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The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
3. Institutionalizing A Political Idea: Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power
Mark Shulman, Columbia University
Despite the absence of major changes in threats to its external security, the U.S. naval policy changed radically between 1882 and 1893. The policy change was propelled by local economic interests, internal institutional reforms, and technological change. Foremost, however, the new strategic posture emerged as a result of the political institutionalization of an idea: navalism. This idea offered a popular amalgam of nationalism and progressivism that linked order and efficiency to a sense of shared national destiny. As Edward Rhodes noted in chapter 2, navalism succeeded because the political culture was ripe for this adjustment. Essential to this achievement, however, were the marketing and reforms of the navalists.
The new navalist strategy reflected a melding of international and domestic political agendas and efforts by the U.S. federal government to provide structure and stability at home and in the non-European world. As such, it reflected a “realist” perspective of politics, one descended directly from the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. The new naval strategy embodied this drive for ordering and hierarchy and called for a navy composed of a battle fleet of battleships and battle-cruisers that would engage and defeat great power contenders at sea—in blue water. Eventually the revolution in military affairs spawned by the navalists fundamentally altered the critical power nexus and shifted the fulcrum of global power from Europe to the United States.
The Old System and the New
The first American peacetime buildup (1882&-;1893) created a new navy that inevitably and irreversibly reshaped the nation’s strategic posture and its role in world affairs. 1 In the seven decades following the 1815 Peace of Ghent, the United States had relied mostly upon Pax Britannica and the land’s natural defenses for protection of national sovereignty. In peace, most of the small regular army was scattered along the western frontier while the militia remained on the books if needed to protect local order or to mobilize for a major war. War broke out twice, against Mexico (1846–1847) and between the states (1861–1865). In each instance, the Navy expanded as needed. By 1865, in fact, the U.S. Navy was the largest such force in the world, with more than seven hundred vessels capable not only of the cruiser operations that dominated its activities but also of amphibious assaults, of riverine operations, and even major battles of the line.
In the decade following Appomattox, the Navy fell into considerable disrepair through inattention, intentional reductions, and a widespread consensus that such vast capabilities were no longer required. Instead it provided a traditionally balanced defense. On one side of the equation were commerce raiding cruisers for a deterrent or an “offensive-defense.” On the other, small boats, coastal batteries, and the local militia provided a “defensive- defense.” The major ships were propelled by mixed steam and sail systems, outdated by most measures of technological sophistication. They were manned by thousands of foreign-born illiterates with few developed skills and even less allegiance to the stars and stripes. The officers, with some notable exceptions, generally lacked talent, ambition, and vision. The annual budget was $15 million, much of it poured into corrupt and inefficient yards that serviced the decrepit fleet. Despite these limitations, the Navy of 1882 served the nation adequately. In times of peace, the cruisers would police American trade and perform diplomatic functions while the defense systems would stand by, costing little and threatening no one. 2 The militia had additional advantages of enhancing regime stability not only as an ancillary police force but also as an institution for the education and experience of civic virtue. Overall, this system accurately reflected the lack of strategic threats that remained constant throughout the post-Civil War era.
A dozen years changed everything with astounding rapidity. By 1893, an emergent internationalist agenda evoked a new strategy, with the United States independent of Britain’s defensive umbrella and capable of undertaking its own offensive operations against the navies of other nations. The budget had been doubled to $30 million. These changes reflect neither a split with the British agenda nor a change in the importance of the natural land defenses. Nor were they driven primarily by “interests.” The navalist revolution had succeeded by 1893, before “interests” were seriously engaged, except for a couple of impoverished shipbuilding concerns and pacifistic steelmakers. Rather, the new strategic posture resulted from the actualization or institutionalization of the ideas of navalism by politically savvy navalists. 3 Samuel Huntington calls this process “political institutionalization.” He notes,
Political community in a complex society thus depends upon the strength of the political organizations and procedures in the society. That strength, in turn, depends upon the scope of support for the organizations and procedures and their level of institutionalization. Scope refers simply to the extent to which the political organizations and procedures encompass activity in the society. If only a small upper- class group belongs to political organizations and behaves in terms of a set of procedures, the scope is limited. If, on the other hand, a large segment of the population is politically organized and follows the political procedures, the scope is broad. Institutions are stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior....Institutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability. The level of institutionalization of any political system can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organizations and procedures. 4
Huntington’s illumination of this process explains how the United States came to adopt the new blue-water naval doctrine that eventually allowed the nation to become a great and then a superpower.
Ideas and their Proponents
The navalists were part of a larger movement in late-nineteenth-century American political culture—an elite rebellion against the long-standing commercial and agrarian national ethos. Taking up a century-old debate, they intended to replace the Jeffersonian democracy with a more Hamiltonian republic. Like Alexander Hamilton, they believed that the state could and should play a significant role in creating the circumstances by which the people of the nation could improve their lot and that of the nation through industry and commerce. Followers of Thomas Jefferson had long opposed these notions; they perceived the strength and moral integrity of the nation as derived from close ties to its agrarian, rural roots; they supported a minimalist government—one that would police and protect people and property while allowing for the greatest possible release of creative energy.
Neo-Hamiltonian navalists such as Theodore Roosevelt, James Russell Soley, and Alfred Thayer Mahan saw America as the world’s great hope, but only if they could bring its people to understand the importance of its mission. They believed that the Civil War and Reconstruction had distracted the nation. Secession had been a misguided effort to return the South to a Jeffersonian system. The Republican Reconstruction’s implicit goals were to strengthen (as well as to restore) the Union. Only then could Americans fulfill this mission to provide order and justice to an anarchical and menacing world. 5 The same drive, turned inward, fed the progressive movement. Navalists called for a navy to fulfill the nation’s expansionist destiny, and by 1890 agreed that it required a blue water navy—a battle-oriented fleet of fighting ships. Taking advantage of a service aggressively rebuilding at every level—officers and men, ships and guns, public relations, and even the nation’s intellectual culture—navalists catalyzed America’s emergence as a great power.
Only in retrospect are navalists recognizable as a group. And yet, they made up a cohesive political unit throughout much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their backgrounds were diverse. Their numbers included officers and civilians, Republicans and Democrats, and individuals from the various quarters of the nation. Most famous, Theodore Roosevelt was a leading intellectual and political light in the movement from his 1882 publication of The Naval War of 1812 until his death in 1919. The scion of an Old Dutch-American family, and a 1880 graduate of Harvard, Roosevelt’s only nongovernment job was a brief stint as a cowpuncher while mourning the early death of his first wife. His meteoric rise from Assistant Secretary of Navy (1897–1898) to Vice President and then President (1901) was interrupted only by his Spanish War service in the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the Rough Riders, and a brief postwar stint as Governor of New York. Throughout his long public life, Roosevelt remained devoted to building and improving the Navy as a tool for and measure of national greatness.
Alfred Thayer Mahan was born at West Point where his father served as the longtime professor of geography and tactics. An Annapolis graduate and career officer, the younger Mahan only took up writing history when assigned to lecture on strategy at the new Naval War College in 1885. The resulting books and articles on sea power expressed theories on the relationship between war and empire that became more true the more they were read. 6 Mahan died soon after the guns of August opened the Great War, which should have disproved some of the value of his ideas about sea power. It is testimony to the political effectiveness of Mahan and his navalist allies that their ideas lived considerably after material circumstances had shown their limitations.
Finally, among the pantheon of lesser-known navalists can be found James Russell Soley. Like Roosevelt, the Marylander was Harvard-trained, as a historian and lawyer. For many years he taught at Annapolis and then at the Naval War College. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s Soley wrote on naval history and legal topics. A Democrat, he preceded Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of Navy during the second Cleveland administration. Soley shared with Mahan and Roosevelt a vision of American greatness through sea power. Each of these men knew the others well, cooperating over decades to institutionalize that idea. 7
Never a cabal nor even a society, navalists were united only by the belief that a larger navy could not fail to benefit the nation. It was not until after the 1890 publication of Captain Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 that they even agreed as to the shape of such an expansion. Until then, their ranks included those, like Rear Admiral Stephen Luce, who would have built cruisers and those, like Secretary Benjamin Franklin Tracy, who favored battleships. They encompassed Professor Soley, who was interested in the education of sailors and officers, and former Harvard Professor Henry Cabot Lodge who had a much larger audience in mind. A navalist society could even have counted among its brothers former Lieutenant Colonel Hilary A. Herbert, who had led the Eighth Alabama Regiment during the Wilderness Campaign against a Union army that included Colonel B. F. Tracy’s 109th New York Volunteers. Yet such a society never existed.
One might wonder if the navalists constituted a movement motivated by class interests. This might be the case, but this line of reasoning only pushes the investigation back one step. How would they determine their class and what its interests were? (1) Was increased mercantile exchange in their favor? If so, then why would Mahan and many of his messmates write so meanly of commerce in their private letters? Given their generally limited access to capital, what made them think that expanding commerce was going to benefit them? (2) Was it the preservation of old class virtues—such as deference to a natural aristocracy? If so, then why were they so Darwinian in their perception of what made nations strong? (3) Was it simply anti-agrarian? If so, then why are most of the navalists silent on such burning agricultural issues as Populism, the Grange movement, immigration, and even the tariff?
In one form or another, navalism had existed since the earliest days of the republic. Craig Symonds noted of the early nineteenth century that:
Navalists were men for whom the practical problems directly concerned with national defense were not the sole or even a primary consideration. Navalists were generally concerned with image, honor, prestige, and diplomatic clout....Navalists yearned for empire, not only for purposes of economic exploitation, but also from a unique vision of what constituted national greatness. To them a naval fleet was physical evidence of national adulthood. 8
Nevertheless, the navalists of the early nineteenth century focused their efforts too narrowly and, on the whole, were out of step with the increasingly democratic ways of the Jacksonian republic. Finally they died off, and the drive to empire was subsumed in the conquest of North America. It awaited the consolidation of the continental empire at the conclusion of the crises of Civil War and Reconstruction. Not surprisingly, it reemerged only a few short years later. When it did so, the new navalists set about to institutionalize their strategic ideas through a variety of intellectual, institutional, and political means. They revised history to reflect some newly discovered principles about the alleged relationship between sea power and the rise and fall of great nations. They also changed popular perceptions of the Navy through the written and graphic media. They wrote essays and sponsored parades. They fed articles to newspapers and constructed impressive exhibits at the world’s fair. They changed the Navy itself, by cleaning up its procurement, construction, and repair systems, and by improving the quality of training and education of officers and sailors. And they worked assiduously and effectively within the political arenas to ensure greater financial and institutional support for the construction programs required by a blue-water navy.
