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The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
4. Geography and Strategy: The Politics of American Naval Expansion
Peter Trubowitz, University of Texas at Austin
Why does the United States find it so difficult to respond to international change? Why is the making of American security policy so conflict-prone? These old questions have been asked in one form or another since Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America. From Tocqueville to Lippmann to Kennan, observers have argued that the policymaking process in the United States is poorly suited to the needs of a great power. 1 In contrast to other industrialized nations, where leaders often enjoy considerable latitude in setting strategic priorities and committing national resources, the American policymaking process is highly politicized and notoriously inefficient, making it extremely difficult for the nation’s leaders to articulate a vision of the national interest that commands broad domestic support. 2 Questions of national security often assume a prominent role in national politics and provoke intense and bitter debate. One consequence is that the nation’s ability to act strategically or purposefully in international affairs is compromised.
Scholars explain this shortcoming in two general ways. Some locate the source of the problem in America’s political culture. They argue that, since the country’s founding, Americans have held deeply divergent images of their nation is, or what it should be, and that these differences invariably give rise to profound disagreements over the purposes of American power and the authority to exercise it. 3 Scholars have described this tension in Americans’ understandings of their place in the world in various ways: as Hamiltonian versus Jeffersonian philosophies, realism versus idealism, power versus liberty, or pragmatism versus principle. From the view that emphasizes political culture, conflicts over security policy are essentially conflicts over America’s identity. They surface during periods of international instability and crisis. It is then that the conflict between the imperatives of security (centralization, secrecy, and dispatch) and democracy (liberty, openness, and accountability) is most conspicuous.
A second explanation is institutional. It focuses on the structure of the American state and identifies the nation’s fragmented political system as an obstacle to coherent and purposeful statecraft. 4 The “weakness” of the American state, manifest in the sharing of foreign policymaking powers between the White House and Congress, is considered to be, in Edwin Corwin’s famous phrase, “an invitation to struggle” for control over the authority to make policy. The fact that presidents and members of Congress face different electorates—one national, the other local—compounds the problem by providing additional incentives to disagree. 5 Presidents are held accountable for the broad effect of policy choices. Individual congressmen generally are not. As a result, presidents must make decisions based on a national interest while members of Congress can respond to the needs of narrower, more particularistic interests. In short, the American Constitution invites conflict by dividing the authority to make security policy between the branches of government and by giving self-interested politicians who occupy different positions in the national government reason to compete for control over foreign policy.
This chapter offers an alternative way of thinking about American security policy and the difficulties leaders face when responding to international change. In contrast to accounts that grant primacy to national ideologies or institutions, the interpretation put forward here identifies America’s regional diversity as the most important source of tension and conflict over security policy. I show that conflicts over the purposes of American power, as well as the constitutional authority to exercise it, are fundamentally conflicts over the distribution of wealth and power in American society among coalitions with divergent interests and claims on the central state’s resources. They are regional in nature, and they grow out of the uneven nature of the nation’s economic development and integration into the international economy. Different parts of the country have different stakes in how the national government responds to international challenges and opportunities because of differences in what they produce, where they look for markets, their level of technological development, and more generally, their position in the world economy. Domestic conflict over how to define America’s “national interest” is the result.
The argument is developed by analyzing the debate over American naval expansionism in the 1890s. Sometimes viewed as an inevitable byproduct of America’s rise as an economic power, the rise of the modern navy was actually a more protracted process marked by intense and bitter disputes and lasting well over a decade. Like so many of the debates over American security policy before and since, this fight broke down along regional lines. 6 At one end of the spectrum were politicians who represented areas—mostly in the industrial Northeast—that had the most to gain from a strategy of imperial expansion at the turn of the century. At the other end were political leaders from the agrarian South, a region that for its own economic and political reasons favored the status quo—a small coastal navy. These two regions clashed over the need for a battleship navy, and over the strategy of overseas expansion that naval development implied. This is because they occupied significantly different positions in the international and national economies. Debates that were expressed in terms of conflicting values, and that were played out at the national level, sprang from underlying conflicts of regional interest. In the 1890s, when America debated its place in the world, the geographic dimension of conflicts over the national interest was revealed in stark form.
One would not necessarily expect this to be the case. The late nineteenth century was the highwater mark of party politics in the United States. Parties were stronger and more cohesive than they are today, and thus one might expect national considerations to outweigh local ones in the minds of politicians, especially in dealing with issues of national defense. Indeed, most of the literature on the politics of national defense claims that elected officials’ views on defense policy have never had much to do with whether (or how much) their districts or states benefit from military spending. 7 Whatever impact local interests have on politicians’ views of domestic policy, ideological and partisan considerations are believed to determine their stance on national security. The 1890s provide a hard test not only for this argument but also for any argument that gives America’s position in the world economy pride of place in the analysis. The national economy was then far less integrated into the international economy than it is today. If my argument holds for that era, then it should hold as well for America today—a time when one would expect political representatives to be more, not less, sensitive to the domestic consequences of the nation’s foreign policies than they were in the past.
Regions, Politicians, and Strategy
Regionally based political competition and conflict is one of the most distinctive features of American politics. Frederick Jackson Turner first identified the significance of regionalism in the United States, and since then a large literature has developed on the sources of regional strife over national political decisions. A common theme in this literature is that regional political competition is rooted in the geographically uneven nature of economic growth and development. 8 In other industrialized countries, where political systems are also based on spatial representation, regional economic differentiation is often coterminus with ethnic or religious difference. While ethnic and religious difference is also an important feature of American politics, it is most conspicuous at the neighborhood and city level. At the regional level the absence of the kinds of cultural cleavages present in other nations has meant that regionalism is usually grounded in conflicts of economic interest.
Geographers identify a number of factors to explain the uneven nature of regional growth. Some emphasize geographic differences in resources, markets, or the costs of factors of production. 9 Others focus on regional variation in technological innovation or the organization of labor and production. In addition to analyzing factors internal to regions, geographers have also studied how interaction between intraregional factors and larger national and international processes shapes regional economic trajectories. There is also an important literature on the role that the federal government plays in shaping patterns of private investment and spending in the national economy and thus the possibilities for regional growth and development. Employing these approaches, geographers working on the United States have documented and analyzed sharp differences in regional economic structure.
These differences give rise to divergent interests which, in turn, can produce regional conflict. The spatially decentralized structure of political representation in the United States ensures that these regional differences find political expression at the national level, where the dispersal of decisionmaking power and competition between the national parties for regional electoral advantage magnifies the role of regional interests, economic needs, and political imperatives in shaping the national agenda. Institutional decentralization provides various channels for elected officials to levy claims on the federal government’s resources, initiate or obstruct policy change, and build policy coalitions with political elites from other parts of the country through logrolling, vote-trading, ideological appeals, and the like. Regional political competition is the result. This is well understood by analysts who study the regional bases of political conflict over domestic policy matters. I argue that this is also true in the foreign policy domain.
Three main factors appear to be particularly relevant in shaping regional preferences about security policy. 10 The first is export dependence. 11 Regions that specialize in sectors that are export dependent are likely to favor policies that promote liberal, open, or free trade, and to be more willing to permit the market to control their trade flows. 12 Regions that are heavily dependent on the home market (or less well placed in global competition) are more likely to support active government intervention to shelter or protect their markets from foreign competitors. This is most obvious in the area of trade policy but, as I will show, the same considerations can influence regional preferences toward security policy. A second consideration has to do with effects of military spending on regional economies. Various locational factors (availability of skilled labor, industrial specialization, local tax structures, real estate prices, etc.) give some regions advantages as “sites” for military production, as well as for military bases and military fortifications. 13 Regions that stand to reap the largest rewards (i.e., jobs, profits, growth) from military spending are more likely to favor such federal outlays than those which are less “ideal” as defense-production locations. 14 Parts of the country that pay the “overhead costs” of an expensive national defense while receiving a disproportionately small share of the rewards are likely to see costly foreign policies in “guns-versus-butter” terms. A third consideration has to do with the terms of trade between regions. The goods produced by one region may provide the inputs into the production of commodities in other regions, either in the form of raw materials, capital goods, or labor costs. This sets the stage for conflict over terms of trade and the various institutional arrangements that serve to subsidize growth in one region at the expense of another. The classic example is the struggle between North and South over the protective tariff in the nineteenth century.
