Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan is accepted as a naval philosopher and as a pioneering geopolitical thinker, a man who touched off a whole series of attempts to explain the dynamics of world power. He is accepted as an influential historian, a historian who not only wrote history but made history, who stimulated the growth of modern navies and who had an important influence on the development of national strategies. But Mahan is not accepted as a practical mariner. Even within our own Navy, for all the honor we accord him, he is generally regarded as an intellectual who was only incidentally a naval officer, an accomplished scholar but something of a misfit at sea.
Does it really make any difference whether Mahan was a good line officer or not? Mahan, himself, felt that it did and, even after he was world famous, he fought hard to maintain his professional reputation as a seagoing officer. Part of this was due to his personal and professional pride, because he was a proud man in spite of the Christian humility he practiced so earnestly. But he also realized that the acceptance of his ideas by the Navy was to some extent dependent upon his professional seagoing reputation.
On the other hand, he was not able to be “all things to all men.” As his proclivity and prominence as a writer grew, he was forced to make choices between what was best for his seagoing career and what was best for his intellectual career. In the last ten years before his retirement, he had a foot in each camp and sometimes found the position awkward. It was also during this period that professional resentment—of his increasing intellectual prominence and of his efforts toward the permanent establishment of the U. S. Naval War College—began to focus on his performance afloat.
He suffered a running attack by those in the Navy who felt that the infant War College and the theoretical study of warfare were not only useless but somehow destructive to the spirit of practicality and elan of the seagoing officer. Their primary target was not Mahan himself but the ideas that he had come to represent. If these thoughts of his contemporaries had ever been put into words, they might have been as follows: An intellectual cannot be a good officer; Mahan is an intellectual; therefore Mahan is not a good officer.
This bias lay behind one of the most unfortunate incidents of Mahan’s career, his receiving an unsatisfactory fitness report while commanding officer of the cruiser Chicago, one of the Navy’s top commands. Fortunately, his opponents did not prevail. The War College was finally accepted, his theories became famous, and his reputation as a seaman was officially upheld—but not before the water had been thoroughly muddied. Rumors and attitudes were generated that were not only an injustice to Mahan, but that opened the door to a dangerous misreading of history. If we accept the myth that Mahan was an incompetent and unprofessional officer, we must conclude that his historic insights resulted from intellectual activity alone. This was not the case, and in this day of increasing (and justifiable) emphasis on the intellectual approach to military problems, it is important that we do not underestimate the part that professional experience and direct observation played in so classic a precedent as Mahan’s development of his theories of sea power.
The tendency to underrate Mahan as a professional is to some extent rooted in our unfortunate tendency to expect great men to be universally great. This is neither realistic nor reasonable. That Mahan failed to distinguish himself afloat cannot be argued. He never became a great fleet commander; he had no “Santiago” or “Manila Bay.” His promotion to rear admiral was not even a special recognition of his contributions to naval theory. It took place in 1909 as the result of a general promotion of all officers on the retired list who had served in the Civil War. But all this was a long way from incompetency.
Historical facts show that Mahan was a capable and experienced, seagoing officer, and that, within the limitations of the opportunities offered by the Navy of his day, he enjoyed a very adequate measure of recognition in terms of promotion and assignment to command afloat. He was also a thorough-going professional in terms of his first-hand knowledge of the world and its peoples. He was well read, and at a time when most of America was scarcely aware that the rest of the world existed, his path had crisscrossed the globe from San Francisco to Capetown and from New York to Tokyo—from an exotic Bombay to a sophisticated Paris and a still provincial Rio de Janeiro.
Mahan was born on 27 September 1840, at West Point, where his father, Dennis Hart Mahan, was Professor of Engineering and Dean of the Faculty. In this exclusively military setting, fate, in her whimsical and unpredictable way, managed to point young Mahan toward the sea. As Mahan later recorded, after the Hudson River froze up in winter, West Point was cut off from the outside world, and during the long winter days, he “spent many of those happy hours that only childhood knows pouring over the back numbers of a British service periodical . . . Colburn's United Service Magazine . . . whose early issues abounded in reminiscences by naval officers. . . .”
