeing access to key markets, and the American state fully recognized this security and indeed exploited it. As Lake concludes,

As long as Britain remained committed to free trade and abstained from protection, the United States could protect its increasing returns industries, exploit its market power through an optimal tariff, and expand its trade with traditional English markets in Latin America while continuing to ship nearly half of its exports to the United Kingdom. As Britain’s interests evolved in later phases, American trade strategy would shift in response. But in the period between 1887 and 1897, the United States faced an era of opportunity in which its preferred policies could be easily obtained. The United States responded to this opportunity by free riding on free trade. ₃₀

But what if the strategic adjustment was aimed not at protecting access to the all-important European markets and to British-dominated Latin American ones, but to the relatively minor East Asian ones? Given European imperialism in China, might not the United States need to expand its naval forces in order to preserve access there? After all, even though the East Asian market was small, it might eventually grow, and failure to protect American access to the region might have long run costs.

Regrettably, continued European imperialism in East Asia fails to provide a logically coherent explanation for the strategic adjustment that actually occurred. At least three problems must be noted. First, had representing American commercial interests in a developing competition for Far Eastern markets been the motivation for U.S. naval expansion, we would expect to see aggressive expansion of the U.S. cruiser force, not a shift to battleships. Construction of a fleet of battleships would hardly be a cost-effective means of ensuring U.S. access to East Asian markets. Such a fleet was unlikely to spend much time in that region, nor could it be maintained there. And since European capital fleets were effectively restricted to home waters by the balance of power and were hardly likely to be sent halfway around the world on some colonial errand (and since, in 1890, Japan had yet to emerge as a major naval power), the need for a fleet of vessels specifically designed to battle the other side’s capital force was slight. The general point should be clear: capital ships were designed to destroy an adversary’s fleet or (if geography permitted, as in the British case vis-à-vis Germany) to deny it access to the high seas. They were not cost-effective tools for maintaining a political presence in distant Asian waters or for blocking imperial aggrandizement. Actual U.S. behavior in the region underscored the applicability of traditional U.S. naval policy: East Asian waters were the one place after 1890 where the United States continued to cling to the traditional policy of peacetime “overseas station,” maintaining a small squadron of cruisers to show the American flag, exert political leverage, and protect American citizens from insult.

More specifically, it is impossible to square an East Asian motivation for strategic adjustment with the range limitation deliberately imposed on the first three U.S. battleships. The “seagoing coastline” battleship, while quite capable of venturing far out into the oceanic commons and contesting that common with an adversary, was hardly designed for operations on the far side of the broad Pacific. Had the aim of strategic adjustment been protection of East Asian markets, why explicitly and deliberately build capital ships that would have difficulty operating there? It was only after the acquisition of the Philippines created a regional obligation that American battleships were designed for trans-Pacific range. ₃₁

Second, if the point of strategic adjustment was to permit the United States to prevent American exclusion from East Asian markets, it is difficult to understand Congressional and, under Cleveland, presidential reluctance to acquire key bases, most notably Hawaii. If the motivation for strategic adjustment lay in the western Pacific, then fleet expansion and Pacific bases should have been inextricably linked—but in fact they were not. Acquisition of Hawaii was an adjunct to the seizure of the Philippines, which itself was a somewhat inadvertent outcome of Caribbean conflict; as Grenville has observed, “incredible as it may seem, the attack on the Philippines was a secondary consideration, a by-product of the war with Spain....[an] almost incidental operation, to be undertaken merely to humiliate and embarrass Spain.” ₃₂ Pacific expansion thus seems to have been a result of strategic adjustment, not a stimulus for it.

Finally and most obviously, if the reason for U.S. naval expansion was the protection, through imperialist or anti-imperialist measures, of U.S. trade opportunities in China, why do we fail to see it used for this purpose? Why does the United States neither acquire Chinese colonies nor employ its naval power as a stick in its anti-imperial diplomacy?

In sum, a Realist examination of changing American security and economic interests, and of the changing threats to those interests, fails to provide a plausible explanation of the strategic adjustment of the 1890s. Traditional naval policy continued to offer effective defense of the American republic from external adversaries, to allow the republic to defend its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, and to ensure access to the overseas markets that might enhance American economic well-being.

Bureaucratic Explanations

Bureaucratic explanations interpret state behavior as the logical consequence of competition among self-serving organizations that comprise the state. This focus on the nonunitary nature of the state and the peculiarly bureaucratic character of its components gives rise to two sets of hypotheses about strategic adjustment.

1. Strategic adjustment was a consequence of organizational behavior

Allison’s Model II emphasizes the routinized, organizational character of state decisionmaking. Policy choices in this view reflect the essence and logic of bureaucracies: to survive and prosper, bureaucratic actors have an interest in controlling uncertainty. This means narrowing the range of variance in their environment and developing routinized standard operating procedures for dealing with assigned tasks. As a consequence, behavior at any time typically resembles that in the preceding period. The dominant inference of this theory, Allison notes, is that “the best explanation of an organization’s behavior at t is t-1; the best predictor of what will happen at t+1 is t.” ₃₃

The organizational quality of state behavior may help us to understand the stasis we observe in naval policy in the 1880s when the Navy incorporated new technologies into its existing strategy and force structure. Similarly, it may help us to understand continued fixation on the battleship in the years between Jutland and Pearl Harbor when, despite the inconclusiveness of engagements between battleships, despite the remarkable successes of German U-Boat operations, despite the technological development of naval aviation, and despite promising experiments with amphibious warfare, U.S. standard operating procedure continued to assume that the essence of naval war was the clash of battleship-dominated war-fleets. ₃₄ But Allison’s Model II offers little explanatory power for the dramatic shift of 1890. Three problems must be noted.

First, if behavior reflected standard operating procedures, we would expect the 1890s to mirror the 1880s. The organization and procedures that resulted in cruisers and coastal defense vessels for nearly 100 years were still in place. Indeed by most obvious measures the Navy’s existing standard operating procedures were at least minimally satisfactory: the United States had not lost any wars recently, and thanks to the new cruisers built in the 1880s the U.S. Navy was no longer an international laughing stock. But, contra Model II’s dominant inference, 1889 is a bad predictor of 1890.

Second, if stasis were for some reason not possible in 1890, Model II, with its emphasis on “quasi-resolution of conflict” and “problemistic search” ₃₅ would lead us to expect marginal rather than revolutionary change: if battleships were constructed at all, we would expect to see them phased in as an addition to the existing program, as indeed was implied by the Navy’s in-house McCann Board, not substituted as a wholesale replacement for it. But this is not at all what we observe. Even a historian as favorably disposed toward capital ships as Albion concedes that the post-1890 building program was surprisingly lopsided in favor of battleships. ₃₆

Third, the revolution of 1890 not only is inconsistent with the dominant inference of Model II but also cannot be reconciled with Model II’s foundational premise of institutional uncertainty minimization. The revolutionary changes of 1890 were guaranteed to render the Navy’s environment vastly more unpredictable and uncontrollable. Most obviously, building battleships was a risky business, fraught with potential for technological or fiscal embarrassment. Second, as Congressional response to the McCann report illustrated, a change in naval policy threatened long-standing Navy-Congressional relations, running a danger of provoking a budgetary backlash from isolationists. Third, because of the cost of the battleships and the rapid rate at which they, unlike cruisers, would obsolesce, the Navy would become increasingly dependent on Congress and vulnerable to its pressure and whim, reducing the Navy’s ability to manage its environment. Fourth, the Navy’s ability to control its environment would be further eroded because, with a battleship fleet, definitions of military sufficiency would no longer be highly predictable or controllable by the Navy. With a battleship fleet, sufficiency would depend on other states’ building programs and on potentially revolutionary developments in armor and ordnance, neither of which was under the control of Navy planners. By contrast, the Navy’s need for cruisers and the technical requirements of those cruisers were dictated by relatively unchanging factors such as the number of overseas stations to be patrolled in peacetime and the size and composition of potential adversaries’ merchant marine. In total, rather than being an outgrowth of existing standard operating procedures or an effort to better isolate the Navy from dangerous shocks, the decision to pursue a large battleship navy was a revolutionary departure that sharply reduced the ability of the Navy to plan for its future or to prepare to perform its assigned functions.

