ALFRED THAYER MAHAN
The ideas contained in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History have certainly resonated through the ages. Published in 1890, the book’s principal argument was that the United States must abandon the small satisfactions of regional hegemony and any hope of attaining economic self-sufficiency. Instead the nation should consciously emulate Great Britain in building a dominant navy to enhance its security, project power globally, and hence expand economically through free trade—where the nation’s advantages in natural resources and ingenuity could best be brought to bear. Mahan’s biographer, Robert Seager II, described the volume as “perhaps the most powerful and influential book written by an American in America in the nineteenth century.”1
This provocative claim invites us to reflect on what is meant by power and influence when comparing literature to history. Yet if we stick to nonfiction, Seager’s judgment appears broadly sound. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 2005, “No American since the Founding Fathers had worked out so systematic an analysis of the Republic’s geopolitical position in the world. To a people accustomed to thinking of foreign policy in terms of legal right or moral purpose, Mahan now offered hard talk about national interest, naval bases, firepower, lines of communication.”2 The Influence of Sea Power upon History was read and admired by Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Admiral John Fisher of Britain’s Royal Navy, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the decades after publication, the book was translated and used as a textbook for sailors in the German and Japanese navies. Charles Beard detected the book’s insidious influence on multiple levels: “Besides setting politicians aflame in the United States, Mahan set their rivals on fire in Europe and Asia and prepared the way for a world conflagration which began in 1914 in full force.”3 Whether Mahan’s theory of sea power helped cause the First World War is an exotic open question. What we do know is that The Influence figures prominently on naval training syllabi in the United States and across the world today—in China, most notably and, from a U.S. perspective, perhaps most worryingly.4 When China’s president Xi Jinping observed in July 2013 that the “oceans and seas have an increasingly important strategic status concerning global competition in the spheres of politics, economic development, military, and technology,” he was speaking Mahan’s language.5
Mahan’s body of work, which ultimately ran to 20 books and 137 articles, was an inescapable point of reference for many of the individuals discussed herein. Woodrow Wilson drew little instruction from Mahan’s Anglophilia, hardheaded realism, and incessant lobbying for greater naval “preparedness.” In 1914, the Wilson administration forbade all former naval officers from writing on the European war, silencing Mahan’s agitation for a more explicitly pro-entente stance. Wilson and Mahan disagreed sharply over the leadership America owed the world. Mahan viewed international arbitration as an unnecessary constraint to action that powerful nations like the United States should avoid—for this Achilles should have no unprotected heel. Wilson, conversely, believed that history’s cycle of devastating wars—destined to become more and more lethal due to technological advances—could be broken only if every nation ceded sovereignty and committed seriously to the success of a supranational entity vested with genuine power.
Wilson had a low opinion of Mahan’s worldview, but his hostility was a mere trifling compared to the contempt Charles Beard felt toward a man he considered one of the great villains in American history. Beard described Mahan as “the most successful propagandist ever produced in the United States.” He observed that Theodore Roosevelt “made Mahan’s work his bible of politics for the United States,” and decried the expansionary, imperialistic policies—culminating in the Spanish-American War—that his works had encouraged. He charged that Mahan had helped transform the United States from a nation that tilled its own land—a Jeffersonian idyll—into one that emulated Britain in exploiting other nations for the fiduciary advantage of a narrow elite. In attacking Mahan, Beard rounded on his compromised, politically motivated scholarship (a charge, ironically, that was often leveled at Beard):
What Mahan did in his propaganda was to “historicize” his creed for popular consumption, that is, to use history to “prove” that it was true, inevitable, and desirable. He had no training whatever in historical research, the scrutiny and authentication of documents, or the philosophy of historical composition. In all this he was a veritable ignoramus. He took such old works as suited his preconceived purposes, tore passages and fragments out of their context, and pieced his notes together in such a fashion as to represent his own image of life, economy, sea power, greed, and war.6
Beard believed that Mahan had played a pivotal role in transforming the United States into a more violent and materialistic nation—shredding its virtuous, exceptional nature in the process. Thanks to Mahan and his policymaking acolytes, America left Arcadia and became as flawed and self-interested as every other nation.
It was during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and in the early Cold War that Mahan appeared less like a siren and more like a prophet. In the late 1930s, as Adolf Hitler’s Germany dismantled the Treaty of Versailles with ever-increasing confidence, the journalist Walter Lippmann led the way in calling for a stronger appreciation for Mahanian principles: chief among them that no hostile power, such as Nazi Germany, be permitted to assume control of the Atlantic. George Kennan similarly viewed Mahan in positive terms, as a man who rejected isolationism as a comforting unhistorical dream, and who anticipated the importance of naval expansion and free trade: he charted “new paths at that time in the analysis of international realities—paths which led in the direction of a more profound appraisal of the sources of American security.” Kennan identified in Mahan and the historian Brooks Adams (brother of Henry) “an isolated spurt of intellectual activity against a background of general torpor and smugness in American thinking about foreign affairs.”7 For Kennan, it was Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic illusions that caused American foreign policy to become disastrously unmoored from reality.
Mahan’s antagonists have raised some strong objections to his writings through the ages. A common theme is that Mahan’s worldview does not resonate with American values—a charge later leveled at Henry Kissinger. One can follow Charles Beard in criticizing Mahan’s worldview for being “based on the pure materialism of biological greed.”8 Or one can follow Woodrow Wilson in rejecting Mahan’s pessimistic view that war is interwoven into the fabric of the international system, that the United States should shun arbitration proposals and prepare for the worst. But it is impossible to deny Mahan’s prescience on so much of what would unfold. The world in which we live resembles the one he said would come to pass in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Washington-led world economic system is dominated by free trade facilitated by open shipping lanes; the U.S. Navy has no peer competitor in its global reach; significant world crises are rarely resolved through the good offices of the United Nations; and the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally if its interests are threatened. In all of these matters, for good and for worse, Mahan anticipated the shape of the modern world. And so the story begins here.
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On an early autumn day in 1871, an agitated elderly gentleman paced the decks of a Hudson River steamboat, mulling the indignities of government service. Adorned in quality fabrics, with piercing eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, Dennis Hart Mahan’s distinguished appearance did not deceive. Through his long career as a professor of engineering at West Point, Mahan dined with the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris, taught military science to virtually every senior officer who fought in the Civil War, and wrote seminal texts that revolutionized battlefield tactics.9 West Point made the man, and Mahan in turn had indelibly shaped its graduates: William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson all benefited from his instruction. Yet despite compiling a towering record of achievement, Mahan was not reconciled to retirement. Although President Grant had previously assured Mahan that he could remain in his post for as long as he desired, West Point’s Board of Visitors had insisted on placing the sixty-nine-year-old professor on the retired list. As the steamboat approached Stony Point, Mahan decided with finality that the wrench of leaving his beloved West Point was too much to take—that life without purposeful labor was not worth living. He climbed the railings of the boat and cast himself onto the paddle wheel rotating below.
Obituaries attributed Dennis Mahan’s suicide to a momentary “fit of insanity,” the exculpation deployed in that era when distinguished gentlemen committed suicide. But the actual cause of Mahan’s death was the prospect of enforced indolence—compelling testimony to his unbalanced work ethic. The dangers of this trait were deftly avoided by his eldest son, Alfred Thayer, who bequeathed a legacy even more substantial than that of his father, but who managed his work-life balance with greater care. Alfred found his father impressive in certain aspects: upstanding, diligent, and possessed of a virtuous value system. Yet he could scarcely bring himself to acknowledge the shameful manner in which his father had abandoned his family.10 His only recorded reflections speak privately to his “seasons of great apprehension” that he might have inherited his father’s tendency toward melancholy and, potentially, self-destruction.11
Beyond these words, Alfred spoke little of his father’s suicide, either in his memoir or in his voluminous correspondence to friends and family. His reticence was indicative of the Victorian age in which he lived, but it also dovetailed with Mahan’s yearning for privacy and an aversion to making a spectacle of himself. While Alfred followed his father in educating the military’s brightest prospects, he never lost his dread of having to stand at a lectern and hold court for an hour or more. “I have … an abhorrence of public speaking,” Mahan confessed, “and a desire to slip unobserved into a backseat wherever I am, which amount to a mania.”12 It was the timeliness and logic of Mahan’s ideas—not an attention-seeking disposition—that brought him renown.
Born in West Point on September 27, 1840, Alfred was the first of six children raised in a solvent, stable family that set great store in the value of education. His father was raised in Virginia to Irish parents, although his Anglophilia—he shed his Irish affectations with breezy abandon—was untypical of second-generation emigrants from the old country. Alfred’s mother, Mary Okill, was a devout Christian who prayed daily that her eldest son would pursue a career as a clergyman. Mary was a northerner, and this was the only flaw that her husband could discern in his wife, informing Alfred that “your mother is Northern and very few can approach her but still, in the general, none compare for me with the Southern woman.”13 That Mahan was a child of the South is reflected in his father’s reaction to discovering him reading a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “My father took it out of my hands,” Alfred recalled, “and I came to regard it much as I would a bottle labeled Poison.”14 Living in remote West Point—accessible only by steamboats in its prerailroad years and isolated by a frozen Hudson through the winter—ensured that Alfred’s early years were closeted but conducive to scholarly endeavor. Surrounded by his father’s books on military history, and compelled daily to display his mastery of Scripture by his loving but demanding mother, Alfred’s intellectual development was impressive, even if his parents’ stern pedagogical instruction left his social skills, hampered by a narrow circle of playmates, lagging behind the swiftness of his reading and the fluency of his writing.
Dennis Mahan’s desire to immerse his children in the societal norms of the genteel, slaveholding South informed his decision to send Alfred to Saint James School in Maryland, an Episcopalian boarding school attended overwhelmingly by the well-heeled offspring of conservative southerners desirous of an education that ignored Uncle Tom’s Cabin and treated chattel slavery as part of the natural order of things. Yet Alfred’s father was also pragmatic, so when Saint James failed to provide Alfred with what he took to be adequate instruction in mathematics, he had few qualms about sending him northward to the racier, cosmopolitan setting of Columbia College in New York City. Alfred entered the college as a freshman in 1854 and remained in New York for two years—the time it took for him to identify his calling. Keen to expand his horizons beyond the northeastern seaboard, Mahan decided that a career in the Navy offered an unparalleled combination of discipline, travel opportunities, and the moral and spiritual well-being that comes with pursuing a selfless life in the service of one’s nation.
Dennis Mahan’s reaction to his son’s plans for a career at sea was distinctly cool. Looking back in later years, Alfred could not help but applaud his father’s prescience: “My entrance into the navy was greatly against my father’s wish. I do not remember all his arguments, but he told me he thought me much less fit for a military than for a civilian profession, having watched me carefully. I think myself now that he was right; for, though I have no cause to complain of unsuccess, I believe I should have done better elsewhere.”15
So why did his father judge Alfred so unsuitable for naval life? The answer lies largely in the fact that the earnest and bookish young Mahan lacked the spirit of camaraderie that lured so many young men to the Navy. Reveling in the company of his fellow men was simply not Mahan’s thing. He was upstanding to the point of sanctimony, and his introspective nature and unbending interpretation of the rules made him a lonely student through his college years. “It takes at least twenty gentlemen to remove the bad impression made by one rowdy,” he complained to his father after observing uncouth behavior on a New York ferryboat.16 His sense of right and wrong was wound to an unsustainably high level, and this trait tended to antagonize all but the most prissy.
Placing his reservations to one side, Dennis Mahan went to great lengths to secure his son’s acceptance to the Naval Academy. He arranged an audience with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who had trailed Dennis by just three classes at West Point. Davis advised the aspiring sailor to meet with Congressman Ambrose S. Murray from New York, who in turn agreed to support Alfred’s admission to Annapolis. As Mahan acknowledged, “It has pleased me to believe, as I do, that I owed my entrance to the United States Navy to the interposition of the first and only President of the Southern Confederacy, whose influence with Mr. [President] Pierce is a matter of history.”17 Mahan had Jefferson Davis to partly thank for his success, but his route to Annapolis would have been much less certain with a different surname. His father offered unequivocal support, in the form of his personal prestige, when the stakes were highest for his cerebral, straitlaced son.