He “devoured” these and the sea stories of Cooper and Marryat until he was “held enthralled by the mere sight of an occasional square-rigged vessel, such as at rare times passed our house on the Hudson, fifty miles from the sea.” This romantic attraction of the sea persisted and in 1856 drew him, against his father’s wishes, to the Naval Academy.
He graduated, in 1859, in a class of 20 that was soon to be separated forever. In 1861, six “went South” to fight for the Confederacy and one resigned because of southern sympathies. Three more died in action, one committed suicide, one was lost in a shipwreck, and one resigned soon after the war. In the years that followed, selection, poor health and death took their toll. Only two remained in the service longer than Mahan, and only one reached flag rank while in active duty.
Mahan was ordered to the 52-gun, square- rigged frigate Congress, which was assigned to the “Brazil Station” where she operated between Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro “with rare and brief stops elsewhere.” This was typical of the Navy under the “cruising station” system then in effect; single ships were stationed throughout the world to show the flag and support commerce. The fleet operations that Mahan advocated so strongly in later years were then to all practical purposes nonexistent.
Mahan found the Congress to be “a magnificent ship of her period,” “delightful to look at” and “splendidly martial.” She was still an exciting memory to him some five decades later and anyone who has been thrilled by the sight of a flight deck at peak operation will find himself in tune with Mahan’s reminiscences. “When her five hundred and odd men swarmed up for an evolution . . . The deck was peopled to the square foot despite her size ... I have always remembered the effect produced on me by this huge mass, when all hands were gathered ... to wear ship in a heavy gale. . . .”
On board the Congress he learned the seamanship of a passing era. Later he wrote with characteristic insight, “The officers and crew by training and method were still of the older time in tone and ideals . . . yet they had that curious adaptability characteristic of the profession, which afterward enabled them to fall readily into the use of the new constructions of every kind evolved by the War of Secession.” The midshipmen who ranked, as today, between the ship’s six junior officers and four warrant officers, became intimate with both: Traveling “from one side to the other; here at home, there guests, but to both admitted freely,” and learning from both not only the business but the lore of the sea. Mahan’s memories of those days will find an echo in many an officer’s personal experience. There was even an old boatswain with a typical boatswain’s flare for pungent phrases—“He didn’t know what to do, but there he stood, looking all the time as happy as a duck barefooted.”
It is typical of the bias concerning Mahan as a seaman that even his memories of these early sailing days have not been safe from misinterpretation. In Sail to Steam Mahan quoted a little ditty:
A strong nor’wester’s blowing Bill:
Hark! don’t you hear it roar now
Lord help them! how I pities all.
Unlucky folks on shore now.
This he preceded with the statement, “I guard myself from implying the full acquiescence of seamen in what is a caricature; few seamen, few who have really tried, really enjoy bad weather.” This, one of his biographers has distilled into: “He never enjoyed a storm.” Contrast this interpretation with more of Mahan’s own words—“It must be conceded that it was unpleasant to be waked at midnight, told your hour was come, that it was raining and blowing hard . . . Dressed in storm-clothes, and a nor’wester that caught at every corner . . . you forced your way up through two successive . . . hatches . . . you groped your way forward . . . being jostled and trampled by your many watchmates, quite as blind and much more sleepy than their officers could afford to be . . . But when you were awake, what a mighty stimulus there was to the salt roaring wind and pelting rain! How infectious the shout of the officer of the deck! The answering cry of the topmen aloft . . . Then when all was over . . . delightful relaxation from work well done and finished.”
Ashore in Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Bahia, and the various minor ports of the area, the “round of duties and enjoyments . . . made life pleasant enough.” Always observant, Mahan drank in the color of tropical life from the “pervading odor of rum and sugar” in Rio, to the charm of the women of Uruguay.
This idyll ended in June 1861, when the mail arrived in Montevideo with news of the fall of Fort Sumter and orders for the Congress to return home. Upon arrival in Boston, most of the “combatant sea officers” were ordered to other duty. Mahan was sent to the Pocahontas, a small steam corvette of only six guns, five smoothbore, and one rifle whose projectiles were “quite apt to go end over end.”