The concept of regional economic differentiation is a structural one. Regional economic differences give rise to divergent interests which shape, constrain, and influence the behavior of politicians. Yet to explain political struggles at the national level, structural features of the American economy must be linked to the decisions of politicians. I establish this link by making a simple assumption about political behavior: politicians are political entrepreneurs who for electoral reasons seek to secure benefits for “constituents” (voters, producers, and investors) in the form of jobs, markets, and revenue. Their responses to international challenges are shaped by their interests in promoting the fortunes of geographically defined constituencies. 15 Those who promote and support programmatic agendas for strategic adjustment do so for three broad reasons. First is their belief that policy reform will promote (or simply sustain) growth in the districts and states they represent. Second is their interest in generating and distributing (or maintaining) federal pork and patronage, thereby shoring up and expanding their political base of support. Third, politicians back programmatic agendas because they see broad policy platforms as ways of building political coalitions that enhance their power at the national level. The discussion that follows traces these dynamics as they were manifest in the struggle over strategic adjustment at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Struggle Over Naval Expansion
Few eras in American history have had a more profound impact on the nation’s foreign policy, or enjoyed more attention by American diplomatic historians, than the 1890s. Having created a continental empire in the nineteenth century, Americans set their sights on more distant frontiers. As every textbook on American diplomatic history declares, in the 1890s the United States became a great power, breaking with its long-standing tradition of self- isolation and adopting a more assertive and vigorous role in world affairs. The American state began to actively promote economic activity overseas for the first time. 16 New government bureaus were created to encourage foreign trade and investment, and new policy tools were devised to give leaders more military and diplomatic leverage in their dealings with foreign states. America built a modern battleship navy, transformed the tariff from a passive instrument of protection into a bargaining tool for opening foreign markets, and seized foreign lands to extend the nation’s strategic reach. These policy initiatives were supplemented by others: the decision to rebuild the merchant marines, efforts to reform the spoils-based diplomatic corps, and the creation of a larger, more professional army.
The development of the modern Navy was arguably the most important strategic change initiated by American leaders in the 1890s. In a way that few actions could, the decision to begin building a battleship navy in 1890 signalled the nation’s willingness to assume a more vigorous role in world affairs. In the quarter century that followed the Civil War, the Navy had distintegrated into what historian Walter LaFeber described as a “flotilla of deathtraps and defenseless antiques.” 17 Most politicans in the 1870s had been preoccupied with other matters and had seen little need for anything other than light-draft gunboats and seagoing raiders. Even in the 1880s, when attitudes toward the Navy began to change and when Congress started to replace the nation’s obsolete ironclad and wooden-ship fleet with new steel- hulled, steam-powered cruisers, there was little change in the Navy’s primary missions: defending the coastline and protecting American commerce. The result was that at the end of the 1880s, the American Navy was still a third- rate power, slow in speed and short on firepower. It lagged far behind the great navies of Europe.
America did not begin to produce a world-class navy until 1890. 18 In that year, Congress broke new ground by authorizing the construction of the first three in a new fleet of battleships, equal in size and power to the best in the world, at the unprecedented cost of more than $3 million apiece. Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy had set the stage for this departure in naval policy the year before. He deplored the nation’s long-standing tradition of relying on light cruisers as the first line of defense, and insisted that only a fleet of heavily armored battleships capable of interdicting and destroying an enemy fleet of capital ships at sea could safeguard the nation’s wealthy port cities and expanding overseas trade. 19 Echoing the views of a growing number of naval strategists, Secretary Tracy argued that the Navy’s traditional missions were no longer sufficient to guarantee the nation’s security. In the future, the best defense would be a good offense. What was needed were two new battleship fleets—one stationed in the Atlantic, the other based in the Pacific.
A vigorous proponent of expansion, Secretary Tracy set the Navy on a new course. The program to rebuild the Navy gained tremendous momentum during the 1890s. Over the course of the decade the Navy’s share of the federal budget more than doubled, rising from $22 million in 1890 to $56 million, with Congress authorizing on average at least one battleship per year. By 1905, it had doubled again. The shift toward a battleship navy was reflected in the Department of the Navy’s budget: a growing share went for investment and capitalization, spurring demand for the output of America’s shipyards and steel mills. 20 The results were dramatic. In 1890, the American Navy ranked twelfth among the navies of the world, behind Turkey and China. By the turn of the century, the United States had become a major naval power. It was now fourth in battleship strength and sixth in overall fleet size. America had developed a navy worthy of Secretary Tracy’s ambitions: “The sea will be the future seat of empire. And we shall rule it as certainly as the sun doth rise.” 21
Strategic Adjustment: Necessity or Choice?
America had never pursued a military program of this magnitude in peacetime. Such a break with the nation’s long-standing opposition to European-style military establishments would not have been possible without the active support of many naval enthusiasts in Congress. While successive Republican and Democratic administrations both favored developing a battleship navy, the program repeatedly encountered resistance. In the face of untiring opposition, those in favor of naval buildup found it necessary to compromise to win sufficient backing for naval appropriations. They pushed their radical agenda under the banner of “reform.” At first, this meant presenting their case in ways that resonated with the Navy’s traditional mission of coastal defense. 22 Naval expansionists stressed the danger of colonial encirclement and even the possibility of a British attack. Such arguments for strategic adjustment were dismissed by opponents who claimed that the country’s geopolitical position made a large battleship navy superfluous. A small navy consisting of light cruisers and backed up by coastal fortifications, they insisted, would be more than adequate to guarantee American security for the foreseeable future.
The scope of the debate over naval expansion was soon broadened. Arguments about the threat facing America’s seaports were subsumed by a more fundamental and pressing issue: commercial expansion. Drawing on the writings of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose influential book The Influence of Sea Power upon History pointed to a future marked by increasing rivalry among the Great Powers for overseas markets and colonies, naval expansionists linked sea power and commercial promotion. 23 Successful competition in the struggle for commercial supremacy would require a strong merchant marine which, in turn, would require adequate protection from foreign predators. Only a fleet of capital ships, they argued, could provide such protection for American ports and shipping. The key to all was, in Mahan’s words, “command of the seas.” Without control of the sea lanes in broad areas contiguous to the United States, American shipping would be at the mercy of the great powers. One member of Congress captured the essence of the argument: “Our future growth lies in the success of our commerce, and no great commerce has ever been built up without the assistance of a navy to protect the merchant marine and enforce the rights of merchants and traders.” 24
Those who believed that the American government should play an active role in opening foreign markets found the case for strategic adjustment irrefutable. Hard economic times in the 1870s and 1880s contributed to the perception that foreign markets were essential to American well-being. Overproduction was seen as the cause of these crises, and each one sent more and more farmers and manufacturers in search of new markets to sell their surplus goods. 25 The discontent and turmoil engendered by these economic downturns had no less an impact on America’s lawmakers. They eyed foreign markets the way an earlier generation of politicians had looked to the national frontier: as a “safety valve” for economic and social problems. There was a growing conviction in the 1890s that continental expansion had reached an end, and this only underscored the sense of urgency that many felt about the “export solution.” Many on Capitol Hill concluded that unless surplus manufactures and foodstuffs could be sold abroad, it would be impossible to break the cycle of “boom and bust” that had already produced so much economic hardship and social unrest.