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Mahan was struck down by “melancholia” upon arriving in Annapolis—a pretty but provincial town of approximately eight thousand residents—in September 1856. The immediate onset of this affliction did not augur well for his career as a sailor, but he soon shook off his blues and in a warm letter to Elizabeth Lewis, the stepdaughter of his uncle, the Reverend Milo Mahan, professed himself wholly satisfied with both his classmates and his early experiences of sailing: “You can form no idea what a nice class we have … Our mutual attachment renders us I fear rather disloyal to the fair sex … Life at sea, so far as I have experienced it, is the most happy careless and entrancing life that there is. In a stiff breeze when the ship is heeling well over there is a wild sort of delight that I never experienced before.”18
These words are joyful and without guile. Yet this would be the first and last time that Mahan would wax lyrical about his fellow classmates and being at sea. Mahan concluded that Annapolis was “a miserable little town” and that he was destined for greater things than carousing with his philistine cohort of midshipmen. Mahan also soon discovered that he wasn’t really much of a sailor. In fact, he actively disliked the sea—the tedium of sailing broken only by sudden storms that he failed to endure stoically.
Instead, Mahan cruised through the academy’s unchallenging syllabus and devoted his spare time to reading the French medieval historian Jean Froissart, the diarist and diplomat Henry Lytton Bulwer, and the Scottish Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. His close friend, Samuel Ashe, was duly impressed by his friend’s range of learning, describing him as “the most intellectual man I have ever known. He had not only a remarkable memory but also a capacity to comprehend and a clarity of perception.”19 At Annapolis, Mahan managed to graduate second in his class without exerting himself beyond some last-minute cramming.
Alfred graduated in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, and the loyalties of his graduating class were split by the conflict that ensued. His views on the looming crisis were understandably mixed, combining as he did staunch Unionism with an implacably southern upbringing and no real hostility to slavery. His view of America’s black population was entirely typical of someone of his age and background, and he habitually deployed terms such as “nigger” and “darkie” to refer to free and enslaved African Americans. While never relenting in his opinion that America’s black population was inherently inferior to those of European stock, Mahan did amend his views on the “peculiar institution” upon encountering field slaves for the first time in South Carolina. As he remarked in his memoir, “It was my first meeting with slavery, except in the house servants of Maryland … and as I looked into the cowed, imbruted faces of the field hands, my early training fell away like a cloak. The process was not logical; I was generalizing from a few instances, but I was convinced.” Even his father, a proud Virginian who supported slavery and oozed contempt for the abolitionist cause, backed Abraham Lincoln instinctively in his struggle to restore the Union: “My son, I did not think I could ever again be happy should our country fall into her present state; but now I am so absorbed in seeing those fellows beaten that I lose sight of the rest.”20
Mahan’s Civil War was uneventful. The Confederacy’s naval assets were relatively inconsequential, so the Union enjoyed a mastery that was rarely challenged, allowing Lincoln to impose a strangulating blockade of the South’s main ports. Serving on the Union blockade, Mahan heard a shot fired in anger just once—at Port Royal, South Carolina, on November 7, 1861—and his references to the conflict invariably speak to the essential tedium of serving through the defining conflict of American history. The Civil War did not make Mahan in the way that later diplomatic thinkers were shaped by their experience of the First and Second World Wars. Mahan made one serious attempt to join the action, requesting a transfer to the Monongahela, which was then engaged in the “sociable” (and more perilous) blockade of Mobile, Alabama. His transfer was declined and his classmate Roderick Prentiss was ordered to the ship instead. It was a fortunate rejection for Mahan, for Prentiss was killed aboard the Monongahela during the Battle of Mobile Bay of August 1864. The main highlight of Mahan’s war was an encounter with a victorious General William Sherman, whom he had approached in Savannah with a message from his father. When Mahan introduced himself, Sherman “broke into a smile—all over as they say—shook my hand forcibly, and exclaimed ‘What, the son of old Dennis?’ reverting instinctively to the familiar epithet of school days.” Sherman confessed to feeling a great glow of pride whenever Professor Mahan “dismissed him from the blackboard with the commendation, ‘Very well done Mr. Sherman.’”21 Victorious in Georgia with the Union’s most celebrated general, Mahan found that his father still cast quite a shadow.
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Through his mother’s instruction, and the high regard that he felt for his uncle Milo, an Episcopalian minister who published to acclaim on various theological issues, Mahan was a devout Christian. Indeed, understanding the depth and sincerity of Mahan’s faith is essential to understanding his subsequent foreign-policy views. He tithed his income to the church throughout his lifetime—including the substantial royalties he would accumulate from 1890—and was near faultless in his church attendance. When he visited England, he was discomfited by the secular direction in which this otherwise exemplary country appeared to be headed. This was reflected in the haphazard fashion that its aristocracy and upper middle class regarded devotion to their maker—skipping Sunday service when frivolities like hunting got in the way. Tied to his religiosity were prudish tendencies that did not sit well with a naval career. When he rose to positions of command, for example, Mahan believed that talk of sex was improper and so he refused to discuss “sanitary precautions against syphilis” with fellow officers, declaring that the “morals of factory girls” and those of “Charlestown Navy Yard girls” were also “unclean subjects and to be avoided.”22
Yet while Mahan’s Christianity was traditional in its approach to Scripture, it was also fairly progressive by the standards of the day. Mahan was a staunch Republican and throughout his life was a vocal opponent of radical progressivism, socialism, and indeed anything that smacked of excessive government interference in one’s private sphere. But he recognized that he owed a duty to God to invest some time in ameliorating the conditions of others less blessed. In later years he decried the growing epidemic of homelessness in America’s major cities: “There is no condition of life that should appeal more strongly to the sympathy of the fortunate than that of the homeless.”23 He was sympathetic to many progressive causes. Sharing Theodore Roosevelt’s distaste for the excesses of the Gilded Age, he opposed trusts, monopolies, and the “malefactors of great wealth,” as TR famously described them. This is not to say that Mahan was at the vanguard of the Progressive movement. He opposed the imposition of the eight-hour day, was relaxed about child labor, and was shaken at the prospect of women being granted the vote—“the proposition to give women the vote breaks down the constant practice of the past ages by which to men is assigned the outdoor rough action of life and to women that indoor sphere which we call the family.”24 An orthodox conservative in many respects, Mahan nonetheless possessed the capacity to surprise.
At the close of the Civil War, Mahan embarked on a series of voyages that took him across the world, affording him a wonderful opportunity to observe America’s global competitors firsthand. In the winter of 1867–1868, Mahan traveled to Japan on board the Iroquois, a “beautiful sea boat,” as the young sailor described it to his mother, although his dread of storms also led him to observe that “despite what romancers have written, a gale of wind is uncomfortable and anxious to everyone responsible … who can say when an accident may happen or what chastening God may intend for us.”25 Having been spared God’s wrath across the Pacific, Mahan arrived in Japan at a propitious time, as Western-inclined modernizers were in the midst of casting aside the feudal Tokugawa shogunate in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The declared aim of Japan’s new oligarchs was now to “enrich the country, strengthen the military,” a program that Mahan supported for all right-thinking nations. While his first impressions were xenophobic, “I find the people uninteresting and don’t care for their peculiarities, nor for their customs,” he soon decided that “I think I shall like Japan; all agree in representing the people as amiable and goodnatured to the utmost. The two sworded fellows are the only ones who give trouble and they only rarely and when drunk.”26 Mahan was impressed by Japan’s efforts to emulate Western models of development, and he remained well disposed toward Japanese tenacity and ingenuity, even while in later years insisting that restrictions be placed on the ability of Japanese emigrants to settle permanently in the United States. Even then, his justification was reasonably complimentary:
Personally, I entirely reject any assumption or belief that my race is superior to the Chinese, or to the Japanese. My own suits me better, probably because I am used to it; but I wholly disclaim, as unworthy of myself and of them, any thought of superiority … Now while recognizing what I clearly see to be the great superiority of the Japanese, as of the white over the Negro … America doubts her power to digest and assimilate the strong national and racial characteristics which distinguish the Japanese, which are the secrets of much of their success.27
While Japan was forward thinking in its emphasis on Western-modeled modernization, Mahan believed that its people—“a very small race and nearly beardless, which tends to make them appear like boys playing at soldiers”—lacked the martial qualities to truly become a power of the first rank. The nation that he admired above all was Great Britain, which combined political stability, cultural achievement, the rule of law, economic ingenuity, hirsuteness, and a judicious emphasis on the vitality of naval preeminence. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, as Mahan was attached to ships destined for East Asia, Europe, and Latin America, his greatest comfort came not in the company of his fellow Americans but on British ships, where he could congregate with men of superior taste and sensibilities—and where his Anglophilia guaranteed a warm welcome. Reflecting on the historical necessity of the British seizure of the Yemeni port of Aden in 1839, Mahan would remark, “Are a pack of savages to stand in the way of the commerce of the world?”28 This sentiment neatly crystallizes his worldview. The British were doing the world a favor in their colonial expansion during the nineteenth century. They were opening backward nations up to trade, cleansing the arteries of global commerce, and thus doing all exporting nations a great service. As Great Britain inevitably lost strength, Mahan believed that the United States had to follow its path in building a similarly dominant navy.
This instinctive preference for British models and values, which his father imparted from an early age, was the bedrock upon which Mahan’s philosophy of sea power was built. Bolted up in his room, poring over volumes of those two giants of French and German historiography—François Pierre Guillaume Guizot and Leopold von Ranke—Mahan developed a sophisticated understanding of world history. But it was through traveling and observing the world that Mahan could see firsthand the Royal Navy’s unrivaled reach and influence, which in turn allowed Britain to enjoy high levels of economic growth and a constantly improving quality of life (even if it was becoming increasingly godless). Meanwhile, the United States was the rising power of the world. A combination of America’s abundant natural resources, high fertility rates, and a declaration of fidelity to British models of economic and military development would make it virtually unstoppable. But the America of 1880 was still far from reaching that Promised Land.
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In 1880 the sultan of Turkey, concerned at the parlous state of his nation’s finances, made some cuts to its diplomatic service. He closed his missions and embassies in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. His rationale was straightforward: all were medium-size powers that played a minimal role in world diplomacy.29 In retrospect it is easy to characterize the sultan’s decision as myopic, but in 1880 few world leaders would have been surprised by the news. In the two decades after the Civil War, successive U.S. presidents failed to chart a distinct, activist path either at home or abroad, and all have relatively undistinguished reputations today. From 1865 to 1885, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Chester Arthur scarcely approached Abraham Lincoln’s leadership and sense of purpose. Drift at the top meant that America was commensurately weakened as its prestige and position on the world stage waned. Particularly distasteful to Mahan was the pervasive corruption of that era.
With Congress ascendant in this same period, there was little appetite for authorizing the expenditure that might have made the United States into a top-rank military and diplomatic power. In 1869, Congress allocated a paltry thirty-one clerks to serve the far-reaching requirements of the entire State Department. Only with the greatest reluctance was this number nudged upward to fifty in 1881.30 Throughout the 1870s, the American Navy ranked twelfth in the world behind the sultan’s Turkey and a sullen and passive China.31 A punitive naval expedition against Chile was called off in 1881 when Washington planners noticed that the Chilean navy was superior in number to the U.S. Navy.32 In economic terms, the United States was moving through the process of displacing the United Kingdom as the world’s preeminent nation. But this bulky economic stature cast a faint military shadow.33
Throughout the 1880s, steps were taken to ensure that the United States packed a military punch that better matched its financial buoyancy. In 1882, the Republican Chester Arthur administration persuaded Congress to fund the production of seventeen steel-hulled cruisers to replace the wooden ships on which Mahan had learned his basic seamanship. None of these ships possessed armor or maneuverability to compare with the great navies of Great Britain or France. But adding metal to the fleet was clearly a step in the right direction for those individuals—overwhelmingly Republicans—who wanted America to play a greater role in world affairs. There was a clear partisan divide on the issue of what kind of global stance the United States should adopt. The Democrats favored states’ rights and local control, and were instinctively skeptical of increasing the size of the federal government. In light of the devastating Confederate defeat in the Civil War, it was hardly surprising that most Democrats subscribed to the view that, as one southern politician phrased it, “no man has the right or duty to impose his own convictions upon others.”34 Such moderation was anathema to most Republicans, who backed an active federal government in a dangerous world. And many, like Mahan, viewed Great Britain as the finest expression of what might be achieved when an activist foreign policy is allied with the moral and temperamental advantages of the Anglo-Saxon race. Imposing one’s convictions on others was simply indicative of well-placed self-belief and a fair reading of the future. If southern Democrats disliked this forceful logic, it owed everything to their shattered self-confidence, and nothing to a dispassionate reading of international affairs.
