What was enlisted life like in the U.S. Navy at the turn of the 20th century? For those of us who once struggled to learn how to roll and tie a neckerchief, how to shape a white-hat and how to make a blue flat-hat look rakish, information about earlier enlisted life is in remarkably short supply. Yet, the inescapable truth is that our Navy has always been comprised mainly of ordinary young men (and more lately, young women) who serve their nation with pride, but without much publicity, and unfortunately, without creating an extensive written record of their experiences. With the advent of e-mail, it seems even less likely that lucid accounts of life on today’s lower deck will be written and preserved for the future. We can only hope that in some obscure blog exists what a future generation will judge to he the quintessential account of enlisted life in the early 21st century—if its author doesn’t some day nonchalantly push the “delete” button.
Over the course of our existence as a navy, it seems everything has changed; yet common threads of the sailor experience remain. Charles Nordhoff served as a boy on board the 74-gun ship-of-the-line Columbus during her three-year world cruise beginning in 1845. The first liberty for enlisted men on that cruise occurred an astonishing 18 months after the ship sailed from New York. Nordhoff’s book, Man-of-War Life: A Boy’s Experience in the United States Navy, during a Voyage Around the World in a Ship-of- the-Line, published originally in 1855, is replete with reminders of the continuity of a great many aspects of the enlisted experience. Writing in the preface to the 1883 edition of his book, nearly 40 years after his cruise, Nordhoff alluded to a feeling doubtless shared by every generation of Navy veterans:
When I nowadays visit a war ship, I am surprised to find the sailors enjoying comforts which were unknown and undreamt of when I was a lad; the lower decks warmed by steam coils; mess tables where we spread our mess cloths on deck and sat about them; and other provisions against discomfort, which, no doubt, have their merits, but which have a queer look to an “old salt.”1
The post-Spanish War expansion of the fleet generated predictable personnel problems for the Navy’s leadership. Following the war, the force more than trebled, from an authorized 1898 strength of 13,500 men to 44,500 in 1908.2 By then, the authorized strength of the enlisted force had increased a staggering 523% in just 16 years, though even this increase proved inadequate to meet the Navy’s requirements.
Crews to man the new battleship fleet simply could not be recruited from U.S. seaports and the existing pool of skilled merchant mariners. Therefore, the Navy expanded recruitment. In 1901, recruiters in “itinerant recruiting parties” began visiting inland cities. There they tapped a vast new pool of youth. Many were graduates of public schools, virtually all were literate— indeed, literacy was a requirement—and a great many retained close ties to their families and home communities.
This was a marked change for the Navy, and in at least one respect, a revolutionary one. Most pro fessional sailors of earlier days formed a separate subculture and maintained few ties with the broader society. At the turn of the 20th century, the nation’s sons were enlisted to serve. When those sons found conditions in the Navy unsatisfactory, they reported their dissatisfaction in letters to their parents, who often contacted congressmen or even the Secretary of the Navy, demanding explanations.
Bunny Buenzle enlisted in the 1880s and spent his early years in sail, in fact preferred sail to the new ships.3 Charlie Fowler, a nonsmoking teetotaler and a vegetarian, enlisted and made yeoman third class, then was selected for promotion to paymaster’s clerk, a warrant rank.4 He rarely went ashore, except for extremely long hikes through the Philippines countryside. One of his regular companions on these hikes was an elderly African-American gunner’s mate named Sutton, who remained a walking partner until on one of their hikes they walked all the way to Manila, where Sutton fell off the wagon in spectacular fashion, much to Charlie’s disgust.
John Paynter was the best educated of all the enlisted authors, with a baccalaureate degree before he joined in 1884.5 He was an African American, however, and so was employed as a mess attendant and did not rise above that position.
John Swift, an Iowan, joined late in 1898 as a landsman for training and 18 months later was a chief petty officer and the senior yeoman for the Commander-in- chief, Asiatic Station, a remarkable achievement, even at that time.6
And Fred Wilson, “Wils” to his friends, enlisted during the depression in 1895, reached first class petty officer by 1899, and ultimately became a chief water tender.7 Wilson fit many of the stereotypical images of sailors. He drank heavily while ashore and sometimes drank on board. He collected tattoos in port. He also collected Japanese women in foreign ports, and wives in U.S. ports, marrying at least three, and possibly four times in the United States and possibly once in Japan.
