THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY of the Navy worked quietly and unobtrusively for over seven weeks before making his first public address, at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, on 2 June.18 It turned out to be the first great speech of his career, a fanfare call to arms which echoed all the more resoundingly for the pause that had preceded it. He chose as his theme a maxim by George Washington: “To be prepared for war is the most effectual means to promote peace.” This, to Roosevelt’s mind, could signify only one thing in 1897: an immediate, rapid buildup of the American Navy.
He dismissed the suggestion that such a program would tempt the United States into unnecessary war. On the contrary, it would promote peace, by keeping foreign navies out of the Western Hemisphere. Should any power be so foolhardy as to attempt invasion, why, that would mean necessary war, which was a fine and healthy thing. “All the great masterful races have been fighting races; and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then … it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best.” Roosevelt did not have to remind his listeners that the Japanese, fresh from last year’s victory over the Chinese, were in full possession of those virtues, and were even now patrolling Hawaiian waters with an armored cruiser.19 “Cowardice in a race, as in an individual,” he declared, “is the unpardonable sin.” During the last two years alone, various “timid” European rulers had ignored the massacre of millions of Armenians by the Turks in order to preserve “peace” in their own lands. Again, Roosevelt did not have to mention Cuba, where Spain’s infamous Governor-General Weyler was currently slaughtering the insurrectos, to make a point. “Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.”
Intoxicated with his theme, Roosevelt continued:
No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war … It may be that at some time in the dim future of the race the need for war will vanish; but that time is yet ages distant. As yet no nation can hold its place in the world, or can do any work really worth doing, unless it stands ready to guard its rights with an armed hand.20
Aware that his audience consisted largely of naval academics devoted to the theory, rather than the practice, of war, Roosevelt praised teachers, scientists, writers, and artists as vital members of a civilized society, but warned against the dangers of too much “doctrinaire” thinking in formulating national policy. “There are educated men in whom education merely serves to soften the fiber.” Only those “who have dared greatly in war, or the work which is akin to war,” deserved the best of their country.
By now the Assistant Secretary was using the word “war” approximately once a minute. He was to repeat it sixty-two times before he sat down.
Roosevelt cited fact after historical fact to prove that “it is too late to prepare for war when the time for peace has passed.” He poured scorn on Jefferson for seeking to “protect” the American coastline with small defensive gunboats, instead of building a fleet of aggressive battleships which might have prevented the War of 1812. He pointed out that the nation’s present vulnerability, with Britain, Germany, Japan, and Spain engaged in a naval arms race, was more alarming than it had been at the beginning of the century. Then, at least, a man-of-war could be built in a matter of weeks; now, naval technology was so complicated that no battleship could be finished inside two years. Cruisers took almost as long; even the light, lethal, torpedo-boat (which he had already made a special priority item in the department)21 needed ninety days to put into first-class shape. As for munitions, America’s current supply was so meager, and so obsolete, that if war broke out tomorrow “we should have to build, not merely the weapons we need, but the plant with which to make them in any large quantity.”
Roosevelt chillingly demonstrated that it would be six months before the United States could parry any sudden attack, and a further eighteen months before she could “begin” to return it. “Since the change in military conditions in modern times, there has never been an instance in which a war between two nations has lasted more than about two years. In most recent wars the operations of the first ninety days have decided the results of the conflict.” It was essential, therefore, that Congress move at once to build more ships and bigger ships, “whose business it is to fight and not to run.” Line personnel must be subjected to the highest standards of recruitment and training, while staff officers “must have as perfect weapons ready to their hands as can be found in the civilized world.” This new Navy would be more to America’s international advantage than the most brilliant corps of ambassadors. “Diplomacy,” Roosevelt insisted, “is utterly useless when there is no force behind it; the diplomat is the servant, not the master of the soldier.”22
Moving into his peroration, he anticipated another great war speech by forty-three years in a eulogy to “the blood and sweat and tears” which heroes must sacrifice for the cause of freedom. He begged his audience to remember that
there are higher things in this life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort. It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness. We ask for a great navy, partly because we feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and its tears like water, rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown.
