The Birth of the New Navy

The Birth of the New Navy

USS Oregon, a pre-Dreadnought battleship

I. Introduction

A. The Navy, like the Army, experienced a period of rejuvenation in the period after the Civil War. Parallels:

1. Renaissance began in a context of reduced appropriations, social status.

2. Involved professionalization--esp. schools, intellectual ferment.

3. Each movement had a prophet--Upton in the case of the Army, Alfred Thayer Mahan in the case of the Navy.

B. Key difference: The Army only managed to establish some of the basic ideas for ultimate reform--e.g., a general staff considered but not actually developed; first steps toward a more integrated regular-reserve relationship but that's all.

1. Navy, by contrast, managed to realize its most significant reform program.

C. Navy's problems were similar to that of Army, but change (in this case) did occur.

1. Battle fleet emerged, was vindicated in 1898; then reform impulse faded.

2. For Army, the ideas were in place by 1898. But the War with Spain, from a professional Army perspective, felt like a defeat. (19th century Grenada).

a. Pros within Army recognized luck factor.

b. So did savvy public officials.

c. Reforms then implemented.

D. Reconstruction of the US Navy

1. 1870s: The Doldrums

2. At close of Civil War US had one of largest navies on earth.

a. But by late 1860s it had largely disbanded; no longer needed.

b. By mid-1870s US ships seemed antiquated.

(1) British naval periodical, 1876: "Never was such a hapless, broken-down, tattered, forlorn apology for a navy as that possessed by the United States."

(2) British naval officers visiting US warships were fascinated by their living museum quality.

(3) Oscar Wilde to an American woman who lamented America's lack of ruins. "No ruins! You have your navy!"

II. The Context of National Policy

A. Within a few years, however, this sorry state of affairs began to be reversed.

B. In order to understand why the Navy enjoyed relative success in its quest for modernization and expansion, one must grasp the changing nature of American expansionism.

1. Navy became an instrument of American expansionism.

a. Expansionism a historic American policy--one might really say a mindset--stretching back to colonial period.

(1) Two changes after 1860s

(a) shift from continental expansion to extracontinental expansion

(b) shift from territorial acquisition to exploitation of markets.

C. For several decades the settlement of the West Coast had been turning American attention toward expansion overseas

1. territorial expansion: Alaska; Central America (site of a potential canal); Caribbean Sea (flirtation with annexations, esp. of Dominican Republic); and Hawaiian Islands. These were areas considered desirable because they would facilitate trade.

2. economic expansion--quadrupling of gross national product: from $9.1 billion in 1869-1873 to $37.1 billion for 1897-1901.

a. exports increased more sharply than imports.

(1) $393 million in 1870

(2) $858 million in 1890

(3) $1.4 billion in 1900 (By 1898 US exported more than it imported)

b. cultivation of foreign markets regarded as a priority. If unsuccessful, as one observer warned, "our surplus will soon roll back from the Atlantic coast upon the interior, and the wheels of prosperity will be clogged by the very richness of the burden which they carry, but cannot deliver."

c. Originally the concern of the private sector, this emphasis on exports presently became the concern of the Federal gov't as well--pressures to avert or recover from economic depressions, e.g., that of 1884.

(1) Congressional appropriations for overseas exhibitions.

3. United States had also become involved in imbroglios in Central America, Samoa and Korea, which pointed up the need for a more modernized Navy to protect and extent US interests abroad.

D. "Social Darwinism" and Imperialism

1. Economic factors alone did not sustain this expansionist drive. It was buttressed by powerful ideological factors as well.

2. In Europe as well as the United States, this was a period of expansion--a renewed drive for power, colonies, markets.

3. "Social Darwinism"--Darwin's theories of natural selection applied, in bastardized form, to interactions among humans, sometimes at the level of business, sometimes at the international level.

a. Sense that competition between nations was necessary and right--a part of the natural order.

b. Assisted by the relative absence of really major wars since the Napoleonic period.

4. "White Man's Burden"--belief that Anglo-Saxon peoples must subdue and civilize the rest of the world.

a. American evangelists: John Fiske, Josiah Strong

(1) Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885)

E. New developments made creation of a modernized Navy possible.

1. Recovery from economic depression in early 1880s resulted in a large Treasury surplus.

2. By 1886 the Navy had ordered that all steel, armor, and ordnance for US ships should be made in the US, which encouraged Big Business to get behind the Navy.

3. Expanding US interests, esp. in Latin America, and realization that these interests lay at the mercy of stronger European and even Latin American fleets.

F. These factors meshed to encourage development of a new Navy,

1. beginning with four all-steel vessels in 1883

a. proposed by Naval Advisory Board, 1881.

b. Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dolphin. (ABCD Navy)

c. Between 1885-1889 thirty more ships authorized by Congress.

d. Congress also cooperated with SecNav William Whitney to improve Navy's bureaucracy and fleet personnel.

G. One element still missing: consensus on need for offensive fleet built around battleships.

1. Vessels built in 1880s still relatively short-range; designed for blockade-breaking, commerce raiding, coastal defense.

2. US moving in direction of very pronounced expansionism, but opposition--anti-expansionists--continued to operate as a brake both on US foreign policy and development of a full-blooded battle fleet.

III. The Brain of the Navy

A. Still, the altered environment of the 1880s encouraged reforms in the Navy's administrative and professional institutions.