Not everyone agreed that naval supremacy was the key to American commercial expansion. Many claimed that the relationship was a spurious one: Commercial advantage flowed to those who produced goods that were in demand. Why, opponents charged, should the United States rely on a navy to accomplish what could be achieved at much less expense to the taxpayer by a strategy of free and open trade? Foreign nations, they argued, were so dependent on trade with the United States that they had little incentive to harass American commerce or blockade the nation’s ports. In a fiery speech on the House floor, the populist “Sockless” Jerry Simpson of Kansas mocked the navalists’ arguments about a British blockade: “Every interest of Great Britain,” Simpson declared, “puts her under bonds to keep the peace with us. Why, sir, if Great Britain should throw her shells into any of our great cities—Boston, New York, or Philadelphia—she would in all human possibility destroy more property belonging to British subjects than to American subjects.” 26 The real threat facing America was not foreign aggression but rather misguided government policies. A large and expensive steel-hulled navy might feather the nests of shipbuilders and steel producers, but it would do little to address the nation’s most pressing economic and social problems: idleness, poverty, and hunger. Worse yet, a big naval establishment raised the spectre of European despotism.
Navalists invariably dismissed such arguments as misleading, and worse, short-sighted. Most argued that security knows no price: “The cost of building a navy casts no perceptible burden upon a country of our vast resources. It is the premium paid by the United States for the insurance of its acquired wealth and its growing industries. It is a cheap price to pay for safety.” 27 Even in the midst of the depression years of the mid-1890s, naval expansionists saw little need to revise their judgment about the economic benefits of naval spending. Speaking for many others in the House and Senate, Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut reminded the Navy’s detractors that “[c]ompared with other nations we are richer than any. Our national debt is less in proportion to our ability to pay it than that of any other nation. Our opportunity to raise money without seriously taxing the people is greater than the opportunity of any other Government. We would do well not to forget that the United States is rich and able to build such a navy as it requires.” 28 As for the notion that a large navy was incompatible with the nation’s republican ideals, naval advocates were quick to respond that security is the handmaiden of liberty.
Sectional Bases of the Conflict
In view of such rhetoric, it is not hard to see why some scholars view the debate over naval expansion in terms of competing judgements about what was strategically necessary and politically acceptable. 29 At what point would the need to establish an American presence on the high seas conflict with the nation’s long-standing tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements? Did America’s growing interest in overseas commerce require, ipso facto, the development of a battleship navy? At the same time, the debate involved questions of institutional power and constitutional authority. Would the creation of a large peacetime naval establishment subvert America’s constitutional order? Would military expansion create an “imperial presidency” and sap the power of Congress? These themes did run through the debate over the new Navy. What such accounts cannot adequately explain is why the issue of naval expansion split the country along sectional lines. Like so many issues in late-nineteenth century America, naval expansion divided the country along industrial-agrarian or core-periphery lines. On vote after vote in the Congress, politicians from the North and South clashed over a wide array of issues linked directly and indirectly to the issue of naval expansion.
Figure 4.1: Support for Naval Buildup, 1890–1901
Figure 4.1 summarizes the pattern of voting in Congress on naval expansion. The vast majority of the rollcall votes on the Navy during the decade dealt directly with appropriations for naval buildup. 30 Those concerning the price of battleship armor-plating spoke to the issue of naval expansion while raising Populist concerns about “price-fixing” and more broadly, the power of the Eastern “trusts.” Support for the new navy was strongest in the Northeast throughout the decade, especially among congressmen from the New England and Middle Atlantic states. 31 This bloc of urban and coastal interests was opposed by one that was centered in the South. 32 The pattern of voting in the West is more mixed. Much of the region aligned with the Northeast in the fight over naval expansion. Western support for naval expansion was strongest along the Pacific Coast and in the upper Great Plains. Representatives from the lower Great Plains (Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska) and the Mountain West (Montana, Idaho, and Washington) were more likely to align with Southern lawmakers. Together, they waged a rearguard battle against the new navy, constantly searching for ways to slow the pace of warship construction.
The Northeast and Naval Buildup
An ambitious naval shipbuilding program served the interests of America’s industrial heartland in three important ways. 33 First, a modern seagoing navy served the interests of industrialists and bankers who sought greater access to, and control over, markets in Latin America and Asia. These parts of the world were the focal points for America’s growing trade in manufactured goods and direct overseas investment, as well as a focal point for Northern politicians looking for concrete ways to signal their commitment to solving the problem of domestic “overproduction” by opening new markets. Second, such a program promised high-wage jobs for the Northeast’s workers, lucrative federal contracts for its shipyards and steel mills and gun foundaries, and business for many of its ancillary industries. Finally, naval expansionism proved to be enormously popular among the leaders of the Republican party. 34 Republicans used the Navy to create patronage, expand the party’s political base in the Western states, and siphon off politically embarassing budgetary surpluses generated by the protective tariff.
It is clear that a larger, more powerful navy served the commercial interests of the Northeast. The late nineteenth century was an era of rapid growth in American exports, especially in manufactures. 35 More and more of the region’s business community had a stake in overseas trade, and Latin America and Asia were areas of special interest to manufacturers. 36 The rapid growth in American exports of manufactures in the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic shift in the geographical pattern of trade: the share of American exports to Europe declined while exports to Latin America and Asia increased. 37 Before the Civil War, the bulk of America’s export trade went to Europe, particularly Britain, which was the largest importer of American cotton and wheat. Europe continued to be the biggest export market for the United States in the postbellum period, but as America industrialized it sold an increasing proportion of its exports in North America, Asia, and South America. Manufactures, led by the sale of finished goods, accounted for the bulk of this trade with less developed nations. 38 Industrial exports to Europe also increased in the period but not nearly as sharply; raw materials continued to make up the single largest class of exports to the Old World.
Despite fears among European industrialists that the continent would be commercially “Americanized,” it was becoming clear to some American economists that the real “commercial struggle between Europe and the United States centered not in the European market, but in the underdeveloped markets throughout the remainder of the world.” 39 This view was shared by many congressional delegations from the Northeast who saw the acquisition of world class navy and overseas bases and coaling stations as a significant first step in winning this struggle. It is true, as Edward Rhodes points out, that industrialists overestimated America’s need for markets in Asia and Latin America, but this is irrelevant. In the 1890s, the belief that the country would be running a permanent industrial surplus, well in excess of effective domestic purchasing power, was widespread in the Northern core. So was the notion that America’s best trading partners were nations less developed than the United States:
We know today that we can not successfully compete with England, France, and Germany in the manufacture of many goods that are sold in Europe. They have the markets there, and they hold the markets there. They are great manufacturing countries, and they can manufacture materials just as cheap if not cheaper than we can. They pay, as a general thing, less wages than we do, and their workmen and artisans labor more hours a day. We, too, are a great manufacturing country. We must find a market for our surplus goods. What we can not sell in Europe we must find a market for in Central and South America, in Asia and Africa, in the East Indies and the South Seas. Here is a new outlet and a great market. There is no doubt our merchants are aware of it and alive to its great advantages and rich opportunities. 40
The New Navy served the interests of the Northeast in other ways as well. One need not attribute the naval buildup to the dominance of “big business” to recognize that shipbuilders and steel producers, among others, also had a considerable stake in the modernization of the Navy, and to see that these producers generally acted in ways that were consistent with their interests. 41 Shipyards clearly profited by the demand for a strong navy. Economists at the time went even further and gave the government credit for almost single- handedly creating the steel shipbuilding industry. 42 Steel producers also enjoyed handsome profits, and before the 1890s many were already “active lobbyists and propagandists for naval expansion.” 43 At a time when rail and structural steel markets were poor, there was much to be said for a long- term, federally financed program involving large sums of money and little risk, even if it did involve some degree of government regulation. 44 Congress insisted that only domestic steel, which was more expensive than European steel, be used in the construction of American warships, and this fact only made the program more appealing to an industry that had massive capital requirements, and that therefore looked for ways to stabilize markets and allow for orderly debt amortization.