ROOSEVELT’S SPEECH WAS PRINTED in full in all major newspapers and caused a nationwide sensation. From Boston to San Francisco, from Chicago to New Orleans, expansionist editors and correspondents praised it, and agreed that a new, defiantly original spirit had entered into the conduct of American affairs.23 “Well done, nobly spoken!” exclaimed the Washington Post. “Theodore Roosevelt, you have found your place at last!” The Sun called his words “manly, patriotic, intelligent, and convincing.” The Herald recommended that readers study this “lofty” speech “from its opening sentence to its close,” while the New Orleans Daily Picayune said that it “undoubtedly voices the sentiments of the great majority of thinking people.” Even such anti-expansionist journals as Harper’s Weekly found the address “very eloquent and forcible,” although the commentator, Carl Schurz, logically demolished Roosevelt’s main argument. If too much peace led to softening of the national fiber, Schurz argued, and war led to vigor and love of country, it followed that prevention of war would only be debilitating. “Ergo, the building up of a great war fleet will effect that which promotes effeminacy and languishing unpatriotism.”24
Schurz should have left his syllogism there, for it was unanswerable, but he went on to argue dreamily that the United States was so protected by foreign balances of power that no nation dare attack it. This made him sound like one of the naive doctrinaires Roosevelt had criticized in his speech, and served only to justify the Assistant Secretary’s warnings. “I suspect that Roosevelt is right,” President McKinley sighed to Lemuel Ely Quigg, “and the only difference between him and me is that mine is the greater responsibility.”25
This startling admission by a Chief Executive personally committed to a policy of non-aggression suggests that Roosevelt had more than mere headlines in mind when he spoke to the Naval War College that June afternoon.26 His words were obviously intended to create, rather than just influence, national foreign policy. In both timing and targeting, the speech was accurate as a karate chop, for Hawaii and Cuba were the issues of the hour, and the Naval War College was the nerve center of American strategic planning.27 The isolationists in the Cabinet never quite recovered from Roosevelt’s blow, and its shock effects were felt in every extremity of the Administration.
Traditionally, the Naval War College had been founded to give officers advanced instruction in science and history of marine warfare. But during the course of nearly a decade of domination by Alfred Thayer Mahan, it had also become the prime source of war plans for the government.28 Thes
e documents, drawn up by brilliant young Mahanites ambitious to thrust the American Navy into the twentieth century, were submitted for consideration by the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, whence they went to the Secretary of the Navy for approval or rejection. Under the conservative Administration of President Cleveland, the Office of Naval Intelligence had acted as a foil to the Naval War College, toning down its more strident proposals, and Secretary Herbert saw to it that such war plans were pigeonholed before they had any effect on national defense policy. Herbert, indeed, was so suspicious of the War College that he had organized a senior board, consisting mainly of Old Guard officers, to keep both it and the Office of Naval Intelligence safely under control.29
With the accession of President McKinley, however, the composition of the Board changed radically. A few days after Roosevelt’s arrival in the Navy Department, it was ordered to exhume two of the most recent war plans and to produce a new strategy in the light of recent developments in the Pacific and Caribbean. Captain Caspar F. Goodrich, president of the Naval War College, was just beginning to work on this document when Roosevelt chose to deliver his bellicose address to the Staff and Class of ’97. There could not possibly have been a stronger hint as to what kind of thinking the new war plan should contain. Roosevelt had, in fact, already sent Captain Goodrich a “Special Confidential Problem” for academic deliberation:
Japan makes demands on Hawaiian Islands.
This country intervenes.
What force will be necessary to uphold the intervention, and how should it be employed?
Keeping in mind possible complications with another Power on the Atlantic Coast (Cuba).30
Such a problem would never exist, he privately informed Captain Mahan, “if I had my way.” In an undisguised fantasy of himself as Commander-in-Chief, Roosevelt continued that he “would annex those islands tomorrow. If that was impossible I would establish a protectorate over them. I believe we should build the Nicaraguan Canal at once, and in the meantime that we should build a dozen new battleships, half of them on the Pacific Coast.… I would send the Oregon and, if necessary, also the Monterey … to Hawaii, and would hoist our flag over the island, leaving all details for after action.” He acknowledged that there were “big problems” in the West Indies, but until Spain was turned out of Cuba (“and if I had my way,” he repeated, “that would be done tomorrow”), the United States would always be plagued by trouble there. “We should acquire the Danish Islands.… I do not fear England; Canada is hostage for her good behavior …”
In the midst of his flow of dictation, recorded at the Navy Department, Roosevelt seems to have noticed that his stenographer’s neck was flushing. “I need not say,” he hastily went on, “that this letter must be strictly private … to no one else excepting Lodge do I speak like this.”31
It would appear, nevertheless, that he expressed himself almost as strongly to Assistant Secretary of State William R. Day, at least on the subject of Hawaii. So, too, did Lodge and other members of the expansionist lobby. Bypassing Day’s senile superior, John Sherman, they persuaded President McKinley to approve a treaty of annexation on 16 June 1897.32 The treaty was forwarded to the Senate, where Lodge triumphantly undertook to secure its ratification, and Roosevelt rejoiced. It is fair to assume that champagne was drunk in the Metropolitan Club that evening. At last America had joined the other great powers of the world in the race for empire.33
