Worldmaking (9 page)

Mahan's foreign-policy vision was driven by an instinctive “realism”—the notion that a nation's actions in international affairs must be driven by self-interest. He agreed with the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes that international politics was driven by a struggle for power. Conflict in the international system was inevitable—indeed, it was ennobling and virtuous in certain circumstances—and such circumstances precluded most countries from practicing anything that resembled altruism in world affairs. Unlike his friend Theodore Roosevelt, he was not stirred by Rudyard Kipling's call to take up the “White Man's Burden” and improve the lot of less fortunate nations through selfless but stern colonial instruction. He admired Great Britain's willingness to rule multiple territories and believed these subjugated people benefited from their acceptance of British values, laws, and models of governance. But America possessed sufficient power and natural resources to eschew such activities as an unnecessary encumbrance. Mahan drew the lessons from history he deemed pertinent to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century; he did not believe that the nation should follow the historical experience of any other nation to the letter. He was a nuanced, contextual thinker.

In addition to this geopolitical particularism, Mahan concurred with the Scottish political economist Adam Smith that self-reliance and the pursuit of individual advantage would create a virtuous cycle of wealth creation that might benefit all socioeconomic strata. If the people of all nations worked hard and looked after their own, some kind of global equilibrium might be attainable, in the sense that wealthy nations were satisfied nations and that conflict, while unavoidable, might be curtailed in time through this diffusion of wealth. He was less convinced by another Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant, who believed that “Perpetual Peace” might be achieved if nations had the bravery and foresight to subsume their national interest in the name of a larger good guided by a supranational entity—a league of nations. This notion was fanciful and potentially dangerous, in Mahan's opinion. A more peaceful world would be achieved by individual nation-states practicing the Mahanian virtues of free trade, export-led commerce, and the creation of advanced financial institutions, to enable a nation to invest adventurously and profitably across the world. This would ensure that all nations had a vital economic stake in the maintenance of global stability. “Peace” would be achieved from the bottom up, not downward from abstract Kantian heights.

Mahan's magnum opus was received rapturously upon its publication in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt holed himself up in his library over the weekend of May 10–11 and read the book from cover to cover. Delighted by what he had read, he wrote a warm note to Mahan singing its praises: “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book. That I found it interesting is shown by the fact that having taken it up, I have gone straight through and finished it … It is a
very
good book—admirable; and I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.”
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According to Edmund Morris, Roosevelt's most eloquent biographer, America's future president “flipped the book shut a changed man.”
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In a review in
The Atlantic Monthly
, Roosevelt praised Mahan's skill in “subordinating detail to mass-effects” and extolled his mastery of French sources. But the main purpose of Roosevelt's review was to set out his store as Mahan's foremost champion, to make clear what lessons his book held for the United States. What America needed more than anything else, Roosevelt asserted, was a “large navy, composed not merely of cruisers, but containing also a full proportion of powerful battleships able to meet those of any other nation. It is not economy, it is niggardly and foolish short-sightedness, to cramp our naval expenditures while squandering money right and left on everything else, from pensions to public buildings.” The
Chicago Times
admitted that it was “startling” to discover that “control of the sea has throughout history been the prime factor in deciding the leadership, the prosperity, and often the existence of nations, and … by throwing away her commercial marine and the occupations related to it [America] has deprived herself of the very means of creating a navy.”
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But the book's warm reception in America was nothing compared to the enthusiasm its publication engendered in Britain and Germany.
The Times
of London decreed that Mahan's achievement was of an order that British historians had yet to emulate, that the United States now stood “first in order of merit in the production of naval historical works which are truly philosophical.”
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An appreciative reviewer for
Blackwood's Magazine
touched upon the prime reason for the book's appeal in Britain, noting that it “might almost be said to be a scientific inquiry into the causes which have made England great.”
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In 1893, Mahan visited England and was hosted for dinner by Captain William H. Henderson of HMS
Edgar.
In an effusive toast to his distinguished guest, Henderson joked that the Royal Navy owed to Mahan's instructive book the “£3,000,000 just voted for the increase of the navy.” Later that summer, Mahan dined with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. The kaiser sent a telegram to Mahan declaring that he was “devouring” his book and later ordered that a copy be placed on every ship in the German fleet. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to the German ambassador, Hermann Speck von Sternburg, that “I am glad Mahan is having such influence with your people, but I wish he had more influence with his own. It is very difficult to make this nation wake up.”
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Mahan was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. During a private dinner at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Lord Rosebery told Mahan that “no literary work in his time had caused such enthusiasm as
Sea Power
.”
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In 1894,
The Times
declared Mahan to be the “new Copernicus”—that Mahan had revolutionized naval history in the same way as the great Polish thinker had remade astronomy.
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This adulation transformed Mahan into one of the most prominent writers of the late nineteenth century. But he still found time to grouse that Britain's swoon had not been replicated at home. “Recognition is pleasant, particularly after the almost entire absence of it at home,” Mahan complained to his wife. “Except Roosevelt, I don't think my work gained me an entrée into a single American social circle.”
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With rather more grace, Mahan wrote to his one and only big-hitting American fan that he had “derived great satisfaction from the lavish expressions of appreciations given to me personally—that is, to my work.”
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Appreciative words aside, Mahan was disappointed that his name carried greater luster in Britain than in the United States. While he had dined with Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Rosebery, invites to President Benjamin Harrison's White House were noticeable in their absence. But given the choice to gain entrée into just one American's social circle in 1890, Theodore Roosevelt would be at the top of most people's lists. Mahan's enduring legacy as an architect of American naval expansion owed more to Roosevelt's good opinion than all the bouquets that England could offer.