Interestingly, the revolution of 1890 also posed a stark challenge to the essence of the institution as it was understood by naval officers. Independent command was the core institutional value in the traditional navy: captains patrolling “on station” had a free hand in running their ships and considerable discretion to protect American interests within the general guidelines provided by political authorities. By replacing independent cruising with fleet action, a capital-ship navy eliminated this independence. The naval revolution of 1890 thus not only promised to leave the Navy less able to control its environment and plan its future but also threatened to remake the very nature of the institution in ways foreign to its members. ₃₇

All this said, it is still of course notoriously difficult to disconfirm “organizational process” explanations because of their predictive indeterminacy: given the range of goals an organization might conceivably be pursuing, given the variety of ways it could define its essence, and given the acknowledged but unspecified ability of organizations to learn and of governments to intervene in organizational processes, an ad hoc account can be formulated to explain nearly any outcome. As Allison candidly observed about his Model II, “these loosely formulated propositions amount simply to tendencies. Each must be hedged by modifiers like ‘other things being equal’ and ‘under certain conditions.’...Additional information about a given organization is required for further specification of the tendency statements.” ₃₈ Even allowing for the theory’s striking flexibility in predicting outcomes, however, there is a striking disjuncture between the revolutionary change of 1890 and the proposition that “the behavior of these organizations—and consequently of the government—relevant to an issue in any particular instance is, therefore, determined primarily by routines established in these organizations prior to that instance. Explanation of a government action starts from this base line, noting incremental deviations.” ₃₉ Perhaps more telling, the process described by Allison’s model is wildly inconsistent with the one involved in building a new navy in 1890: Allison posits that

the decisions of government leaders trigger organizational routines. Government leaders can trim the edges of this output and can exercise some choice in combining outputs. But most of the behavior is determined by previously established procedures....Existing organizational routines for employing present physical capabilities constitute the range of effective choice open to government leaders confronted with any problem. ₄₀

By contrast, in 1890 political leaders dictated the establishment of a fundamentally new navy.

2. Strategic adjustment was the product of competition among governmental actors

By contrast to his Model II, Allison’s Model III emphasizes the parochial, competitive character of state decisionmaking: “players-in-positions” occupying offices in the government and representing various bureaucracies compete to advance their parochial interests. Outcomes are political resultants—the reflection of bargaining along regular action channels and according to the existing rules of the game. Changes in behavior reflect changes in relative power or changes in the interest of relevant actors. ₄₁

Given that change occurred in the 1890s, this model would lead us to infer that there must have been a shift either in the interest of key bureaucratic actors or in the structure or rules of decisionmaking, resulting in changes in relative power among bureaucratic actors. In fact, however, we find neither.

The critical bureaucracy engaged was obviously the Navy itself. In 1890 did key players in the Navy come to see strategic adjustment as in the institution’s interest and push their representative, the Secretary, to shift policy? The answer is no. Though Secretary Tracy was indeed a leading proponent of strategic adjustment, there is no evidence that he was pressed or even encouraged by the Navy’s top officers. To be sure, we do witness, as the 1880s progress, the rise of an insurgent group within the Navy, interested in strategic adjustment and willing to define the Navy’s and nation’s interest in terms of development of a battleship fleet. This group, however, had a diverse agenda and was not united in support of battleships until after 1890. And it certainly did not bureaucratically dominate the Navy in the 1880s or 1890s: it was, bureaucratically, nearly powerless until after the revolution transformed the Navy. ₄₂ Indeed, in 1890 the top brass in the Navy viewed this reform effort as irrelevant or inappropriate: the center and institutional home of the insurgents, the Naval War College, was nearly disestablished and in 1893 the uniformed Navy’s foremost proponent of battleships, Alfred Thayer Mahan, was banished to sea duty.

In sum, there is no evidence that Tracy’s advocacy of strategic adjustment was the consequence of pressure from his bureaucratic constituency. The Navy threw its bureaucratic weight behind battleship construction only after strategic adjustment was undertaken. In the years leading up to 1890, the Navy’s top officers denied not only the need for battleships to protect American interests but also the likelihood of fleet-fights and the decisiveness of fleet engagements. In the view of the admirals, traditional commerce-raiding policies represented an appropriate strategy. ₄₃

We encounter a similar timing problem if we attempt to explain the revolution as a product of a change in action channels, rules of the game, or relative power of actors within the Navy. To be sure, we do see important changes in bureaucratic structure. But these come after, not before, strategic adjustment. Organizational reform, reducing the independent power of the bureaus and centralizing power in the hands of potential policy-reformers, comes a decade or more after the decision to abandon cruisers and monitors. It is not until 1900 that we see the creation of the General Board—and not until 1915 that we see the establishment of an Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and the definite relaxation of the strangling grip of the competing bureau chiefs. The long-standing competition between line and engineering officers in the Navy also remained unresolved and unchanged in the 1890s.

Neither was there any shift in bureaucratic power outside the uniformed Navy that would account for the reform of 1890. To be sure, Secretary Tracy was a forceful individual who, because of personal tragedy, became close to President Harrison. But his power was not unchecked: within the cabinet, Blaine served as a counterweight until 1892, well after strategic adjustment was underway. Nor was Tracy’s power qualitatively different from that of his immediate predecessors, Hunt, Chandler, and Whitney, all three of whom (successfully) advocated a very different naval program. Even if Tracy’s close ties to Harrison help to explain his ability to push the battleship bill through in 1890, despite Congressional opposition and concerns raised by publication of the McCann Board report, it does not explain why Tracy wanted to construct a navy very different from the one Hunt, Chandler, and Whitney wanted. Nor can it be argued that Tracy’s predecessors would have wanted battleships if they could have gotten them: Chandler actively opposed Tracy’s battleships in 1890. ₄₄

Domestic Explanations

Perhaps, though, we can successfully explain the strategic adjustment of the 1890s in terms of the changing interest or power of particular domestic groups. In such an account “politics is viewed as a competition among organized interests. Government policy is understood to be the ‘resultant of effective access by various interests.’ ” ₄₅ This sort of explanation leads us to focus our attention on the four interest groups that might plausibly have been interested in strategic adjustment: the shipbuilding industry, the steel industry, American exporters broadly conceived, and the Northeast region. We would hypothesize that strategic adjustment correlated with the interests or growing power of at least one of these groups.

1. Strategic adjustment reflected the interest of the shipbuilding industry

This explanation fails on three grounds. First, there is no evidence that shipbuilders lobbied for an increase in navy building, either individually or as a group. Second, far from pressing the state to create navy work, private shipbuilders do not seem to have been particularly interested in taking such work on. In 1883, when the Navy began its construction program, for example, only eight shipbuilders even bothered to bid for any of the new cruisers. ₄₆ Third, in 1889–90, at the time of the revolution in policy, the government understood shipbuilders to want “unarmored vessels which could be produced quicker and more profitably” ₄₇ —that is, the economic interests of shipbuilders were seen as running counter to the strategic adjustment.

2. Strategic adjustment reflected the interest of the steel industry

At least on first blush, the case here seems more plausible. The shift from lightly armored and armed cruisers to battleships meant an enormous increase in the Navy’s demand for steel. Given economies of scale, only a few firms were likely to become involved in forging the required weapons and armor, and these firms were quite able to collude to garner monopoly profits. Further, the steel industry was clearly able to exert considerable pressure on the government.

Closer analysis, however, yields substantial reason for skepticism. How much profit the colluding oligopolists were able to make on arms and armor contracts was then, and remains now, a matter of debate. What is clear, however, is that the arms and armor business remained a relatively minor sideline for the steel corporations, and (thanks to the Navy’s insistence on high quality and bothersome inspections) an irritating one. How literally one should take Andrew Carnegie’s obviously strategic and self-interested assessment is unclear, but nonetheless there is something to his lament that “We make about 150,000 tons of finished steel per month and the two or three hundred tons of Armor we make per month demand greater attention and give more trouble than all the 150,000 tons. We shall be delighted if the Government will let us out of the Armor business. We can use the Capital in several lines of our business to better advantage.” ₄₈ In fact, Carnegie was quite willing to get out of the armor business—though the price was regarded as too steep by the Navy—and in the mid- and late 1890s it was not unusual for government armor contracts to elicit no bids from the steelmakers. ₄₉

More to the point, it is quite clear who was the supplicant in the arms and armor business—and it was not the steel companies. Far from pressing the government to create work, the steel companies repeatedly had to be cajoled or bribed into producing the products required for the battleships and armored cruisers of the post-1890 Navy. This uninterest was manifestly clear to government officials even before the strategic adjustment was undertaken: even in 1884 Secretary of the Navy Chandler was writing that “patience, forbearance, and liberal treatment of the manufacturers are necessary in order to encourage them to undertake the development of the production in this country of steel plate and armor for naval vessels and ingots for heavy cannon.” ₅₀ In 1886, only one firm could be induced to bid on steel for coastal fortifications. Historian B. F. Cooling’s account of the Navy’s efforts to get steelmakers interested in the idea of forging armor is replete with references to “actively wooing the elusive steelmen” and the Secretary’s writing “imploringly” to steel concerns. ₅₁ In response to the first major request for bids on armor and ordnance in 1887, for the armored cruisers Maine, Texas, and New York, only three firms bid on the ordnance contract and only two on the armor. Despite substantial pressure, Carnegie refused to bid, “claiming excessive costs, little rewards, and too many headaches” ₅₂ It was only in 1890 that Carnegie could be convinced to become a second supplier of armor to the Navy, and his obvious willingness to forego this opportunity meant that he was able to extract excellent terms. ₅₃

Explaining the dramatic policy reversal of 1890 as a response to pressure from steelmakers thus encounters substantial evidential difficulties; beyond these, however, it also encounters a significant logical one. Even if a desire to support the steel industry had been a major factor in the calculus of decisionmakers, it still does not follow that decisionmakers would turn to the construction of battleships: increasing the state’s consumption of iron and steel, and the revenues of steelmakers, did not require a major departure in American defense policy. As Jan Breemer notes, heavily armored coastal defense monitors were at least as metal-intensive as oceangoing battleships: “as long as warships were ‘ironclads,’ it made little profit-making difference whether they were coastal or high sea battleships. Ton-for-ton, the two types cost about the same.” ₅₄

In sum, there is no evidence to suggest that the steel industry pressed for armor and ordnance contracts. But even if Bethlehem and Carnegie had, their demands could have been accommodated without strategic adjustment: increased construction of coastal defense warships, or even completion of the nation’s languishing Endicott-Board harbor-defense program, would have provided the same business without demanding a revolution in naval policy.

3. Strategic adjustment reflected the interest of exporters

The principal problem with this hypothesis is that, as noted above, in general American business quite correctly saw peace and free trade as the keys to the export market and concluded that British naval hegemony ensured both. Given the competitiveness of U.S. industry and the size of the U.S. domestic market, the development of a U.S. empire overseas, particularly if it involved conflict with European imperial powers, was unnecessarily expensive and potentially counterproductive. ₅₅

As a consequence, exporters tended to plead for restraint, not expansion, in U.S. foreign policy. Pratt’s analysis of business sentiment leads him to conclude that the business community’s belief in the efficacy of free trade led it to oppose political expansion:

Confidence in the continued expansion of the export trade was based upon faith in the working of natural forces in a world given over largely to a system of free trade. American industry had reached a point where it could meet the world on more than even terms in both the price and the quality of its products. Given a fair chance, these products would make their own way. Government could aid them, not by acquiring colonial markets but by removing or lowering the barriers that restricted imports of raw materials and exchange commodities. ₅₆

Rather than coming from the business community or reflecting objective material interests of the American nation, Pratt argues, the pressure for expansion came from Social Darwinists such as John Fiske, from advocates of a militant Anglo-Saxon Christianity such as Josiah Strong, from popularizers of the white man’s burden such as John Burgess, and from naval intellectuals such as Alfred Thayer Mahan. Far from a commercial movement, the campaign for strategic adjustment was, Shulman observes, “part of a larger movement in late nineteenth century American political culture—an elite rebellion against the long-standing commercial and agrarian national ethos.” ₅₇ Indeed, it appears that American firms were relatively uninterested in pursuing new markets. As Lake notes, Harrison and Blaine were not pushed toward their imperialist policies by business interests; to the contrary, they pushed business interests to pursue exports more aggressively. ₅₈

Given the diversity of American exports, it is potentially dangerous to treat exporters as a homogeneous group. But even if we disaggregate exporters, it is difficult to discover significant groups who would be interested in strategic adjustment. Producers of raw materials—cotton and tobacco in the south, grain and meat in the west—and the eastern banking and commercial interests associated with the export of these commodities would hardly be served by measures that antagonized European (principally British) markets. ₅₉ Producers of finished goods for Latin American markets similarly would be unlikely to see the benefit of challenging the British navy. And it was doubtful that even those few exporters who traded in East Asia would gain from the construction of a battle fleet likely to be concentrated in Atlantic waters: cruisers, not battleships, would represent U.S. commercial interests in China and the Far East. ₆₀ As Breemer notes, “that America’s exporters might be shut out from foreign markets [was] hardly a convincing reason for a fleet of expensive battleships. If naval ‘presence’ was believed necessary to capture and hold onto foreign markets, a few cruisers would have sufficed. The same type of ship was also the weapon-of-choice to protect shipping (and attack the enemy’s).” ₆₁

4. Strategic adjustment reflected the interests of the east coast

Perhaps, though, as Peter Trubowitz has argued, the special interest involved was not a particular economic group but a geographic one. ₆₂ The steel industry was heavily concentrated in Pennsylvania; shipbuilding was concentrated in the Middle Atlantic and New England; manufacturing was concentrated in the Northeast and the upper Midwest; increased naval spending would provide a justification for the tariff, which protected Northeastern manufactures and penalized the South. Perhaps the Northeast region—the nation’s industrial core—effecting a logroll with agricultural Midwestern interests also represented by the Republican party, managed to exploit the national government, shifting funds to its own economy.

Superficially, this explanation seems plausible enough. Support for naval expansion and the battleship fleet was indeed significantly stronger among Republicans and Northeasterners. Further, the timing of the beginning of strategic adjustment fits the thesis well: strategic adjustment began when the Republicans acquired control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 1889. But if the policy shift of 1890 reflected the rise to power of Republicans who sought to exploit the South for the benefit of the Northeast, we are left with four problems.

First, how do we explain the widespread opposition of Northeastern Republicans to a large blue-water battleship fleet prior to 1890? As Paullin notes, until 1890

The opinion was common that the United States should not adopt the policy of building seagoing war vessels after the manner of the European nations, but should confine its construction to coastwise vessels of defense, to monitors, torpedoes and marine rams. This view was well expressed by Senator George S. Boutwell, of Massachusetts, the most seafaring state in the union. In February 1877 he said in the Senate that he believed that the “time passed several years ago when it was for the interest of this country to make the least preparation for an open sea fight. Anybody who looks at the character and extent of this country, the number of its people, and the magnitude of our influence as a nation, must see that an open sea fight would settle nothing in any controversy that we might have with any power upon the face of the globe; and to be expending money year after year, whether one million a year or ten millions a year, or twenty millions a year, with the idea that something is to be gained in a naval contest, has no foundation in any generous conception of public policy.” He thought that it was not for the “interest of this country to expend a dollar for naval appropriations directly, except such as are necessary for coast defenses.” ₆₃

Northeastern commercial interests in the 1870s and 1880s counted on peace, the competitiveness of American industry, and the British Navy to ensure prosperity: any navy was probably a waste, and a departure from the coastal-defense-and-raider policy was downright dangerous. In 1889, Maine Senator Eugene Hale led the fight for a relatively inexpensive monitor-and- cruiser navy, one that would contain “none of those vast, unwieldy, and monstrous structures which have consumed millions upon millions of the money of other powers.” ₆₄ If the United States were to construct seagoing vessels, as far as Maine Senator Lot Morill were concerned the U.S. aim should not be “to build up a fighting force to rival those of France and Great Britain, but ‘simply...to provide...a naval police force’ to guard the country’s peacetime commerce.” ₆₅

Second, how do we explain the continuation of the strategic adjustment program when the Democrats regained the political upper hand? Democrats regained control of the House in 1891 and of the White House in 1893, yet the program continued unabated. Surely if naval expansion and the construction of a battleship fleet reflected Republican pork barrel, paid for by Democratic regions of the country, the Democratic party in office should be expected to have reversed the expansion policy, not to have vigorously advanced it. In 1892, as in 1884 and 1888, every Southern and border state gave its support to Cleveland, while steelmaking Pennsylvania and most of New England remained Republican: if regional spoilsmanship were the name of the game, certainly Cleveland’s supporters should have expected relief from the onerous burden of the new navy.