Even though Mahan agreed with his Republican friends and colleagues that the government should increase the size of the U.S. Navy, he did not embrace conventional imperial acquisition as a path to American greatness. In private correspondence in the 1870s and early 1880s, Mahan made clear that he expected the United States to develop a dominant presence in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean basin, specifically at the Isthmus of Panama, where he, along with many others, believed it imperative that America link the Atlantic to the Pacific through the building of a transisthmian canal. But to Samuel Ashe in 1884, Mahan had written, “I don’t know how you feel, but to me the very suspicion of an imperial policy is hateful; the mixing our politics with those of Latin republics especially. Though identified, unluckily, with a military profession, I dread outlying colonies or interests, to maintain which large military establishments are necessary.”35 He was an expansionist but not an imperialist—an important distinction at that time. Mahan soon realized that the United States did not need colonies; it simply needed guaranteed access to adequate harbors to refuel its ships. This was a powerful insight.
In 1883, Mahan published his first book, The Gulf and Inland Waters. For the previous three years he had been navigation officer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a position with little responsibility, leaving him ample time to write.36 The publisher Scribner’s had offered Mahan $600 to write the book, and as he sheepishly recalled to Samuel Ashe, “As I wanted the money I consented with great misgivings as to whether I could do justice to the subject, but believing I would probably do as well as another.”37 The book was a well-researched account of naval tactics during the Civil War, and Mahan’s main contention was that Union control of the Gulf, Mobile Bay, and the Mississippi and Red Rivers had been critical to the defeat of the Confederacy. The process of researching and writing the book—allied to its positive critical reception—recalibrated Mahan’s ambitions away from achieving promotion through active duty and toward seeking self-realization, and winning influential adherents to his thesis on the primacy of sea power, through the pen.
Soon afterward, Mahan’s scholarly ambitions received a significant boost. It had long been the ambition of Admiral Stephen B. Luce, a decorated sailor who admired The Gulf and Inland Waters, to establish a federally funded Naval War College in Rhode Island. Luce believed this new institution should offer an advanced, historically informed syllabus, far removed from the nuts-and-bolts training offered by the Naval Academy in Annapolis. In July 1884, Luce wrote to Mahan inviting him to join the faculty of the new institution, which he surmised had gained unstoppable momentum within the Arthur administration. Mahan leapt at the opportunity. He was keen to take any job that served the dual purpose of reuniting his family and realizing his passion for naval history. On September 4, 1884, his eagerness to return home was strikingly expressed in the acceptance letter he wrote to Luce:
I should like the position, like it probably very much. I believe I have the capacity and perhaps some inherited aptitude for the particular study; but I do not, on questioning myself, find that I now have the special accurate knowledge that I should think necessary … I ought to go home at once and be given till at least next summer to get up the work; I can only promise hard work … If you say come—I should wish to go home at once and be put on special duty.38
Mahan was evidently not worried about coming on too strong. A month later, on October 6, Luce’s inkling that the government was coming around to his way of thinking was proved correct when Secretary of the Navy William E. Chandler authorized the creation of the college in Newport, Rhode Island, under the supervision of the Bureau of Navigation. But it was not possible for Luce to spirit Mahan home quite as rapidly as he desired.
In November, the Wachusett, a sloop of war captained by Mahan, was anchored off the Peruvian capital city of Lima. Desperately bored and frustrated in his wait for good news, Mahan decided to take leave from the ship to catch up on some reading. He wandered through the city until he found the English Club of Lima, which was home to a small library housing some classics of literature and history. It was there that he read Theodor Mommsen’s The History of Rome, which told the story of the Roman Republic’s rise and fall. Mahan found Mommsen’s account of Hannibal’s heroic passage through the Alps—in which he lost a quarter of his army of approximately forty-five thousand—particularly insightful. Hannibal’s achievement in moving his army, including thirty-seven elephants, through arduous, snow-peaked Alpine terrain, is rightly considered one of the great logistical operations in military history. But think of what damage Hannibal might have wreaked against the Romans, Mommsen proposed, had he assumed control of the Mediterranean and circumvented the need for that perilous passage.
Mahan reflected on this insight for some time and had his eureka moment. In a letter to Admiral Luce in May 1885, he outlined his inaugural lecture course, which would focus on the vital strategic benefits that accompanied mastery of the sea. As he recounted to Luce, “Hannibal for instance had to make that frightful passage of the Alps in which he lost the quarter part of his remaining army because he did not control the sea … I read 2 ½ volumes of Mommsen in this one view.”39 Mahan wanted to update Mommsen’s thesis with specific reference to the Anglo-French strategic rivalry that had dominated the previous two hundred years. Britain’s victories, achieved primarily by the Royal Navy’s superiority, would serve as a virtuous example for his students to ponder and emulate.
It was not until October 16, 1885, that Mahan finally reported to Luce for teaching duty in Newport. A month previously, Mahan had warned Luce not to “expect anything in the way of lecture or instruction from me this year.”40 A forbearing Luce himself taught the nine student officers who turned up for instruction. But from this slow start, the Naval War College would establish itself as a vital pedagogical cog in the American military machine, educating such Navy luminaries as Ernest J. King, Chester W. Nimitz, Thomas H. Moorer, and William J. Fallon. Its future was uncertain through the late 1880s, however, dependent as it was on the vagaries of party politics. Republicans generally viewed the enterprise in a more favorable light than did Democrats.
In a letter to Samuel Ashe dated February 2, 1886, Mahan explained what his new job entailed:
The object is to impart, or at any rate, afford, courses of teaching in advance of what is taught at the Naval Academy, in many branches, but most especially on the more purely professional subjects—military subjects. Among these I have had assigned to me the subject of Naval Strategy and Tactics involving of course to a considerable extent Naval History … How to view the lessons of the past so as to mould them into lessons for the future, under such differing conditions, is the nut I have to crack.41
It was a broad remit that allowed him space and time to pursue his own academic interests. But a potential impediment appeared in Mahan’s path in the summer of 1886, when Admiral Luce was called up to assume command of the North Atlantic Station. With few credible successors readily apparent, Mahan stepped into the breach to assume the presidency of the college—a time-consuming job that curtailed the amount of time he was able to spend in the library. But Mahan still made rapid progress on the book that would eventually be fashioned from his lecture series.
Mahan worked long hours at the college, reading through the secondary literature on the naval history of the past two centuries. Having been able, due to the rigors of active duty, to read only infrequently and furtively for much of the past thirty years, Mahan was now being paid to read, to reflect, and to write—academic life lived up to all his expectations. And his presidency of the college also allowed him to invite guest speakers to Newport whose research interests and strategic predilections corresponded with his own. One such individual was Theodore Roosevelt, an effervescent, politically ambitious Harvard graduate—then dividing his time between ranching in North Dakota and politicking in New York City—who himself had published an influential naval history, The Naval War of 1812, at the tender age of twenty-three.42 The New York Times described Roosevelt’s debut as “an excellent one in every respect, and shows in so young an author the best promise for a good historian—fearlessness of statement, caution, endeavor to be impartial, and a brisk and interesting way of telling events.”43 The Naval War of 1812 established Roosevelt’s reputation for strategic thinking predicated on a judicious combination of deft diplomacy and the maintenance of a powerful military. Roosevelt appropriated the West African proverb that summarized this approach: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Mahan were very different in background, appearance, and personality. Roosevelt was garrulous, barrel-chested, and formidable in argument, a force of nature with a hardwired proclivity to lead. Mahan was tense, slender, and reclusive, more inclined to retreat to his study than lead a debate in a crowded, politically charged room. But Mahan and Roosevelt held strikingly similar views on the ideal composition of the Navy and the correct parameters for U.S. foreign policy.44 Both believed that the United States had learned the wrong lessons from the War of 1812—in which Britain and America had fought to a painful stalemate over the course of three years and America’s plan to annex Canada had been foiled—and this had retarded its naval development. The conventional view held that the United States had scored some notable victories against its more powerful opponent through the deployment of small, maneuverable single cruisers that targeted British merchant shipping and bled resolve through small-scale but painful engagements. Roosevelt believed that this strategy was unduly defensive—that, as Mahan phrased it, “we wanted a navy for coast defense only, no aggressive action in our pious souls.”45 Rather than being satisfied with a modest navy of small vessels with small ambitions, limited to the protection of America’s coastal waters, Mahan and Roosevelt believed that America needed to build a navy that better anticipated the global preeminence for which the nation was destined: large ships devoted to substantial causes in all four corners of the globe.
Following Roosevelt’s lecture to Mahan’s students in the fall of 1887, the two men talked at length on how this aim would be achieved. While it was not evident then, as Roosevelt’s vast potential had yet to be translated into tangible political influence, the division of responsibility would become apparent in subsequent years. Mahan would provide the ideas—the imprimatur of the respected intellectual—and Roosevelt would deploy his formidable powers of political persuasion. But to assume his share in this unspoken division of responsibility, Mahan had to first publish his magnum opus.
Throughout 1888 and 1889, Mahan devoted a great deal of time to securing a publisher for a book-length version of his lecture series at Newport, which he titled “The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783.” He first approached Charles Scribner’s Sons, the house that had published The Gulf and Inland Waters:
While lecturing at this institution during the past two years I have accumulated the text for a work, whose general scope is the bearing of naval power upon the general course of History in Western Europe and America between the years 1660 and 1783, the end of the American Revolution. It carries along a general thread of the history of the times, with a view to eliciting the effect of naval and commercial power events … and so afford an opportunity for pointing a lesson.46
Oblivious of the potential carried in Mahan’s final nine words, Scribner’s turned him down on the basis that his study was too narrow. Mahan sent his proposal to countless other publishers, but to no avail. As Mahan despaired to Luce on September 21, 1889, “I am naturally a teacher and would like to increase my audience … But I am not willing … to go on begging publishers. It both distracts, vexes and hinders me in my other work.”47 While Mahan did not go so far as to beg, he was impressively dogged in his attempts to track down a suitable outlet for his big idea. Later that month, John Murray Brown, the head of Little, Brown and Company, agreed to publish Mahan’s book, subject to revisions and additions. The publisher informed Mahan that the book would be priced at $4 a copy ($95 in today’s prices), suggesting that it viewed the book as a specialized scholarly title with an appeal limited to college libraries and wealthy individuals. A relieved Mahan was in no position to dispute the wisdom of its selling price.
Mahan’s manuscript—as he sent it to Brown—constituted an 185,000-word narrative study of the Anglo-French naval rivalry that raged through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Impressive as this was, it lacked a sense of immediate relevance, which was why so many publishers had taken a pass. What lessons could the United States glean from Britain’s successful campaign to forestall French dominance and expand its empire and, in turn, its commercial interests? How could a study of naval conflict in Europe speak to contemporary American concerns? To boost its appeal, Little, Brown asked Mahan to write a provocative introduction to the book, making clear what lessons his study should offer the United States. Mahan set about his task quickly and produced a memorable, punchy encomium to the vitality of the naval supremacy in an increasingly interconnected world.