*   *   *

From 1888 to 1895, Theodore Roosevelt worked for the New York Civil Service Commission, before serving a two-year stint as president of the board of the New York City Police Commissioners. These relatively low-key roles belied Roosevelt's vast potential for national leadership, evident to most seasoned political observers at the time. Intellectually inquisitive and historically literate, as evidenced by
The Naval War of 1812
, Roosevelt made a strong impression on whomever he came into contact with. As John Hay, a future secretary of state, memorably recounted: “I have heard Mr. Rudyard Kipling tell how he used to drop in at the Cosmos Club at half-past ten or so in the evening, and then young Roosevelt would come and pour out projects, discussions of men and politics, criticisms of books … ‘I sat in the chair opposite,' said Kipling, ‘and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.'”
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Roosevelt was nonetheless skeptical of those individuals who espoused big ideas based on cold, abstract reasoning, who lacked practical experience in a cognate field and a well-defined moral compass. He remarked, “Character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual.” As his career progressed to high office, he complained, “Oh, how I wish I could warn all my countrymen … against that most degrading of processes, the deification of mere intellectual acuteness, wholly unaccompanied by moral responsibility.”
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These cautionary words partly explain why Roosevelt viewed Mahan so favorably. He respected his naval experience and his duty in the Civil War, even if he was an unskilled and reluctant sailor and lacked the masculine virtues—an ability to hunt, fight, climb mountains, chase down robbers, and subsist in North Dakota's Badlands—that made Roosevelt such a colorful character. Mahan adhered to a deeply felt value system in the form of his devout Christianity and possessed a strong sense of right and wrong. He knew where he stood on all the great matters of diplomacy and morality that were posed to him throughout his career. Mahan's self-assurance, life experience, and depth of historical insight represented a potent combination that enthralled Roosevelt and led to him fervently championing his virtues. According to Warren Zimmermann, “Roosevelt acted as a self-appointed press agent for the
Influence of Sea Power upon History
.”
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The success of Mahan's book came as a distinct relief to John Hay, “as Theodore would now no longer feel obliged to make [us] all go … to hear his lectures.”
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Although Roosevelt lacked a “bully pulpit” through the 1890s, his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 1893 to 1924, certainly had a forum for his ideas.
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His career spanned two seminal wars for the United States, and his influence on both was profound. Austere and haughty, Lodge possessed a fine mind—he completed a doctoral dissertation in history at Harvard under the supervision of Henry Adams—and agreed with Mahan and Roosevelt that the United States had to exert itself much more forcefully on the international stage. Throughout the 1890s, the United States was a regional power, whose only unassisted victory over another nation had been its defeat of institutionally weak, revolution-prone Mexico in 1848. Lodge recognized that American territory, and the virtual limits of American power, was restricted to the North American continent and that this had to change. Like Japan up until recently, the United States possessed the second-largest economy in the world. And like Japan, America was a bit-part geostrategic player, content enough to pursue a singular path in its quiet corner of the world. But even America's fast-rising economic strength was looking a little shaky in the 1890s. In the midst of a depression that commenced in 1893, the acquisition of foreign markets appeared increasingly attractive to the leaders of American industry, and to ambitious politicians like Lodge and Roosevelt. Providing further impetus to overseas expansion, the U.S. Census Bureau had declared the continental frontier closed in 1890—Americans would have to look beyond their continent for acquiring additional territory. Across the ocean, the great European powers were carving up Africa in their scramble for colonial possessions. Many argued that the United States should be pursuing a similar path in the western hemisphere and the Pacific.

Lodge lacked the warmth and charisma to establish a national reputation—he was the archetypal Boston Brahmin in his wealth, seriousness, and lack of empathy for the “common man”—but with his keen mind and powerful oratory he became a major figure in the Senate. In 1895, Lodge made a speech on the Senate floor that owed a clear debt to Alfred Mahan:

It was the sea power in history which enabled Rome to crush Hannibal, perhaps the greatest military genius of all time; it was the sea power which enabled England to bring Napoleon's empire to ruins … It is the sea power which is essential to the greatness of every splendid people. We are a great people; we control this continent; we are dominant in this hemisphere; we have too great an inheritance to be trifled with or parted with. It is ours to guard and to extend.
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Lodge's tribute to Mahan's theory of sea power tied the latter even tighter to the Republican Party. He wrote to his wife on his growing displeasure with the Democratic Cleveland presidency: “A year of this administration has convinced me, I think finally, that the future is with the Republican party—the outward necessary aspirations of the U.S. will only be fulfilled by the Republicans. With rare exceptions the Democrats know nothing of Sea Power—neither by knowledge nor by instinct.”
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Which side to back in the election of 1896—pitting the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan against the pro-business Republican William McKinley—provoked no agonizing on Mahan's part. As he wrote to Samuel Ashe, “I have not found in the
speeches
of Mr. Bryan the proof that he is both intelligent and honest. He may be the one or the other, I can't find it in his speeches that he is both.”
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He believed that a Bryan presidency would embolden and radicalize the labor movement and that his shortsighted preference for silver over gold would create rapid inflation and a slump in the value of the dollar—in short, that a Democratic victory would be a “terrible catastrophe” for the nation.
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What Bryan might do to Mahan's beloved navy was disturbing. It thus came as a considerable relief to Mahan—and like-minded friends such as Roosevelt and Lodge—that McKinley defeated Bryan handily on November 3, 1896. The United States had elected a president whose views on an expansive economic and military strategy corresponded closely with Mahan's. President-elect McKinley wasted little time in proving this point by appointing Theodore Roosevelt to serve as his assistant secretary of the Navy. While Roosevelt doubted the sincerity of McKinley's dedication to a more muscular foreign policy—he remarked that he had all the backbone of a “chocolate éclair”—he was confident in his own ability to add ballast to the administration.
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