Third, how do we explain the growing support of Southerners after 1890? To be sure, Southerners (and Midwesterners) were less enthusiastic than Northeasterners about strategic adjustment, but key figures in the strategic adjustment story were from the South. Most notable was Hilary Herbert— an Alabama Democrat—chair of the House Naval Affairs committee from 1885 to 1889 and from 1891 to 1893 and Secretary of the Navy from 1893 to 1897, who stands with Tracy and Mahan as one of the fathers of the battleship navy.

Fourth, how do we explain the vigorous opposition of key partisan Northeastern Republicans after 1890? Senior Northeastern Republican figures, individuals who surely were in a position to understand whatever regional advantages of strategic adjustment that existed—men such as former Secretary of the Navy Chandler from New Hampshire—were active in the fight against the new, large, battleship navy. ₆₆

It is, further, ironic to note the Northeast’s actual reaction to war in 1898. In the event, Northeasterners hardly seem to have felt that their interests had been served by abandoning coastal defense. The clamor to use oceangoing warships for harbor defense was sufficient to force the Navy to ignore Mahanian teaching and divide the fleet. That the material interests of Northeasterners were served by building a navy that could steam away to conquer Cuba was certainly not evident at the time, nor is it self-evident in retrospect.

Finally, it should be apparent that, to the extent that differences existed in how average Southern Democrats and average Northeastern Republicans viewed the construction of a large battleship navy, it is far from obvious that this was a product of regional spoilsmanship. A quarter of a century after the Civil War, there remained significant ideological and cultural differences between the two groups—differences, for example, in how they viewed the essence of the American nation and what they assumed was the appropriate relationship between state and nation. The industrialization of the 1880s, too, had a different impact upon Southern and Northeastern societies. The failure of pre-industrial cultural institutions to provide a satisfactory basis for daily activity, personal individuation, and national cohesion was surely most apparent in the large cities of the industrial North. It is hardly surprising that Southerners, less pressed than Northeasterners by the social turmoil of the 1880s and more skeptical about giving the central government greater power, were slower in adopting a new cultural understanding of war that glorified the state, or that the initial, and strongest, support for a new navy should be associated with progressive Republicans, concerned with the social collapse they witnessed.

Cultural-Cognitive Explanations

A fourth approach to explaining the 1890s is to focus not on changing national, bureaucratic, or special interests, but on the fall and rise of beliefs. Does the assumption that policy change occurs because of changes in the world of ideas—changes reflecting the functional reconstruction of core cultural images in response to social traumas that threaten the survival of political institutions—permit us to explain the shift in 1890 from a small navy designed for protecting coasts and interfering with imperial commerce to a large navy designed for controlling large expanses of ocean and meeting opposing imperial fleets in battle?

If our cultural-cognitive explanation is correct, we should expect to see at least three substantial changes in core political beliefs to account for this complete transformation of naval policy. First, to account for the sudden acquisition of forces capable not merely of protecting America against imperial predators but also of defeating foreign adversaries and forcing them to acquiesce to American demands, we would need to see a change in images of the state and its role—that is, we would assume there must have been a rejection of the early republican conception of the state as a hopefully weak but potentially tyrannical institution existing in parallel to other organic manifestations of a national civil society and functioning principally to shield a stable, peaceful domestic order from imperial aggression. In place of this traditional vision, to account for the development of an offensive fleet we would need to see the construction of a new conception of the state, one that identified the state as the political embodiment of the nation and that defined the success of the state by its ability to represent and advance the national interest on a world stage. In other words, to explain 1890 we would need to see a cultural upheaval that resulted in a fundamentally new, internationalist image of the state replacing a traditional, isolationist image of the state. ₆₇

Second, to account for the abandonment of commerce raiding in 1890 and the new focus on fleet encounters, we would need to see a reconstruction of the culture’s image of war. Obviously, images of war—like images of the state—lie near the center of any political culture or cognitive structure. War may possess a variety of cultural and symbolic meanings and serve a number of cultural and social purposes; as one of the central institutions of society, it is potentially critical in establishing membership and core values. ₆₈ Changes in how nations understand themselves, define their membership, and conceive their purpose are thus likely to demand changes in images of war. Prior to 1890 war generally figured in American thinking as a countersocietal exercise—a struggle between two peoples or ways of life, won when one or the other was destroyed or when the pain imposed on one society was sufficient to force its political representatives to sue for peace. Our cultural-cognitive model would lead us to predict that this conceptualization ceased to serve effectively basic cultural and cognitive functions in the late 1880s and that after 1890, in response to the social challenges of the day, a countermilitary image of war was constructed—that of a highly structured struggle between opposing military establishments, won when one side’s military forces were decisively defeated.

Third, to account for the new national willingness to spend on the Navy, we would expect to find that a transformation in dominant images of the military objective of war had taken place. Underlying early republican policies was the presumption that political victory in war required achieving control over the “private” territorial property of the other state. To explain the new force posture of 1890 in cultural-cognitive terms we would need to see this traditional image of victory discarded and the construction of a new belief that political victory could be achieved by seizing control over the international common—the ocean—and thereby dominating the international system. In other words, observing the military revolution of 1890, we would expect to find an underlying intellectual revolution, from a cisoceanic image of victory, in which naval power served a supportive and instrumental role in assisting land forces in the vital terrestrial theater, to an oceanic image of victory, in which naval power was perceived as independent and decisive.

But do we actually find these changes in how Americans conceived of the state, of war, and of the military requirements for political victory? And, to the extent that we do find them, can we demonstrate that these changes in the world of ideas are not mere epiphenomenon—mere reflection of changes in material circumstance? Finally, did the new beliefs about the state and war that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s represent a functional response to social challenges that threatened the survival of the political community?

1. Strategic adjustment reflected changes in dominant beliefs about the nature of the state and the state's relationship to the outside world

The 1880s and 1890s were a period of profound cultural transformation in America: long-dominant images of the American republic’s nature and its relationship to the world failed to provide the cultural tools necessary to overcome the new fissiparous pressures tearing American society. ₆₉ Political culture faced two critical functional challenges at this juncture. First, with the end of militarily imposed Southern political reconstruction, reintegration of the South into the national polity necessitated an image of the American state and its mission that would establish a common identity and national purpose. Simultaneously, the nation faced a series of interconnected economic and social problems associated with industrialization, including the social dislocation associated with the replacement of small-scale agricultural and commercial capitalism by larger-scale industrial capitalism; the closure of the frontier, with all that implied about the relative price of factors of production; the rise of new class fissures within American society; and the arrival of substantial numbers of linguistically, religiously, and ethnically distinct immigrants from Central and Southern Europe. Just as Southern reintegration required the development of new cultural myths and institutions to bind the two edges of the regional wound together, the trauma of industrialization demanded new myths and institutions to overcome the alienation of the new urban proletariat, to stem the nativism and angry populism of the increasingly economically and politically disenfranchised members of the old economy, and to harness and rein in the vital yet destructive power of the new industrial capitalism.

Industrialization in particular generated two problems, one cognitive and the other cultural. Cognitively, the daily experience of life was increasingly inconsistent with traditional images of American national essence, creating problems not only of cognitive consistency but also of ego defense in the face of social and economic alienation. Culturally, the old republican intellectual touchstone of an American nation composed of independent yeomen, a nation unbowed by the tyranny of state power that enslaved Europe, a nation whose contribution to world progress was to be the demonstration of the glory of human liberty and of the benefits of a polity based on individual independence and consent, provided a less and less plausible account of a “good” society, how it was to be achieved, and of the role of the state. It offered no explanation of why an urban proletariat should join in common society with an industrial capitalist class, or of why Protestants of English, German, and Dutch descent should work in common cause with Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe. The traditional construction of “America”—a light on the hill, whose unique essence could best be protected and preserved by the republic remaining untainted by involvement in world politics—and the image of a weak, isolationist American state that flowed logically from this vision of American political society thus no longer served the critical cultural function of binding the nation together into a single civil society.