What might we say collectively of these men? They were good, solid enlisted men. The white sailors became very senior petty officers and served the Navy long and well. Had they served in today’s Navy, their complaints would have been heard and considered. Such was not the case, however, 100 years ago. Indeed, no process existed to allow enlisted men’s grievances to be addressed to their officers. As for John Paynter, he served but one tour and left the service before the period we are examining; however, his is the only published African-American enlisted account of the period.
One difficulty the historian must confront, in addition to the dearth of material, is that existing material does not represent the “average” enlisted men, for the average men, by and large, were inarticulate and left no record of their service. What we have, then, are the diaries and letters of some of the best men in the Navy. That they so despaired of their service tells us even more, as they were not down- and-outers or misfits.
This period witnessed a rise in nationalistic sentiments in the United States, which influenced the Navy Department to “Americanize” the enlisted force and increasingly to restrict enlistment to U.S. citizens or aliens who had declared their intention to become citizens. But these measures had little immediate effect on enlisted life. Enlisted men often found themselves under the direct supervision of senior deck petty officers from northern European nations, whom they derisively called “square heads.” As John Swift noted in 1901, the men found “service under petty officers of foreign speech (Germans, Dutchmen, Swedes, etc., who spoke our language brokenly and domineered those under their command)” far worse than the intimate association with black sailors that also was part of Navy life. Further, Swift indicated, sailors believed naval officers found these foreign petty officers “more willing and submissive” and therefore liked them more than U.S. sailors and so promoted them more rapidly. Concluded Swift, “to serve under a square-head petty officer was considered the greatest aggravation possible.”8
Blacks in the Navy
The postwar expansion of the enlisted force offered an opportunity for the Navy to tap the pool of young African-Americans. However, given the nature of American society in general and the corporate ethos of the officer corps specifically, the Navy seized on recruitment of whites from the hinterland and thus postponed for nearly four decades the effective integration of African Americans into the enlisted force.
Clearly, the most sympathetic figure in Buenzle’s autobiography is an elderly African-American sailor, John R. Bell, who at critical times in Buenzle’s early career provided the future chief with advice and support. What really was the nature of the relationship between African-American and white sailors at the turn of the century? To date, we hardly get past stereotypes.
One aspect of the African-American experience was that service in the Navy took black sailors outside the United States and thus away from the pervasive, personally degrading practice of segregation. As Paynter observed when his ship visited its first foreign port, Gibraltar, in 1885, the Rock had been “a place in which we had for the first time enjoyed full and complete freedom, had men grasp us squarely by the hand as men, and our intellectual and moral statures measured by our attainments rather than by the color of our skin.” Paynter was pleased to discover that Europeans did not have “that accursed prejudice to contend against which says how far one shall or shall not come.”9 That little had changed in the nature of social acceptance of African Americans in the broader American society during the following six decades was reflected in the similarity of the observation made by one crew member of the principally African-American-crewed destroyer escort USS Mason (DE-529) on arrival in Northern Ireland in 1944: “Funny how I had to come all the way across the ocean to a foreign country,” one African-American crewmember observed, “before I got to enjoy the feeling of being an American.”10 [During the period discussed here, the number of African-Americans in the Navy remained constant at somewhat fewer than 2,000, which meant that throughout the period of expansion, their percentage of the total force actually declined.11]
How might we understand the significance of John R. Bell, who Buenzle reported, “breathed forth a sweet air of pervading good will,”12 or of other enlisted comments complimentary of the African-American crew members? Certainly, some crew members objected, often vehemently and violently, to close association with blacks. W. K. Lane, for example, confided to his family in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1908 that “once a fellow gets in [the Navy] he is subjected] to all kinds of treatment and he has to eat at the same table with negroes and he often has a negro to boss him. . . ,”13
Swift includes one intriguing passage relating to race, asserting that white enlisted men “toiled at hard manual labor beside colored men, sat at table with them and found no fault whatever. Jack says, ‘Give me a ship with a sound hull, good strong engines and proper steering gear, and I’ll not grumble at the paint on her.’”14 And Paynter was fortunate in his ship in that the white cook with whom he worked was a man “in whose soul the original and heaven-born principle of equality and fellowship [had] not been crushed by the baneful and proselytizing system of American caste.”15 The remarkable contrast in these points of view suggests that there was not one uniform attitude of rejection of the black enlisted men; that there were white enlisted men of good will toward blacks in the Navy. Though too little evidence exists to constitute firm proof, there probably was some tolerance of blacks in enlisted messes, largely on the part of those sailors who came from states other than the south.
