Worldmaking (6 page)

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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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Throughout the 1870s, the American Navy ranked twelfth in the world behind the sultan's Turkey and a sullen and passive China.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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: