The minority report submitted by Admiral Sims, as a member of the 1933 Board of Visitors to the Naval Academy, occasioned considerable interest in the press. This is quite natural, considering the nature of his comments and recommendations and the fact that he is not only a prominent citizen of the nation but also a famous naval officer as well.
Summed up, it appears that he believes the present educational standards of the Academy are not high enough to turn out graduates who can be rated as educated men. He thinks existing deficiencies should be cured by accepting only full-fledged college graduates for entrance and by reducing the Academy course to one and a half or two years of postgraduate work along strictly professional lines.
The editorials and articles I have seen since the Admiral sent in his report have given the matter rather full treatment, inclining somewhat to his views; but in general they have shown a disposition to be constructive in their criticisms and comments. I have gained the impression, however, that most of the discussions I have read were written without first giving thorough consideration to the basic factors which must control the education and training of young men preparing to become naval officers. It seems to me that a good deal of confusion can scarcely be avoided unless we dig down below the surface and discover a basis from which we can take the subject up in an orderly manner.
First of all, I believe the formal education of a midshipman must be a compromise. The settlement has to be reached by mutual concessions from the various advocates of plans and ideas. It is somewhat analogous to the familiar compromise involved in building a battleship, in which due consideration and allowance must be made for weight of guns, of armor, and of propulsive machinery. On offhand consideration, we would have our battleship built with, say, twelve 18-inch guns, 24 inches of armor over all vital parts, a 35- knot speed. But, of course, such a ship is at present a practical absurdity. The gun advocates must come down to, say, eight 16-inch, the armor must be reduced to 18 inches and less in many places, and the tacticians must be satisfied with a 21- knot speed.
In the education and training of our future naval officers, I would like to include:
(1) A rock-bottom foundation of military character.
(2) A liberal education of the broadest scope consistent with excellence in quality.
(3) A thorough grounding in the technical subjects required by a naval officer in the practice of his profession.
If all three of these general specifications could be fully met, I am sure all of us would be more than satisfied with the result; but I believe analysis will show us, unfortunately, that the matter is a parallel case to that of deciding upon the characteristics of the battleship. Each factor will have to be trimmed and cut down in order to arrive at the best practical balance of the whole.
Military character! Easily the most important and valuable equipment of the military leader, the one thing we can least afford to skimp or neglect. It is the stamp impressed by military habits and actions; and it is built up by a slow process of which the most important molding forces are early military associations, traditions stamped on the young and impressionable mind, experiences in youth. Military character is the quality of mind which, if its foundations have been laid early in life, eventually becomes almost instinctive in guiding a leader to quick and correct decisions when he is confronted with a given set of military conditions. It is the attitude of mind which causes a man to accept cheerfully and as a matter of course, the rigors of military life and the restrictions of discipline. It is the lubricant which enables him to fit easily and naturally into the military machine of which he is a part. Like any other aspect of character, it can best be built up if a start is made while the subject is young and of pliable mind, the younger the better. Somewhere I read or heard that a noted ecclesiastic once said:
Give us the child when he is young and there will be no question as to his loyalty and adherence to the church during the remainder of his life.
The proposed plan of accepting only college graduates for entrance to the Naval Academy would place the officer material under first military influences at the average age of 22, which is worked out simply enough by adding the 4 college years to the present average college entrance age of 18. Thus these young men would come under first military influences an average of 4 years later in their lives than do present- day midshipmen. This, in my opinion, is a most important consideration, since it would mean the difference between applying first impressions to grown young men of comparatively settled and independent minds, instead of to ’teen-aged boys not yet completely past the age of hero worship.
There is no war period in the history of our Navy in which college men who came into military life after maturity have had a fair and adequate test in competition with Naval Academy graduates. But our Civil War furnishes just such a test involving graduates of the sister institution of the Naval Academy, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
During that great struggle the Union Armies were filled with officers who were college graduates, ranging in age from 22 to 62. Three of them who reached brigade generalcies were to be future presidents— Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison. Hayes was valedictorian of his college class and Garfield was graduated an honor man. The college men in the aggregate far outnumbered the graduates of the Military Academy. As the war lengthened and threatened the very existence of the nation, President Lincoln was in no mood to play favorites of any kind in selecting his generals. He was looking for men who could win battles; he was picking them himself, and military ability proved in battle was the only consideration that swayed his choice. It was a free and open contest. When the war ended, his three most successful generals were Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—all of them Military Academy graduates. All three had moved up from complete obscurity, Grant and Sherman starting as unknown volunteers from civil life, Sheridan from the regular Army in which he was serving as a lieutenant only eight years out of the Academy. I do not mean to intimate, nor do I believe, that the college graduates failed to win outstanding positions of war command from any lack of intellectual ability or capacity. In my opinion they were up against a tremendous handicap, namely, the fact that the more successful Military Academy graduates had the stamp of military character impressed upon them when they were boys in their ’teens.