But regardless of individual white sailors’ attitudes, black sailors, like the broader black population in the United States, still had to assiduously avoid the perception of “imposing” on whites, i.e., acting as though they were equal to whites. On the old frigate Independence in 1895, for example, a former enlisted man hostile to the presence of blacks reported that white crew members attempted to murder “an insolent Negro who used [to] swagger about the decks boasting that he could ‘lick a white son-of-a-bitch in the ship.’”16
The place of highest racial tensions in the Navy was the engine room, for it was there that blacks, who regularly advanced to the rank of fireman, were placed in charge of white coal-passers. In June 1907, on board the battleship Rhode Island in New York, an argument broke out between a black fireman and a white coal-passer in which the black allegedly pulled a razor and slashed the white sailor. Other whites rushed into the fray, and the executive officer had to call out the Marines to quell the disturbance.17 The white sailor subsequently died of his wounds, and naval justice moved with remarkable swiftness. The fight occurred on 6 November. The black fireman was tried and found guilty by a general court martial, sentenced to ten years of hard labor, and the court’s findings and sentence were reviewed through the chain of command and finally approved by the Secretary of the Navy in less than one month.18
Uniform Discrimination
Uniform discrimination was the order of the day in many U.S. ports, and sometimes even overseas. Wilson noted that U.S. sailors were forbidden entrance to some hotels and bars in Shanghai in 1900, about the time of the siege of the Western legations by the Boxers, and observed ironically, “but oh, how welcome they must have been at Tien-tsin and Pekin! Nothing [too] good for the men in a blue shirt then.”19 In 1908, Buenzle, by then a chief petty officer, became involved in a highly publicized case of uniform discrimination in Newport, Rhode Island, for which President Theodore Roosevelt personally contributed $100 to assist with legal expenses. Ultimately, the court decided the dance hall was within its rights to discriminate against sailors wearing uniforms. The decision, however, led to a groundswell of public indignation, which resulted in legislation in some states outlawing such discrimination.
Buenzle and others also explored the nature of the relationship between officers and enlisted men. His shipmate, Tom Dunn, spends many years anonymously providing an allotment to the widow of a beloved officer under whom he served, only to be terribly ridden and abused by the son of that officer, a passed midshipman.20 In Buenzle’s account, Dunn turns to excessive drink and ultimately dies, unreconciled. Wilson encountered an executive officer given to drink and abuse of the crew. Lieutenant Commander Charles A. Adams earned the sobriquet, “Jack the Ripper” for his frequent outbursts. At one point, Adams came upon a group of enlisted men clustered by the scuttle-butt. Wilson reported:
He pushed them aside, and singling out a marine for his mark, he spoke very sarcastically. “See this opening?” pointing to the door and [throwing] out his chest and spreading his arms apart. “This,” with a withering look of scorn that almost froze the poor marine, “this is a door! DOOR! A gangway. A place for people to move to and fro about their business, not a place for loafers and bums to congregate in. A door, do you understand me? A DOOR!! A DOOR! DOOR.” Here he swelled up and expanded so, I felt alarmed as to his condition. “Get out of here you loafers! You damn rascals. You infernal scoundrels. You. You.—.” Then he passed on about his business feeling, I take it, very much relieved. Poor old man. Poor old fellow. Only a few more months before a board of survey takes hold of him.”21
In the Navy, we hear much about “the days wooden ships and iron men.” But at the turn of the 20th century, many of the older sailors, like Bunny Buenzle, actually came from those days. Affecting an air of superiority, they implied that the new recruits of the steam-propelled steel warships were wooden men on iron ships. Further, there was a definite sense, often expressed, that these “new” Navy men were accorded opportunities and privileges denied the older salts. Officers talked often about the “new sailor,” but almost nothing has been recorded relating to the reception these new men received from the old hands of their day.