The geographic distribution of these industries all but guaranteed the Northeast the lion’s share of the Navy’s procurement budget. Nearly sixty percent of all naval contracts to shipbuilders during the decade went to Northeastern shipyards, almost three times the share that went to either Southern or Western shipbuilders. Similarly Northeastern steel producers won the bulk of the contracts for armor plating, gun forgings, steel projectiles, and other accoutrements of warship production. 45 The Middle Atlantic and Great Lakes regions accounted for more than four-fifths of the nation’s iron and steel output, with major concentrations in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Even though one of the nation’s newest and most prolific centers of steel production was located in Birmingham, Alabama, the South as a whole accounted for less than one-fifth of the nation’s pig iron.
Northern politicians also had their own political reasons to push for a bigger navy. By increasing America’s relative power in the international system, they would also be expanding their own power here at home. For starters, more federal money for shipbuilding meant more opportunities for patronage. Despite repeated calls to reform and clean up the navy yards located along the East and West coasts, the federal government’s shipyards continued to function as patronage machines. 46 A reliable source of votes in good times, naval contracts were especially valuable during difficult years. As the naval historian Benjamin Franklin Cooling puts it, the new navy “was really a vast public works project designed to further stimulate the business community.” 47 Such considerations were clearly at work during the depression-racked Cleveland years. Although he initially opposed Republican-style “pump priming,” Cleveland relented in the face of mounting pressure, calling on Congress to fund the construction of three new battleships and twelve additional torpedo boats. 48 Meanwhile, naval appropriations could be tailored to serve the goals of coalition-building, especially with the West.
Winning the West
Navy contracts were one of many devices used by naval expansionists to weaken resistance in Congress, and to broaden the geographic bases of support for overseas expansion in the process. California, Oregon, and Washington were clearly the biggest beneficiaries of these efforts, and the Harrison administration’s decision in 1890 to push for the development of two battleship fleets—one stationed in the Atlantic, the other based in the Pacific— was as political as it was strategic. Elected officials from these Western states had their own reasons for favoring naval buildup. Even before the 1890s, the Pacific Coast states reaped the largest share of the Navy’s budget on a per capita basis. 49 Union Iron Works of California was one of the nation’s largest shipbuilders, and there were many smaller ones stretching from San Pedro to Seattle. 50 Moreover, there was large carrying trade, and Latin America and Asia were areas of special interest to Western manufactures and merchants. 51 In the final analysis, that the Pacific Coast states aligned with the Northeast on the naval question is not surprising. By most measures of economic development, the states of the Far West had more in common with the Northeast than they did with the rest of the West. 52
Naval expansion served even broader coalition-building strategies for Northern Republican leaders. The intertwined issues of naval reform, commercial expansion, and the bargaining tariff provided Republican leaders with the basis for an electoral alliance with politicians from the agrarian West. This was a clever strategy that not only dealt with the immediate problem of winning support for naval appropriations outside the Northeast, but also provided a means to counter the powerful and seductive appeal of agrarian populism. The populist insurgency posed a serious challenge to the Republican party’s dominance in the Great Plains and parts of the Mountain West. 53 The fear was not so much that the newly founded Populist party would replace the Republican party, but rather that the Democrats would be the beneficiaries of any three-way competition, picking up House and Senate seats. Republican leaders were looking for ways to forestall further party losses. Starting from the premise that low farm prices, one of the farmers’ chief complaints, stemmed from overproduction, they argued that commercial expansion in Latin America and Asia was the remedy for the West’s problems. Commercial expansion, in turn, required a more powerful navy. They were, Northern Republicans argued, two sides of the same coin:
Not only respect for us depends upon the Navy, but commercial supremacy depends upon a proper and adequate naval force, a force proportioned to the magnitude of the country, to its resources, to its aims, to its purposes. No nation that does not maintain a navy can obtain commercial supremacy. Foreign trade flourishes where there is an adequate and proper navy to defend and protect it, or languishes where the navy is insufficient to protect and defend it. We of this country desire commercial supremacy.” 54
Many Westerners believed that the Republicans were up to no good. Some accused them of trying to divert the attention of the masses from the real problems—usurious interest rates, exorbitant prices for farm equipment, and greedy transportation rates. Others contended that the party of Lincoln was more interested in their votes than their well-being. Despite opposition, the Republican’s “divide-and-conquer” strategy worked in Congress. Many lawmakers representing hard-pressed farmers in the trans-Mississippi West found the promise of new markets in Latin America and Asia hard to resist. Whatever suspicions Western farmers had about Eastern Republicans, they also held “deep misgivings” about their dependence on the British market and viewed the growing competition from other wheat exporters, most notably Russia, with alarm. 55 British efforts to reduce dependence on American wheat only seemed to confirm their worst fears about the future of the European market. As a result, by the mid-1880s Western farmers were already agitating for new markets in other parts of the world, particularly Latin America and Asia. Sensing the West’s vulnerability on this issue, Republican leaders seized the opportunity, splitting the agrarians’ ranks and winning crucial support for naval appropriations.
The Logic of Southern Opposition
Logic and circumstance led the plantation South, and its elected representatives, to view the issue of naval reform differently. While the Northeast could hope to realize gains from greater federal spending on the Navy, most of the agrarian South could not and, in fact, did not. In large part, of course, the regional bias in naval contracting was unavoidable: most defense-related sectors were located in the Northeast and the Pacific Coast. Compounding matters was the fact that Southern influence on the House and Senate Committees of Naval Affairs was quite limited. 56 On average, Southerners held only one-third of the seats on the House and Senate Committees. 57 Under such conditions, only those non-committee members who represented Southern constituencies around the navy yards in Norfolk and Pensacola, and perhaps the steel mills in Birmingham, could expect to win navy contracts and generate patronage. For most members from the Southern periphery there were few political rewards in supporting naval shipbuilding, regardless of which party occupied the White House, and perhaps more to the point, headed the Navy Department. If naval spending was warranted, and few were prepared to concede the point, it made more sense (i.e., politically) to limit the amount. One way to justify such limits was to stress the continuing viability of the more traditional and less costly naval missions of coastal defense and commerce protection.
Table 4.1: Regional Export Dependence, 1870–1910
| Region | 1870 | 1880 | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| East | 0.017 | 0.039 | 0.023 | 0.021 | 0.024 |
| Midwest | 0.029 | 0.122 | 0.036 | 0.062 | 0.034 |
| South | 0.192 | 0.264 | 0.206 | 0.146 | 0.109 |
| West | 0.166 | 0.184 | 0.059 | 0.059 | 0.032 |
| United States | 0.049 | 0.075 | 0.049 | 0.062 | 0.039 |
Source: Ratios were estimated from data in William K. Hutchinson, “Regional Exports to Foreign Countries: United States, 1870–1914,” in Research in Economic History, ed. Paul Uselding (Greenwich, Conn., JAI Press, 1982), 7: 133–237. In the case of Regional Exports, estimates are based on those indicated in Hutchinson, Table 1, 145. Regional Output was calculated from Gross Regional Product Estimates of Hutchinson (200, table B.6), converting these from nominal to real terms using the GNP deflated index in Robert E. Lipsey, Price and Quantity Trends in the Foreign Trade of the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 422–23, app. G, table G-8. Hutchinson’s regional classification scheme differs from the one used here. In Hutchinson, states from the Great Lakes and Great Plains make up a separate category. In table above this category of states is referred to as Midwest. The “East” refers to the New England and Middle Atlantic regions.
Such considerations aside, the periphery did have a sizeable stake in foreign trade. And like their Northern and Western counterparts Southern politicians were very keen on expanding trade. In fact, the South was more dependent on foreign markets than either the Northeast or the West. Between 1870 and 1910, the region’s exports averaged between 15 and 20 percent of its regional output (Table 4.1). By contrast, the Northeast’s ratio of exports to regional output was much closer to the national average of exports-to-GNP of between 5 and 6 percent. 58 Even the West, which specialized in the production of exportable foodstuffs such as wheat and cattle, was sending less than 10 percent of the regional gross product abroad by the 1890s. One important reason for the regional disparity was the high level of specialization and trade between the Northeast and the West. 59 Compared to the Northeast, the South was virtually self-sufficient in foodstuffs, which sharply limited its potential interregional links with the West.
