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By Root 1251 0

badgered friends, colleagues and correspondents on this theme. His passion was for naval power, not for ships, as such, for he did not enjoy sea duty and looked nothing at all like a sailor. Well over six feet tall, wiry, thin and erect, he had a long, narrow face with narrowly placed pale-blue eyes, a long, straight, knifelike nose, a sandy moustache blending into a closely trimmed beard over an insignificant chin. All the power of the face was in the upper part, in the eyes and domed skull and the intellectual bumps over the eyebrows. Born the year after Reed, he was fifty in 1890, and though exceptionally reserved and retiring, he was capable, according to his wife, of sudden roars in “his quarter deck voice.” His brother called him Alf. He had little sense of humor, a high moral tone and shared the respectable man’s horror of Zola’s novels, which he forbade his daughters to read. So precise were his scruples that when living on naval property at the War College he would not allow his children to use the government pencils.

His friends and acquaintances were few and his social life, except on the occasion of his tour of duty abroad, virtually nonexistent. External expression of his personality was limited; his life was inner. He was like a steam kettle in which the boiling goes on within an enclosed space and the steam comes out through a single spout. Like Reed he was intensely clear-thinking and definitive in his conclusions. Apropos of a trip ashore at Aden, where he visited a colony of Jews, he wrote, “I am without anti-Semitic feeling. That Jesus Christ was a Jew covers his race for me.” In a total of sixteen words he settled to his own satisfaction a problem that had harassed mankind for nineteen centuries and had reopened in his own days full of new trouble and malignance. Samuel Ashe, his lifelong friend since they had been classmates at Annapolis, said, “He was the most intellectual man I have ever known.”

In 1890 the Navy at last began to build. On the recommendation of the Policy Board appointed by Harrison’s Secretary of the Navy, Benjamin Tracy, Congress reluctantly and not without strong objections from inside and out authorized three battleships, the Oregon, Indiana and Massachusetts, and a fourth, the Iowa, two years later. They were the first fruits of Mahan’s long campaign. The policy which these ships expressed, though far from being generally accepted at once, represented a fundamental change in the direction in which Mahan was pointing: outward. They meant recognition that America must create a fleet capable of meeting successfully the best that a potential enemy could send against her. Canada was regarded as a hostage to restrain Britain, and the political balance in Europe was considered likely to prevent any potential European enemy from sending its full fleet into American waters. The object was therefore to be supreme in these waters and this meant a fleet capable of protecting the American coasts by taking offensive action against enemy bases anywhere from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. Such was to be the function of the new battleships. They were of the 10,000-ton class, with an average speed of fifteen knots, a coal capacity sufficient for a cruising radius of 5,000 miles at moderate speed, four 13-inch guns, and eight 8-inch guns. In combination of armor and firepower they represented the best in design and construction of the time. At their trials, the Indiana in 1895 followed by the Iowa in 1896 soberly impressed the British as a match for Britain’s first-line ships, of which the latest of the “Majestic” class were 15,000 tons with four 12-inch and twelve 6-inch guns.

The ships lent heart to Mahan’s disciples. Roosevelt, still on the Civil Service Commission, was not yet widely heard, but his friend and political mentor, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, was the principal political voice in Washington of Mahan’s views. Son of a family whose fortune had been made in clipper ships and the China trade, author of various biographies and histories of the Colonial period, Lodge was