On 31 August 2022, Fincantieri Marinette Marine began construction on the future Constellation (FFG-62), the lead ship in a new class of frigates. Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael M. Gilday hoped to build 56 of these small surface combatants, which should be “capable of defending the fleet, striking adversary forces in all domains, and expanding interoperability with allies and partners.”1 The Navy’s last frigates, the Oliver Hazard Perry class, left U.S. service in 2015.
Launching this new class is an opportunity for the Navy to examine the causes of its recent failures, including major program mistakes, such as the Littoral Combat Ship program, and ethical lapses, such as the Fat Leonard scandal. The name of the class, however, raises some questions about the Navy’s understanding of its own history and organizational culture.
Part of ethical leadership and positive organizational culture is the willingness of members to reflect, assess, and engage about times when their actions fell short of professed moral values and commitments. As the new class of frigates is being built, it is worth revisiting the Navy’s complicated relationship with ships named Constellation as a case study of the role of motivations, organizational culture, and moral disengagement in an ethical community of practice.
Announcing the New Constellation Class
On the surface, there does not seem to be much awry in the decision to name the new class of frigates Constellation. The Secretary of the Navy is responsible for naming ships, and in October 2020, then-Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite chose Constellation.
He announced the name while standing on board the wooden-hulled museum ship Constellation in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and he noted that many famous ships in the U.S. Navy’s history had carried the name. The first was one of the original six frigates, named by President George Washington in honor of the stars on the American flag. Recalling that long history, Braithwaite said, would emphasize “the importance of heritage in the Navy and Marine Corps” because when sailors “serve on a ship that has such a glorious history in its name, that stuff just bubbles to the top and makes people feel proud and makes them feel that they are a part of something special and part of something that’s greater than self.”2 Secretaries of the Navy name ships for similar reasons every year. What, then, is the problem?
The First Two Constellations
The first USS Constellation, the 1797 frigate named by Washington, had a distinguished career in the Quasi-War with France (1798–1801), the Barbary Wars (1801–5 and 1815–16), and the War of 1812. By 1853, she was obsolete, so the Navy disassembled her in Gosport Navy Yard and built a sloop-of-war to replace her. This new ship was built with different timbers and to a different design than the original, but she also was named Constellation.
The sloop-of-war served the Navy for the next century. After World War II, the Navy decided it no longer wanted the Constellation, but a group now known as Historic Ships in Baltimore fought to save her from the breakers. The Navy transferred that Constellation to the group in 1955, and today she is moored in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as a museum ship.3
Beneath this simple story of one ship replacing another, however, there is a more complicated story. Until 1908, there was no confusion about the provenance of the sloop-of-war Constellation, which was, at the time, a training ship in Newport, Rhode Island. The Navy’s official records showed that she had been launched in 1854 at the Gosport Navy Yard. But in 1909, the annual reports of the Navy Department began to claim that the ship had in fact been built in 1797 in Baltimore. It is unknown who made the change or on what grounds. The ships were superficially similar—square-rigged, three-masted, all-sail ships displacing between 1,200 and 1,500 tons with complements of 250 to 350 sailors—and perhaps the question about the ship’s provenance arose in Newport naturally.
The Navy’s role in U.S. strategy and in the world was widely debated at the turn of the 20th century, and the Constellation’s homeport in Newport was the epicenter of that debate. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s best-selling Influence of Sea Power upon History had been written in sight of the Constellation at the Naval War College in 1890, and his subsequent publications discussed the achievements of the 1797 frigate. President Theodore Roosevelt first came to public prominence as a War of 1812 naval historian, so he was intimately familiar with the original Constellation and her history. He left office in 1909, having just welcomed the Atlantic Fleet back from its round-the-world cruise. It is plausible that the original change from the first Constellation to the replacement sloop arose innocently amid this heady naval atmosphere. Alternatively, it may have been deliberate. The archives, so far, are silent on the matter.