As with most things naval at this time, there was a vast chasm between officers’ and enlisted men’s “take” on things. In this case, the officers generally enthused over the new men recruited since the war with Spain. These new recruits came, Commander William G. Miller advised Secretary of the Navy Truman H. Newberry, “from the same class of people from which officers are taken and [their] average intelligence is equal to the average intelligence, less the superior education, of the officers of the navy.”22 They were enlisted, Rear Admiral Charles S. Sperry wrote in 1909, “from the very pick and choice of the whole country.” Pay, in itself, was not sufficient enticement. “The men we must have enlist largely from a spirit of adventure, a desire to see the world, stimulated by a very considerable amount of patriotic pride.”23
But unlike the senior officers, Fred Wilson had to deal with some of these new recruits, whom he and his mates dubbed “Dixie heroes”—those who had joined the navy after the war with Spain. Wilson felt that if this “excellent material” was a “fair sample of budding manhood, then terrible indeed must be the outlook and condition of a country that produces such material and expects to make good citizens [of them].” He estimated that of all he had met, not more than 10% were “straight, manly young fellows.”
Remarkably, recruiters in the decade that followed concluded just about the same thing. Of the 547,003 young men who applied to enlist in the navy from 1899 to 1909, only 142,995 were actually accepted. A staggering 73.9% were rejected for physical or other reasons.24 Even then, not all who gained entrance into the service were actually fit.
Unfortunately, as with so much relating to enlisted life, the Navy conducted no scientific studies of recruits’ motivation for joining, but the heroic images of the Navy’s victories in the war with Spain and extensive reporting of overseas travel and adventure must have been powerful contributing factors. Though smooth recruiting officers might entice men to enlist, there were major problems in the Navy that soon convinced many recruits they had been duped. Recruiters mentioned little about naval discipline, the harsh nature of which had not changed, despite the revolutionary changes that had occurred in the personnel of the Navy. Nor did they mention that the “free” uniform issue would have to be repaid in full before a man would be permitted liberty—a process that required a minimum of three months and generally four. Also unmentioned in the recruiting pitch was the infrequency of liberty once the uniforms were paid off. At the turn of the century, officers still routinely gave liberty only when they could think of no excuses for not doing so.
Ships during this time spent very little time at sea, and then usually just long enough to transit from one port to another. As Charlie Fowler noted in one of his letters, when he had been deployed for six months, he had had six days at sea and only three liberties, presumably out of about 174 days in port. In other words, Charlie had had the chance to go ashore once every two months. And that was not uncommon.
In between those infrequent runs ashore, sailors became prisoners of ship-board routine, and fought boredom. Frequent are the references to shellac cocktails, and many men died each year from drinking that particular concoction. Yet, while the men were denied even an occasional beer or the opportunity to go ashore to get one, officers were permitted beer and wine on board. The inequity of that particular arrangement caused remarkable bitterness in the lower decks, and rightly so, until Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels terminated officers’ on-board drinking privileges.
How could officers such as Admiral Sperry describe the enlisted men as coming from “the very pick and choice of the whole country,” and yet expect those same quality young men to submit willingly to a capricious and petty system of justice in which the punishments far exceeded the infractions for which they were imposed? The regular and liberal use of double irons as a means of punishment rather than simply for necessary restraint was particularly degrading. “In them days,” Archie Adamson, who enlisted in 1907, recollected, “you so much as winked and you got clapped in double irons.”25 Given the conditions of life in the Navy it is not remarkable that many men chose to desert.