On 9 September, Mahan, now 20 and soon to be promoted to lieutenant (the next grade after past-midshipman), wrote a letter to the Assistant Secretary of Navy proposing the outfitting of a helpless looking sailing ship with a heavy gun (much as “Q” ships were outfitted in World War I) and requesting its command. He proposed to decoy the Confederate raiders, the C.S. Sumter in particular, that were enjoying a spectacular and highly publicized success in destroying Union shipping and were thereby casting “an undeserved stigma on the Navy.” Mahan’s arguments were hardly typical of the conservative, unaggressive personality that is sometimes fastened upon him, “Suppose it fails, what is lost? A useless ship, a midshipman and a hundred men. If it succeed, apart from the importance of the capture, look at the prestige such an affair would give the service.” Would it also have created another and different Mahan, a Mahan famous as a doer as well as a thinker? The speculation is interesting but fate denied Mahan his chance. Like many another brave effort, his request disappeared into the administrative confusion of the early war years. It was later retrieved as a historical document, but there is no record of any action having been taken on the bold proposal.
Duty on the Pocahontas proved unspectacular but not without excitement. In November, she participated in the capture of Port Royal, South Carolina, coming under fire that was “good line but high,” damaging only the main top. Capture of Port Royal and other coastal positions opened up the inland waterways along the Atlantic coast to Union control and enabled the Union to establish an “inside” blockade of the whole coast with the exception of Charleston. As Mahan recorded, “During the ensuing ten months there were very few of these entrances, from Georgetown, the northernmost in South Carolina, down to Fernandina, in Florida, into which the Pocahontas did not penetrate. . . The operations not only involved the throttling of Confederate waterborne traffic but included close fire support of small detachments of infantry which operated close to the coast. Mahan was executive officer, and for a period acting commanding officer.
In the late summer of 1862, the Pocahontas came north for repairs, and Mahan was ordered to duty as an instructor at the Naval Academy, which had been temporarily moved to Newport, Rhode Island. He spent the next eight months there. Professionally he was in good company for here began his long association with Stephen B. Luce, then a lieutenant commander and head of the Department of Seamanship to which Mahan was assigned. The next summer he became Luce’s executive officer in the sailing ship, Macedonian, for the midshipman cruise to Europe. That he retained the continuing respect of Luce, one of the Navy’s famous seamen, is in itself clear testimony as to his capability as a ship’s officer.
The simple fact of the undertaking of this routine cruise in an outmoded sailing ship like the Macedonian at the very time that the Confederacy was reaching its high water mark at Gettysburg is conclusive evidence of the effectiveness of the North’s control of the sea. The very pervasiveness of this control meant that duty for many of the officers of the Navy was routine—dull and unexciting. Mahan shared this monotony on his next assignment. When the Macedonian returned to Newport, he was ordered to the Seminole, a nine-gun steam sloop, operating in the Western Gulf between Sabine Pass and Galveston. In one of those peculiarly slanted phrases by which the image of Mahan as a misfit has been perpetrated, one biographer has observed that this duty “was regarded by Mahan as the ultimate in dullness.” This it undoubtedly was—not only for Mahan but for the whole crew. Mahan later recalled, “Day after day, day after day we lay inactive—roll, roll.” “The largest reservoir of anecdotes was bound to run dry. ... I have never seen a body of intelligent men reduced so nearly to imbecility.”
Life improved for Mahan in the spring of 1864. He was ordered back to the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron as executive officer of the converted passenger steamer Adgir. There, things were livelier; relatively fresh provisions were available; social contacts with other ships of the blockading squadron were possible; and above all there was the activity of the close-in operations. After a few months he was transferred to the staff of Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, the commander of the squadron. There he was several times entrusted with temporary commands and for a period was squadron ordnance officer. In view of Dahlgren’s stature as an ordnance expert, this latter assignment was a significant one.
His staff activities involved him closely in General William T. Sherman’s operations around Charleston and gave him a broad view of that important strategic episode. It was coincidental that Luce was also present and was so impressed with the “science of war” as consciously practiced by Sherman that he commenced a personal study of the subject that led him in 1884 to initiate the establishment of the Naval War College. Mahan’s own studies did not begin until several years later, but when they did, he was to find remarkable parallels between these experiences and earlier historical events. It is quite possible, even probable, that without these parallels and the insights they generated, he would never have attained his later eminence.