But if not this vision, what gave the American nation purpose and destiny? What made the nation a nation? The new national myth, and the new account of the state implicit in it, was both state-centric and explicitly outward-looking. In the absence of other common institutions—religion, language, freehold agriculture—citizenship became the essential element in social membership. The state thus became central to social identity. What made Americans American was their common participation in and fealty to the American state. At the same time, however, the state remained a culturally problematic symbol and institution: the republic’s heritage and rhetoric denied the legitimacy of a domestically strong state, while a construction of the state that legitimated its control over domestic society was plainly anathmatic in the South. A strong state must, therefore, be outward-looking: the state must be an institution embodying the American nation, but at the same time its essence must be defined not in terms of its authority to reorder domestic life but in terms of its ability to represent the American people against an external “them.”

The new construction thus neatly squared the circle: the American nation—and its political manifestation, the American state—had been called into being to transform the world, not simply advancing civilization to a new plane but also spreading that civilization. This vision of American destiny, however, implied a new relationship between America and the world and a new, internationalist image of the state and its duties. Ensuring that the American nation was left alone was no longer sufficient: America must be empowered to perform its ordained mission of transforming the world. Christian duty and Social Darwinist necessity both legitimated this doctrine of societal justification through external action.

As we have already noted, it is difficult to model this new external drive, this new concern with the world beyond the American state’s borders, as a function of new security threats or of economic interests. This change is not epiphenomenal, except perhaps to the enormous social and political dislocation taking place within the American nation—and even in this regard it is difficult to understand the intellectual ferment of the period as consciously manipulated by any identifiable interests. It is, in fact, relevant to note where the new image takes root first. As O’Connell observes, this image’s key proponents were

a small circle of political reformers, publicists, and intellectuals who collectively were about to become a dynamic force behind American self-assertion. Anglo-Saxons of upper-class origins and anticommercial leanings, the most important other members of the clique were John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert J. Beveridge, Brooks Adams, and editors Whitelaw Reid and Albert Shaw. In one way or another, each had been led to embrace foreign policy as an outlet for excess energy. One and all they dreamed of the day when the United States would play a role on the world stage commensurate with its size and prosperity. As a consequence, they gloried in military power and the prestige it represented. ₇₀

Thus, what we witness during the 1880s and 1890s is that while America’s place and interests in the world remained unchanged, its understanding of its place and interests changed substantially. The widespread attraction of Social Darwinism and the appeal of “Anglo-Saxon Christian” imperialism bear witness to the weakening of the old liberal-republican national myth and the rise of a new one: as Herrick notes, “American imperialists, though few in number [in the 1880s], were winning recruits by linking their ideology to democracy and humanitarianism and by stretching Darwinism to support the thesis that national survival depended wholly on armed might.” ₇₁

While the rise of internationalist visions of the American state and its duty logically said nothing about whether the United States needed to acquire cruisers or battleships, it implied the necessity of a modern, oceangoing force. The face the American republic presented to the world—its legitimacy as a transformative agent—was important. What followed logically was the rejection of the technologically laggard “Dark Ages” fleet of the post-Civil War years: the construction of a new fleet of steel cruisers began in 1883, roughly the time when internationalist images were making inroads into policymaking circles. The new cruisers of the 1880s were warships that could honorably represent America in distant waters and that could compete with European cruisers in the task of civilizing the world.

Indeed grasping the fact that dominant images of the state’s place in the world changed over the course of the 1880s is necessary to make sense of both the 1890s and the “Dark Ages” of the 1870s, when the American fleet sank into obsolescence. The “Dark Ages” have baffled historians who assume that the American state’s manifest destiny to transform the world was as self- evident to leaders of the period as it was to those of later years and who have therefore been forced to assume that policymakers of the period were peculiarly stupid or venal. ₇₂ As Stephen Howarth observes, though, the behavior of “Dark Ages” policymakers (like the very different behavior of their successors) makes perfect sense, given their image of the American state.

To lay the blame for the dark years entirely on ignorant naval secretaries and reactionary naval officers is...a mistake, although some of the secretaries of the period were incredibly ignorant and some officers abnormally reactionary....This (which might be called the imperial interpretation) viewed the dark years as an incomprehensible error, a blind alley in the United States’ journey to world power. But that hundred-year-old view from other countries (particularly Great Britain and France) was based on the assumption that everyone wanted world power. To see a nation capable of the challenge rejecting it voluntarily was mystifying. Guardians of empire saw empire as the thing most to be desired. The only explanation for not wanting an empire and its essential partner, a great navy, had to be folly, ignorance, or reaction....That interpretation assumes that in the twenty-five years from 1865 to 1890, Americans thought the same and had the same values as British and French people then and Americans today. On the whole, though, they did not, which is why their twentieth- century descendants (and nineteenth-century Europeans) called the dark ages dark. ₇₃

2. Strategic adjustment reflected changes in American beliefs about the nature of war

On examination, it is easy to find considerable support for the contention that America’s understanding of the nature of war was reconstructed in a subtle yet fundamental fashion in the 1880s. Historically, the frontier experience and the weakness of the state had figured prominently in American constructions of war. While elements of European thinking can certainly be found (for example, in the creation and employment of a continental army), the peculiarly American character of American images of war prior to the industrial revolution is abundantly evident: the most obvious example is the continued survival, and indeed glorification, of the essentially pre-state notion of a militia. For Americans, war was conceived of as both a total undertaking and, frequently, a matter of self-help. War, in the American imagination, was inherently countersocietal and only secondarily countermilitary. It was a struggle of people against people, not military against military. Defensively, war was viewed as involving the protection, principally by locally organized and controlled forces, of farms and commercial centers; offensively, the American image of war focused on the destruction of the adversary’s economic or political base in order to eliminate his will or ability to fight on. In the Indian Wars, this meant destroying villages at times of maximum vulnerability; in the Mexican War it involved the shelling of Veracruz and the seizure of Mexico City; in the American Civil War it translated into the Federal fixation on protecting Washington and capturing Richmond, into Sherman’s March to the Sea, into Lee’s two northern invasions, and into Confederate investment in commerce raiders. None of these operations was directed against the adversary’s military forces: each sought to deny the legitimacy of the opposing state (or political institution) as a representative or protector of the opposing nation, or to destroy the national capacity upon which that opposing state relied. As the most famous exemplar of this American tradition of war, William Tecumseh Sherman, explained in 1864, “war is cruelty, and you can’t refine it.” ₇₄

In the 1890s, however, this countersocietal construction of war was abandoned. Rather than a struggle between nations, it was reconceived in American culture as a stylized clash between military units, testing the discipline and valor of the men on either side. This duel between the organized representatives—the “champions”—of competing states would decide the fate of the nations represented; further struggle was at most anticlimactic. Alfred Thayer Mahan was one of the great exponents of this new—for America— vision of war, attributing it to Jomini: “Jomini’s dictum that the organized forces of the enemy are the chief objective, pierces like a two-edged sword to the joints and marrow of many specious propositions.” ₇₅

What should be clear is that the old countersocietal image of war did not simply fail to offer a cultural solution to the social challenges facing the American people in the 1880s and 1890s; it actually painfully exacerbated them. If war were a struggle between disparate societies—between good and evil ways of life—then how could the South be peacefully rejoined and reincorporated into the Union without either denying the outcome of the war or demanding massive social change in the South? Only by redefining the meaning of war—by reconstructing it as a chivalric encounter between military units, in which victor and vanquished alike demonstrated their worthiness to be part of the nation—could the Civil War be used as a positive, healing symbol rather than a divisive one.

