The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [300]
Roosevelt’s easy recourse to the world’s ranking naval authority, now and on many subsequent occasions in his career as Assistant Secretary, makes it worthwhile to examine their complex relationship or, more accurately, reexamine it, in the light of the enduring belief that the younger man’s naval philosophy was inherited from the older. Facts recently uncovered suggest the reverse.36 In 1881, when the twenty-two-year-old Roosevelt sat writing The Naval War of 1812 in New York’s Astor Library, Mahan had been an obscure, forty-year-old career officer of no particular accomplishment, literary or otherwise. He did not publish his own first book, a workmanlike history of Gulf operations in the Civil War, until two years later, by which time Roosevelt’s prodigiously detailed volume was required reading on all U.S. Navy vessels, and had exerted at least a peripheral influence on the decision of Congress to build a fleet of modern warships. Mahan, indeed, was still so unlettered in world naval history that in 1884, when offered an instructorship at the new Naval War College, he asked for a year’s leave to study for it. Most of 1885 was spent in the Astor Library, reading the same tomes Roosevelt had already devoured. This research was the basis of Mahan’s lecture course at the War College, which in turn became The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890).37 Long before this masterpiece appeared, however, he had familiarized himself with Roosevelt’s theories, to the extent of discussing them with him personally. At least one of the other instructors at the War College, Professor J. Russell Soley, was an enthusiastic Rooseveltian; so, too, was the institution’s founder, Admiral Stephen B. Luce. “Your book must be our textbook,” Luce told the young author.38
Roosevelt’s next two histories, Gouverneur Morris and Thomas Hart Benton, were replete with arguments for a strong Navy and mercantile marine, while The Winning of the West propounded visions of Anglo-Saxon world conquest as heady as anything Mahan ever wrote. All of these works predated The Influence of Sea Power upon History.
The relative academic prestige of Roosevelt and Mahan altered drastically in the latter’s favor after Sea Power came out. As has been seen, Roosevelt enthusiastically welcomed the book, reviewing it—and all Mahan’s subsequent volumes—with a generosity that could not fail to endear him to the austere, reclusive scholar.39 During his early years in Washington, he worked to save Mahan from sea duty (which the captain detested) and to increase his backing in government circles.40
It is not surprising, therefore, that when the new Assistant Secretary sought to advance his own ambitions in the spring of 1897, he could call upon Mahan in confidence. The fact that their naval philosophies were identical at this point only increased the willingness of one man to help the other.41
FINDING HIMSELF IN full, if temporary control of the Navy Department, Roosevelt worked energetically but cautiously, not wanting to jeopardize his chances of being Acting Secretary through most of the summer. He signed with pleasure a letter of permission for general maneuvers by the North Atlantic Squadron in August or September, and told its commanding officer that he would “particularly like to be aboard for a day or two” during gun practice.42 He continued to dig up Secretary Herbert’s suppressed reports, on the grounds that those most deeply buried might yield the most interesting information,43 ordered an investigation of the management of the