Table 4.2: Regional Exports by Commodity Type, 1870–1910 (percentage)
| Exports | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Region | Class* | 1870 | 1880 | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 |
| East | Materials | 8.7 | 8.9 | 8.5 | 9.8 | 17.3 |
| Food | 30.4 | 53.2 | 56.4 | 11.1 | 0.8 | |
| Manufacturers | 60.9 | 37.9 | 35.2 | 79.2 | 79.9 | |
| Midwest | Materials | 5.0 | 2.2 | 4.1 | 1.2 | 2.2 |
| Food | 80.9 | 92.1 | 83.3 | 98.0 | 81.5 | |
| Manufactures | 14.2 | 5.6 | 12.6 | 0.9 | 16.4 | |
| South | Materials | 98.5 | 86.4 | 89.8 | 85.6 | |
| Food | 1.0 | 11.9 | 9.2 | 15.1 | 9.0 | |
| Manufactures | 1.1 | 1.7 | 0.9 | 4.3 | 5.3 | |
| West | Materials | – | 1.0 | 0.1 | 1.2 | 3.8 |
| Food | 93.3 | 96.7 | 82.1 | 89.3 | 25.4 | |
| Manufactures | 6.7 | 3.7 | 17.8 | 10.1 | 70.7 | |
Sources: Based on data in William K. Hutchinson, “Regional Exports of the United States to Foreign Countries: A Structural Analysis,” in Research in Economic History, ed. Paul Uselding (Greenwich, Conn., JAI Press, 1986), 10: 131–54, 140, table 3. For each region and year the columns add to 100.0 percent except for rounding error. Hutchinson's regional classification scheme differs from the one used here. In Hutchinson, states from the Great Lakes and Great Plains make up a separate category. In table above this category of states is referred to as Midwest. The “East” refers to the New England and Middle Atlantic regions.*The five standard commodity classes were organized as follows: materials (raw materials); food (crude and manufactured foods); manufactures (semi- and finished manufactures).
Considering the South’s heavy dependence on international markets, it is not surprising that Southern politicians were among the most vocal proponents of expanded trade. For the South and its representatives, however, there was a key difference. Unlike the Northern core, the Southern periphery mainly produced raw materials (e.g., cotton, tobacco, minerals). True, the South’s share of national manufacturing production had increased since the Civil War. But raw materials, especially cotton, were still the region’s most important class of exports (Table 4.2). 60 And markets for raw materials were not to be found in Latin America or Asia. Unlike the industrial Northeast or the agricultural West, the plantation South required industrial markets, either in the United States or Europe. 61 A large offensive navy might be useful in promoting expanded trade with non-industrialized countries that could import Northern manufactures, and even perhaps Western foodstuffs, but it held little promise for securing markets for Southern raw materials. Those markets already existed, and European demand for Southern raw materials was strong at the time, accounting for almost 80 percent of Europe’s cotton imports.
The Southern experience thus contradicted the notion that “trade follows the flag.” A large and powerful navy was not required to guarantee access to overseas markets for the South. For this reason, many Southern lawmakers found arguments about the commercial value of a blue-water navy to be unpersuasive. One analyst puts the point this way: “While the Southerners were as interested in commercial expansion as other Congressmen, they doubted the need for a large naval establishment to implement commercial policy. Like Mahan, Southern Congressmen believed that commerce was the ‘civilizing’ factor that enabled the prosperous nations to help the unfortunate peoples of the world; unlike him, however, they were satisfied that commerce could perform this mission without the help of a new navy.” 62 What was to be avoided were policies that might provoke or exacerbate tensions among industrial nations and thereby threaten American access to the great industrial markets of Europe. Southern politicians who stressed the dangers of naval arms races were well aware of the commercial issues at stake. For the South, a policy of free trade was the best way to promote regional prosperity.
Southern lawmakers were risk averse: they were more sensitive to possible losses than potential gains. To be sure, there were important exceptions like Congressman Hilary Herbert (D-AL) and Senator John Tyler Morgan (D- AL) who believed that commercial expansion in South America and Asia provided a key to curing the South’s depressed, colonial condition. But these champions of Southern industry and overseas expansion were a distinct minority. 63 Most politicians saw whatever gains Southern industry could hope to reap through expanded trade in Latin American and the Pacific Basin as vastly outweighed by the needs of Southern agriculture. Old-line Democrats’ attitudes toward naval expansion reflected this essential fact. Twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War, over two-thirds of the Southern labor force was still involved in agriculture, and most of these were engaged in the cultivation of cotton. Here lay the Democrats’ core constitutency, not in the new urban, professional “business class” sprouting up in cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Charlotte. 64 Few Southern Democrats were prepared to compromise agriculture in the name of industrial progress, especially when such temporizing could open them to attack from Southern populists.
There was, however, a more immediate reason for Southern opposition to the development of a blue-water navy. To the extent that increased federal spending on the Navy could justify high tariff barriers, it was clearly damaging to Southern interests. The relationship between the Navy and the tariff was not lost on Southern politicians, many of whom viewed a vote for naval spending as a vote for high tariffs. The relationship between the naval expenditures and customs duties is not difficult to understand. Each year since the end of the Civil War, revenue generated by the tariff, the single largest source of federal revenue at the time, exceeded government expenditures. 65 One of the continuing issues before Congress was how to deal with the politically embarrassing surplus. One option was to reduce it by cutting taxes, thereby lowering trade barriers to foreign goods. Southerners favored this option because it would lower the costs of goods that they consumed, and because a policy of free trade was the best way to promote regional prosperity. Another option was to maintain tariff barriers and increase federal spending. This alternative was much more attractive to Northern members of Congress.
The trade-offs were clear to political representatives from the Southern periphery. As William Oates of Alabama noted, it was hard not to view the naval buildup as anything other than “a well devised scheme to take advantage of that unsubstantial and transitory popular idea in favor of building a navy, to make a permanent disposition of the surplus revenue, and thereby dispense with the necessity of revising the tariff and reducing taxation.” 66 He was not alone. Most of his Southern colleagues saw naval appropriations as a clever method for disposing of customs duties and redistributing wealth. In this regard, the naval build-up was not considered much different than the military pension, which also recycled revenues generated by the tariff. 67 Like the pension plan, the naval buildup disproportionately favored the Northeast. Disposing of government revenue by investing in the Navy was perhaps a more indirect and subtle means of redistributing wealth, but from the South’s vantage point the underlying purpose was the same. The industrial core would prosper at the expense of the agrarian periphery.