But, of course, it was not only the challenge of postwar reconstruction but also that of creating a multiethnic industrial society, and creating bonds of communal loyalty that transcended ethnicity and class, that demanded a new construction of of war. The problem here was twofold. On the one hand, the absence of other common institutions—language, Protestantism, or Anglo-German-Dutch political culture—meant that the state and loyalty to the state were a critical glue holding society together. But how was loyalty to the state to be demonstrated or proved? How was citizenship to be bought? The traditional countersocietal image of war, in which the state occupied a minor place, offered no help: war and the state were not intimately linked. War was a personal and local matter, not the exclusive competence of the state. A countermilitary construction of war, by contrast, made military service a proof of citizenship and hence membership in civil society. Importantly, it also made military service a proof of manhood, thus offering an attractive solution to the second problem posed by industrialization, that of personal individuation. ₇₆ American society in the 1880s and 1890s required a culture of military heroism—a bond of patriotic self-sacrifice and national dedication that promised to give meaning to individual lives and, simultaneously, to bind a fissiparous nation together.

This profound individual and cultural need to employ war—or the concept of war—as a personal touchstone and cultural cement is evident in naval historian James Barnes’s argument in the 1890s that “the country that has not national heroes whose deeds should be found emblazoned on her annals, that can boast no men whose lives and conduct can be held up as examples of what loyalty, valor, and courage should be, that country has not patriotism, no heart, no soul.” ₇₇ As Shulman concludes, for Progressives of the 1880s and 1890s, for individuals such as Barnes and (popular naval historian as well later president) Theodore Roosevelt, “war gave the nation its soul, and tested the mettle of its leaders.” ₇₈ This cultural imperative led to reinforcing prospective and retrospective revision: future war was envisioned as a countermilitary clash, while past American wars, particularly the War of 1812, were reinterpreted, reappraised, and popularized in these terms. ₇₉

The argument here is that the new social realities and fissures of the 1880s and 1890s rendered the countersocietal image of war cognitively and culturally dysfunctional, leaving that image vulnerable to challenge. That challenge came most notably in the form of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s writings, the most influential of which, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1600–1783, was published in 1890. ₈₀ Mahan presented a countermilitary image of war that possessed a number of positive attributes: it was intellectually simple, it met cultural and societal needs created by industrialization, and it served well both the intellectual and emotional needs of the emerging “professionalized” military officers and the cultural needs of political figures like Roosevelt concerned about the implications of industrialization for American society. Although these Mahanian ideas ran contrary to the interests of dominant elements in the Navy and were relatively unappealing to major business interests, they caught on. Progressive Northeasterners were perhaps most susceptible to them: Mahan’s teachings fit best with their other beliefs about the role of the state and with their concerns about the decay of society and the body politic. But once initially established, Mahan’s ideas spread like a virus until by the mid-1890s they had infected most of the policymaking community. In 1890, although Secretary Tracy was fully conversant with Mahan’s ideas, Congress was familiar with them only second- hand, largely through Tracy. ₈₁ By 1892, the uniformed Navy had been thoroughly infected with Mahanism and had adopted in its studies the premise that raiding was not an effective strategy. ₈₂ By 1895, Mahan’s ideas were broadly known and fully endorsed by Congress. ₈₃

The implications of this changing image of war for the U.S. Navy were dramatic. If war were a heroic contest between warriors and between highly organized military institutions representing the best capabilities of the state, rather than an effort to exterminate or render abject an opposing population, then the United States needed to abandon its historic collection of cruisers— warships that could impose pain on the adversary’s nation by destroying its unprotected commerce or raiding its unguarded shores, but which, like lowly jackals of the sea, were fit only to flee from any armed opponent— and turn its effort to constructing a fleet of battleships. Only these could manfully duel, proving in mortal conflict which state deserved to live. Where America had previously assumed that the protection of American economic resources and the destruction of the adversary’s were of primary importance, in the 1890s the dominant assumption quickly shifted. “The destruction of the enemy fleet is the first task of a navy in war. Everything else is a sideshow. Once the enemy fleet is destroyed, the victorious navy can exploit its resulting control of the sea for any further purpose that is desirable.” ₈₄ Violence at sea, as on land, must be concentrated and directed against the enemy’s principal military forces, not dissipated in blows against commerce or industry. ₈₅ This need for concentration logically implied construction of a capital-ship fleet, and later the construction of the all-big-gun capital ship (and still later the construction of supercarriers); it further implied that naval sufficiency needed to be measured in comparative terms, gauged against the size of potential adversaries’ forces.

3. Strategic adjustment reflected changes in dominant beliefs about the military requirements for political victory

At the same time this shift from a countersocietal to a countermilitary image of war was taking place, we also witness the triumph of an oceanic, rather than cisoceanic or transoceanic, image of victory in conflict. The oceanic commons, not the sovereign territories it washed, came to be regarded as the key to success. As a consequence, sea power came to be perceived as critical in and of itself, rather than as simply an adjunct to terrestrial power. This was a revolutionary notion: the contrast between this view and America’s historical experience could not be more striking. Deployed offensively, naval power had historically provided the Army with artillery and mobility; defensively, it had shielded the American coasts. However valuable, these duties hardly suggested the independent decisiveness of naval power or the importance of the ocean in itself.

This shift in images served both cognitive and cultural functions. Cognitively, it provided a powerful parsimonious thesis—in this case, again Mahan’s—that rendered a complex reality easily understandable and manageable. Control of the oceans, Mahan argued, ultimately translated into national victory. Mahan was thus able to render a complicated world simple: international greatness (a matter of increasing concern to an American people whose isolationist self-image had proven unacceptable) depended on a single factor, sea power. What a relief for straining minds! Equally to its credit, this simple answer also had the convenient attribute of being consistent with existing American prejudices against large professional armies. It squared a difficult cultural circle for Americans. If international greatness was a measure of national success but a large peacetime standing army was un-American (and would make the state too powerful domestically), then international dominance must be possible through naval power alone, and therefore naval power must be independently decisive. ₈₆

Taking together these two changes in the vision of warfare—from a countersocietal and cisoceanic one to a countermilitary and oceanic one—we would expect to see increased attention given to the accumulation of naval power and the development of a naval force able to engage the military forces of adversary states directly, rather than by hurting their people. In a nutshell, this is what we observe in 1890.

One last point seems worth reemphasizing. These three changes in how Americans envisioned foreign policy and warfare—the new images of America as internationalist and of war as countermilitary in character and oceanic in focus—did not simply reflect changed material realities. The changes in beliefs that drove the naval revolution of 1890 were unsupported by changes in circumstance: indeed, to a significant degree they flew in the face of the technological and political shifts taking place. Even as the old isolationist image of America was abandoned, the feasibility of an isolationist policy was growing: the evolution of technology, the expansion of American power, and the increased preoccupation of Britain with the European balance of power all decreased the already minimal security concerns facing America, making isolation a more, not less, attractive policy. Even as the countersocietal image of the nature of war was set aside, technological and social developments were dramatically increasing the ability of states to wage strategic war and decreasing the probable utility of destroying an adversary’s military forces: the evolution of submarines, mines, and torpedoes and the rise of nationalism combined to make the new countermilitary image of war increasingly unreal. As for the Mahanian image of the oceanic commons as key to world power, his writings appeared at the same time that the rise of the railroad and telegraph dramatically reduced the importance of the technological- economic forces on which his logic had been based.

Conclusions

This examination of the strategic adjustment undertaken by the United States in 1890 thus leads us to two general conclusions. On the one hand, it proves quite difficult to make sense of the adjustment in terms of shifting interests or the power of particular actors—at any of the three levels of analysis we examined. Even with perfect historical hindsight, it is hard to construct plausible interest-based explanations for what we observe. On the other hand, the strategic adjustment does follow upon an upheaval in how Americans conceptualized their state and war. These intellectual shifts represented cultural responses to social upheavals that undermined the effectiveness of existing images in binding society together and providing meaning in daily life.

Realist explanations of the 1890s would direct our attention to the evolving foreign threats to American national interests. There was, however, nothing in the international environment to justify constructing an imperial-style navy: the sovereign territory of the republic was increasingly secure; the threat to the hemisphere from European powers other than Britain was minimal and the construction of a battleship fleet was not accompanied by the acquisition of bases or development of plans for hemispheric defense; the American economy did not demand the acquisition of an empire, nor was the construction of the fleet associated with other policies designed for imperial aggrandizement; and the protection of existing American overseas markets was not well-served by the shift from cruisers to battleships. In sum, given the external environment of 1890, Realism would have led us to predict a continuation of traditional naval policy.

