Worldmaking

1. The Philosopher of Sea Power: Alfred Thayer Mahan

44. In “The Nature of Influence,” Peter Karsten argues that Mahan’s influence on Roosevelt has been greatly exaggerated, and that TR was an original naval thinker in his own right, requiring little tutoring from the overestimated Mahan. He contends that Roosevelt used Mahan—and his intellectual respectability—to serve his own expansionary ends. Karsten’s article makes some fine cautionary points, but he both overestimates the depth of Roosevelt’s historical insight and underplays Mahan’s originality.
In 1886, Roosevelt, while engaged in writing a shallow, cursory biography of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, wrote to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “I have pretty nearly finished Benton, mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and being by nature a timid and, on occasions, by choice a truthful man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history.” Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 172.