Politicians from the Northeast vigorously denied any such motive. All parts of the country, they claimed, stood to benefit from efforts to improve the nation’s ability to protect its coastlines and project power abroad. How, they asked, could farmers expect to sell their cotton and wheat overseas if America could not even protect its coastlines? Responding to criticisms from congressmen from agrarian states, William G. McAdoo (D-NJ), the future Assistant Secretary of the Navy, observed: “One month of blockade of our ports on the seacoast and you would burn more corn in Kansas than you now do....One of the vessels thundering from her iron sides is defending the humblest homes out on the prairies in Indiana, the great cities in the Mississippi Valley, and the miners upon the Pacific coast just as much as she is the cities upon the Atlantic.” 68 Naval enthusiasts warned that playing to divisive regional interests might be good politics, but it was damaging to the national interest. Sensing the danger and leaving nothing to chance, navalists called on their colleagues to take the high road and refrain from playing the sectional card. Paraphrasing Daniel Webster, Henry Cabot Lodge urged members to remember that in matters of state “all sectionalism ought to cease at the water’s edge.” 69 Such appeals may have struck a responsive chord in some quarters, but for those who opposed the naval buildup it was nothing more than self-serving rhetoric. One section’s gain was another’s loss:
It is well to remember, that the sums of money Congress is called upon to appropriate for these purposes will be drawn from our people by excessive and exhaustive taxation, taxation not necessary for the national defense, and will be expended in a limited section of our country, a section said to be prosperous, drowning in the fruits of the labor of other sections of the Union for the local benefit of the favored section, and this, while the industries of the greater portion of our country, the great agricultural interests, are fearfully depressed. 70
Conclusion
The modern American navy was forged in the crucible of regional political struggle. Often depicted as a contest between competing visions of America’s role in the world, the conflict over naval reform was also a conflict of interests. The stakes were high. As countless historians have argued, the foreign policy choices that politicians faced at the end of the nineteenth century were also choices about how to restore domestic prosperity and social stability in the midst of what was then considered America’s greatest depression. These choices entailed changes in the locus and scope of political authority at the federal level, and thus promised to alter the prevailing balance of power in the polity at large. More obviously, competing visions of the national interest carried with them different prescriptions for using the taxing, spending, and investment powers of the federal government. They implied choices about which overseas markets to pursue, which sectors of the economy to subsidize, and about whose blood and treasure should be invested in pursuit of these ends. Who wins? Who pays? These were the fundamental questions that divided the nation at the end of the nineteenth century.
The debate over the Navy was thus part of a larger struggle over whether the federal government should play a more active role in promoting American commercial interests overseas. Devising a more active role for government raised difficulties. The problem was not only that many Americans remained wedded to laissez-faire liberalism or feared that a more active foreign policy would mean a more powerful presidency. The more pressing concern was who would benefit from the adoption of a more activist, neomercantile strategy. The answer to this question did not turn simply on who won the naval contracts. Elected officials viewed the issue of military spending against a larger political canvass. The issue of naval reform was debated in terms of its impact on each region’s overseas commercial interests and on postbellum political arrangements like the protective tariff that continued to make the agrarian South a “colony” of the industrial Northeast.
This approach to explaining conflict over American foreign policy contrasts sharply with cultural and institutional explanations. Those who favor cultural or institutional explanations must explain away the fact that where politicians’ stand on questions of foreign policy is shaped by interests—their own, as well as those of the individuals and groups they represent. This is plainly evident in the case at hand. Politicians who championed a blue- water navy came from parts of the country that had the most to gain from an expansionist or imperialist foreign policy and the centralization of power that would accompany it. Those who remained wedded to the liberal or Jeffersonian ideal of a small brown-water navy and expressed fears about the “excessive growth of the state” were the ones who knew they would have little control over, and derive little benefit from, the strong state. Ideas were grounded in interests, and institutional conflict between the executive and legislative branches (and the Democratic and Republican parties) reflected patterns of competition that were grounded in deeper and broader societal conflicts.
Explanations of American foreign policy that rest on ideas and institutions confuse symptoms with causes. Each approach is handicapped by its view of politicians. Cultural explanations view America’s elected officials as though they were little more than surrogates of the Founding Fathers: poor substitutes to be sure, but substitutes nonetheless. Politicians are reduced to ideas, and politics is reduced to the clash of ideas. This is a very apolitical view of politics. Politicians may have strongly held beliefs but they also have interests. For them, ideas are also political resources: instruments for mobilizing voters, building coalitions, and translating interests into foreign policy. When naval enthusiasts like Republican Henry Cabot Lodge waxed Hamiltonian, linking naval expansion to national greatness, they were also playing politics, searching for ways to divide Democrats along sectional lines and strengthen the party’s control over the machinery of national government.
Many institutionalists recognize that there is a strategic dimension to politics. They see political leaders, executives as well as legislators, as strategic actors who are self-interested. Politicians seek power, influence, and approbation (votes) first; matters of principle come second. The problem with this view is not that it focuses on institutions per se, or that it insists that presidents and congressmen seek to protect and expand their institutional prerogatives and resources. Analysis of institutions is necessary; assumptions about political self-interest are sensible. The trouble with this view of American foreign policy is that it strips away the larger socioeconomic context within which fights over institutional prerogative are played out. Institutionalists flesh out the “agents” that culturalists caricature, but like culturalists, their conception of “structure” is narrow and insufficiently contextualized. In the 1890s, politicians were constrained by the harsh realities of economics. Their views about naval expansion and more generally, the national interest reflected this essential but often disregarded fact.
The analysis of America foreign policymaking at the end of the nineteenth century also tells us something about the limits of more traditional Realist explanations of strategic adjustment. Those accounts give pride of place to the “external” environment in explaining strategic change. They argue that America did not so much seek empire at the end of the nineteenth century as have empire thrust upon it. 71 For much of its history, the United States had lived in “splendid isolation,” free of internal discord and unfettered by the miseries of European strife. But by the late nineteenth century the geopolitical conditions that assured American safety in the past—geographical isolation, British naval power, and the balance of power in Europe—were rapidly disappearing. “The era which had seen the new world fattening on the follies of the old,” writes British historian John A. S. Grenville, “was coming to an end; soon the follies of the old world impinged on the peace and prosperity of the new.” 72 In the traditional geopolitical account, the United States, no longer able to assume the safety of the Western Hemisphere, was forced to respond by developing new means to deal with the new external realities. America adjusted, reluctantly and with periodic lapses, but it adjusted all the same.
Such accounts remind us of the importance of the international environment in explaining strategic change. Where Realists go astray is in assuming that the internal consequences of international forces are spatially uniform. They are not, especially in countries as regionally diverse as the United States. In the 1890s, as in other eras, uneven growth meant that the implications of external developments varied internally within the United States. One region’s strategic imperative was another’s economic albatross. For Northern industrialists and Southern cotton growers in the late nineteenth century, for example, the decline of British hegemony and the rise of imperial rivalry meant very different things: for the former, it opened possibilities for commercial expansion; for the latter it threatened an already-weakened liberal trading order on which the South was vitally dependent. The point is this: the implications of changes in the external environment are indeterminate when it comes to explaining grand strategy. International affects vary regionally, and must be translated into policy via a complex and competitive political process.
During periods of transition in American security policy like today, this indeterminacy is conspicuous. It is manifest in bitter domestic struggles over policy and, at a deeper level, in conflicts over the very meaning of “the national interest.” Because Realists cast their analysis at the national level, and miss crucial geographic variations in the effects of external forces, they cannot explain how changes on “the outside” produce big changes on “the inside.” They assume what needs to be shown: why one view of how America should respond to changing international conditions and circumstances triumphs over another. Without a model that shows how conflicts over the meaning of international trends and events are mediated politically, they cannot account for what they purport to explain: programmatic changes in strategy. In the final analysis, it is the realities of power inside a country, not the distribution of power in the international system, that determine the course of the nation’s grand strategy. In the 1890s, it was Northerners’ ability to prevail in Washington that produced a mighty blue-water navy—without this Captain Mahan’s ideas about American naval mastery might well have gathered dust on the shelves.
Acknowledgment
I wish to thank Catherine Boone, Lynn Eden, Emily Goldman, Timothy McKeown, Edward Rhodes, and Mark Shulman for their comments and suggestions.
Endnotes
Note 1: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945); Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955); and George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). For a general overview of this and related literature see Miroslav Nincic, Democracy and Foreign Policy: The Fallacy of Political Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1&-;24. Back.
Note 2: The standard references on the consequences for American diplomacy are Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1951); Henry Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Row, 1960); George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy: 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); and Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); For a contrary view, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). Back.
Note 3: This formulation is best expressed in Felix Gilbert’s classic To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). See also Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Robert A. Isaak, American Democracy and World Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977); Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Paul Seabury, Power, Freedom, and Diplomacy: The Foreign Policy of the United States (New York: Random House, 1963); and Robert Strausz-Hupé, Democracy and American Foreign Policy: Reflections on the Legacy of Alexis de Tocqueville (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1995). See also the chapters by Edward Rhodes and Mark Shulman in this volume. Back.