As the revolution began in 1882, navalists limned out its intellectual guidelines. Navalist historians—from within the service and without—paved the way for the buildup, generating new historical treatments of the War of 1812. The revised history lessons, drawn from the reexamination of the second Anglo-American conflict, emphasized the dangers of inadequate preparations for war, the inefficacy of land war, and the need to control the seas. Much like the siren call “Pearl Harbor” two generations later, these historiographical changes directly supported the authors’ contemporary political agendas, which advocated the creation of a large battle fleet to defend the nation’s interests and to support increasing expansionism across the seas. Recasting a single historical interpretation, navalists reformulated the predominant intellectual rationale for the nation’s geostrategic perspective. 9
They believed that the American Revolution had not secured the nation’s full birthright, including freedom of the seas. Only the War of 1812, feebly fought a generation too late, eventually clinched this freedom. To push the nation into a more aggressive nationalist position, the navalist historians wrote with a more expansive notion of freedom—now including an inalienable right to trade, even with belligerents. The notion of “Free Bottoms, Free Goods,” however, contradicted the Union position taken during the time of the Civil War’s leaky blockade. This in part explains why the small-scale War of 1812 better served the purposes of the navalists than did the cataclysmic war of 1861–1865. Furthermore, the personal wounds of the earlier war had generally healed, leaving the issues relatively open to dispassionate discussion, North and South.
The War of 1812, then, provided fertile ground for debate of America’s foreign policy. To support their new interpretation of prerogatives, the navalist historians emphasized first the mistakes of the leaders and second the costs of neglecting national rights. The chief culprit was Thomas Jefferson for his notorious failure to prepare the nation adequately for war and in particular for war at sea. The eminent historian and political economist Francis A. Walker, for one, adopted this interpretation for his standard text. He wrote sarcastically of Jefferson’s embargo: “The customs of oriental nations were not so well known as at the present; and Mr. Jefferson was not able to strengthen his convictions by reference to the usage in certain provinces in India, by which a person who has been wronged sits down before the door of the evildoer and there rips open his abdomen to bring a curse down on his enemy. Had Mr. Jefferson known this, it might have been of a great comfort to him” [and given him the strength to maintain his embargo]. 10
Despite Jefferson’s shortcomings, the valor and extreme efforts of the officers and men of the Navy bestowed upon the United States its de facto freedom in 1815. Such revisionist interpretations quickly came to dominate navalist history, and soon popular discourse as well. In this paradigm, Jefferson’s “embargo” became a watchword, the 1880s version of “Munich”— a craven and dangerous occasion of appeasement. The navalist historians used their new-formed historical lessons to rail against similarly treacherous cowardice in the late nineteenth century. Instead, they called on the nation to build a strong navy capable of preserving American integrity and rights, as it should have done in the era of the early national republic. These lessons quickly spread to the works of more general authors, into popular histories, and even primers and schoolbooks. In this way they soon generally introduced the reading public to the importance of sea power to American freedom.
While historians were laying an intellectual framework for the New Navy, they and other navalists were doing everything they could to popularize the service, employing a remarkable array of media. As well as histories, navalists wrote pro-Navy pieces for fictional, journalistic, and even technical media. In the mid-eighties and especially the nineties, the entire spectrum of American publications allowed a growing group of navalist authors to describe and discuss the merits of the Navy for the reading public. While the elite magazines offered space to navalist writers, the more popular publications were even more enthusiastic. 11 The newly powerful yellow press, always on the verge of demagoguery, picked up the cause of the Navy with at least as much fervor as had such self-consciously elite journals as the North American Review. Pulitzer’s editors, for instance, swelled with pride, noting, “the success of our guns must be flattering to Americans.” 12 Editors across the spectrum increasingly offered space to Navy secretaries and officers or amateur enthusiasts, space to explain the necessity of naval preparedness and the virtues of its heroism. Boys’ magazines, for instance, used navy stories to portray the paradigm of the modern boy—brash, adventurous, and honorable. For the literate adult public, officers produced discourse on machtpolitik as well as stories of brave deeds and gallant officers. Beyond their highly successful literary efforts, the navalists succeeded in marketing the idea via parades, exhibitions, and expositions.
These grand events appealed to the public fascination for heroes and the gee-whiz technology of great machines. For example, the full-scale battleship constructed in Lake Michigan, for 1893’s Columbian Exposition, allowed hundreds of thousands of Americans to step on board and experience the wonders of the electric lights, massive engines, and great guns. Even the cosmopolitan Henry Adams was awed by the power on display at Chicago. At the same time, the Navy treated its visitors to the staged heroics of mock sea rescues regularly performed by the crew of the U.S.S. Illinois. As a fighting vessel, however, the ship was a sham, constructed of plywood laid over concrete pylons. Still, it was the most useful battleship in the navalists’ fleet. Such demonstrations, as well as reenactments, parades, and commissionings, encouraged the public to participate in the excitement of the New Navy. Also in this era, the music of John Philip Sousa and his United States Marine Corps Band entertained millions, encouraging their support for the bright- work of the Navy. His “Semper Fidelis,” for instance, contributed to the Corps’ image as a smart elite while his “Washington Post” did the service no harm to relations with the influential namesake newspaper. 13 Through many trials and few errors, the Navy sold the nation a fleet of Illinois—ships barely more useful than the one resting on stilts in Lake Michigan.
Making a New Navy
As well as giving the Navy a new intellectual rationale and stirring cultural support, navalists had to provide it with an improved image based upon a more efficient service. In many ways the Navy Department modernized its organization and facilities. Its administration abandoned obsolete management techniques to become competent and more cost-effective. The acquisition process temporarily turned away from wholesale “pork barrel” politics, and the service was able to purchase 30 cents more for each dollar spent. The new secretaries also reformed or reduced the administration at antiquated and corrupt Eastern and Southern yards, while opening new coaling stations and drydocks on the blossoming Pacific. Recruiting and educational practices also took advantage of the period’s penchant for rationalization and specialization. These changes typify the efforts to reorganize naval administration along the lines of efficiency and economy and explain how the growth of the surface fleet could so far outstrip that of naval expenditures.