Mahan’s hastily conceived introduction, titled “Elements of Sea Power,” ran to more than one hundred pages and overshadowed—in succinctness, originality, and impact—the original manuscript that had fared so poorly with publishers. His introduction stressed the vital importance of securing naval mastery and connected the links between sea power and commercial expansion, which, Mahan explained, assured the fundamental well-being of the nation. Mahan first praised Holland, a path-breaking maritime nation that overcame limitations in size and natural resources to grow wealthy off the trade secured by its magnificent navy. He next turned to Great Britain, a small island nation that wisely emulated the policy of naval primacy pursued by the Dutch in its successful bid to accrue wealth through expanded trade assisted by the acquisition of overseas territory. Although impressed by the British achievement, Mahan cautioned that the primary purpose of a strong navy is to secure the safe passage of trade—allowing a nation of America’s natural advantages to achieve economic preeminence—not necessarily to allow a government to annex land and gratuitously pick fights with its competitors:
The necessity of a navy, in the restricted sense of the word, springs … from the existence of a peaceful shipping, and disappears with it, except in the case of a nation which has aggressive tendencies, and keeps up a navy merely as a branch of the military establishment. As the United States has at present no aggressive purposes, and as its merchant service has disappeared, the dwindling of the armed fleet and general lack of interest in it are strictly logical consequences.48
But Mahan also recognized the necessity of progressive nations waging war periodically against those with less enlightened views on the efficacy of free trade, whose governments repress their citizens and seek overseas expansion to exploit and pillage, not to construct enduring commercial relationships. To ensure that the United States was not disadvantaged against such an enemy, Mahan suggested that it should establish a global presence in the form of overseas bases and coaling stations, to assure the continuance of trade in wartime and to allow the Navy’s military arm to strike decisive blows against its enemies. While Great Britain had built a formal empire to further this goal, Mahan believed that securing access to strategic ports, not annexing the nations to which they are connected, was a perfectly respectable route to wealth and power. His insight was borne out by the available evidence. Between 1870 and 1900, as Europe gorged on the territorial pickings available in sub-Saharan Africa, Great Britain added 4.7 million square miles to its empire and France expanded by 3.5 million square miles. The United States added a relatively meager 125,000 square miles to its territory in this same period but still leapt ahead of both nations in every important economic indicator.49
One of the most penetrating parts of Mahan’s introduction is his discussion of the “principal conditions affecting the sea power of nations,” which he divides into six categories—Geographical Position, Physical Conformation, Extent of Territory, Number of Population, Character of the People, and Character of the Government—which predict whether a nation is destined for naval greatness or not. The first of these, an unfortunate geographical position, might detract significantly from a nation’s naval potential. This occurs specifically when a nation shares a land border with dangerous enemies, increasing a nation’s susceptibility to land invasion and mitigating the potency of its navy. This factor strongly disadvantaged France—bordering Germany, Italy, and Spain—against Great Britain, protected by the Atlantic, North Sea, and English Channel. The United States shared some of Britain’s advantages in the sense that Canada and Mexico were unlikely aggressors, and the Atlantic and Pacific constituted vast barriers against the real threat posed by Europe and Japan. If a canal were successfully carved out of arduous terrain in Central America, however, this connection between the two great oceans would present both opportunities and threats to the United States. The trading benefits of a transisthmian canal were vast: “The position of the United States with reference to this route will resemble that of England to the Channel, and of the Mediterranean countries to the Suez route.”50 But American dominance of Central America and the Caribbean should not be taken as a given, particularly in light of America’s own naval weaknesses vis-à-vis her Old World competitors. To assure strategic dominance in this vital part of the world, “the United States will have to obtain in the Caribbean stations fit for contingent, or secondary, bases of operations; which by their natural advantages, susceptibility of defence, and nearness to the central strategic issue, will enable her fleet to remain as near the scene as any opponent.”51
Physical conformation is Mahan’s second prerequisite for achieving naval greatness. Deep harbors, connecting with long, navigable rivers, were essential to the accumulation of substantial wealth derived from trade. Although the United States was blessed with an abundance of deep-water ports and trade arteries such as the Mississippi, Mahan cautioned against complacency:
Except Alaska, the United States has no outlying possession—no foot of ground inaccessible by land. Its contour is such as to present few points specially weak from their saliency, and all important parts of the frontiers can be readily attained—cheaply by water, rapidly by rail. The weakest frontier, the Pacific, is far removed from the most dangerous of possible enemies. The internal resources are boundless as compared with present needs; we can live off ourselves indefinitely in “our little corner,” to use the expression of a French officer to the author. Yet should that little corner be invaded by a new commercial route through the Isthmus, the United States in her turn may have the rude awakening of those who have abandoned their share in the common birthright of all people, the sea.52
Again, Mahan reinforces a central message. More financial resources and political capital must be spent to maintain America’s dominant position in the western hemisphere, for the creation of a Panama Canal will both create opportunities and invite numerous challenges.
Extent of territory, Mahan’s third category, refers not to “the total number of square miles which a country contains, but the length of its coast-line and the character of its harbors.” The critical issue in this respect is whether a country’s population is adequate to protect the length of its coast. Great Britain, a small nation with a crowded population, clearly had sufficient bodies to patrol its waters and pack a significant naval punch. The Confederacy during the Civil War, conversely, had a long seaboard to defend with insufficient population to man the coastal defenses. The North’s blockade of the southern ports was highly effective and a critical component in its success. But the outcome of the Civil War might have been very different if the South’s population had been sufficient to defend its many ports: “Had the South had a people as numerous as it was warlike, and a navy commensurate to its other resources as a sea power, the great extent of its sea coast and its numerous inlets would have been elements of great strength … [The blockade] was a great feat, a very great feat; but it would have been an impossible feat had the Southerners been more numerous, and a nation of seamen.”53
Size of population was not as important a factor to Mahan as one might imagine. In the period following the French Revolution, “the population of France was much greater than that of England,” Mahan writes, “but in respect of sea power in general, peaceful commerce as well as military efficiency, France was much inferior to England.” Mahan understood that a large population meant a large domestic market and this sometimes meant that foreign trade, and the naval expansion to facilitate it, was not prioritized. And while having adequate numbers to man an effective navy was one thing, the quality of seamen themselves was the more important consideration. In 1793, the British Navy made a concerted effort to employ Cornish miners, “reasoning from the conditions and dangers of their calling … that they would quickly fit into the demands of sea life.”54 In other words, the lot of the average Cornish tin miners was so dank and perilous that the relative respite offered by naval life ensured that their work rate and hardiness greatly surpassed that of their soft French counterparts. Of course, the ideal naval power would be blessed with a high numerical population infused with a Calvinist work ethic—like Britain or the Netherlands on a much larger scale.
In Mahan’s opinion, national character was a vital condition affecting the sea power of a nation. Nations that aspire to strength, wealth, and global respect should have “aptitude for commercial pursuits.” In this regard, Mahan compares successful trading empires such as the British and Dutch with plundering nations like Spain and Portugal, which sought gain through “avarice” alone. While the Iberian peoples were “bold, enterprising, temperate, patient of suffering, enthusiastic, and gifted with intense national feeling,” they became blinded by gold-lust, failing to build the rudiments of a sound, diversified national economy: a functioning infrastructure, heavy industry, export-led manufactures, a sophisticated banking sector, and an entrepreneurial spirit that matched their spirit of adventure. On this matter, Mahan approvingly quotes a contemporary:
The mines of Brazil were the ruin of Portugal, as those of Mexico and Peru had been of Spain; all manufactures fell into insane contempt; ere long the English supplied the Portuguese not only with clothes, but with all merchandise, all commodities, even to salt-fish and grain. After their gold, the Portuguese abandoned their very soil; the vineyards of Oporto were finally bought by the English with Brazilian gold, which had only passed through Portugal to be spread throughout England.
Whereas Napoleon Bonaparte had mockingly dubbed Britain a “nation of shopkeepers,” Mahan made clear that this label was something to embrace: “The jeer, in so far as it is just, is to the credit of their wisdom and uprightness. [The British] were no less bold, no less enterprising, no less patient.” By character and temperament, Mahan asserted, the British “were by nature business-men, traders, producers, negotiators … The tendency to trade, involving of necessity the production of something to trade with, is the national characteristic most important to the development of sea power.”55 The French were superior in temperament and industry to the Spanish and the Portuguese—“France has a fine country, an industrious people, an admirable position”—but common among Frenchmen was a self-defeating tendency to save, practice thrift, and live a cloistered existence in their beautiful nation. “Who was it said there are two kinds of nature,” Mahan wondered, “human nature and French nature?”56 There was timidity inherent in the French DNA, which contrasted unfavorably with the British sense of adventure, reflected in their greater propensity to travel and spend hard-earned resources on riskier investments overseas. Britons sagely regarded the hoarding of money as a route to adequate but second-class status. It was fine for a self-satisfied nation such as France, but the British Empire aspired toward a grander ideal, namely, global supremacy founded on the unrelenting accumulation of wealth:
It is said to be harder to keep than to make a fortune. Possibly; but the adventurous temper, which risks what it has to gain more, has much in common with the adventurous spirit that conquers worlds for commerce. The tendency to save and put aside, to venture timidly and on a like small scale, may lead to a general diffusion of wealth on a small scale, but not to the risks and development of external trade and shipping interests.57
Britain’s acquisition of vast colonial territory—the “planting [of] healthy colonies,” as Mahan phrased it—and the pecuniary benefits this brought to the mother country, was another realm where national traits played a decisive role. Britain’s success, in Mahan’s opinion, owed much to the fact that “colonies grow best when they grow of themselves, naturally,” and that Britons did not feel compelled to remake their adopted homes into replicas of the mother country, as the French invariably did, or simply take what was valuable and send it back homeward, as was the case with Spain and Portugal.58
The English colonist naturally and readily settles down in his new country, identifies his interest with it, and though keeping an affectionate remembrance of the home from which he came, has no restless eagerness to return. In the second place, the Englishman at once and instinctively seeks to develop the resources of the new country in the broadest sense. In the former particular he differs from the French, who were ever longingly looking back to the delights of their pleasant land; in the latter, from the Spaniards, whose range of interest and ambition was too narrow for the full evolution of the possibilities of a new country.59
That Britons were better suited to the task of empire building owed much to the fact that the nations they colonized were invariably more inviting than the gray, wet, windswept country from which they came. The French had sunshine, an indigenous cuisine that was the envy of the world, and a cultural attachment to leisure that offended northern Europeans. How could the French compare with the British as a colonizing force? Leaving Blackburn for Burma was no great wrench for a Briton. But giving up Marseille for Martinique was likely to give a Frenchman far greater pause.
How did the character of Americans match up with their Old World competitors? Mahan viewed his countrymen favorably in that the U.S. population had an “instinct for commerce, bold enterprise in the pursuit of gain, and a keen scent for the trails that lead to it … It cannot be doubted that Americans will carry to them all their inherited aptitude for self-government and independent growth.”60 “Inherited” is the operative word. Mahan believed that Anglo-Saxon virtues had been passed down from Britain to its white settler progeny: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most important, the United States. But unleashing the nation’s latent capacity for expansion required bold leadership. A population possessed of an enterprising spirit was not sufficient. Channeling these potentialities into a coherent strategy required strong guidance from an American president cognizant of the manner in which maritime commercial success determined a nation’s place in the global pecking order.
Mahan’s final condition affecting a nation’s sea power was character of government, in which the book’s contemporary resonance was made most explicit. While Mahan instinctively preferred democracy, he was sharply aware that less representative governments often made the better choices on behalf of their people:
In the matter of sea power, the most brilliant successes have followed where there has been intelligent direction by a government fully imbued with the spirit of the people and conscious of its true general bent … but such free governments have sometimes fallen short, while on the other hand despotic power, wielded with judgment and consistency, has created at times a great sea commerce and a brilliant navy with greater directness than can be reached by the slower processes of a free people.61
Oliver Cromwell’s England was a good example of what farsighted despotism might achieve. Cromwell’s Navigation Act held that all imports into England or its colonies must be carried in English ships or in ships registered to the country where the goods originated. This decree was greatly resented by the Dutch, whose navy had carved out a niche as the preferred carrier service of that era—the FedEx of its day—but Cromwell’s actions greatly benefited English commerce.