Note 4: Edwin Corwin’s The President’s Control of Foreign Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917) is the touchstone here. See also Louis Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the Constitution (New York: Norton, 1972); George C. Edwards, III and Wallace Earl Walker, eds, National Security and the U.S. Constitution: The Impact of the Political System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Harold Hongju Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power After the Iran-Contra Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); and Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (New York: Norton, 1969). For a good discussion of the relationship between American institutions and American strategy in the current period, see Aaron Friedberg, “Is the United States Capable of Acting Strategically?,” The Washington Quarterly 14 (Winter 1991), 5–23. Back.
Note 5: On this distinction, and its impact on foreign policymaking, see Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 63–64; David A. Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 69–72; and Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 51. Back.
Note 6: See Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Back.
Note 7: See, for example, Robert A. Bernstein and William A. Anthony, “The ABM Issue in the Senate, 1968–1970: The Importance of Ideology,” American Political Science Review, 68 (September 1974), 1198–1206; James Clotfelter, “Senate Voting and Constituency Stake in Defense Spending,” Journal of Politics, 32 (November 1970), 979–83; James M. Lindsay, “Parochialism, Policy, and Constituency Constraints: Congressional Voting on Strategic Weapons Systems,” American Journal of Political Science, 34 (November 1990), 936–60; and Kenneth R. Mayer, The Political Economy of Defense Contracting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 8: See John Agnew, The United States in the World-Economy: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ann Markusen, Regions: The Economics and Politics of Territory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987); and Richard Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Back.
Note 9: For a discussion of the various approaches see Michael J. Healey and Brian W. Ilbery, Location and Change: Perspectives on Economic Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 10: For a more extensive discussion see Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest, pp. 13–18. Back.
Note 11: Export dependence refers to the net balance of regional exports to regional imports, as well as to the relative importance of these exports vis-a-vis total regional production. Thus, a region’s export dependence measures its sensitivity to reductions in regional sales abroad. Back.
Note 12: The logic here is similar to that developed in sectorally-based models of foreign economic policy. See, for example, Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially 55–60; Jeffry A. Frieden, “Sectoral Conflict and U.S. Foreign Economic Policy, 1914–1940,” International Organization 42 (Winter 1988), 59–90; and Thomas Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38 (Winter 1984), 41–94. Back.
Note 13: See Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Brendan O hUallacháin, “Regional and Technological Implications of the Recent Buildup in American Defense Spending, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (Spring 1987), 208–23. Back.
Note 14: On this point see the discussion and analysis in Peter Trubowitz and Brian Roberts, “Regional Interests and the Reagan Military Buildup,” Regional Studies 26 (October 1992), 555–67. See also Ben Baack and Edward John Ray, “The Political Economy of the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States,” Journal of Economic History 45 (June 1985), 369–75. Back.
Note 15: Politicians, of course, have other goals, such as achieving political influence and making “good” foreign policy. Re-election, however, is a necessary precondition for pursuing these other goals. On this point see David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Back.
Note 16: On the changing role of the national government in foreign affairs during the 1890s, see Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion: 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and Robert L. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900 (Arlington Heights, Ill: Harlan Davidson, 1986). Back.
Note 17: The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 58. Back.
Note 18: Historians generally regard 1890 as the “pivotal” or “benchmark” year in the development of the modern American navy. On the distinction between the navy of the 1880s and 1890s see George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–2, 9–26; Robert L. O’Connell, The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), 60–71; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Gray Steel and Blue Water Navy: The Formative Years of America’s Military-Industrial Complex, 1881–1917 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979); and Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 213. Back.
Note 19: Lightly armored cruisers were “useful in deterring commercial states from aggression,” but they did not, the Secretary argued, “constitute a fighting force.” To wage “even a defensive war with any hope of success,” he continued, “we must have armored battleships.” What was needed was a fleet “able to divert an enemy’s force from our coast by threatening his own, for a war, though defensive in priciple, may be conducted most effectively by being offensive in its operations.” See Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1889, 51st Cong. 1 Sess., H. Ex. Doc. No. 1, Pt. III. The Secretary’s report was premised on the notion that the very character of naval warfare was undergoing a “seachange,” and that in the near future only seagoing, capital- ships would provide a credible deterrent to foreign pressure and aggression. Along these lines, the report also marked a significant change in how naval requirements were to be determined in the future. They would be based on comparisons of relative strength with selected foreign navies. On the significance of Secretary Tracy’s report see Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Benjamin Franklin Tracy: Father of the Modern American Fighting Navy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1973), 75–78 and Walter R. Herrick, Jr., The American Naval Revolution (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1966), 54– 68. Back.
Note 20: As a share of the total naval budget, the procurement of steel ships rose from a little over 13 percent in 1885 to 35 percent in 1895. By 1905, roughly 39 percent of the Navy’s annual budget was spent on the construction of new steel ships. By comparison, military pay’s share of the naval budget dropped from 43 percent in 1885 to just over 26 percent in 1895. By 1905, military pay accounted for a little less than 17 percent of the Navy’s budget. See Ben Baack and Edward John Ray, “Special Interests and the Nineteenth-Century Roots of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex,” Research in Economic History, ed. Paul Uselding, Vol. 11 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1988), 153–69, 156. Back.
Note 21: Secretary Tracy quoted in LaFeber, New Empire, 127. Back.
Note 22: On the initial debate over the relative advantages of an offensive battleship and coastal defense navy see Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1890, 21, pt. 4, 3161–72, 3216–23, and 3256–74. Back.
Note 23: For a discussion of Mahan’s ideas and their impact see Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power, 1–2, 9–33; LaFeber, New Empire, 85–89; and Sprout and Sprout, Rise of American Naval Power, 202–22. Back.
Note 24: Representative Thomas A. E. Weadock of Michigan, Congressional Record, 53rd Cong., 3d sess., 1895, 27, pt. 3, 2259. Back.
Note 25: There is a large literature on the “overproduction thesis” and its impact on American politics at the end of the nineteenth century. See LaFeber, New Empire; Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967); William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Random House, 1969); and James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 26: Congressional Record, 53rd Cong., 3d sess., 1895, 27, pt. 3, 2242. Back.
Note 27: Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy, Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1891, 21, pt. 11, app., 3171. Back.
Note 29: See, for example, the chapters by Edward Rhodes and Mark Shulman in this volume. See also Lance Buhl, “Maintaining `An American Navy,’ 1865– 1889,” In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775– 1984, ed., Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984), 145–73 and Allen R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1984), 233–66. Back.
Note 30: Principal components analysis was used to construct an index or scale of state support for naval buildup. Only votes that loaded on the first component (i.e., where the loading was greater than 0.60) were used to construct the voting support scale. (A total of 18 votes made the cutoff.) One vote was then selected to define support for the naval buildup. The direction of every other roll call vote was determined by its sign of correlation with this roll call. The position of each representative on the votes in the analysis was then identified and a mean support score was calculated for the representatives for each state. Following convention, paired votes and announced positions were treated as formal votes. Territories that were not already incorporated as states by 1890 are not included in the analysis. Back.
Note 31: The Northeast refers to states in New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Great Lakes areas: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The South includes states from the Southeast and Southwest: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The West refers to states from the Great Plains, Mountain West, and Pacific Coast: California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming. Back.
Note 32: The mean for Northeastern and Southern states is 78.8 and 33.1 percent respectively. Back.
Note 33: Much of the following discussion is derived from Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest. Back.
Note 34: Edward Rhodes argues in this volume that Republicans before 1890 opposed naval expansion. The voting record in Congress suggests otherwise. While there were certainly exceptions, the vast majority of Republicans favored increased spending on the Navy as early as 1883. See Baack and Ray, “The Political Economy of the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States.” Back.