The navalists “polished up that handle so carefully” to ensure support for the advancement of their political agenda. This work brought great changes to the actual condition of the Navy as well. Men and officers were taught to think professionally about how to organize their efforts in the management of violence. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Rear Admiral Stephen Luce, the preeminent leader in the reorganization of the naval education system, provided training programs for youths, for sailors, and, most notably, for officers. Opening in 1884, his Naval War College gave to the service an academic veneer, a professional military direction and the notion of a professional military education for senior officers. It provided as well a coherent new strategy that grew out the efforts to validate strategy with historically “proven” tradition. From the start, the war college embraced and inculcated the political need for a forward-oriented military strategy and for an engaged domestic political strategy as well.
The most visible precipitate of Luce’s Naval War College—the battleship philosophy—not only established the discourse for America’s naval strategy but also reflected the new American way of doing business. The concentration of battleships into fleets appeared just when the concentration of industrial and commercial might was beginning to become the standard American business practice. For many industries, bigger was better. 14 It is not surprising that the trusts developed in the 1880s were followed by analogous concentrations of force in the military. Since before the Civil War, as Alfred D. Chandler points out, the military had been cooperating with big business, sharing production techniques and logistical skills. The two most influential secretaries of the New Navy, William C. Whitney (served 1885–1889) and Benjamin F. Tracy (1889–1893), had previously worked as corporate lawyers. In fact, all of the secretaries of the emerging New Navy had been trained as lawyers—a profession devoted to actualizing ideas or theories. 15 Luce’s reforms, then, were not sui generis but arose and succeeded in part because they reflected current organizational practices. Reorganizing inefficient yards, halting excessive repairs, retiring alcoholic or incompetent officers, and opening up the bidding-contracting system were among the secretaries’ most important contributions to creating efficient land and personnel establishments.
Much like the early national navalists described by Symonds, the leaders of this new movement used emergent technologies to support an imperial agenda. In fact, their emphasis upon gee-whiz machinery often undermined support for more practical tools of war. Martin van Creveld has labeled these diverse pursuits “Make-Believe War” and “Real War.” 16 In general, contemporary naval construction plans in less-democratic powers tackled “Real War” with greater enthusiasm: witness Britain’s battle cruisers and Germany’s U-boats. 17 But for American navalists, technology foremost supported a public appeal, frequently at the expense of military effectiveness. 18 It also suited the changing world view of the officers who designed it.
The New Navy of the 1890s spawned not only from a new strategic rationale but also from new attitudes among naval officers regarding the Pacific Ocean. In many ways, I agree with Edward Rhodes who argues that for these navalist ideas to succeed, they must be in sympathy with the cultural climate of the day. Navalism did fit nicely within the imperialist notions that naval officers were developing on the Pacific in the late nineteenth century. Their personal recollections in diaries, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies reflect a mentality ripe for empire. 19 They reflect a dramatic shift from those of the Civil War-era navy. For instance, Midshipman David Dixon Porter had joined his father’s ship during the War of 1812 and eventually rose to succeed David G. Farragut as Admiral of the Navy, serving in that post from 1868 until 1890. Through the 1880s, Porter’s leadership provided a visible symbol of nostalgic and traditional service. Officers of Porter’s Navy viewed the Pacific as a place of physical challenge, where natives controlled their own destinies and where commerce was best based upon exporting fine goods to the United States. By the 1890s, the officers of the New Navy had reversed these notions. The Pacific no longer represented a challenge to modern ships and men, while its peoples came to be seen as less individualistic and more like shadows. Naval officers valued the region more for its strategic position, as a field upon which the great powers would express a counter-force sea power in place of the counter-value warfare of the Old Navy. Mahan the officer represented this cultural shift, while Mahan the writer embodied and popularized it. And the newly conceptualized Pacific was the slate upon which the U.S. battleship-dominated fleet was going to fulfill the nation’s destiny. By the time of the scramble for the Pacific at the end of the 1880s, the officers of the New Navy had adopted stances that justified or even catalyzed American participation in it, with great enthusiasm.
The biggest challenge in the creation of a new naval strategy was to procure authorizations for the required hardware—a challenge to navalists’ political and institutional ability more than to their technological capacity. While Peter Trubowitz makes a good argument for representatives voting to benefit their specific constituents, my analysis of the Congressional and public debates over naval construction and strategy emphasizes different conclusions. 20 It details the traditional wartime strategy generally favored by most of the defense establishment, including many senior officers, Congressional Naval Affairs Committee members, strategic writers in the press, and armaments manufacturers. Through the early 1880s, this traditionally balanced strategy called for a coastal defense bolstered now by the deterrent of all-steel, fast, steam cruisers that would engage in guerre de course or commerce raiding. Through the mid-eighties, the Navy altered its strategy, succumbing to pressures from navalists and a Congress that authorized only large ships. By 1886 a forward maritime strategy, in which the Navy abandoned coastal defense, had replaced the old one. To a great extent the efforts of Secretary Tracy and the Congressional navalists explicitly authorized construction for this forward strategy, which by the early nineties had discontinued even commerce-destroying for complete dependence upon battle fleets or guerre d’escadre—the expressions of sea power popularized by Captain Mahan.
In the end, navalists within Congress provided the critical component of the revolution in military affairs. To succeed, they had to move unprecedentedly expensive weapons systems through the authorization process, all the while disarming opponents who claimed that they were merely unneeded and unwelcome manifestations of porkbarrel politics. One might wonder how the navalists could turn away from pork (inefficient consensus building) and logrolling (relatively efficient coalition building) and still have succeeded. First, one must note that the type of success they achieved was somewhat limited in that the nation did not receive a balanced fleet. The navalists could build a battleship-dominated fleet largely because they were willing to sacrifice many other elements that would have gone into the creation of a balanced fleet.