THE NEXT MORNING Secretary Long, who was beginning to feel the heat of approaching summer, left town for two weeks’ vacation, preparatory to taking his main vacation. Roosevelt was relieved to be alone for a while, since the Secretary had not been at all pleased with his War College speech,34 and was already resisting pleas for a buildup of the Navy. Beneath the kindly exterior he sensed an old man’s obstinacy which gave him “the most profound concern.” It would hardly do to have the pace of naval construction slow just as the expansion movement was accelerating. “I feel that you ought to write to him,” Roosevelt told Mahan, “—not immediately, but some time not far in the future, explaining to him the vital need for more battleships.… Make the plea that this is a measure of peace and not war.”35
Roosevelt’s easy recourse to the world’s ranking naval authority, now and on many subsequent occasions in his career as Assistant Secretary, makes it worthwhile to examine their complex relationship or, more accurately, reexamine it, in the light of the enduring belief that the younger man’s naval philosophy was inherited from the older. Facts recently uncovered suggest the reverse.36 In 1881, when the twenty-two-year-old Roosevelt sat writing The Naval War of 1812 in New York’s Astor Library, Mahan had been an obscure, forty-year-old career officer of no particular accomplishment, literary or otherwise. He did not publish his own first book, a workmanlike history of Gulf operations in the Civil War, until two years later, by which time Roosevelt’s prodigiously detailed volume was required reading on all U.S. Navy vessels, and had exerted at least a peripheral influence on the decision of Congress to build a fleet of modern warships. Mahan, indeed, was still so unlettered in world naval history that in 1884, when offered an instructorship at the new Naval War College, he asked for a year’s leave to study for it. Most of 1885 was spent in the Astor Library, reading the same tomes Roosevelt had already devoured. This research was the basis of Mahan’s lecture course at the War College, which in turn became The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890).37 Long before this masterpiece appeared, however, he had familiarized himself with Roosevelt’s theories, to the extent of discussing them with him personally. At least one of the other instructors at the War College, Professor J. Russell Soley, was an enthusiastic Rooseveltian; so, too, was the institution’s founder, Admiral Stephen B. Luce. “Your book must be our textbook,” Luce told the young author.38
Roosevelt’s next two histories, Gouverneur Morris and Thomas Hart Benton, were replete with arguments for a strong Navy and mercantile marine, while The Winning of the West propounded visions of Anglo-Saxon world conquest as heady as anything Mahan ever wrote. All of these works predated The Influence of Sea Power upon History.
The relative academic prestige of Roosevelt and Mahan altered drastically in the latter’s favor after Sea Power came out. As has been seen, Roosevelt enthusiastically welcomed the book, reviewing it—and all Mahan’s subsequent volumes—with a generosity that could not fail to endear him to the austere, reclusive scholar.39 During his early years in Washington, he worked to save Mahan from sea duty (which the captain detested) and to increase his backing in government circles.40
It is not surprising, therefore, that when the new Assistant Secretary sought to advance his own ambitions in the spring of 1897, he could call upon Mahan in confidence. The fact that their naval philosophies were identical at this point only increased the willingness of one man to help the other.41
FINDING HIMSELF IN full, if temporary control of the Navy Department, Roosevelt worked energetically but cautiously, not wanting to jeopardize his chances of being Acting Secretary through most of the summer. He signed with pleasure a letter of permission for general maneuvers by the North Atlantic Squadron in August or September, and told its commanding officer that he would “particularly like to be aboard for a day or two” during gun practice.42 He continued to dig up Secretary Herbert’s suppressed reports, on the grounds that those most deeply buried might yield the most interesting information,43 ordered an investigation of the management of the Brooklyn Navy Yard,44 and proposed that some of the great names in American naval history be revived on future warships. He suggested the installation of rapid-fire weaponry throughout the fleet. Horrified when an elderly, bureaucratic admiral boasted about being able to account for every single bottle of red and black ink supplied to ships around the world, Roosevelt initiated a massive campaign to reduce the department’s paperwork. Soothingly, he wrote to Long, “There isn’t the slightest necessity of your returning.”45
Undismayed by strong Japanese protest regarding the Hawaii trea
ty, Roosevelt set his expansionist lobby to work on the subject of Cuba, “this hideous welter of misery on our doorsteps.” On 18 June he invited several key Senators to dine at the Metropolitan Club with an envoy recently returned from the island.46
Elsewhere on the propaganda front, he played off two publishers—Harpers and G. P. Putnam’s Sons—in competition for a volume of “politico-social” essays covering the whole of his career as a speaker and man of letters. Articles on “The Manly Virtues” and “True Americanism” were prominent among them, along with his most ambitious reviews, “National Life and Character,” “Social Evolution,” and “The Law of Civilization and Decay.” For good measure he added his recent address to the Naval War College. “I am rather pleased with them myself,” he told Putnam’s, the successful bidder.47 Less robust tastes were repelled by a cumulative impression of jingoism, militarism, and self-righteousness, when the essays came out under the title American Ideals.48 “If there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, Theodore,” said Thomas B. Reed, “it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.”49
Henry James, reviewing the volume for a British periodical, expressed mock alarm. “Mr. Theodore Roosevelt appears to propose … to tighten the screws of the national consciousness as they have never been tightened before.… It is ‘purely as an American,’ he constantly reminds us, that each of us must live and breathe. Breathing, indeed, is a trifle; it is purely as Americans that we must think, and all that is wanting to the author’s demonstration is that he shall give us a receipt for the process.” James granted that Roosevelt had “a happy touch” when he eschewed questions of doctrine for accounts of his own political experiences. “These pages give an impression of high competence.… But his value is impaired for intelligible precept by the puerility of his simplifications.”50
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 65