Worldmaking (7 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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