Secondly, it must be said that this minority movement included a few consummate politicians capable of remarkable maneuvers. After a decade of increasing naval authorizations, the Republicans lost control of the House in 1890. Consider the events of 1892 and the Congress that sat after the dramatic reversals of GOP fortune in 1890. Although the House had a large Democratic majority, the Senate and the Executive branch remained in the control of the GOP, which was able to enforce its pro-big navy position. Undoubtedly expecting opposition, the House Naval Affairs Committee introduced a bill calling for the authorization of only one ship, a New York- class armored cruiser and providing only $23,726,823.71 for the service, nearly $9 million less than the provisions for fiscal year 1892. The House debate in early spring reflects the range of opinions, from the emerging Mahanian orthodoxy to an idealistic pacifistic position, with all positions in between. An interesting “triangular debate” opened on the House floor, among those in favor of the bill (most of the Democrats), those opposed to it for being too small (GOP), and those disputing it for its excessive largesse (Populists and left-leaning, Midwestern Democrats). The navalists, led in the House by Maine Republican Charles Boutelle, pointed to the crises in which the United States had involved itself in the early nineties (especially in Chile and the Bering Sea). Boutelle went into the by-then standard discourse on the lessons of 1812, as did the young Massachusetts Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge, while proposing the substitution of two battleships and ten torpedo boats for the armored cruiser.
On another side of the triangle, an embryonic “peace” party called for no new authorizations, employing a variety of arguments. Owen Scott (D- IL), picking up on the Navy’s favorite historical debate, claimed that the United States had suffered no genuine invasion threat since 1814 and postulated, “The time has come when nations should cease warfare. The progress of civilization, Christianity, humanity, demands that swords shall be sheathed.” Tom Watson, agrarian rebel and a Democrat from Georgia, contributed his views on the folly of war in 1812 and opposed any new construction that might foster another pointless war. However cogent their arguments, the anti-navalists struggled against the current.
On the last face of the debate triangle, the one with the broadest base of support, was the new, mostly Democratic, majority position favoring the Naval Affairs Committee’s New York-type armored cruiser and the money to continue the ongoing construction. Once again the debate focused on the question of the nation’s strategic needs as informed predominately by interpretations of early national history. After Chairman Hilary A. Herbert’s introduction, John O. Pendleton (D-WV) submitted one rendition, “The Navy has been extremely popular with our people since the war of 1812” and concluded that the present bill provided sustenance for the moderate navy fitting the national requirements. 21 In the end, split opposition and arguments such as this enabled the majority to pass the bill on to the Senate.
The Republican-dominated Senate fought the meager appropriations, acceding to the House’s requests only after many debates and intercameral conferences. Debate within the upper chamber was only two-sided: for and against increases. As in the House, the anti-navalist sentiment came mostly from the Midwest. William F. Vilas (D-WI), typically, opposed further construction, claiming that the Navy had already proved adequate for the nation’s nonaggressive needs. Francis Cockrell (D-MO) concurred, contributing a new reinterpretation of 1812 as a case of a suitable ad hoc response to the threat of an invasion. Sounding “1812,” however, only brought more debates on the lessons of history. John T. Morgan (D-AL) retorted, “the mere fact that we were considered to be very weak upon the sea, [provoked the] war of 1812.” Most of the Senate agreed on the need to protect against another invasion. Creating a consensus on naval construction, most Southern Democrats joined with the Republicans only as far as agreeing to support the creation of a coastal defense force. Significantly, the Senate did not request authorizations for any more battleships, but only for defense vessels: a coastal monitor, four river gunboats, and six harbor-based torpedo boats. The Senate, attempting to take the initiative in reformulating the national defense strategy, thus sought to reintroduce the capability for a defensive-defense.
The House majority had already abandoned any pretense of a defensive- defense, and it took three intercameral conferences finally to force the Senate to acquiesce to a solely offensive-defense formula. The conferees, navalists appointed by each house, readily agreed among themselves. In the critical second conference, the House had explicitly charged its representatives with securing funding just for one armored cruiser. The Senate, meanwhile, had instructed its conferees to authorize a monitor, four gunboats and six torpedo boats. The navalist-dominated conference, in turn, reported in favor of one 9,000-ton battleship (Iowa) and the armored cruiser (Brooklyn). On a smaller scale, this foreshadows Winston Churchill’s statement about British dreadnought authorizations some years later: the admiralty “demanded six ships: the economists offered four: and we finally compromised on eight.”
Herbert had slid the Iowa into the legislation calling merely for its authorization with virtually no concomitant appropriation. This ruse allowed a cost-conscious House to authorize a $6 million battleship as a less expensive defense option than the million dollars required for the ten small boats (at approximately $100,000 apiece). With the sly addition of the largest battleship to date, the bill was reported again. The Senate approved the report essentially intact and intransigently fought the House for its approval. Finally after a third conference, Congress authorized the construction of the Iowa and the Brooklyn on July 16, 1892. Only the battleship and its half-sibling, the armored cruiser, passed through the perilous shoals of the appropriations process. The hardware of naval strategy moved increasingly and irreversibly toward the offensive-defense.
Where Ideas Failed
The 1892 debates tell not only about the success of navalism but also about the failure to oppose it. Opposition to navalism was weak, fragmented, and politically crippled. Theodore Roosevelt derided the opponents of navalism and empire as “Flapdoodle Pacifists and Mollycoddlers.” Like the American anti-anti-communists of the Cold War, anti-navalists were sometimes branded traitors. Actually they were merely expressing their different visions of America’s destiny. Some were pacifists from the cash-poor Midwest or South who held economic or religious perspectives that opposed war. Some were politicians who wanted to save, or at least to appear to save, money. Others, like journalist Carl Schurz, wanted to avoid foreign entanglements precisely because they diffused efforts to improve the domestic situation. Schurz, a “forty-eighter,” had watched as his native Germany’s rulers used the strains of an aggressive foreign policy as a pretense to stifle domestic reform and progress. Perhaps the most confusing anti-navalists were men working both sides of the issue, such as Francis A. Walker, whose historical writing helped popularize the Navy, and steel monger Andrew Carnegie, who personally negotiated large contracts for armor plate. Both men were dedicated anti-imperialists by the late 1890s. Overall, anti-navalism was a fragmented movement, unable to coalesce until the imperial crises of 1898 and successive wars with the Spanish and then the Filipinos.
The failure of the anti-navalists to gain support is also, in part, explained by falling prices and increased efficiency that diminished the short-term costs. During the dozen years examined by this work, the purchasing power of naval expenditures increased extremely rapidly. The naval expenditure price index decreased between 1882 and 1893, from 106 to 76—showing a drop in real costs of close to 30 percent. 22 The big new navy, as a consequence of this and the elimination of waste, cost only $15 million per year more than had the old. In the days of great trusts, no income tax, and, for part of the time, even a considerable treasury surplus, few voters begrudged these paltry sums. Surprisingly little literature, American or other, documents the anti-imperialist efforts during the era of new imperialism. 23 This dearth accurately reflects the comparatively small size and fragmented nature of the anti-navalist movement and its diversity. By contrast, the campaign to build a great American navy can be documented through sources in fictional and nonfictional literature, exhibitions, monuments, and even music, as well as in an understanding of the changing economic and political situations. Investigating those opposed to the buildup, however, points more often to what they were not, and to resources or arguments they failed to use.
The opposition failed not only because of the effective popularization of the service, but also because the opponents of the New Navy came from diverse backgrounds with often contradictory agendas; they could not agree what they did want. At various times, opponents included mugwumps, religious pacifists, and populists from the old Northwest and the deep South: groups unlikely to coalesce into a strong political force. In the end, Roosevelt had little to fear from the mollycoddlers.
The Navalists' Triumph
Politics created strategy in the late nineteenth century; navalists could alter the political discourse sufficiently to create an offensive navy, the embodiment of their assertive agenda. Historically, two schools have vied to shape and to explain America’s increasingly aggressive role in world affairs. Internalists, who tend to come from the political left with an overt anti- interventionist agenda, generally find the roots of “American empire” in the selfish search for economic gain. Realists, on the other hand, coming from the center or the right, explain “liberal internationalism” as derived in reaction to foreign threats. 24 In this case, at least, the truth lies somewhere in between. There will always be opportunities for intervention: a Cuban Revolution to aid (1873–1898) or thwart (1959-present), a Chilean Civil War to encourage (1891) or subvert (1973), and an oppressive and apparently fragmenting China in which to intervene (1900) or not (1994). Still, this theory of institutionalization of ideas provides a bridge between the two schools, showing how ideas (whether domestic or of foreign origin) shaped foreign relations. It argues that the navalists were the effective agents of this dramatic shift.
The navalists understood the contingency of America’s relations with the world and confidently believed that America’s proper role was to take part in foreign affairs by using sea power to influence other nations and thereby to help the people of the United States and the world. They had no dreams of creating a formal empire, but still they set out to write their self-confident vision on their home and foreign lands. In their sincere efforts to encourage America to take the lead among nations, the navalists conceived of an agenda that allowed the best and brightest to lead the new nation. The self-assuredness of navalism was based on a belief in the ideas of rationalization and professionalization as well as the intellectual consensus then emerging that battleships represented the apex of naval construction.
American navalism emerged during a historical moment in the 1880s when the nation seemed destined for greatness with sea power the standard by which it would be judged as well as the tool with which it would be effected. An examination of navalism’s first dozen years affords insights into the dynamics of militarism, the remarkable degree to which politics, pork, policy, and strategy are inextricably linked, and the interrelatedness of various social discourses in the early progressive era. It also places the extraordinary fame and impact of Mahan and his writings into a context from which his successors too quickly removed him. The cost of placing him upon a pedestal has been paid many times over by the Navy and by the nation. Over the past century, the Mahanian navy is the single most expensive organization ever, a status toward which it had been launched by 1893. 25
In the end, navalism triumphed for three reasons. First, foreign crises granted reprieves from domestic travails. For as Paul Kennedy writes, “The emperors, kings, prime ministers and presidents of great powers have always preferred the heady world of diplomacy, war and international affairs to the less than glamorous realm of fiscal reform, educational change, and renewal.” 26 In the battleship revolution, presidents could focus on great affairs of state and on the inevitable naval crises. Secondly, it succeeded quickly because it faced immature and fragmented opposition. But finally and critically, the comprehensiveness and cohesiveness of navalist efforts made for an overwhelming movement. As noted, they fought for a large navy by creating historical and strategic justifications, by reorganizing and professionalizing the service, and by marketing it based on the widespread appeal of the big and heroic. They institutionalized a political notion—a strategic idea—through a multi-front, creative political campaign of a mere dozen years.
By 1893 the United States had become a naval power. Certainly the impetus was provided by elites, but at each stage domestic politics and social constructs molded the shape and direction of American expansion. The complex negotiations between the leaders and the followers explain in part how a self-absorbed inward-looking nation became an imperial power.