Sound leadership was thus essential in the building of naval greatness. In peacetime, “the government by its policy can favor the natural growth of a people’s industries and its tendencies to seek adventure and gain by way of the sea.” In wartime, “the influence of the government will be felt in its most legitimate manner in maintaining an armed navy, of a size commensurate with the growth of its shipping and the importance of the interests connected with it.”62 The parameters of U.S. foreign policy had to expand radically to allow the nation to thrive—and to survive. America lacked the capacity to project power, and this was a critical limitation in a world that was shrinking in the face of rapid technological advances. Worse than this, the U.S. Navy lacked the ability to adequately protect its major cities from blockade, a blind spot that could be ruthlessly exploited by any nation determined to challenge the status quo. In its war against France, Britain had successfully blockaded Brest, the Bay of Biscay, Toulon, and Cádiz. What if a hostile nation attempted to do the same to Boston, New York, Delaware, the Chesapeake, and the Mississippi? Mahan was determined that throughout the twentieth century the United States would emulate the forceful, prescient Great Britain, not the wasteful, defensive France.
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Mahan’s vision for America corresponded fairly closely with the reality that unfolded throughout the twentieth century. Historians are divided on whether the United States is an “Empire,” an “Empire in Denial,” or an explicitly anti-imperial power.63 Irrespective of which term best encapsulates America’s capabilities and intentions, the nation’s route to achieving unrivaled global interventionist capability was the acquisition of geographically dispersed military installations—such as Okinawa, Japan; Holy Loch, Scotland; Diego Garcia; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and more than seven hundred other bases across the world—in precisely the manner favored by Mahan.64 Mahan recognized that America, blessed with abundant natural resources, need not acquire colonies in the fashion of Britain, Spain, and France. Indeed, the military expert John E. Pike observed in 2009 that “even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked” the United States from every base on its territory, the American military should still be able to “run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.”65
This is what differentiates the American empire from its predecessors. Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Palmerston, and Benjamin Disraeli had expanded their nations’ power primarily through the sword. All that America required was a peaceful world in which free trade was practiced. In this benign environment, America’s inherent advantages—a people protected by two vast oceans, self-sufficient in vital natural resources, and able to sustain a growing population through large-scale immigration—made its ascendancy virtually ordained. Mahan’s achievement was to make this so lucid.
Mahan’s foreign-policy vision was driven by an instinctive “realism”—the notion that a nation’s actions in international affairs must be driven by self-interest. He agreed with the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes that international politics was driven by a struggle for power. Conflict in the international system was inevitable—indeed, it was ennobling and virtuous in certain circumstances—and such circumstances precluded most countries from practicing anything that resembled altruism in world affairs. Unlike his friend Theodore Roosevelt, he was not stirred by Rudyard Kipling’s call to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and improve the lot of less fortunate nations through selfless but stern colonial instruction. He admired Great Britain’s willingness to rule multiple territories and believed these subjugated people benefited from their acceptance of British values, laws, and models of governance. But America possessed sufficient power and natural resources to eschew such activities as an unnecessary encumbrance. Mahan drew the lessons from history he deemed pertinent to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century; he did not believe that the nation should follow the historical experience of any other nation to the letter. He was a nuanced, contextual thinker.
In addition to this geopolitical particularism, Mahan concurred with the Scottish political economist Adam Smith that self-reliance and the pursuit of individual advantage would create a virtuous cycle of wealth creation that might benefit all socioeconomic strata. If the people of all nations worked hard and looked after their own, some kind of global equilibrium might be attainable, in the sense that wealthy nations were satisfied nations and that conflict, while unavoidable, might be curtailed in time through this diffusion of wealth. He was less convinced by another Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant, who believed that “Perpetual Peace” might be achieved if nations had the bravery and foresight to subsume their national interest in the name of a larger good guided by a supranational entity—a league of nations. This notion was fanciful and potentially dangerous, in Mahan’s opinion. A more peaceful world would be achieved by individual nation-states practicing the Mahanian virtues of free trade, export-led commerce, and the creation of advanced financial institutions, to enable a nation to invest adventurously and profitably across the world. This would ensure that all nations had a vital economic stake in the maintenance of global stability. “Peace” would be achieved from the bottom up, not downward from abstract Kantian heights.
Mahan’s magnum opus was received rapturously upon its publication in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt holed himself up in his library over the weekend of May 10–11 and read the book from cover to cover. Delighted by what he had read, he wrote a warm note to Mahan singing its praises: “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book. That I found it interesting is shown by the fact that having taken it up, I have gone straight through and finished it … It is a very good book—admirable; and I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.”66
According to Edmund Morris, Roosevelt’s most eloquent biographer, America’s future president “flipped the book shut a changed man.”67 In a review in The Atlantic Monthly, Roosevelt praised Mahan’s skill in “subordinating detail to mass-effects” and extolled his mastery of French sources. But the main purpose of Roosevelt’s review was to set out his store as Mahan’s foremost champion, to make clear what lessons his book held for the United States. What America needed more than anything else, Roosevelt asserted, was a “large navy, composed not merely of cruisers, but containing also a full proportion of powerful battleships able to meet those of any other nation. It is not economy, it is niggardly and foolish short-sightedness, to cramp our naval expenditures while squandering money right and left on everything else, from pensions to public buildings.” The Chicago Times admitted that it was “startling” to discover that “control of the sea has throughout history been the prime factor in deciding the leadership, the prosperity, and often the existence of nations, and … by throwing away her commercial marine and the occupations related to it [America] has deprived herself of the very means of creating a navy.”68
But the book’s warm reception in America was nothing compared to the enthusiasm its publication engendered in Britain and Germany. The Times of London decreed that Mahan’s achievement was of an order that British historians had yet to emulate, that the United States now stood “first in order of merit in the production of naval historical works which are truly philosophical.”69 An appreciative reviewer for Blackwood’s Magazine touched upon the prime reason for the book’s appeal in Britain, noting that it “might almost be said to be a scientific inquiry into the causes which have made England great.”70 In 1893, Mahan visited England and was hosted for dinner by Captain William H. Henderson of HMS Edgar. In an effusive toast to his distinguished guest, Henderson joked that the Royal Navy owed to Mahan’s instructive book the “£3,000,000 just voted for the increase of the navy.” Later that summer, Mahan dined with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. The kaiser sent a telegram to Mahan declaring that he was “devouring” his book and later ordered that a copy be placed on every ship in the German fleet. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to the German ambassador, Hermann Speck von Sternburg, that “I am glad Mahan is having such influence with your people, but I wish he had more influence with his own. It is very difficult to make this nation wake up.”71 Mahan was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. During a private dinner at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Lord Rosebery told Mahan that “no literary work in his time had caused such enthusiasm as Sea Power.”72 In 1894, The Times declared Mahan to be the “new Copernicus”—that Mahan had revolutionized naval history in the same way as the great Polish thinker had remade astronomy.73
This adulation transformed Mahan into one of the most prominent writers of the late nineteenth century. But he still found time to grouse that Britain’s swoon had not been replicated at home. “Recognition is pleasant, particularly after the almost entire absence of it at home,” Mahan complained to his wife. “Except Roosevelt, I don’t think my work gained me an entrée into a single American social circle.”74 With rather more grace, Mahan wrote to his one and only big-hitting American fan that he had “derived great satisfaction from the lavish expressions of appreciations given to me personally—that is, to my work.”75 Appreciative words aside, Mahan was disappointed that his name carried greater luster in Britain than in the United States. While he had dined with Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Rosebery, invites to President Benjamin Harrison’s White House were noticeable in their absence. But given the choice to gain entrée into just one American’s social circle in 1890, Theodore Roosevelt would be at the top of most people’s lists. Mahan’s enduring legacy as an architect of American naval expansion owed more to Roosevelt’s good opinion than all the bouquets that England could offer.
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From 1888 to 1895, Theodore Roosevelt worked for the New York Civil Service Commission, before serving a two-year stint as president of the board of the New York City Police Commissioners. These relatively low-key roles belied Roosevelt’s vast potential for national leadership, evident to most seasoned political observers at the time. Intellectually inquisitive and historically literate, as evidenced by The Naval War of 1812, Roosevelt made a strong impression on whomever he came into contact with. As John Hay, a future secretary of state, memorably recounted: “I have heard Mr. Rudyard Kipling tell how he used to drop in at the Cosmos Club at half-past ten or so in the evening, and then young Roosevelt would come and pour out projects, discussions of men and politics, criticisms of books … ‘I sat in the chair opposite,’ said Kipling, ‘and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.’”76
Roosevelt was nonetheless skeptical of those individuals who espoused big ideas based on cold, abstract reasoning, who lacked practical experience in a cognate field and a well-defined moral compass. He remarked, “Character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual.” As his career progressed to high office, he complained, “Oh, how I wish I could warn all my countrymen … against that most degrading of processes, the deification of mere intellectual acuteness, wholly unaccompanied by moral responsibility.”77
These cautionary words partly explain why Roosevelt viewed Mahan so favorably. He respected his naval experience and his duty in the Civil War, even if he was an unskilled and reluctant sailor and lacked the masculine virtues—an ability to hunt, fight, climb mountains, chase down robbers, and subsist in North Dakota’s Badlands—that made Roosevelt such a colorful character. Mahan adhered to a deeply felt value system in the form of his devout Christianity and possessed a strong sense of right and wrong. He knew where he stood on all the great matters of diplomacy and morality that were posed to him throughout his career. Mahan’s self-assurance, life experience, and depth of historical insight represented a potent combination that enthralled Roosevelt and led to him fervently championing his virtues. According to Warren Zimmermann, “Roosevelt acted as a self-appointed press agent for the Influence of Sea Power upon History.”78 The success of Mahan’s book came as a distinct relief to John Hay, “as Theodore would now no longer feel obliged to make [us] all go … to hear his lectures.”79
Although Roosevelt lacked a “bully pulpit” through the 1890s, his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 1893 to 1924, certainly had a forum for his ideas.80 His career spanned two seminal wars for the United States, and his influence on both was profound. Austere and haughty, Lodge possessed a fine mind—he completed a doctoral dissertation in history at Harvard under the supervision of Henry Adams—and agreed with Mahan and Roosevelt that the United States had to exert itself much more forcefully on the international stage. Throughout the 1890s, the United States was a regional power, whose only unassisted victory over another nation had been its defeat of institutionally weak, revolution-prone Mexico in 1848. Lodge recognized that American territory, and the virtual limits of American power, was restricted to the North American continent and that this had to change. Like Japan up until recently, the United States possessed the second-largest economy in the world. And like Japan, America was a bit-part geostrategic player, content enough to pursue a singular path in its quiet corner of the world. But even America’s fast-rising economic strength was looking a little shaky in the 1890s. In the midst of a depression that commenced in 1893, the acquisition of foreign markets appeared increasingly attractive to the leaders of American industry, and to ambitious politicians like Lodge and Roosevelt. Providing further impetus to overseas expansion, the U.S. Census Bureau had declared the continental frontier closed in 1890—Americans would have to look beyond their continent for acquiring additional territory. Across the ocean, the great European powers were carving up Africa in their scramble for colonial possessions. Many argued that the United States should be pursuing a similar path in the western hemisphere and the Pacific.