When called on to account for the high rates of desertion, commanding officers generally reported that the food they served was excellent, their liberty policies liberal, and that therefore the problem must lie with the young enlisted men themselves. This conclusion doubtless was reassuring to the officers involved, but hardly reflective of reality.
Given the seriousness of the problem, intense study was warranted. Unfortunately, Rear Admiral Henry C. Taylor, who, as Chief of the Bureau of Navigation was responsible for the welfare of the enlisted men, might have initiated such studies, did not concur. He came to office convinced that the “largest element” of the problem lay with “the restlessness of the average American young man, and the easy way in which he can get employment, and, therefore, the readiness with which he drops any position he may hold.”26 Thus, when Captain Caspar F. Goodrich, as commanding officer of a receiving ship, proposed to conduct a confidential interrogation of all returned deserters in the hope of drawing some conclusions, he was discouraged by Taylor, who responded that the causes of desertion were “well understood.”
Goodrich recommended an exhaustive analysis of the causes of desertion and then the removal of all causes “susceptible to removal.” After that, any marked increase in desertion would indicate to the Navy Department “that things are not quite right on board” the affected ship; “that the commissary steward is incompetent or indifferent; that the men are subjected to unnecessary nagging; or that the administration of justice is harsh and arbitrary, etc.; that, in short, it is high time to overhaul the captain and ask leading questions of the crew.”27
This was excellent advice. Unfortunately, most senior officers rejected any idea that there might be a solution other than harsh punishment. “You have no idea how much we suffer from desertion,” Secretary of the Navy John D. Long wrote to the father of a deserter then in the brig, “and how I am continually pressed by good officers not to do anything that will encourage desertion or let up on the penalties attending it.”28
Discussing desertion, Rear Admiral Charles D. Sigsbee noted in 1903 that many recent recruits were not fully informed of the consequence of desertion—loss of the right to hold office, loss of rights as citizens, etc. “It seems cruel,” Sigsbee told Secretary of the Navy William Moody, “to inflict punishments on young men not properly informed of their liabilities in the matter of desertion.” Nevertheless, Sigsbee supported just that: “I beg to submit that leniency in respect to desertions is likely to work harm to the service. Inflexible precedent has much to do with the support of those in authority." [Emphasis added.]29
Far too many senior officers failed to recognize that the change in the enlisted force—a change upon which they frequently commented with pride—demanded a change in their traditional methods of leadership. “Inflexible precedent” might have been very comforting to the senior officers. But to a class of men able to read and write and evaluate the justice and rationality of events on their ships, the application of logic to the system of discipline would have been much more effective as a method to maintain “the support of those in authority.” The officer corps’ failure to grasp this very basic principle constituted a leadership failure of staggering proportions, and contributed in a very large way to the flood of desertions throughout the period.
The officers’ attitude was critical to the welfare of the enlisted men. As one petty officer commented in 1908 concerning one of the Navy’s happy ships, the battleship Louisiana, “The officers made the crew, and the crew made a home of the ship.”30 But clearly, crew morale was subject to change. Just two years earlier, another enlisted man on board the Louisiana wrote a stinging assessment of the officer corps:
There are a few officers in this outfit who have the first principles of a square deal in their composition, but they are most woefully few and seldom. Their training at Annapolis seems to make the worst kind of snobs of them. They get the idea that the flatfoot is some kind of an animal to be driven and not led; and the sea service they get as midshipmen . . . helps them along the same lines.”32
As “One of Dewey’s Men” wrote from the Pacific Station in 1902, “We . . . would be the best drilled Navy in the world, as we were once, if the after part of the ship [officer’s country] were hauled out for the sun of investigation to shine on it for a little while.”32
1. Charles Nordhoff, Man-of-War Life: A Boy’s Experience in the United States Navy, During a Voyage Around the World in a Ship-of-the-Line, with an introduction and notes by John B. Hattendorf (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985), p. 4- Officers, of course, were regularly granted liberty.
