Worldmaking (12 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

*   *   *

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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