Lodge lacked the warmth and charisma to establish a national reputation—he was the archetypal Boston Brahmin in his wealth, seriousness, and lack of empathy for the “common man”—but with his keen mind and powerful oratory he became a major figure in the Senate. In 1895, Lodge made a speech on the Senate floor that owed a clear debt to Alfred Mahan:
It was the sea power in history which enabled Rome to crush Hannibal, perhaps the greatest military genius of all time; it was the sea power which enabled England to bring Napoleon’s empire to ruins … It is the sea power which is essential to the greatness of every splendid people. We are a great people; we control this continent; we are dominant in this hemisphere; we have too great an inheritance to be trifled with or parted with. It is ours to guard and to extend.81
Lodge’s tribute to Mahan’s theory of sea power tied the latter even tighter to the Republican Party. He wrote to his wife on his growing displeasure with the Democratic Cleveland presidency: “A year of this administration has convinced me, I think finally, that the future is with the Republican party—the outward necessary aspirations of the U.S. will only be fulfilled by the Republicans. With rare exceptions the Democrats know nothing of Sea Power—neither by knowledge nor by instinct.”82 Which side to back in the election of 1896—pitting the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan against the pro-business Republican William McKinley—provoked no agonizing on Mahan’s part. As he wrote to Samuel Ashe, “I have not found in the speeches of Mr. Bryan the proof that he is both intelligent and honest. He may be the one or the other, I can’t find it in his speeches that he is both.”83 He believed that a Bryan presidency would embolden and radicalize the labor movement and that his shortsighted preference for silver over gold would create rapid inflation and a slump in the value of the dollar—in short, that a Democratic victory would be a “terrible catastrophe” for the nation.84 What Bryan might do to Mahan’s beloved navy was disturbing. It thus came as a considerable relief to Mahan—and like-minded friends such as Roosevelt and Lodge—that McKinley defeated Bryan handily on November 3, 1896. The United States had elected a president whose views on an expansive economic and military strategy corresponded closely with Mahan’s. President-elect McKinley wasted little time in proving this point by appointing Theodore Roosevelt to serve as his assistant secretary of the Navy. While Roosevelt doubted the sincerity of McKinley’s dedication to a more muscular foreign policy—he remarked that he had all the backbone of a “chocolate éclair”—he was confident in his own ability to add ballast to the administration.85
Mahan and Roosevelt had maintained regular correspondence since the publication of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, and the latter’s elevation to government hastened this flow—although Mahan’s pen was the busier. In a candid letter to Roosevelt in May 1897, Mahan explained the purpose of his correspondence: “You will believe that when I write to you it is only to suggest thoughts, or give information, not with any wish to influence action, or to ask information. I have known myself too long not to know that I am the man of thought, not the man of action … The comparison may seem vain but it may be questioned whether Adam Smith could have realized upon his own ideas as Pitt did.”86
Mahan was being a little coy in this instance for, as subsequent letters make clear, there is little to distinguish the desire to “suggest thoughts” and the “wish to influence action.” The issue that Mahan pushed with the greatest energy was the necessity that the United States move swiftly to annex Hawaii. Japan had launched a highly ambitious program of naval building—taking a direct cue from Mahan’s writings—that threatened to tilt the balance of power in the Pacific toward Japan. To assert American interests in the Pacific, and forestall Japan’s potential advance, it was vital that McKinley take the Hawaiian Islands “under our wing,” as Mahan suggestively put it to Roosevelt.87 Mahan further pressed Roosevelt to lobby President McKinley for substantial increases to the naval budget, noting that “it is lamentable to have to insist on such commonplaces … but at times I despair of our country arousing until too late to avert prolonged and disastrous conflict.”88 Roosevelt replied that “all I can do towards pressing your ideas into effect will be done,” affirming Mahan’s efforts and inviting additional correspondence. He further confided that in an ideal world the United States would construct a canal through Nicaragua “at once,” build a dozen battleships, annex Hawaii, and expel Spain from Cuba “tomorrow.” Aware that these sentiments were incendiary, Roosevelt advised Mahan to be discreet on the issues raised in their correspondence: “I speak to you with the greatest freedom, for I sympathize with your views, and I have precisely the same idea of patriotism and of belief in and love for our country. But to no one else, excepting Lodge, do I talk like this.”89
In August 1897, Roosevelt wrote to Mahan that “I wish I could get a chance to see you. There are a number of things about which I want to get your advice, and a number of things I would like to talk over with you.”90 The foreign-policy issue that Roosevelt wanted to discuss with Mahan above all was Spain’s war against nationalist rebels in Cuba, and the myriad opportunities that the insurrection offered to the United States.
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A Castilian proverb offers insight into Spain’s shortcomings as a colonial power. In a bout of generosity, the story goes, God granted Spain a wonderful climate, fine grapes, and beautiful women. But when angels requested that he also give the nation effective political leadership, he refused, stating that granting this wish would make Spain heaven on earth—disincentivizing virtuous living in pursuit of the afterlife.91 Spain’s record of governing Cuba offered confirmation. Its colonial government was distant, repressive, and polarizing; the island’s economy was hamstrung by Madrid’s imposition of shortsighted restrictions on trade with other nations; and huge disparities in wealth, evident soon after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492, created tight-wound social tensions. In 1895, José Martí, the great Cuban nationalist and poet, sailed from the Dominican Republic to lead a popular revolt against Spanish rule. Just one month after his arrival, Martí was killed by the Spanish during the Battle of Dos Ríos. Cuban nationalists quickly overcame this setback and the insurrection gained force as the months progressed. The brutality of Spain’s response increased proportionally with the threat posed to its imperial prestige. Its troops murdered, raped, and pillaged in an effort to terrorize its opponents into submission. The war was a humanitarian catastrophe for Cuba, and belligerent sections of the United States press attacked Spain for the massacres it perpetrated. For American expansionists, the Cuban Revolution represented a gilt-edged opportunity to fight a beatable European power in the name of a conveniently altruistic goal. The spoils of any victory against overstretched, territorially bloated, imperial Spain were likely to be significant. And with the dissolution of Spain’s restrictive trade practices, U.S. business interests could penetrate Cuba’s economy and make substantial profits. Sensing an economic opportunity, Henry Cabot Lodge declared in a speech to the Senate that “free Cuba would mean a great market to the United States; it would mean an opportunity for American capital.”92 Political momentum for a war against Spain had been gathering pace during the final years of the Cleveland administration. With a new Republican president in place, the clamor intensified.
William McKinley remains one of America’s most enigmatic presidents, a legacy that he purposefully bequeathed. America’s twenty-fifth president refused to commit himself to paper, so historians and biographers have no personal correspondence from which to fashion a portrait. His friends’ papers are disappointingly guarded on the subject of McKinley’s character. So we have in our possession just tidbits of evidence from which to draw our conclusions: McKinley was commended for gallantry several times during the Civil War, he was a devout Christian who refused to work on the Sabbath, and he was utterly devoted to his invalid wife, Ida Saxton, whose life was blighted by epileptic seizures. He was high-minded, virtuous and, like Mahan, something of a prude—chastising friends and colleagues for bad language or inappropriate anecdotes.93 At the time of his inauguration, McKinley was an unknown quantity on foreign policy. In Congress he had avoided service on committees that attended to foreign or military affairs. Throughout the presidential campaign, he made no reference to Cuba, and he assured those who asked that there would be “no jingo nonsense” in his administration.94 Having fought on Virginia’s bloodstained battlefields during the Civil War, he evinced little interest in military adventure of the type that Theodore Roosevelt—who was too young to have fought in the conflict—believed was natural and ennobling. William McKinley was not, in other words, the obvious man to launch America’s first war of imperial acquisition against a major European nation.
For Mahan, as for many other “jingos,” Cuba was extremely important in geostrategic terms. Located 90 miles from Key West and measuring 760 miles in length, Mahan observed that its “positional value” was incalculable, and that a hostile navy in Santiago Bay “could very seriously incommode all access of the United States to the Caribbean mainland, and especially to the Isthmus.” As Mahan described it, Florida, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico formed a long peninsular line interrupted by narrow passages to the sea. If this line was interrupted by an avowedly hostile power, then the Gulf of Mexico might be blocked, causing untold damage to American commerce. This dismal potential outcome made Cuba as important—and potentially dangerous—to the United States as Ireland was to Great Britain.95
On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine, docked in Havana harbor, was destroyed by an explosion that claimed the lives of 260 of its 347 crew. Fitzhugh Lee, the U.S. consul general in Havana, witnessed the devastation. He noticed flames rising above the harbor walls, hurried down to establish the cause, and returned promptly to his office to inform Washington that the Maine had been sunk with the loss of many lives and that Spanish officers had been helpful and courageous in rescuing wounded Americans from the harbor as ammunition exploded around them. Lee was in no position to speculate on the cause of the explosion, but he noted, “I am inclined to think it was accidental.”96 The majority of Navy Department officials agreed with Lee’s assessment, although some suspected a more malevolent cause.
The cause of the explosion eludes us even today, although foul play appears highly unlikely. For the past century, official investigators and amateur sleuths have attributed the destruction of the Maine to either an accidental coal bunker fire or a collision with a Spanish mine. There was less equivocation in 1898 when prominent American newspapers, and politicians such as Roosevelt and Lodge, instinctively attributed the “attack” on the Maine to Spanish skullduggery and demanded an appropriately fierce response from President McKinley. In the week following the explosion, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal devoted eight pages daily to the sinking of the Maine. Lurid allegations stated as fact, such as “The Maine was destroyed by treachery” and “The Maine was split in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine,” increased the Journal’s circulation from 416,885 copies on January 9 to 1,036,140 on February 18.97 It even printed implausible diagrams showing how Spanish saboteurs had attached underwater mines to the hull and detonated them from the beach. When the illustrator Frederic Remington arrived in Cuba to find much ado about nothing, as the oft-recited story goes, he cabled Hearst: “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst was said to have replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”98 Joseph Pulitzer’s World was more restrained, but its editors were similarly convinced that this was no accident. Taking their cue from New York’s “yellow press,” jingo editors from across the nation joined the action, although some believed that fighting Spaniards in Cuba was beneath the nation’s dignity. As William A. White, a Kansas editor, wrote: “As between Cuba and Spain there is little choice. Both crowds are yellow-legged, garlic-eating, dagger-sticking, treacherous crowds—a mixture of Guinea, Indian and Dago. One crowd is as bad as the other. It is folly to spill good Saxon blood for that kind of vermin … Cuba is like a woman who lets her husband beat her a second time—she should have no sympathy.”99
As the French ambassador to the United States observed, “A sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation.”100 On March 14, Roosevelt, who was similarly spoiling for a fight, complained to Mahan, “I fear the President does not intend that we shall have war if we can possibly avoid it.”101 The beating of the war drum was deeply unsettling to the level-headed Mahan, who was genuinely appalled by the irresponsibility of the Hearst press and its chauvinistic aspirants across the nation. In a speech to the New Jersey chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, he pleaded for restraint: “We should be very cautious in forming hasty conclusions in reference to such things as this disaster. People are liable to jump at conclusions at a great national crisis like this which might involve them seriously.”102 Mahan, still focused intently on the Pacific and on the transisthmian canal, was not convinced that an American war against Spain was a strategic priority.
President McKinley shared Mahan’s caution, but the saber-rattling mood across the nation made it difficult for him to pursue a moderate course.103 Seven weeks after the Maine tragedy, with no declaration of war against Spain in sight, McKinley was hung in effigy in Colorado. The Hearst press reported with satisfaction that the president’s picture was commonly booed and hissed in New York theaters. As Ernest May writes,
To maintain a business-like “hands-off” policy toward Cuba could easily infuriate veteran, Negro, church, or other groups in the party … In no circumstances could McKinley, either as a Republican or as a conservative, ignore his responsibility to maintain a united party …
McKinley found himself faced with a terrible choice. He could embark on a war he did not want or defy public opinion, make himself unpopular, and risk at least the unseating of the Republican party if not the overthrow of what he conceived to be sound constitutional government.104
On March 28, a Naval Court of Inquiry issued a report that claimed presumptuously that the Maine had been destroyed “by the explosion of a submarine mine which caused the partial explosion of two or more of the forward magazines.”105 The logic of the battle cry “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” had become impossible for McKinley to ignore.