2. Figures here reported come from Pitman Pulsifer, comp., Navy Yearbook, 1910, p. 740. See also Frederick S. Harrod, Manning the Navy: The Development of a Modem Naval Enlisted Force, 1899-1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 174-87.
3. Fred J. Buenzle, Bluejacket: An Autobiography (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988).
4. Rodney G. Tomlinson, ed., A Rocky Mountain Sailor in Teddy Roosevelt’s Navy: The Letters of Petty Officer Charles Fowler from the Asiatic Station, 1905-1910 (Boulder, C): Westview Press, 1998).
5. Jno. H. Paynter, Joining the Navy, or Abroad with Uncle Sam (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1895).
6. Jno. Swift, An Iowa Boy Around the World in the Navy, 1898-1902: A True Story of Our Navy (Des Moines, IA: The Kenyon Printing & Mfg. Co., 1902).
7. James R. Reckner, ed., A Sailor’s Log: Water Tender Frederick T. Wilson on Asiatic Station, 1899-1901 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004).
8. Swift, An Iowa Boy Around the World in the Navy, p. 319.
9. Paynter, Joining the Navy, p. 102.
10. Mary Pat Kelly, Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. ix.
11. Harrod, Manning the New Navy, 181, citing ChBuNav annual reports. The 1904 figure is noted on R. R. Wright, Georgia State Industrial College to SecNav (Morton), 21 Dec. 1904, NA, RG 24:88/523-69.
12. Buenzle, Bluejacket, p. 23.
13. W. K. Lane to Mrs. J. A. Storrell, 17 Jan. 1908.
14. Swift, An Iowa Boy Around the World in the Navy, p. 319.
15. Paynter, Joining the Navy, pp. 32-33.
16. First Lt. George Steunenberg, “Negroes in the Navy,” Army & Navy Journal, 44 (19 Jan. 1907), p. 563.
17. “Fight on a Battleship,” The New York Times, 8 Nov. 1907.
18. “Must Serve Ten Years," The New York Times, 3 Dec. 1907.
19. A Sailor’s Log, p. 186. Reports of uniform discrimination are common in the service journals and newspapers of the day.
20. Buenzle, Bluejacket, pp. 180-186.
21. A Sailor’s Log, p. 121.
22. Cdr. William G. Miller, CO, Minnesota, to Newberry, 9 Feb. 1909, NA, RG 24:88/1159-267.
23. RAdm. Charles S. Sperry, manuscript, “Cruise of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet,” 13, Sperry Papers, Naval Historical Foundation Collection, Library of Congress (hereafter NHF, LC). Sperry commanded the Great White Fleet curing the second half of its cruise around the world, 1907-1909.
24. Harrod, Manning the New Navy, p. 176, citing annual reports of the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation.
25. Adamson, “Impressions,” Navy Department Library.
26. Taylor to SecNav Moody, 29 July 1902, Moody Papers, v.2, NHF, LC. RAdm. J. B. Coughlan repeated this same justification, almost verbatim, in an article, “What the Navy Is and What It Needs,” published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger and extracted in Army & Navy Journal, 42 (1 April 1905), p. 826.
27. RAdm. Caspar F. Goodrich, “Desertions in the Navy,” Army & Navy Register, 39 (17 March 1906), pp. 26-7. Reprinted from Naval Institute Proceedings.
28. Long to Mr. I. B. Thurman, 19 Oct. 1901, Long Papers, Letterbook P.O. 26, Box 53, MHS.
29. Sigsbee to Moody, 28 Aug. 1903, NA, RG 24:88/3711-3.
30. Electrician First Class John M. Buris, quoted in “Letters from the Enlisted Men of the Navy,” Army & Navy Register, 44 (29 Aug. 1908), p. 21.
31. Unidentified enlisted man’s letter, USS Louisiana, 13 Nov. 1906. Enclosed in E. McBeth to Theodore Roosevelt, 16 Jan. 1907. NA, RG 24:88/1159-115.
32. “One of Dewey’s Men: The Blue Jacket’s Point of View,” Army & Navy Journal, 39 (29 March 1902), p. 757.