Note 35: Between 1865 and 1898, exports expanded from $281 million to roughly $1,231 million, making America the third greatest exporter in the world behind Britain and Germany. While most of this increase was due to the steady expansion of agricultural production, by the late 1890s manufactures accounted for fully 35 percent of the country’s export trade. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975) Series U 213–224. Back.
Note 36: For a discussion of the commercial preferences of the American business community during this period see David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 159–77. More generally, see William H. Becker, The Dynamics of Business- Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982). Back.
Note 37: On this point, and its relationship to the naval buildup, see Baack and Ray, “Special Interests and the Nineteenth-Century Roots of the U.S. Military- Industrial Complex,” 162. Back.
Note 38: On the changing regional composition of American trade see Emory R. Johnson, T.W. Van Metre, G.G. Huebner, and D.S.Hanchett, History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1915), 64–97. See also Matthew Simon and David Novack, “Some Dimensions of the American Commercial Invasion of Europe, 1871–1914: An Introductory Essay,” Journal of Economic History 24 (December 1964), 591– 605. Back.
Note 39: See Johnson, et al., History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States, 90. Back.
Note 40: Representative William Sulzer (D-NY), Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 2d sess., 1898, 31, pt. 6, 5905. Back.
Note 41: This is a prominent theme in Benjamin Franklin Cooling’s account of the steel industry and its role in the naval buildup in Gray Steel. Back.
Note 42: J.F. Crowell, “Shipping Industry of the United States; its Relation to the Foreign Trade,” in Monthly Summary of Commerce and Finance of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1901), 1373–1411. Back.
Note 43: Sprout and Sprout, Rise of American Naval Power, 194. See also Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 31–36. Back.
Note 44: The value of heavily armored battleships was certainly not lost on Andrew Carnegie, the voracious Captain of Industry, who candidly observed, “there may be millions for us in armor.” Cited in Cooling, Benjamin Franklin Tracy, 92. The irony here is that Carnegie was a vocal opponent of imperialist expansion. Apparently, he mastered the distinction between the “need” to develop tools of war and decisions to actually use them. Back.
Note 45: See Cooling, Gray Steel, Tables 5, 6, and 9. Estimates for regional steel output (measured in pig iron) are from Harvey S. Perloff, Edgar S. Dunn, Jr., Eric E. Lampard, Richard F. Muth, Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), 210. Back.
Note 46: For a discussion of this issue, see Cooling, Benjamin Franklin Tracy, 102–24. Back.
Note 47: Cooling, Gray Steel, 88. Back.
Note 48: For a discussion of the impact of the depression on the Cleveland administration, and the naval buildup more generally, see LaFeber, New Empire, 231–35. See also Cooling, Gray Steel, 120–21. Back.
Note 49: See John Legler, Regional Distribution of Federal Receipts and Expenditures in the Nineteenth Century: A Quantitative Study (New York: Arno, 1977), Table 24, 77. Back.
Note 50: J.F. Crowell, “Shipping Industry of the United States,” 1411. Back.
Note 51: On Western attitudes toward overseas commerce see Salvatore Prisco III, John Barrett, Progressive Era Diplomat: A Study of a Commercial Expansionist, 1987–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 13–30. Back.
Note 52: While these states were still major raw materials producers, by 1870 they had also achieved the greatest concentration of manufacturing-service activities outside the Northeast. For supporting data see Perloff, et al., Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth, 170–90, especially 182–84. Back.
Note 53: The following discussion owes much to William Appleman William’s cogent analysis. See his The Roots of the Modern American Empire, 319–37. Back.
Note 54: Senator Orville Platt (R-CT), Congressional Record, 53rd Cong., 3d sess., 1895, 27, pt. 4, 3045. Back.
Note 55: On Western attitudes toward the British market see Morton Rothstein, “America in the International Rivalry for the British Wheat Market, 1860–1914,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (December 1960), 401–18. Back.
Note 56: An obvious exception here was Congressmen Hilary Herbert of Alabama who was Chairman of Naval Affairs Committee in the early 1890s. A convert to Secretary Tracy’s naval reform program, Herbert went on to assume the position of Secretary of the Navy during the Cleveland administration. As Secretary, Herbert used his considerable influence to move a somewhat reluctant Cleveland to pursue the program begun by the Harrison administration. For an account of Secretary Herbert’s tenure in office see Herrick, The American Naval Revolution, 153–92. Back.
Note 57: Computed by author from Congressional Directory, selected years. Back.
Note 58: William K. Hutchinson, “Regional Exports to Foreign Countries: United States, 1870–1914,” in Research in Economic History, ed. P. Uselding, (Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press, 1982), 7: 133–237, 156. Back.
Note 59: David F. Good, “Uneven Development in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparison of the Habsburg Empire and the United States,” Journal of Economic History 96 (March 1986), 147. Back.
Note 60: William K. Hutchinson estimates that cotton accounted for roughly 50 percent of Southern exports in the late nineteenth century. See his “Regional Exports to Foreign Countries,” 155. Back.
Note 61: On the South’s dependence on European markets see Morton Rothstein, “The New South and the International Economy,” Agricultural History 57 (October 1983), 385–402. Back.
Note 62: Thomas Coode, “Southern Congressmen and the American Naval Revolution, 1880–1889,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 30 (Fall–Winter 1968), 108– 09. Back.
Note 63: As Joseph Fry repeatedly points out in his excellent biography of John Tyler Morgan, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and a champion of imperialism, such views were exceptional in the South, lying outside the mainstream of Southern opinion. See his John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). Back.
Note 64: Treatments of Southern politics after Reconstruction revolve around C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). Woodward’s account, which emphasized the demise of the old planter elite and the rise of a new urban, industrial, professional elite in explaining post-Civil War politics in the South, has been repeatedly challenged. It now seems clear that Woodward’s view of the disjuncture in Southern political life was overstated, that the planter class was still a powerful political force in Southern society, and that in most cases southern Democrats in Congress aligned themselves with agrarian-minded interests rather than industrially oriented ones. See, for example, James Tice Moore, “Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South, 1870–1900,” Journal of Southern History 44 (August 1978), 357– 78 and William Cooper, The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877– 1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). For a balanced survey of this issue and the relevant literature see Howard N. Rabinowitz, The First New South, 1865–1920 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992), 72–131. On the political orientation of Southern Democrats during this period see Carl V. Harris, “Right Force or Left Fork? The Section-Party Alignments of Southern Democrats in Congress, 1873–1897,” Journal of Southern History, 42 (November 1976), 471–506. Back.
Note 65: The surplus, and more generally the tariff, was a persistent theme in the debates over the Navy. Even in the mid-1890s, when many contended that government revenues were no longer sufficient to cover increased naval expenditures, the issue continued to provoke heated debate. See, for example, the speeches in the Congressional Record, 54th Cong., 1st sess., 1896, 28, pt. 4, 3193–203; pt. 5, 4502–23; pt. 5, 4847–56. Back.
Note 66: Oates, a leading opponent of the battleship navy, continued: “The right thing to do is to revise the tariff and reduce taxation and modify the internal-revenue laws so that there will be no surplus in the Treasury; leave the surplus in the pockets of the people, where it rightly belongs.” Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1890, 21, pt. 4, 3259. Back.
Note 67: For a similar interpretation see Baack and Ray, “Special Interests and the Nineteenth-Century Roots of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex,” 167. On the relationship between the protective tariff and veteran’s pensions, see Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 62–73. Back.
Note 68: Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1890, 21, pt. 4, 3169. Back.
Note 70: Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1890, 21, app., 178 Back.
Note 71: See John A. S. Grenville and George B. Young, Politics, Strategy and American Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1961); and Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands, 2d edition (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964). Back.
Note 72: “Diplomacy and War Plans in the United States, 1890–1917,” in Essays on the History of American Foreign Relations ed. Laurence B. Gelfand (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), 240. Back.
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