The Civil War rapidly was drawing to an end. Charleston fell on 17 February 1865; Richmond followed on 3 April; and General Lee surrendered on the ninth. The blockading forces began to “wrap-up” their operations, and Mahan was released from Dahlgren’s staff to go back to the Adgir. On 7 June, at the age of 24, he became a lieutenant commander.
Confederate raiders were still operating, and the Adgir was sent to Haiti to take up convoy duty escorting Union ships from the Windward Passage toward Panama. Here Mahan caught Chagres Fever, a virulent malaria, and was invalided home for six months.
After his recovery in December 1866, he was ordered to the Muscoota, an iron double- ender paddle steamer which was part of a squadron maintained in the Gulf because of the Maximilian affair in Mexico. This activity unavoidably brought home to him the close relationship between diplomacy and national power. As a result of the Naval Academy cruise, he had been present in Cherbourg in 1863 when the French celebrated their capture of Mexico. With American military power completely committed to the Civil War, American diplomatic protests had been blithely ignored. Now that the United States was free to use its power, Mahan saw how readily the French gave in.
After a visit to the mouth of the Rio Grande half of the ship’s company was stricken with the fever, and the Muscoota was forced to return to her base in Pensacola. Mahan later reported, in an understatement that says a great deal about the conditions of his time, “It was not malignant—we had but three deaths.” Soon after, the Muscoota was sent north, and the ship went out of commission in September 1866.
Mahan was not only spared the illness this time, but by a trick of fate the Muscoota’s misfortune became his good fortune. He was ordered to temporary duty at the Washington Navy Yard where he found a small, three-masted, steam-powered corvette, the Iroquois, fitting out for the China Station. He requested and was assigned as executive officer.
In his words, the new ship was a typical representative of a type built during the war— “beautiful vessels in outline . . . which repaid in appearance all the care which the seaman lavishes upon his home. One could well feel proud of them, the more so that they had so close behind them a good fighting record.” She was about 700 tons, a steamer with sails for auxiliary power, and a screw that could be disconnected and hoisted out to reduce drag. Her guns were four smoothbore and one rifle, so that in both ordnance and propulsion she spanned an era of revolutionary change.
In February 1867, the little ship set out, “destined for China and Japan, the dream of years for me, but better still ... we were to go by the West Indies, to Rio de Janeiro, thence by the Cape of Good Hope (Capetown) to Madagascar, to Aden . . . , to Muscat . . . , and so by India (Bombay) . . . to Hong Kong.” And go she did, visiting all these ports and Manila and Singapore besides. It was nine months later when she pulled into Hong Kong. The 26-year old Mahan was “seeing the world” as few have a chance to see it, and one has only to read his reminiscences to feel the eagerness and perception with which he viewed it.
Mahan was especially impressed with the “continual outcropping of the British soldier.” “It is not that there is so much of him, but he is so manywhere.” In Madagascar, the escort of native soldiers for the official visit to the Sultan (front rank shod—rear barefooted) was “commanded by a young Arab, who seemed very anxious to do all in style, rising on tiptoe at the several orders, which he jerked out with vim, and to my surprise in English.” Here was empire in action—not grandeur and overwhelming power, but a workaday pervasiveness of influence and control maintained with a bare minimum of forces. He had visited England. Now he saw its far-flung possessions. He had seen the wealth, pomp, and circumstance of the homeland. Now he saw the economy of effort by which it was obtained. Did he begin then to consider the enigma of England’s greatness, or did the question remain unphrased until his studies began to reveal the unique leverage of sea power some 20 years later? Whichever it was, there is little question that his observations of these years played an important part in the formulation of his theories.
On 26 November, the Iroquois left Hong Kong for Japan, arriving at Nagasaki on 6 December 1867, and moving on to Kobe which, along with Osaka, had just been opened as an additional treaty port. This was only 17 years after Perry had forced the opening of Japan and anti-foreign feeling was still running high among the samurai who were, Mahan found, “as thick almost as black berries.” However, they were kept under a tight rein by the Japanese authorities, who correctly feared that any outburst would bring retaliation. The various powers, American, British, and French, each had several ships on hand and co-operated enthusiastically in protecting all occidentals.