On the Confederate side the score was about the same. Lee, Jackson, and Stuart, probably the three outstanding names, were all Military Academy graduates. Lee was a regular up to the outbreak of the war and already a distinguished soldier. The other two were volunteers who came up from comparative obscurity.
In the biographical notes on Admiral Farragut, appearing in an encyclopedia now before me, is this sentence:
He joined the Navy at the age of 9 and was engaged in battle in a position of responsibility at the age of 12.
I don’t know that Farragut’s case can be called typical of the midshipmen of his time; but, as we all know, the embryo naval officers of the days before the Naval Academy was founded were taken away from their mothers at a tender age and brought up in ships’ gunrooms in the hard school of experience. While the plan had serious defects, there is no denying that it furnished the Navy with a long line of splendid leaders, men of the highest military character, commanders to whom we are now indebted for most of our finest traditions.
We might say that the manner in which midshipmen were trained in Farragut’s time represents one extreme solution of the problem, and that the plan now proposed by Admiral Sims represents another. The older method developed strong military character at the expense of liberal education; the one now proposed would secure liberal education at the expense of military character. If forced to a choice between the two extremes, I, for one, would much prefer a return to the methods used in Farragut’s day. I believe it would involve less injury to the Navy. But, fortunately, we are not forced to such a Hobson’s choice. We can make a reasonable compromise as we do when building a battleship. We can take in the new midshipmen not so young as the little chaps of Farragut’s time, but a good deal younger and more pliant of mind than present-day college graduates. We can give the youngsters as much liberal education as possible during a rigorous 4-year course, which period will also be available for building up military character in youthful minds. In other words, we can hold to the general plan in operation at present, with modifications in method from year to year as such are proved necessary and desirable by experience and by new ideas which have been thoroughly tested in the general educational field.
Since I first heard of the Naval Academy, it has from time to time been the subject of attack from well-meaning critics whose sincerity has generally matched their enthusiasm. Always the underlying charge seems to be that the Academy is in a state of stagnation. It is not, of course, nor has it ever been so far as I am able to judge. It is distinctly conservative, however, and in my opinion it should be. After all, an institution charged with the responsibility of selecting the leaders of the nation’s first line of defense and giving them their early groundwork of education and training is not a suitable laboratory in which to experiment with new and unproved educational ideas. Mistakes would be too costly. I believe we are all in agreement that the Navy’s military leaders have not as yet been found wanting in any important particulars whenever they have been subjected to the revealing test of war. Should the time ever come when they let the nation down in an emergency, then indeed will the critics of the Naval Academy have their day; and rightly so, for the trouble will undoubtedly have its roots in the system of training and education in operation at that institution.
According to newspaper reports, Admiral Sims admittedly based most of his criticisms upon his recollections of the Naval Academy of his own day; that is, upon the Academy as it was between 1876 and 1880. It seems unnecessary to belabor the point that the institution’s progress and development of the last half-century must be taken into account before a correct judgment of present-day conditions can be formed. Since my own graduation from the Academy many changes have been made in the curriculum. In general, they have tended to place more emphasis upon cultural subjects and less upon those which are strictly professional or technical. During the past two years, for example, a new department has been set up to handle economics and government separately from the older departments; the time allotted to the Department of English and History has been greatly increased; and many similar and related changes have been made which, taken together, constitute a revision more extensive than occurs very often in any educational institution. Undoubtedly, an important factor in making these changes possible is the excellent system of technical postgraduate instruction for officers, which has been developed in recent years.
It might be of some value to this discussion to make note of the high estimate which the country at large seems to place upon graduates of the Naval Academy who have left the service and taken up pursuits in civil life. While the only data I could now offer on this phase of the subject would consist of a long list of individual cases, I nevertheless feel confident that a roll call and thorough investigation of this group of graduates would show that their average success is at least as high as that of the graduates of any of our colleges.
When all is said, the status of graduates of the Naval Academy, as regards liberal education, does not differ greatly from that of the technical graduates of our colleges. At graduation both groups are somewhat short on general education, and the deficiencies have to be made up by outside study and reading. Certainly any naval officer of these days who fails to adopt such a course of growth and development will be eliminated from the active list by the severely competitive system of promotion by selection which is in operation in the grades above that of lieutenant commander.
The United States Navy is the surest guarantor of peace which this country possesses. It is earnestly to be wished that we would profit by the teachings of history in this matter.—Theodore Roosevelt.
I advocate that the United States build a Navy commensurate with its powers and its needs, because I feel that such a Navy will be the guaranty and safeguard of peace.—Theodore Roosevelt.