Whatever the rationale, the on-paper transformation of the sloop-of-war into the frigate suddenly made her an appropriate ship to help the Navy celebrate the upcoming centennial of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1913, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that the ship be refurbished to resemble the original frigate’s appearance in the War of 1812.4 The 1854 sloop served important ceremonial functions for the next several decades, including as the reserve flagship of the Atlantic Fleet in World War II, all while outfitted as her 1797 predecessor. Senior naval officers’ enthusiasm for the ship, and their willingness to use her through both world wars, reflected their belief that she was the famed 1797 frigate Constellation and not the otherwise unremarkable 1854 sloop-of-war. After World War II, the Navy and the Constellation Committee in Baltimore used the history of the 1797 ship to raise funds for her preservation.5
Not everyone was so sure, however. The prominent naval architectural historian Howard I. Chapelle looked carefully at the design characteristics of the ship and concluded she could not be the 1797 frigate but had to be the 1854 sloop-of-war. They were, after all, different ships designed for different eras. Chapelle published his findings in a series of articles between 1946 and 1949, and a nasty public debate ensued. In 1954, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert B. Carney split the difference, claiming the ship was intrinsically the 1797 frigate even though she had been entirely rebuilt.6 (To be clear, the original ship had been dismantled and the 1854 sloop was not a rebuild.) This approach allowed the Navy to continue raising funds for the preservation of the Constellation while deflecting Chapelle’s criticism.
The debate, however, continued. During Admiral Ernest Eller’s tenure as Director of Naval History from 1956 to 1970, the Navy’s stance on the Constellation’s origins hardened. Eller believed firmly in the 1797 construction date, and the Navy’s public policy was to maintain the rebuild story barring evidence that the 1797 ship had been dismantled.
The Navy had that evidence, though. John Hattendorf, who in 1967 was a lieutenant serving in Eller’s office, remembers discovering that the office’s top-secret safe contained records of the Gosport Navy Yard from the 1850s. When he brought these documents to Eller’s attention, the admiral ordered him to return them to the safe and to tell no one they existed.7 Eller acknowledged to Hattendorf that the documents proved the ship had been built in 1854 and not 1797; nevertheless, Eller was instrumental in convincing the National Park Service, Maryland Historical Society, and Maryland state legislature to date the ship to 1797. Eller also served on the Constellation Committee’s board of directors and used his official position at the Naval History Division (today, Naval History and Heritage Command) to steer resources toward defending the earlier construction date.
In 1991, a team of researchers headed by Dana Wegner, a Navy civilian and curator of ship models for Naval Sea Systems Command, finally put the issue to rest by demonstrating conclusively that the Constellation in Baltimore was built in the Gosport Navy Yard in 1854, while the original 1797 frigate had been dismantled. The report also combined, for the first time, multiple independent discoveries by Chapelle and others that an employee of the museum ship named Donald Stewart had forged 25 to 30 documents and altered historic drawings in his efforts to deceive the public about the ship’s history.8
As a result of Wegner’s report, Historic Ships in Baltimore changed its interpretation of the Constellation to reflect her 1854 origins. Despite this, the Director of Naval History at that time remained neutral on the subject. The Naval Historical Center (as Naval History and Heritage Command was then known) did not correct the official history of the Constellation until 2003.
Confronting Organizational Culture
It is tempting to focus only on the motivations of the individuals involved in the Constellation controversy: the unknown individual who changed the date in the annual report in 1909, the individual (Stewart) who engaged in repeated fraud and forgery of documents, and the individual (Admiral Eller) who hid crucial records and ordered his subordinates to remain silent about them. Their motivations are important, but collective and organizational motivations should also be considered. Many individuals collaborated to keep the secret, and the collective agent—the Navy—sought to protect its priorities, heritage, and reputation.
Further, the Navy should consider how individual and collective motivations intersected, how they were in tension with one another, and which prevailed. There are multiple narrative strands here with ethical significance—some individuals manufactured and kept the false narrative, while others protested, dissented, and ultimately exposed the truth. Keeping the false narrative of the Constellation reinforced a broader narrative of the Navy’s role in U.S. history. In turn, that narrative generated fundraising opportunities. Changing that story would have been damaging.