Similarly, bureaucratic politics models of 1890 would have led us to expect stasis rather than change. The naval revolution flatly contradicted the dominant inference of Allison’s Model II, rendered the Navy’s external environment much more difficult to manage, and threatened the Navy’s traditional essence. Nor can we identify any changes in the distribution of power within the government that would account for the developments of 1890 in the terms suggested by Allison’s Model III.

As for domestic politics accounts, it is difficult to identify specific interest groups served by the naval revolution of 1890. Shipbuilders were not interested in battleships, steelmakers had to be coaxed into armor and ordnance contracts, and exporters generally saw their interests served by peace and cruisers, not by a naval competition with imperial powers. To be sure, a case can be made that, broadly speaking, the Northeast benefited from the new navy: this, however, leaves us with the problem of explaining why the program was continued after Northeast Republicans lost power, why Northeast Republicans were uninterested in naval expansion prior to 1890, why key Southerners came to support the program after 1890, and why old-line Northeast Republicans continued to oppose the new navy after 1890.

While it is difficult to find a connection between interests and the new navy, it is easy to find one between the social upheaval of the late nineteenth century and the construction of new cultural images of the state and war, and between these new images and the construction of the fleet. Reintegration of the South, the rise of an urban-industrial society, and the incorporation of a new wave of immigrants all demanded a reconstruction of cultural institutions. An internationalist image of the state and a countermilitary oceanic image of war logically implied the construction of a large, modern, imperial-style battleship fleet.

A careful reading of the 1890s and of America’s decision to compete with the imperial powers for naval mastery thus offers interesting, if surely only tentative, insights into the forces that shape American security policy. To focus on national, bureaucratic, or special interests, and to assume that changes in these will somehow translate into changes in behavior, may be to miss the real story and to lead to substantial misexpectations about American strategic choices in the post-Cold War world.

If the 1890s are a guide, it is today’s cultural and cognitive upheaval— today’s struggle to find images of the polity and of conflict that provide a foundation for resolving emerging social tensions and for imposing coherence, parsimony, and order on individual mental processes—that has the potential to transform America’s politico-military choices. Americans’ search to find meaning in their daily postindustrial lives, and their efforts to develop and justify political institutions that provide order and stability and facilitate collective action in a multicultural society, will have critical impact on the images of the state, its external role, and war that dominate American thinking. These in turn will logically imply the strategic adjustment the state undertakes.

Endnotes

Note 1: An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Sea Change: Interest-Based vs. Cultural-Cognitive Accounts of Strategic Choice in the 1890s” in Security Studies 5 (Summer 1996). I am grateful to Security Studies for permission to publish this revised and expanded version of that article. I wish gratefully to acknowledge the financial support of the Rutgers University Research Council, the Social Science Research Council and MacArthur Foundation, and the Joint Center for International and Security Studies; the critical review of the other contributors to this volume; and the valuable comments of John Duffield, Emily Goldman, Ted Hopf, Chaim Kaufmann, Jack Levy, Roy Licklider, Doug Macdonald, Jim Richter, Michael Shafer, Mark Shulman, Peter Swartz, Peter Trubowitz, and Jim Wirtz. All remaining errors of fact and interpretation are my responsibility alone. Back.

Note 2: Perhaps the most striking expression of this republican view of international commerce, and of the assumption of one-sided imperial dependence on it, can be found in the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807: Jeffersonian democrats viewed a severing of foreign trade not as a threat to the well-being of the American republic but as a stick to be used by it. Back.

Note 3: Walter R. Herrick, Jr., The American Naval Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 3. Back.

Note 4: As cited in Herrick, Revolution, 55. Back.

Note 5: Ibid., 56, 61. Back.

Note 6: Interestingly, the McCann Board proposal was in important respects more traditional and less revolutionary than Tracy’s annual report: naval officers were more hesitant about embracing and advocating innovative strategic adjustment than were their civilian masters. While the McCann Board demanded more ships than provided for by Tracy’s annual report, it also envisioned a more balanced fleet that would exhibit some continuity with past American practices of coastal defense and commerce raiding. See Mark Russell Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 128. Back.

Note 7: Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy (New York: Free Press, 1991), 197. Back.

Note 8: Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Makers of Modern Naval Policy, 1798–1947 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980), 211. Back.

Note 9: See, for example, Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 202– 346 and Albion, Makers, 209–36. Back.

Note 10: See, for example, Herrick, Revolution; Hagan, People’s Navy, 185–265; Robert G. Kaufman, Arms Control During the Pre-Nuclear Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 7–8, 24–30; Sprout and Sprout, Rise, 202–36; Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, Toward a New Order of Sea Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 3–44; Albion, Makers, 205–36. Back.

Note 11: In his contribution to this volume, Peter Trubowitz offers a powerful (though, I argue below, ultimately problematic) version of this argument to explain American strategic adjustment in the 1890s. He points to the economic interests of the northeastern portion of the United States and the ability in the 1890s of representatives of those interests to effect a political logroll through the mechanism of the Republican Party. Back.

Note 12: D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 32. Back.

Note 13: Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980), 57. Back.

Note 14: This view is clearly at odds with some popular Gramscian notions. See, for example, Robert W. Cox, “Labor and Hegemony,” International Organization 37 (Summer 1977), 387. Back.

Note 15: For a more extended discussion on the disjuncture between ideas and interests, see Edward Rhodes, “Constructing Peace and War,” Millennium 24 (Spring 1995), 55–56. Back.

Note 16: For a fuller account, see Edward Rhodes, The Pursuit of Hegemony (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Back.

Note 17: Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 169. Back.

Note 18: Ibid., 168–69. Back.

Note 19: Ibid., 168–69. Back.

Note 20: Richard W. Turk, “Defending the New Empire, 1900–1914,” in In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775–1978, ed. Kenneth J. Hagan, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), 188. For a detailed account of the evolution of German war plans see H. H. Herwig and D. F. Trask, “Naval Operations Plans between Germany and the USA, 1898–1913: A Study of Strategic Planning in the Age of Imperialism,” in The War Plans of the Great Powers, ed. Paul M. Kennedy (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1979), 39–74. Herwig and Trask note that the 1889 German contingency plan, at the time of the Samoan Crisis, called for cruiser raids on American coastal shipping and that it was only in 1897–98, nearly a decade after the American battleship buildup began, that the German Navy began to study seriously the problem of German-American war: in other words, German war plans were a reaction to American competition with the imperial powers, not an initial stimulus for it. By 1903, German planners had recognized the obvious military difficulties and dubious politico-military effectiveness of an amphibious assault on the American seaboard and turned their attention to the Caribbean as a point of political leverage; by 1906, German planners acknowledged that European conditions made any American war, even an indirect one in the Caribbean, essentially unthinkable. Back.

Note 21: See, for example, Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 463–65. Back.

Note 22: Herrick, Revolution, 86–107. Back.

Note 23: Herwig and Trask, “Plans,” 61. Back.

Note 24: On this score it is worth noting the impact of Germany’s construction of a battle fleet on British behavior: far from forcing British concessions, the German “risk fleet” ensured British hostility and drew Germany into a naval arms race it had no reasonable hope of winning. See, for example, Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945 (London: Fontana, 1984), 129–60. Of course, until the advent of the U-boat, because of its geographic position Germany had no real naval alternative to a battleship fleet. For the United States, with its two long oceanic coasts, however, commerce raiding would remain a real alternative for creating naval leverage. Back.

Note 25: With hindsight admittedly unavailable to decisionmakers at the time, it should be quite clear that the World War I experience suggests that the traditional strategy would have been enormously effective in dealing with a British threat. A handful of German cruisers, operating under an enormous geographic disadvantage that America, with its long Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, would not face, demonstrated that surface raiders had enormous potential to harass an oceanic empire. And German submarine raiders demonstrated convincingly that Britain’s economy could be brought to a standstill even while British battleships controlled the oceans. Back.

Note 26: David A. Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 91ff. Back.

Note 27: Ibid., 111–12. Back.

Note 28: Julius Pratt, Expansionists of 1898 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 22. Back.

Note 29: See, for example, Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 3–61. Back.

Note 30: Lake, Power, 117. Back.