B. Reform movements frequently have an "inside" and an "outside."

1. That is, some people work within the system while others remain outside, propagandize, and rally support without the burden of an institutional role.

2. In the case of naval reform, Stephen B. Luce was "Mr. Inside."

a. Institutional player; implements and pushes ideas within the naval establishment.

3. Alfred Thayer Mahan: "Mr. Outside."

a. propagandist; popularizer of ideas.

C. Stephen B. Luce--blessed with skill and charm from the outset; one of those officers whom everyone likes and respects.

1. Born 1827; midshipman 1841; ret. 1889; died 1917.

2. Rear admiral--grew up in old sailing navy; good sailor; wrote book Seamanship (1863); acknowledged a skilled sailor; also a teacher (although not a USNA grad).

a. Founder of US Naval Institute (1873).

b. Naval War College (1884)

3. Convinced that Navy didn't think about war very much, either strategically or tactically.

a. Therefore emphasized different scenarios; big on wargaming.

D. Alfred Thayer Mahan

1. Son of Dennis Hart Mahan; got into USNA almost by accident; undistinguished career for 20 years. Not a good sailor. Avid reader. Asked to write The Gulf and Inland Waters (part of Scribner's Campaigns of the Civil War series). This gave him some prominence, brought him to Luce's attention.

a. Luce placed him at Naval War College.

2. Biggest claim to fame: The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783 (1890).

a. based on lectures given at Naval War College.

b. Anglophile and Episcopalian--great religious conviction wedded to his ideas.

c. Power projection by sea--not just a strategy but a philosophy. Involved and incorporated imperialism into national security policy.

(1) Three essential elements for great power status: trade (including open markets and protect markets like colonies); ships to carry trade; and a military force to protect trade.

(2) Mahanian idea involves overseas bases and colonies.

d. Required a fleet in being

(1) quest for decisive battle

(a) all else would follow

(b) detested commerce raiding.

e. Task of navies: command of the sea.

f. Method: large battle fleet capable of defeating enemy decisively.

(1) guerre de course considered indecisive.

g. Collateral needs of navies

(1) "stations along the road"--ports for fleet; more important if they had economic resources, too.

(2) sea communications--control of interior lines (e.g., Panama Canal, Suez Canal)

3. Criticisms

a. disproportionate emphasis on sea versus land power.

b. historical determinism inherent in argument

c. principle of concentration overemphasized

d. Mahan generalized too much on case of 18th c. Britain.

e. failure to assess implications of technological trends

(1) mine, self-propelled torpedo

(2) improvements in land communications

(3) later: submarine.

4. Mahan almost invariably wrong about technical details

a. but this was largely irrelevant to his main point

b. probably didn't create any ideas, but fit mood of the times very well.

5. Tremendous influence--read by Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and others. International recognition--first in Great Britain, 1893; later in Japan, Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered a copy for each German warship.

E. Institutional Developments

1. Use of Naval War College as ad hoc war planning organization. (Would be replaced by Navy Board in 1898 to plan and conduct Spanish-American War)

2. Office of Naval Intelligence - to conduct research on naval capabilities, intentions of foreign powers.

IV. The New Navy, 1890-1898

A. Publication of Mahan's Influence coincided with a strengthening of expansionist sentiment.

1. Not just a US phenomenon.

2. Europeans also expanding--rejuvenation of colonial impulse--struggle for markets--"White Man's Burden."

a. Period of rapid European expansion--"Scramble for Africa" and enclaves in China.

b. Japan also involved--Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895.

B. Mahan's prescription for a battle fleet came at a time when Americans were more receptive to this idea.

1. New sense that US needed to be able to engage in decisive fleet engagements and confidence that it had the potential to do so successfully.

C. Result was not a full-throated switch to construction of a Navy second-to-none, but rather a more modest but still purposeful steady expansion of American naval might.

1. Second Policy Board of 6 officers (1890) recommended creation of 200 modern warships with a cruising radius of 15,000 miles.

a. Rationale: no immediate need, but there were "indications" that US was entering a period of "commercial competition" when US would be "certain to reach out and obstruct the interests of foreign nations;" when we would "compete in earnest . . . for the vast and increasing ocean-carrying trade;" and when the opening of an isthmian canal would "place this nation under great responsibility which may be a fruitful source of danger."

2. SecNav Benjamin Tracy rejected this as "naval fanaticism" and requested "merely" 100 vessels.

3. Naval Act of 1890--Congress authorized construction of three "sea-going, coastline" battleships with a cruising radius of 5,000 miles.

a. Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon built: 10,000 tons, 15-17 knots, 4 13-inch guns and 8 8-inch guns (respectable firepower).

b. Throughout 1890s, about 2-3 new battleships authorized each year.

4. By eve of Spanish-American War, US had 7 modern BBs, armored cruisers; 7 protected cruisers.

V. Conclusion

A. In 1889, when Tracy entered office, US ranked 12th among naval powers. By 1893, when he left, it ranked 7th and by the end of the 1890s was third in the world.

B. Expansionism helped create the new Navy; expansionism helped fuel a belligerence that resulted in war with Spain in 1898.

1. Godsend for Navy--vindicated Mahanian notions of seapower.

2. Useful for Army, too--showed weaknesses of existing system; spurred reform. Colonial acquisitions gave Army a new mission.

C. We'll deal with the war and its aftermath next time.

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