On April 11, 1898, President McKinley’s request for authorization to stop the fighting in Cuba was read out in the House of Representatives. The president’s primary justification for U.S. intervention was startling in its humanitarian emphasis. He requested Congress
to authorize and empower the President to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba, and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government, capable of maintaining order and observing its international obligations, insuring peace and tranquility and security of its citizens as well as our own, and to use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.106
Thus McKinley sought war to protect Cubans, and Americans, from the deprivations of a particularly unpleasant conflict. In emotive terms he evoked the suffering of Cubans, “a dependent people striving to be free,” who were being killed and maimed by “cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized practices of warfare.” McKinley justified the conflict not in terms of America’s national interest but “in the cause of humanity and to put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation, and horrible miseries now existing there, and which the parties to the conflict are either unable or unwilling to stop or mitigate.”107 His humanitarian casus belli allowed him to justify the conflict with some measure of sincerity. But as Ernest May astutely observes, McKinley led “his country unwillingly toward a war that he did not want for a cause in which he did not believe.”108 McKinley appeared to be a prisoner of events—dragged to war by a popular swelling of pugnacity.109
When the president’s war message was announced, impromptu street parties sprang up across American towns and cities, the Stars and Stripes were unfurled in the hundreds of thousands, and young men patiently stood in line to volunteer, appreciatively accepting free drinks from men and kisses from the ladies.110 The United States, not McKinley’s administration, stood up, puffed out its chest, and picked a fight with Spain, mainly because it could—it was cathartic. War also served the useful purpose of tying the North and South together in a patriotic embrace just thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War. When Congress authorized McKinley’s message and declared war on Spain on April 19, it disavowed the notion of imperial expansion. It fell to Albert J. Beveridge—a fast-rising political star who would serve as U.S. senator for Indiana from 1899 to 1911—to grasp the significance of the moment in a blissfully unvarnished speech justifying expansionary war. His words closely echo Mahan’s view that the military’s purpose is to protect and project commercial interests:
American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours … And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.111
Mahan was enjoying a family vacation in Europe when he was summoned to advise his wartime government. In mid-March, Mahan had sent Roosevelt contingency plans for a “strict blockade” of Havana and the western half of Cuba in the event of war against Spain. While Mahan had doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing Cuban independence above what he viewed as more substantive strategic goals, he remained keen to prove his intellectual worth to Roosevelt and McKinley in this moment of crisis. Delighted with the strategic merits displayed in Mahan’s blockade proposal, Roosevelt informed his mentor that “there is no question that you stand head and shoulders above the rest of us! You have given us just the suggestions we want, and I am going to show your letter to the Secretary.”112 Mahan’s blockade of Cuba was incorporated into U.S. naval strategy when Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long instructed Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, commander of the North Atlantic Station, to follow the plan. Impressed by the blockade recommendation, President McKinley appointed Mahan to serve on a three-man Naval War Board—alongside Rear Admiral Montgomery Sicard and Rear Admiral Arent Schuyler Crowninshield—charged with coordinating U.S. strategy.
The newly constituted board’s strategizing was aided by the fact that the enemy was hopelessly outgunned—a decrepit Spanish fleet faced a modern steel-hulled American navy consisting of four ten-thousand-ton first-class battleships, one six-thousand-ton second-class battleship, two armored cruisers, eleven protected cruisers, and a vast array of auxiliary cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo vessels. It was a war between the twentieth century and the nineteenth, and the victor was never in doubt. As Rear Admiral Pascual Cervera confided to his diary as war loomed in 1898, “We may and must expect a disaster. But as it is necessary to go to the bitter end, and as it would be a crime to say that publicly today, I hold my tongue and go forth resignedly to face the trials which God may be pleased to send me.”113 The trials that materialized were likely worse even than Cervera could imagine.
As Mahan voyaged back across the Atlantic from April 30 to May 7, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey scored a remarkable victory against the Spanish fleet far from Cuba in the Pacific theater. In previous years, Mahan’s Naval War College had carried out contingency planning for war against Spain, extolling the merits of an attack on the Philippines, its sprawling colony in the Pacific. On May 1, Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron had followed this logic and destroyed the Spanish fleet led by Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón. The battle was so one-sided that Dewey was able to place the American fusillade on hold so his men could eat breakfast. In the space of a few hours, at the cost of just one American life (induced by a heart attack), Spain’s position in the Pacific was destroyed.
Mahan was delighted with Dewey’s comprehensive victory but less enamored of the planning authority on which he served. He was quite happy to be put out of a job. On May 10, Mahan advised Secretary Long to disband the board and allocate all planning authority to a single naval officer on active duty. He believed that the unwieldy Naval War Board impeded effective decision making: “Individual responsibility … alone achieves results in war.” Mahan’s response to finding himself in a position of genuine power and influence was admirable. If the apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Kissinger is correct and “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” it certainly didn’t excite Alfred Mahan. Nevertheless, Long was not impressed by Mahan’s selflessness, and the board continued in its existing form with Mahan, in Warren Zimmermann’s words, “the dominant figure.”114
On May 19, 1898, Rear Admiral Cervera made a fateful decision to dock his fleet in Cuba’s Santiago Bay. Hemmed in by Mahan’s blockade, Cervera was unable to dodge the heavily armed American ships—the Indiana, New York, Oregon, Iowa, Texas, and Brooklyn—that loomed ominously in the distance. After six weeks of inaction, Cervera concluded that he had little choice but to face his destiny with as much vim as possible. On July 3, in full daylight, Cervera sailed his flagship, Infanta Maria Teresa, directly into the path of the American battleships in the hope that the distraction might allow the rest of his ships to break for the open sea. The Battle of Santiago Bay lasted just four hours. It is estimated that 160 Spaniards were killed, 240 were wounded, and 1,800 were captured, including Cervera himself. One American was killed during the battle and no U.S. warship suffered any damage. As Mahan wrote after the conflict, “We cannot expect ever again to have an enemy so entirely inept as Spain showed herself to be.”115 Steeped in the history of the great Anglo-French naval battles, Mahan could muster little enthusiasm for writing about the Spanish-American War. His Lessons of the War with Spain, published in 1899, was an underwhelming affair. The main lesson he conveyed was that the United States should never allow itself to become as unprepared and technologically deficient as Spain was in 1898.
Spain had been trounced at sea—its fleet incapacitated—and it took heavy punishment from the U.S. Army in Cuba itself. Theodore Roosevelt had been disappointed to miss the Civil War—and by the fact that his father did not serve—and he viewed the Spanish-American War as an opportunity to hone this martial aspect of his character. He resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy when hostilities commenced and set about raising a volunteer force, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry (“Rough Riders,” as they were colloquially known), to do battle against Spain in Cuba. The force mirrored Theodore Roosevelt’s myriad interests, background, and personality traits, comprising Dakota ranch hands, Ivy League scholars, East Coast polo players, cowboys, and policemen. The Rough Riders scored a much-storied victory against entrenched Spanish forces at San Juan Hill, and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt emerged from the war a popular hero. But it was the two crushing naval victories that paved the way for America’s ultimate success. The decapitation of Spain’s Caribbean fleet, allied with Mahan’s suffocating blockade, detached their vulnerable forces from the Spanish mainland some four thousand miles away. Hostilities ceased on August 12, 1898, and a formal peace treaty between the United States and Spain was signed in Paris on December 10. Cuban nationalists played no substantive role in the peace negotiations—they would learn their fate from afar. An important precedent was established that would hold true through the twentieth century: the destiny of newly liberated colonial peoples would be dictated by great powers at “international conferences” with less than pure motives.
* * *
America’s victory against Spain was one-sided, predictable perhaps, but it sent shock waves across the nations of the Old World—France, Britain, Russia, and Germany—long accustomed to viewing the United States as economically powerful, territorially sated, and avowedly isolationist: a second-tier power in world affairs. The United States was no longer a suitable target for embassy belt-tightening. As America celebrated and Spain lay supine, The Times of London offered a prescient editorial: “This war must in any event effect a profound change in the whole attitude and policy of the United States. In future America will play a part in the general affairs of the world such as she has never played before. When the American people realize this, and they realize novel situations with remarkable promptitude, they will not do things by halves.”116
It was with “remarkable promptitude” that President McKinley recognized the strategic and economic possibilities opened up by his famous victory. Although he initially harbored doubts about the wisdom of an imperial landgrab, informing Secretary of State John Hay soon after Dewey’s victory that he would be happy enough with “a port and necessary appurtenances,” he had been pushed toward bold actions yet again by the popular clamor to realize the spoils of war.117 At the war’s end, American forces occupied Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. More than ten million people—Hispanics, Indians, Polynesians, Chinese, and Japanese—were now in Washington’s care. Dominating the North American continent in the name of Manifest Destiny was one thing. But the United States now had in its grasp the power to transform itself into a bona fide imperial nation—a possibility that some Americans found seductive.
Ostensible independence was granted to Cuba—in keeping with the original declaration of war—but the Platt Amendment, passed enthusiastically by Congress and reluctantly by a helpless Cuban Assembly in 1899, transferred Guantánamo Bay to the American military on a perpetual lease and gave the U.S. government virtual carte blanche to intervene in Cuba’s affairs when its commercial and strategic interests were threatened. This was “independence” of the most compromised type. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were simply annexed in their entirety. President McKinley later told a group of fellow Methodists that he had prayed to God to seek guidance on what to do with the Philippines. The Almighty, an apparent devotee of realpolitik, answered that independence might leave the islands open to French or German imperialism—an unconscionable threat to American-led stability in the Pacific—and that the Filipinos were regardless “unfit for self-government.” God advised McKinley “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.”118 Filipinos were not pleased to lose one colonial master only to have another take its place so quickly. A popular insurrection against U.S. rule commenced in 1899. In embracing imperialism with such equanimity, the pragmatic philosopher William James wondered how America could “puke up its ancient soul … in five minutes without a wink of squeamishness.”119
Mahan believed that annexing the Philippine archipelago in its entirety was likely to create significant problems for the United States. As he confided to a considerably more gung-ho Henry Cabot Lodge, “I myself, though rather an expansionist, have not fully adjusted myself to the idea of taking them, from our own standpoint of advantage.”120 His preferred option was to keep the island of Luzon, with Manila and Subic Bay—an ideally situated Pacific base for the United States—and leave the remaining islands to Spain. Mahan’s skepticism about the wisdom of annexing the Philippines looks insightful in retrospect. The United States would spend the next fifty years there, quelling one popular revolt after another, resorting to brutal tactics that sullied its name in the court of world opinion and revealed an obvious disconnect between virtuous words and unpleasant deeds. Direct imperial rule was a wholly unpleasant experience for America. The informal commercial empire that Mahan favored better allowed the United States to cling to claims of higher virtue vis-à-vis its European competitors. The reality of empire jarred with America’s lily-white self-image.
While Mahan had doubts about swallowing the Philippines whole, he was nevertheless delighted that America had strengthened its position in the Pacific and Caribbean at scant material cost. He wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge congratulating him on his skill in smoothing the ratification of the Treaty of Paris through the Senate, declaring that “the country is now fairly embarked on a career which will be beneficent to the world and honorable to ourselves in the community of nations. I try to respect, but cannot, the men who utter the shibboleth of self-government, and cloud therewith their own intelligence, by applying it to people in the childhood stage of race development.”121 Mahan’s racist paternalism, entirely unremarkable of a man of that era cocooned in a privileged milieu, explains why he thought giving much of the Philippines back to Spain was a good idea—the indigenous population simply lacked the sophistication to establish stability and a measure of prosperity in the nation. Even inept Spanish rule was preferable to self-rule. The notion of national self-determination was ludicrous to Mahan; it was a well-intentioned but dangerous chimera.
Another fashionable theory to which Mahan objected vehemently was that international collaboration designed to limit armaments and mediate conflict was a potential route to world peace. Nothing in history suggested to him that such a course was plausible. An opportunity to vent his spleen on this issue was presented when Secretary of State John Hay appointed Mahan as a delegate to the First Hague Conference of 1899. Created at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, the conference was designed to seek constructive agreement on ways to limit the production of armaments, outlaw certain weapons systems that were currently in development (submarines and poison gas were the two most prominent targets), create diplomatic machinery to arbitrate on future conflicts, and extend the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention of 1863 to naval warfare. Twenty-six nations attended this hugely ambitious conference, which was predictably mocked in the American press as the “Czar’s Peace Picnic.”122
The skepticism was understandable in many respects. Russia had fallen behind its great power competitors in the development of advanced weaponry, and the notion that the conference was a ruse to have the world crouch to Moscow’s modest level was hardly fanciful. Mahan’s “own persuasion” was that “the immediate cause of Russia calling for the Conference was the shock of our late war, resulting in the rapprochement of the U.S. and Great Britain and our sudden appearance in Asia, as the result of a successful war.”123 Consequently, Mahan did not take the conference seriously, using his ten weeks at The Hague to finish some articles, correspond with his publishers, and advise the Russians on their plans to establish their own Naval War College. In lambasting the conference, Mahan formulated a powerful critique of pseudoscientific, multilateral institution-building that Henry Cabot Lodge deployed against Woodrow Wilson in 1919.