Endnotes
Note 1: Much of this material is derived from my book, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882–1893 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995). For the larger geopolitical context, see first Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987). The standard military history of the United States (especially for the nineteenth century) is Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1984, 1991); also see Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) and James Chace and Caleb Carr, America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars (New York: Summit, 1989).
This work has profited from the University of Texas, Austin/SSRC workshop on strategic readjustment in 1994 and a follow-on 1995 conference at the Naval Post-graduate School in Monterey, and particularly from discussions with Emily Goldman, Peter Trubowitz, and especially Edward Rhodes. Back.
Note 2: For the “Old Navy,” see in particular Kenneth J. Hagan, ed., This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: Free Press, 1991); Lance Buhl, “Maintaining ‘An American Navy,’ ” In Peace and War, ed. Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984); David Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798– 1883 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988). For the “Old Army,” see Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New York: Putnam, 1956). Back.
Note 3: For comparison of navalism in other nations, see: William R. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1935); Jonathan Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (London: MacDonald, 1965); Arthur J. Marder, Anatomy of British Sea Power (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964); Volker Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971); Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871–1904, ed. Stephen S. Roberts (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Macmillan, 1976); and Janet Robb, The Primrose League, 1883–1906 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Back.
Note 4: Huntington’s italics in original. Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 12. Back.
Note 5: In another society, at a slightly later time, this type of impulse could well lead to more menacing philosophies. See Paul M. Kennedy, “Levels of Approach and Contexts in Naval History: Admiral Tirpitz and the Origins of Fascism,” in Doing Naval History: Essays Towards Improvement, ed. John B. Hattendorf (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1995). For the softer domestic analogue in the U.S., see Richard Abrams, Conservatism in the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). Back.
Note 6: Mahan’s seminal works include: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890) published in nearly 30 English- language editions as well as in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Swedish; The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1892); The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897).
The literature for Mahan is exhaustive. To start, see: John B. Hattendorf, ed., The Influence of History Upon Mahan (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1991) and John B. Hattendorf and Lynn C. Hattendorf, comps., A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1986). And see Shulman, “The Influence of Mahan Upon Sea Power.” Reviews in American History (December 1991), 522–27. Back.
Note 7: My book, Navalism, provides more biographical details of these and other navalists, as does Peter Karsten’s remarkable study, The Naval Aristocracy (New York: Free Press, 1972). For works chronicling these men specifically, see Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine, 1979); Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Man and His Letters (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1977); and Richard Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987) inter alia. There is no comprehensive study of Soley. John Hattendorf’s forthcoming biography of Luce will no doubt fill an important gap in the literature. Back.
Note 8: Craig Symonds, The Navalists and Anti-Navalists (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), introduction. Back.
Note 9: Shulman, “The Influence of History Upon Sea Power: The Navalist Interpretations of the War of 1812,” Journal of Military History (April 1992). For original sources see Theodore Roosevelt, Naval War of 1812 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1st ed., 1882 and 4th ed., 1894); James Barnes, Naval Actions of the War of 1812, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896); James R. Soley, The Boys of 1812 and Other Naval Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1887); and Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905). For more historiography, see Kenneth J. Hagan and Mark Shulman, “Mahan Plus One Hundred: The Current State of Naval History in the United States,” in Ubi Sumus? The State of Naval and Maritime History, ed., John B. Hattendorf (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1994). Back.
Note 10: Francis A. Walker, The Making of the Nation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 202–7, 293–97. In an effort to avoid becoming entangled in the Napoleonic wars, President Jefferson had declared an embargo on traffic with countries at war. Mostly because the costs of adherence were so high and the ability to enforce the embargo so low, the effort failed. Merchants did trade. Their ships were captured and their men impressed into the desperate Royal Navy, and the U.S. did enter the European war following precisely the course Jefferson had sought to avoid. A century later, Woodrow Wilson’s analogous efforts were also similarly scorned and undermined by navalists. Back.
Note 11: For a partial list of journals, magazines, and newspapers that support these claims, see: Army and Navy Journal; Atlantic Monthly; Century; Chicago Daily Tribune; Comfort; Dawson (GA) News; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper; Harper’s Weekly and Monthly; Ladies Home Journal; Laramie (WY) Boomerang; New Orleans Daily Picayune; New Haven Evening Register; New York Herald; New York Times; New York World; North American Review; Peacemaker and Court of Arbitration; Public Service Review; Puck; San Francisco Chronicle; Scientific American; United Service Review; Virginia City (NV) Territorial Enterprise; World Affairs; Youth’s Companion. Back.
Note 12: New York World Almanac (New York: World Publishing, 1892), 251. For more on the importance of the yellow press, see Bartholomew Sparrow’s chapter below. Back.
Note 13: For the Marine Corps in this period, see Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis (New York: Macmillan, 1980, 1991) and Jack Shulimson, The Marine Corps’ Search for A Mission, 1880–1898 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993) which does not mention Sousa. For the band leader, see W. C. White, A History of Military Music in America (New York: Exposition Press, 1944). Or see Shulman, “From the Sea,” Reviews in American History 23 (1995) 277–83. Back.
Note 14: Of trusts, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. notes “By the 1880s these federations had become part of the normal way of doing business in most American industries,” The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 316. Companies generally maintained this belief in economies of scale for at least a century. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 futurist novel Looking Backward so strongly embraces the notion of economies of scale that Bellamy apparently believed they would eventually allow men and women to support themselves on a few hours of work each week. Only recently has American industry started intentionally to de-massify production, taking advantages of technological changes in information processing and hardware configuration to tailor production to specific needs while maintaining a high level of efficiency. Back.