Soon after the Iroquois arrived, conditions deteriorated because of a revolt of the great nobles against the Shogun, or “Tycoon” as Mahan called him. The Shogun fared badly, and as he was unable to continue the protection of foreigners in Osaka, the foreigners were forced to fall back on Kobe where the ships could protect them. In February, a brief attack on the foreign compound by rebellious samurai forced the landing of some 500 men and the threatening of the town with the ship’s batteries. Fortunately, the nobles were able to re-establish order, and they prudently resumed the protection of foreigners that had been provided by the Shogun. Times remained unsettled, however. Travel was restricted and officers were ordered to carry revolvers when ashore. Mahan later recalled—in a provocatively incomplete anecdote—“I remember well the scuttling away of several pretty young women when one of these was accidentally discharged in a wayside teahouse.” In other less humorous incidents, the British Ambassador was attacked and eight French sailors were killed, but the situation gradually returned to normal and the Iroquois took up more routine duties.
Mahan was able to visit Osaka and Hakodate where he anticipated thousands of his countrymen by staying in a primitive Japanese inn—“scrupulously clean and quite comfortable”—and climbing a lava-clad mountain. In December 1868, the Iroquois returned to Shanghai and entered into routine station movements which took her to Formosa, Manila, and Hong Kong. The following September, Mahan was ordered home and obtained the Admiral’s permission to travel via Suez and Europe, rather than the usual route through San Francisco. Later, on the advice of a Parsee whom he met during the steamer passage from Yokohama to Hong Kong, he decided to also visit India.
He arrived at Calcutta in November and proceeded to Bombay by the round-about route of Lucknow and Delhi, traveling by railway arid post road (as the railway was not yet complete in the interior). From Bombay he took passage through the Suez Canal, just a few months after its opening, and then went on to the Riviera. There he found six months leave awaiting him! He took advantage of his leave to visit Rome and Southern Italy, Paris and London—after a delay at Nice where he found old friends from Newport days and “like thoughtless young men everywhere abandoned myself to pleasant society instead of self-improvement by travel.”
As he left Europe in the spring of 1870, a phase of his own life was ending. Gone was the period of war, of adventure, and of one new sight following close on the heels of another. At his new duty station, the New York Navy Yard, he found a Navy that was entering into a steep decline. America’s eyes were turned inward toward internal developments: railroads, manufacturing, mining and agriculture. The change from wood ships to iron, combined with high labor costs and archaic laws against purchase of foreign ships, was destroying the American Merchant Marine. Although foreign trade was increasing rapidly, it was being forced into foreign bottoms. These factors were combining with public apathy to throttle the Navy. Naval appropriations had dropped from 122 million dollars in 1865 to 19 million in 1871, and would continue down. The great Civil War fleet, much of it made of unseasoned lumber, was rotting in the yards. In spite of the progress in steam propulsion, the Navy had gone back to sail because of the unlimited range and economy afforded. Propellers had been changed to an inefficient two-bladed type in order to improve sailing qualities, and Navy Regulations specifically forbade the use of coal except as an absolute necessity—and then required a log entry in red ink. By 1881, Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt would be forced to announce that it was no longer possible even to meet the responsibilities of the cruising stations, that the Navy could no longer respond effectively to the calls of American citizens and their mercantile interests for protection.
These conditions affected the careers of all officers, Mahan’s among them. He did not become completely “chairborne,” but the pace of life measurably slackened. To pass quickly over the events of these years: April 1871, brought duty on a relief ship to France and a month or two in England; June 1872— marriage to an attractive and intelligent young lady, some years his junior, followed by six months’ leave. In the same year, at the age of 32, he was promoted to commander. Soon after his promotion, he received his first command: the Wasp, a side-wheeler steamer operating on his old South Atlantic Station. He took his bride with him to Montevideo where the ship was based. Here the excitement of a first-born daughter was added to the usual round of yellow fever epidemic and revolution. January 1875 brought orders home, and the Mahans proceeded by commercial steamer to Bahia, Pernambuco, and the Canaries to Pau, in Southern France, for a visit to Mrs. Mahan’s parents who had retired there. Returning via England, the family spent the summer in Maine before proceeding in September to Mahan’s new station, the Boston Navy Yard.