Mahan had no patience with the idea—predicated on universal restraint based on trust—of binding restrictions being placed on naval building. As he explained to the eminent British admiral Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, “The conditions which constitute the necessity for a navy, and control its development, have within the past year changed for the United States so markedly that it is impossible yet to foresee, with certainty, what degree of naval strength may be needed to meet them.”124 He also opposed the extension of the 1863 Geneva Convention to protect those involved in naval warfare. During the Civil War, Mahan had been appalled that the British had rescued Confederate sailors from vessels sunk by Union ships—these men would invariably find a way back home to rejoin the battle to uphold secession. Humanity had no place in naval conflict, and that is exactly what the extension of the Geneva Convention promised. Third parties should steer well clear of the belligerents. Defeated sailors should either die in the water or be taken as prisoners of war—it was only fair that naval victories should be recognized by imposing the harshest penalties on the defeated enemy. Finally, Mahan made a strong case “not to sign away [the] right to maintain justice by war by entering into a pledge beforehand to arbitrate, except on questions most strictly limited and defined.”125 As the United States assumed Brobdingnagian dimensions, it should resist attempts by Lilliputians to constrict its freedom of action. The notion that the world’s nations would agree to collaborate in this unprecedented fashion was a philosophical thought-experiment, not a serious proposal.
Underlying Mahan’s critique of the Hague Conference’s utopianism was the belief that war was a necessary, beneficial stage in the development of nations. As he explained to the reformer-philanthropist Grace Hoadley Dodge, “The shocking evils of war have so impressed [advocates of ‘international arbitration’] that they fail to recognize its moral character. Yet worse things can happen to a man—far worse—than to be mangled by a shell, or to a nation than to be scourged by war.” He concluded that if the United States avoided necessary wars against abhorrent enemies, under the cover of international arbitration, “it will have been better for the nation that it had never been born.”126 These remarks seem callous, and they did not convince Dodge. But Mahan was not blindly valorizing all wars and cruelly downplaying their human cost. He simply believed that some wars had to be fought to the end, no matter the blood sacrifice involved. In an article titled “The Peace Conference and the Moral Aspect of War,” Mahan argued convincingly that international arbitration during America’s war of independence, or during the Civil War, would have damaged America’s development and self-respect. Do-gooders can get in the way of natural justice. Compromise peaces are extremely damaging in wars against enemies that pose an existential threat. Unconditional surrender was Mahan’s mantra in such circumstances—just as it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s forty years hence.
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In the 1900 general election, William McKinley scored another decisive victory against William Jennings Bryan, winning 292 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176. McKinley’s victory had been aided by his popularly acclaimed choice of Theodore Roosevelt as his running mate. But as is often the case, Roosevelt was worried that the assumption of largely ceremonial duties might rob him of his vitality and bore him half to death. His concerned friend Mahan quickly identified a silver lining, advising Roosevelt to view the vice presidency as a benign form of imprisonment:
I do, however, rejoice in one thing; and that is that you are withdrawn perforce, and not by your own volition, for a prolonged rest from the responsibilities and cares of office … A very sagacious clergyman once remarked to me on the providential ordering in the life of St. Paul—whose career, I think, you will agree was at least strenuous, by which in midcourse he was arrested, and spent two years of enforced inactivity under Felix in Judaea, followed by two more in the Roman captivity. The total, four, as you will observe, is just a Vice Presidential term; and I trust this period may be to you, as it was to him, a period of professional rest coupled with great intellectual advance and ripening.127
Roosevelt’s contemplative incarceration was cut abruptly short when a young anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley in Buffalo on September 6, 1901. A telegram was dispatched to Roosevelt, hiking in the Adirondacks at the time, to inform him of the situation: “The president is critically ill. His condition is grave. Oxygen is being given. Absolutely no hope.” A second telegram arrived soon after, stating: “The president appears to be dying and members of the Cabinet in Buffalo think you should lose no time coming.”128 As Roosevelt received these telegrams on September 14, McKinley died from gangrene caused by his wounds. Roosevelt hurried to Buffalo to meet the exalted fate he had long expected. At just forty-two years of age, he was set to become the youngest president in American history. One of his daughters allegedly remarked that “Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” He had certainly assumed the limelight now, and not everyone relished the prospect.129 McKinley’s chief political strategist, Mark Hanna, crystallized the fears of many Republicans concerned by Roosevelt’s domestic progressivism and muscular foreign-policy instincts when he despaired, “Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States.”130
Roosevelt’s presidency witnessed eight years of assertive diplomatic activity designed to realize many of the goals that Mahan had been urging for the past decade. In 1903, President Roosevelt encouraged a powerful minority of wealthy Panamanian landholders to demand independence from Colombia. He amply displayed his sincerity by dispatching U.S. ships to the region to exert pressure on Colombia’s political leadership which, fearing the devastation that would accompany war, caved quickly. On November 3, 1903, Panama declared its independence and published a constitution drafted well in advance by Washington. The path was now clear for the United States to carve a “Panama Canal” through harsh terrain in a tropical, malarial climate, one of the most challenging engineering feats in history. The task was completed with consummate efficiency and singular brute determination—some fifty-five hundred workers died in the process. The canal was formally opened ten years later, in the summer of 1914.131 At a cabinet meeting called soon after the declaration of Panama’s independence, Roosevelt tested a defense of the amoral means he had deployed to separate Panama from Colombia, asking Secretary of War Elihu Root if he had answered his critics. Root replied, “You certainly have, Mr. President. You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”132 Mahan was predictably delighted with the outcome and cared little whether it was achieved by fair means or foul. American ships traveling from New York to San Francisco no longer had to navigate the Cape of Good Hope, slashing the distance from fourteen thousand to six thousand miles. The United States could now move its fleet swiftly between the Pacific and the Atlantic, depending on the threats posed on either flank.133 The creation of the Panama Canal was an essential prerequisite in making the twentieth-century America’s.
Roosevelt further reinforced U.S. supremacy in the western hemisphere through asserting its unilateral right to intervene militarily in the Caribbean or Central America if economic and political instability threatened its interests. The so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine stated that “chronic wrongdoing … may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” Mahan had long worried that the Monroe Doctrine of 1823—warning European nations to refrain from further interference in Latin America—was not accorded sufficient respect by the major European powers. He was delighted that Roosevelt had acted so strongly in asserting America’s police role in the region. Europe should now have little doubt that encroachment in America’s backyard would be met with a swift response. In a similar fashion, Caribbean and Central American leaders knew that they had to act in accordance with America’s interests lest they be punished. Subsequent presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, would follow the logic of the Roosevelt Corollary in ordering U.S. military action in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
As a president wholly in accord with Mahan on the preeminence of naval power, Roosevelt transformed the U.S. Navy into one of the top three in the world. By 1907, the Atlantic Fleet comprised sixteen state-of-the-art battleships. According to Secretary of the Navy Victor H. Metcalf, this force constituted “in weight and numbers combined, the most powerful fleet of battle ships under one command in any navy.”134 In 1908, the United States was ranked second among naval powers in the index of capital ships. In a remarkable show of force, President Roosevelt ordered four battleship squadrons, with attendant escorts, to circumnavigate the globe—a vast fleet manned by 12,793 sailors.135 Upending the conventional wisdom that secrecy should surround the movement of battleships, the so-called Great White Fleet advertised its movements well in advance to attract the maximum media exposure. Indeed, a press center was established on one of the ships, the USS Connecticut, to feed information to the large pool of reporters invited to hitch a ride, who, it was hoped, would file patriotic copy with their editors back home. Only Britain’s navy bettered America’s in size and technological prowess. The Great White Fleet was powerful testimony to Mahan’s influence as a strategist; Roosevelt’s presidency surpassed his wildest dreams. During his final months in office, Roosevelt compiled a list of his greatest presidential achievements, placing his success in doubling the size of the U.S. Navy at the top of the list, ahead of the construction of the Panama Canal and his successful mediation of the Russo-Japanese War.136
As Europe edged toward the primordial bloodletting of World War I, the United States stood on the cusp of greatness. Between 1860 and 1910, America’s population had tripled, from thirty-one million to more than ninety-two million—a demographic revolution made possible by mass migration from southern and eastern Europe.137 This massive influx of human capital, allied with the vast boundaries of America’s fertile landmass, allowed it to overtake Great Britain as the preeminent economic power by the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to Britain, however, American industry mostly responded to domestic demand—just 5 percent of U.S. output was sent abroad compared to the equivalent British figure of 25 percent. As the historian John Darwin observes of fin de siècle Washington, “The economic colonies of American business lay in the west and south of the United States, not overseas. There was no consensus for adopting the aggressive style or military preparedness of the other world states. But what turned out to be critical in shaping American views was the astonishing growth of the U.S. industrial economy, setting off fears of exclusion from other world markets.”138 Mahan’s Anglo-American-dominated global trading system—facilitated by the sagacious acquisition of strategically located military bases in 1898—had not yet come to pass. But the domestic market appeared to be reaching a point of saturation. As America’s economic health became increasingly connected with a stable international environment conducive to free trade, so its days of detachment from European affairs became numbered.
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Theodore Roosevelt left the White House in March 1909 and was succeeded by his secretary of war, William Howard Taft.139 A man not remembered for his charisma, or indeed for many of the skills usually deemed useful when winning elections, Taft still had sufficient savvy to consign William Jennings Bryan to his third defeat at the polls—a victory that was aided by Roosevelt’s strong endorsement of Taft’s merits as a principled Progressive, emphasizing a sense of continuity in leadership. Yet Taft’s presidency was markedly different from Roosevelt’s in the sense that his leadership was purposefully low-key—Taft disliked the way Roosevelt stretched executive power to the constitutional breaking point—and that Taft was less confrontational in his approach to big business. While he issued eighty antitrust lawsuits while president, he refused to criticize specific companies or business practices directly. Progressives of many hues, including Theodore Roosevelt himself, were disappointed with what they took to be Taft’s timorous leadership, conveying the erroneous impression that he was kowtowing to wealthy interests. In a speech in April 1912, Roosevelt declared that “the Republican party is now facing a grave crisis. It is to decide whether it will be as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people … or whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interest, the heir to those who were Lincoln’s most bitter opponents.”140
When Roosevelt failed to wrest the nomination from Taft at the Republican National Convention on June 22, 1912, he left the GOP and formed the Progressive Party to contest the presidency in the forthcoming election. Running on a platform that called for woman suffrage, new inheritance and income taxes, social welfare legislation for women and infants, and wholesale improvements to America’s transport infrastructure, the Bull Moose Party (as it became known following Roosevelt’s response that he was “as strong as a bull moose” to a journalist’s question regarding his health) attracted many supporters impressed by its Progressive agenda and the breakaway candidate’s stature as a forceful former president with a formidable record of achievement.
Mahan was on the conservative wing of the Republican Party and so was dismayed by Roosevelt’s steeply Progressive policy agenda. He was consequently torn by the Republican split of 1912, as he confided to his friend Henry White:
Personally, my views are nearer those of Taft than those of Roosevelt, but I have lost faith in the former as able to guide the ship, because he has not commanded the confidence of his people, as I think Roosevelt has … If I see reason to believe that Roosevelt can be carried in by a third party, I shall vote for him and use any influence I can in the same direction. But if I conclude that the only effect of the third party will be to defeat the Republicans and put in the Democrats, I shall vote for Taft.141
The only thing Mahan knew for certain was that the Democrats were unfit for office, and their leader, Woodrow Wilson, whom he had met for lunch in New York City earlier in the year, was worryingly dogmatic in his approach to domestic and foreign affairs:
We are threatened, and I fear the accession to power of a doctrinaire party—the Democratic—which is dominated by a number of theories which can by no means be made to fit present facts; like the wrong key to a lock. Among others [is] that of keeping the navy well below strength, and ignoring all the dangerous contingencies of the present by the simple process of shutting their eyes, and taking a sleeping potion of the doctrines of a man who died nearly a century ago. Perhaps you know the name Jefferson. He made a hideous mess in his own day, and yet has a progeny of backwoodsmen and planters who think what he taught a great success.142
Mahan identified in Wilson’s Jeffersonian disposition an abstract and theoretical quality—one that might ultimately lead to policies “which can by no means be made to fit present facts.” On Election Day, Mahan cast his vote for Roosevelt, surmising that he was better placed than Taft to stop Wilson in his tracks and to pursue a purposeful yet carefully calibrated policy toward the fast-escalating military tensions in Europe. Mahan believed that much rested on the election of 1912.