“We can’t change our minds” speaks to an organizational culture that prizes projecting naval authority and uses historical traditions to reinforce that authority. The sloop-of-war Constellation was a training ship for many decades, and as such she was the vessel through which the Navy instilled in its recruits the communal rituals, historical narratives, and symbolic artifacts that made up its identity and embedded values. On the positive side, these rituals and symbols echo Secretary Braithwaite’s explanation for why he named the new class of frigates Constellation.
Yet, on the other side there is a clear resistance to undermining an existing narrative, even if the underlying facts are suspect or warrant reexamination. Moral disengagement is a term used by Albert Bandura to describe ways of reasoning in which one disengages from the moral reality of his or her actions and uses certain statements to rationalize otherwise morally problematic behavior.9 The Constellation’s misidentification provides examples of moral disengagement as a part of the Navy’s organizational culture, both individually and collectively. Rather than framing the question of the Constellation’s provenance as an ethical issue, the Navy produced practical and organizational reasons for undermining moral values and ignoring ethical discussions. And yet, to do so, individuals and the collective organization committed fraud and forgery—clearly moral issues. A critical question for ethical reflection is: How does an organizational culture admit and deal with its failures, especially when they have been going on for quite some time?
Telling the Truth
The Naval War College Museum recently opened a new exhibit about the USS Constellation that explores the history of the sloop-of-war, including the controversy about the museum ship’s origins.10 The exhibit features a selection of memorabilia produced in the 1970s to support the idea that she was a modified version of the original frigate. One fundraising brochure quotes retired admirals Chester W. Nimitz and Arleigh A. Burke asking for donations to save the “first warship built for the U.S. Navy to get to sea.” Accompanying it is a copper coin stamped “U.S. Frigate Constellation 1797” that was made to support a similar appeal by the Secretary of the Navy.
These artifacts represent the sunk costs of the Navy’s campaign to solicit public aid in saving one of its historic ships. Admitting that Nimitz, Burke, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Director of Naval History had all raised money for the ship based on a false narrative would require exceptional moral courage. No Navy spokesperson has yet publicly acknowledged the service’s missteps regarding the Constellation. It is time for a candid ethical reflection on why various officials misled the public about these events. Only by engaging with these kinds of issues directly can the Navy hope to improve its organizational culture.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the U.S. government, the Department of the Navy, or the U.S. Naval War College.
1. ADM Michael M. Gilday, USN, Navigation Plan 2022 (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2022).
2. Megan Eckstein, “SecNav Braithwaite Names First FFG(X) USS Constellation,” USNI News, 7 October 2020.
3. There have been four previous ships named the Constellation: the two discussed in this section, plus a battlecruiser laid down but not completed in 1920 (CC-2) and a Kitty Hawk–class aircraft carrier (CV-64), which served from 1961 to 2003.
4. “Constellation II (Sloop-of-War),” Naval History and Heritage Command.
5. Dana M. Wegner et al., Fouled Anchors: The Constellation Question Answered (Bethesda, MD: David Taylor Research Center, 1991) 23.
6. The CNO used a version of the “ship of Theseus” argument. Dating originally to Plutarch, the “ship of Theseus” refers to a paradox about whether a ship that had had all its timbers replaced was still the same vessel. The CNO’s version was to ask whether a Bowie knife that had had its blade and handle replaced was still the same knife. He concluded it was.
7. John Hattendorf, interview with Rob Doane, 4 December 2022.
8. Email exchange between Dana Wegner and Rob Doane, 9 September 2014. During the exchange, Wegner confirmed Donald Stewart was the document forger he alluded to in his earlier publications.
9. Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement.”
10. The other ships named Constellation also are covered briefly in the exhibit. It is worth noting that in 1972, the aircraft carrier was the scene of racial unrest that culminated in a sit-down strike (sometimes described as a mutiny) by a group of Black sailors. This incident revealed deep problems with the Navy’s process for addressing racial mistreatment. It raises further questions about how well the Navy understood the troubled history of ships named Constellation before deciding to reuse the name for FFG-62.