At Boston, he found conditions of corruption that horrified him. Both the conditions and Mahan’s fighting reaction to them are epitomized by these excerpts from a letter written at the time: “According to your suggestion I wrote at some length to judge Merriman, Chairman of the Senate Naval Appropriations Committee, and I have also written many others.” “The immediate need ... is to have the Secretary (of Navy) and several others looked after.” “My own belief is that much money might be spared if politics could be exiled from the management of the yards.” In the spring he appeared before a Senate ccmmittee and gave detailed testimony.
The following summer (1876), the Navy reached a new low. As an economy measure, a number of officers were placed on furlough at reduced pay, Mahan among them. He and his family felt that this action was in retaliation for his crusading, and although this has never been proven, he was probably at least partially right. In order to husband his meager pay, he moved to Pau where Mrs. Mahan’s family was still living. Here for the first time he seriously considered alternatives to his naval career and tried his hand at writing. Although the resulting articles did not sell, he was to become more and more active in this field.
In July 1877, a second daughter was born in Pau, and the day following her birth brought more happy news—orders returning him to active duty at the Naval Academy as Head of the Ordnance Department. At the Academy the availability of time and facilities encouraged him to continue his writing, and he developed the habit of following world affairs closely. In 1879, he won third prize in an essay contest conducted by the U. S. Naval Institute. The article concerned naval education for officers and men and was his first to be published.*
In June 1880, he requested sea duty, but, as there was no ship available, he was ordered to the New York Navy Yard. Many other officers found themselves in a similar situation. Even the fiery George Dewey, later of Manila fame, spent seven years ashore—with the Light House Service. But, for Mahan, this duty proved to be good fortune because in December he was requested by Scribner’s to prepare one of the volumes of a series on the Civil War. The result was his first published book, The Gulf and Inland Waters.
After he completed his book, Mahan renewed his efforts to obtain a ship, seeking command of the flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron, but finally being ordered in August of 1883 to the Wachusett, a tiny 1,600-ton veteran of the Civil War with obsolete guns and an obsolescent propulsion plant. She was operating on the South Pacific Station, moving between Ecuador, Chile, and Peru, and basing alternately in Valparaiso and Callao. This was a primitive part of the world, and neither the ship nor the shore offered much to the now sophisticated Mahan. He was not happy with the duty, and it does not seem reasonable to expect that he should have been.
In a rambling book called Tarns of a Kentucky Admiral, published in 1928, Admiral Hugh Rodman tells a story of this period during which he was an Ensign on Mahan’s ship. According to the Admiral, the Wachusett had a collision with a barque that had the right of way. His conclusion—“The greatest naval strategist the world has ever known . . . was not a good seaman.” This has been quoted by one of Mahan’s biographers without any critical examination of the circumstances surrounding either the incident or its recounting. Rodman himself recorded that there was no courts-martial, although he stated that the damage was serious. He gave no details that would permit analysis of the incident, not even such fundamental information as who had the conn. Worse still, he followed the story with the comment that “it is generally understood” (my emphasis) that “this officer (Mahan) was detached from command of the European flagship and sent home on account of lack of adaptability as a seaman.”
As will be seen later, Mahan was neither “detached” nor “sent home.” The latter story is simply not true, and there is little excuse for such an error when the facts could have been checked quite easily. It is, of course, not only possible but probable that such a story was in circulation, and as claimed, “generally understood” to be true. This in itself is significant as an indication of professional attitudes toward Mahan.