Note 15: For the classical literature on professionalization, first see Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), particularly chapter 9 and Robert Wiebe, The Search For Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Back.
Note 16: Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1991), especially 285–310; see also van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1989, 1991). Back.
Note 17: See Jon T. Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and Nicholas A. Lambert, “The Influence of the Submarine Upon Naval Strategy, 1898–1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992 (to be published by the University of South Carolina Press). Also see Andrew Krepenevich, “From Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions,” The National Interest, 37 (Fall 1994), 30–42, for an interesting summary and interpretation of revolutions in military affairs. See also Andrew J. Bacevich, “Preserving the Well-Bred Horse,” The National Interest, 37 (Fall 1994), 43–49. Back.
Note 18: This case makes evident the problem with military-technical revolutions. Without proper understanding of the political and cultural context within which their technical solution is derived, enthusiasts assume that they have solved the strategic situation they face. In reality they have made a limited assessment of the problem and applied a technological system imperfectly. The shortcomings of this imperfect solution become evident only when the next war breaks out. Back.
Note 19: For memoirs see Daniel Ammen, Old Navy and New (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1891); Charles E. Clark, My Fifty Years in the Navy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1917); George Dewey with Frederick Palmer, Autobiography of George Dewey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913); A. M. Dewey, The Life and Letters of Admiral Dewey (New York: Woodfall Co., 1899); Robley D. Evans, Sailor’s Log (New York: Appleton, 1901); Evans, Admiral’s Log (New York: Appleton, 1908); Bradley A. Fiske, From Midshipman to Rear Admiral (New York: Century Co., 1919); Samuel R. Franklin, Memories of a Rear Admiral (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898); Albert Gleaves, Life and Letters of Stephen B. Luce (New York: Putnam, 1925); Gleaves, The Life of an American Sailor: Rear Admiral William Hemsley, United States Navy, from his Letters and Memoirs (New York: George H. Doran, 1923); William Goode, With Sampson through the War (New York: Doubleday and McClure Company, 1899); John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf, eds., The Writings of Stephen B. Luce (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1975); Harris Laning, An Admiral’s Yarn: The Autobiography of Harris Laning, edited and introduced by Mark Shulman (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, forthcoming); John A. Lejeune, Reminiscences of a Marine (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1930); Daniel P. Mannix, The Old Navy (New York: Macmillan, 1983); Alfred Thayer Mahan, From Sail to Steam (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907); Hugh Rodman, Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928); Winfield Scott Schley, The Greely Relief Expedition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887); Schley, Forty-five Years Under the Flag (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904); Seaton Schroeder, My Half Century of Naval Service (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1922); Robert Seager II and D. Maguire Seager, Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1975); Thomas Selfridge, Memoirs of Thomas O. Selfridge Jr., edited by Dudley Knox (New York: Putnam, 1924); Charles Steedman, Memoir and Correspondence of Charles Steedman, Rear Admiral, United States Navy, with his Autobiography and Private Journals, 1811–1890, edited by Amos Lawrence Mason (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1912). Back.
Note 20: See Peter Trubowitz, “Building America’s Blue-Water Navy: Putting Interests in their Place,” a paper presented before the International Studies Association Annual Meeting, Acapulco, Mexico, March 1993; and Shulman, Navalism, chapters 6 and 7. Previous accounts of this transformation are included in: Benjamin Franklin Cooling III, Benjamin Franklin Tracy: Father of the Modern American Fighting Navy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1973) and War, Business, and American Society: Historical Perspectives on the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: Kennikat Press, 1977); Walter Herrick, American Naval Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939, 1966); and for a dissenting opinion, George T. Davis, A Navy Second to None: The Development of Modern American Naval Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940). And see Ronald Spector, “Triumph of Professional Ideology: The U.S. Navy in the 1890s,” In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775–1984, ed. Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984) and Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1977). For a more complete discussion of the historiography, see Hagan and Shulman, Mahan Plus One Hundred. Back.
Note 21: Herbert, a Democrat representing Mobile, AL was probably the leading navalist in his party. He served as Secretary of Navy in the second Cleveland administration, 1893–1897. Back.
Note 22: The Naval Expenditure Purchasing Index was created by George Modelski and William Thompson to compare relative growth and decline of the naval powers. It represents the average purchasing power of the year’s appropriations. For a more detailed analysis of this materials see Shulman, Navalism, 139 ff. For methodology and comparative data, see Modelski and Thompson, Sea Power and Global Politics, 1494–1993 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). Back.
Note 23: Some of the better works on the American peace movements include: Merle Curti, The American Peace Crusade, 1815–1860 (New York: Octagon Books, 1929); Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936 (New York: Norton, 1936); Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); and David Sands Patterson, Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement 1887–1914 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1976). Back.
Note 24: Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 12–15; and see Bruce Cumings, “Revising Postrevisionism,” Diplomatic History 17 (Fall 1993) 539–60. When considering the historical writing of the period of approximately 1963 to 1993, one could generally categorize the authors as “revisionist” or “realist.” These terms are falling away quickly with post-Cold War evaluations. Back.
Note 25: Recent years have brought a bounty of surveys of the century that followed. See Baer’s One Hundred Years of Sea Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Kenneth Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: Free Press, 1991); Robert W. Love, Jr., History of the United States Navy (Harrisburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 1992); Stephen Howarth, To Shining Sea: A History of the United State Navy, 1775–1991 (New York: Random House, 1991); Nathan Miller, The U.S. Navy: An Illustrated History (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1977); and Robert O’Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991). Back.
Note 26: Quoted in New York Times, September 24, 1990. Back.
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