Note 31: Robert L. O’Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 323. Back.

Note 32: J.A.S. Grenville, “Diplomacy and War Plans in the United States, 1890– 1917,” in War Plans, 25. Back.

Note 33: Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 87–88. Back.

Note 34: On the cult of the battleship, see O’Connell, Sacred Vessels. Back.

Note 35: Allison, Essence, 76, 77. Back.

Note 36: Albion, Makers, 211. Back.

Note 37: See Shulman, Navalism, 44. Back.

Note 38: Allison, Essence, 68. Back.

Note 39: Ibid., 68. Back.

Note 40: Ibid., 78–79. Back.

Note 41: Ibid., 173. Back.

Note 42: For an excellent discussion of the rise of the young Turks in the Navy, see Peter Karsten, “Armed Progressives,” in The Military in America, revised ed., ed. Peter Karsten (New York: Free Press, 1986), 240–58. Back.

Note 43: Sprout and Sprout, Rise, 173–74. Back.

Note 44: Herrick, Revolution, 71; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Gray Steel and Blue Water Navy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979), 89. Back.

Note 45: Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 26. Krasner is citing David Truman. Back.

Note 46: Cooling, Gray Steel, 36–38. Back.

Note 47: Ibid., 89. Back.

Note 48: As cited in ibid., 127. Back.

Note 49: Ibid., 133, 140. Back.

Note 50: Chandler, 1884 Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, as quoted in Cooling, Gray Steel, 51–52. Back.

Note 51: Cooling, Gray Steel, 72. Back.

Note 52: Ibid., 73. Back.

Note 53: Ibid., 59, 76, 94–96. Back.

Note 54: Jan Breemer, “Technological Change and the New Calculus of War: The United States Builds a New Navy” (manuscript presented at SSRC-MacArthur Workshop on “The Politics of Strategic Adjustment,” Austin, Texas, April 1994), 5. Back.

Note 55: Lake, Power, 91–97. Back.

Note 56: Pratt, Expansionists, 257. Back.

Note 57: Shulman, Navalism, 2. Back.

Note 58: Lake, Power, 111–12. Back.

Note 59: Throughout the period from 1870 to 1900, U.S. exports were principally raw materials and foodstuffs, not manufactures. Semi-manufactured and manufactured products, excluding food, amounted to only 20 percent of U.S. exports in the decades of the 1870s and of the 1880s; they climbed only to 25 percent in the decade of the 1890s. In 1880, unmanufactured cotton alone represented 26 percent of U.S. exports. In 1890, this percentage had actually risen to 30 percent of U.S. exports; and wheat, meat and animal products, and tobacco represented another 30 percent. See Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), Series U213–224, U274–294. Back.

Note 60: A word on the Asian export market seems in order, since this seems the most plausible commercial explanation for building an “imperial” navy. Never in the period between 1870 and 1900 was the Asian market a significant proportion of the U.S. export business. In the 1870s, all of Asia took only 1.2 percent of U.S. exports; in the 1880s, this rose only to 2.4 percent; in the 1890s, it still represented only 2.9 percent. Even in the 1890s, more than three-quarters of all U.S. exports went to Europe. Ibid., Series U317–334. Back.

Note 61: Breemer, “Technological Change,” 3. Back.

Note 62: See Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Back.

Note 63: Charles Oscar Paullin, Paullin’s History of Naval Administration, 1775–1911 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1968), 337–38. Back.

Note 64: Hale, as quoted by George T. Davis, A Navy Second to None (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1940), 53. Back.

Note 65: Sprout and Sprout, Rise, 171. Back.

Note 66: Herrick, Revolution, 71; Cooling, Gray Steel, 89. Back.

Note 67: Shulman argues—correctly, I believe—the usefulness of understanding the debate over the construction of the new navy in terms of a struggle between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian constructions of republican democracy. The Hamiltonian vision of a strong, outward-looking republican state was central to the thinking of progressive forces in the 1880s and 1890s and logically implied an internationalist image of the state; by contrast, the Jeffersonian vision of an essentially agrarian-commercial democratic state logically implied the isolationist construction of the state that dominated discussion in the hundred years prior to 1890. Shulman, Navalism, 2. Back.

Note 68: For an extraordinary exposition of this point, see John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3–60. Back.

Note 69: For a classic account of America’s cultural upheaval and transformation, see Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). Back.

Note 70: O’Connell, Sacred Vessels, 69. Back.

Note 71: Herrick, Revolution, 24. For an excellent history and analysis of “the imperialism of righteousness,” see Pratt, Expansionists, 279–316. On the psychological basis for the rise of Social Darwinist and Anglo-Saxon Christian imperialism, see also, for example, Dallek, American Style, 3–31. Back.

Note 72: Sprout and Sprout, for example, account for the “material decline and intellectual stagnation” of the the late 1860s and 1870s by pointing to “an ultraconservative professional group within the Service,” “a virulent attack of politics, graft, and corruption,” a lack of “intelligent executive leadership,” and a Congress “preoccupied with internal problems, and torn by partisan strife.” Rise, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182. Back.

Note 73: Stephen Howarth, To Shining Sea: A History of the United States Navy, 1775– 1991 (New York: Random House, 1991), 225. Back.

Note 74: William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to James M. Calhoun. Sherman—appropriately named for a famous American Indian chief—represents an important transitional figure. Raised in the traditional countersocietal conception of war, Sherman lived to see the evolving, stylized countermilitary construction take hold. In 1880, in a famous remark in Columbus, Ohio, Sherman was to observe “There’s many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory; but boys it is all hell.” As military historian J. F. C. Fuller observed, “Sherman must rank as the first of the modern totalitarian generals. He made war universal, waged it on his enemy’s people and not only on armed men, and made terror the linchpin of his strategy.” Fuller, as cited in Justin Wintle, Dictionary of War Quotations (New York: Free Press, 1989), 458. Sherman, of course, was merely adapting the traditional American style of war—a style both the original Tecumseh and his white adversaries would have understood—to take advantage of the resources provided by industrialization. Sherman’s image of war, however, had by the 1890s become anachronistic: in the new culture of the 1890s, the dominant image of war had indeed been refined of cruelty and glorified. Back.

Note 75: Alfred Thayer Mahan as cited by Weigley, American Way, 175. On Mahan’s views on the primacy of the adversary’s military forces as the target of any campaign see also William E. Livezey, Mahan on Sea Power (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); Margaret Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Edward Meade Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 415–45; and Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan.” Back.

Note 76: For an introduction to the role played by war in individuation see, for example, Anthony Stevens, The Roots of War (New York: Paragon, 1989), 1–5. Dallek, American Style, 19, cites a telling passage from Stephen Crane on how ordinary American soldiers viewed military conflict in the Spanish-American War: “ ‘I got mine,’ one trooper told another after killing a Spaniard. ‘Now you go an’ git yours.’ ” It is hard to imagine attacks on civilian targets as serving the same psychological function as attacks on military opponents in proving manhood. Back.

Note 77: James Barnes, Naval Actions of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896), preface, 1, as cited in Shulman, Navalism, 16. Back.

Note 78: Shulman, Navalism, 16. Back.

Note 79: For my interpretation I am heavily indebted to Shulman, ibid., especially 9– 25. Back.

Note 80: Shulman makes the case that, far from being a prophet alone in the wilderness, Mahan must be understood as part of a broad movement including other progressive navalists, such as Theodore Roosevelt, James Russell Soley, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Ibid., 2. Back.

Note 81: Sprout and Sprout, Rise, 220; Robert W. Love, Jr., History of the U.S. Navy, Volume 1 (Harrisburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 1992), 362; Herrick, Revolution, 78. Back.

Note 82: Love, History, Volume 1, 375. Back.

Note 83: Sprout and Sprout, Rise, 221–22. Back.

Note 84: Weigley, American Way, 175. Weigley is characterizing Mahan’s thesis. Back.

Note 85: On Mahan’s views on the primacy of the adversary’s military forces as the target of any campaign see also Livezey, Mahan; Margaret Sprout, “Mahan”; and Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan.” Back.

Note 86: On Mahan’s impact see also, for example, Margaret Sprout, “Mahan” Livezey, Mahan; O’Connell, Sacred Vessels, 69; and Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan.” Back.