In September of 1884 the real turning point in Mahan’s life arrived. He was invited by Luce, who was in the process of setting up the Naval War College, to take charge of instruction in Naval History and Tactics-Mahan sent his acceptance from Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immediately began such preparation as was possible with the limited resources available. Unfortunately, continued unrest ashore, first in Peru and later in Panama, caused his ship to be retained in South America. In March, Mahan had to land his Marine guard to protect American property in Panama, and ultimately the Americans took temporary possession of Panama City. It was August 1885, before the situation was stabilized and Mahan was able to take the Wachusett to San Francisco for decommissioning. At San Francisco the Board of Inspection found her efficiency “exceptionally high” and was very complimentary in its official report. Soon thereafter Mahan was promoted to captain. He was then 45 years old and, as he departed by train for New York where he was to complete the historical research for his War College lectures, he was embarking in earnest on his new career as a Navy intellectual.
The next eight years constitute another and separate story that, important and interesting as it is, must for want of space be passed over with only a glance. This period was taken up with the creation of his masterpieces, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 7660- 7783 and The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, and with his struggles to keep the infant War College alive. His activities almost without exception were limited to the intellectual side of his career.
In 1893, his life took still another, if temporary, turn. He was ordered to sea. On the face of it, his new command was an excellent one—the USS Chicago, one of the newest and largest cruisers of the “New Navy,” which was being fitted out to become flagship of the European Station. There is no question that he was well qualified for this fine assignment, but there is also some reason to suspect he was being “kicked upstairs” as a preliminary maneuver in a renewed attack on the War College of which he was now president. The War College, after a series of ups and downs, had enjoyed a period of stability and apparent acceptance between 1889 and 1893 because it had gained the support of the Secretary of Navy, Benjamin F. Tracy. But when a new Secretary of Navy, Hilary Herbert, came into office, Rear Admiral Francis M. Ramsay, the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation and long-time opponent of the College, took the opportunity to re-open his previous opposition. Mahan had by now become strongly committed to his writing and to the College. He requested that he be excused from the new assignment so that he could continue his work. In spite of the political support of young Theodore Roosevelt, then a Civil Service Commissioner, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and the unofficial pressure of his supporters within the Navy, such as Luce and the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, Captain Folger, his request was refused. In a letter to his wife he reported, “Ramsay will do me all the harm he can ... I represent a movement with which he has no sympathy.” Ramsay’s own words were more blunt; and, in the light of the fact that he himself had spent only three out of the past 15 years at sea, more revealing, “It is not the business of a Naval Officer to write books.”
To grasp the situation, it must be remembered that the officer corps of the Navy was still a gentleman’s club of less than 2,000 members. Feuds and schisms soon became common knowledge and were the subject of a much more personal interest than they would be today. Unfortunately for Mahan, the new commander of the European Station, Rear Admiral Henry Erben, was a member of the “Old Guard,” a bluff old seadog who played his part to the hilt—as capably at the after- dinner rostrum as on the bridge. He sincerely believed that the War College was an intellectual frill and Mahan an impractical theorist. Unlike Luce and Roosevelt who felt that “Our prize idiots . . . have thrown away a chance to give us an absolutely unique position in Naval affairs,” Erben could see in Mahan only a naval officer who had had the effrontery to decline a command afloat.
Mahan had reason to be downhearted as he took over his new ship. Not only was it obvious that his reputation as a line officer was at stake in a game in which he held low cards, but, as he wrote to Stephen Luce, he was forced to the conclusion that “Our own Navy-—by its representatives—has rejected both me and my work, for I cannot but think that an adequate professional opinion would have changed the issue.”
Happily, as far as his work was concerned, this was the dark hour before the dawn. The efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge had forced the controversy about Mahan’s orders up to the level of the Secretary of the Navy and, while the new Secretary had understandably supported his Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, his interest in the broader aspects of the matter had been stimulated. Several months later, Mahan received word that Secretary Herbert had “read your last book and is convinced” . . . “the War College is safe.” It was never to be seriously threatened again.
A new day was also dawning in the public acceptance of his work. Prior to the summer of 1903, Mahan’s books had received good reviews but had generated little public interest in America. Their reception in England had been better, but neither Mahan nor his countrymen quite realized how much better. The Chicago had been scheduled for a leisurely cruise around Europe to return the courtesies of European participation in a large naval review that had been held in New York the previous spring; but, when she reached England, a flood of invitations made it immediately apparent that an unexpected situation had developed. Mahan’s work had generated a tremendous public interest, and it soon became obvious that he was being lionized. Not long after, the news began to filter back to the United States and to the rest of the world where a similar interest was generated. As a result, the cruise of the Chicago became a triumphal tour for Mahan.
It was not surprising that all this failed to solve the problem of his relations with Admiral Erben. Erben, displaced from his normal position of honor when ashore, found it even more comforting to think of Mahan as a “pen and ink sailor.”
Other factors had also aggravated the situation. Mahan had not taken over command until just before the Chicago left major overhaul and departed for Europe. During the critical shakedown period crossing the Adan- tic, he injured his knee badly and was confined to his cabin. The Admiral, on the other hand, was into everything. As Mahan wrote to a friend, “Great believer as I am in concentration of force, I am disposed to question the advisability of concentrating an Admiral’s command in a single ship.” Mahan, as soon as he was able, had corrected the things that were wrong, but the relationship with the Admiral did not improve. In the words of one of the junior officers, “It was difficult to understand how . . . (Erben) could find fault with the condition and discipline of the Chicago. Erben, however, was very quick tempered even over trifles.”
The same young officer characterized Mahan as “an excellent navigator and pilot” but felt at first that he had an obsessive fear of collision because of the number of collision drills he held. This opinion he later modified when a ship drifted down on the anchored Chicago and the skill that had been developed in the drills was put to good use. Mahan, he reported, handled the situation with efficiency and an “impressive dignity” despite the fact that he had rushed to the scene dressed in only a “smoking jacket and bed slippers.”
On another occasion—and this story will warm the heart of many a flagship commanding officer—Mahan had changed course several times in an effort to avoid a badly yawing merchantman which was approaching from dead ahead. Erben, who was on the bridge, finally blurted out, “Dammit Mahan! Show him your nose and then hold your course. He’ll get out of your way.” Mahan placed the ship on its original course, gave orders to the Officer of the Deck to maintain course, and left the bridge. In the words of the Officer of the Deck, “It was Erben who then became nervous.”
In January 1894, the whole matter came to a head when Erben gave Mahan a copy of his fitness report. It was unfavorable; stating, in addition to a number of criticisms of the ship that had not previously been brought to Mahan’s attention, that “his [Mahan’s] interests are entirely outside the Service for which I am satisfied, he cares but little and is therefore not a good officer.”
Mahan immediately made a full reply and requested an official investigation. As his request would be handled by Admiral Ramsay, he also wrote Roosevelt who asked Lodge to take the matter up with Secretary Herbert. Herbert, wishing to avoid the publicity that Would result from an official investigation concerning the now famous Mahan, asked Lodge to notify Mahan “that there is no reason for you to make yourself uneasy . . . that when the ship went out of commission, she would be rigidly inspected by a first class board, and that you would then have an opportunity if you desired to meet all the criticism of Erben.” When the ship was inspected she was found to be in top condition. But Mahan did not have to wait until then for his exoneration.
In September 1894, Erben was relieved by Rear Admiral William A. Kirkland. Duty under Admiral Kirkland brought a welcome change, there were no more petty annoyances, and the Admiral gave Mahan his full confidence. When the Chicago was ordered home some six months later, Kirkland, before shifting his flag, gave Mahan a copy of a letter he had written to the Navy Department as an addition to his regular report. This letter stated that he had received a memorandum from Erben censuring Mahan and assumed a similar one had reached the Department. He was writing, therefore, as “an act of justice” to state his good opinion of Mahan as a commanding officer. To the copy he provided Mahan he added that “this perhaps may give your friend FMR [Ramsay] a chance to remark on the wholesale excellence of my report.”
The Chicago arrived back in New York on 23 March 1895. Mahan refused a pilot and personally took her up the North River to a berth off 41st Street. Here she received the decommissioning inspection. On the 29th, with the inspection successfully completed, he took her, again without pilot, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There, it is reliably reported, he laid her alongside the dock “in a very handsome manner.” When he left the bridge, his seagoing days were ended. He left them proudly, secure in his confidence of a job well done.
He did not reckon with the whispers and the scratching pens.
* See A. T. Mahan, “Naval Education,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1879, Vol. V (#9), pp. 345-376.