The emergence of American sea power: Politics and the creation of a U.S. naval strategy, 1882-1893

Between 1882 and 1893, the United States Navy was transformed from an inefficient, corrupt institution barely capable of defending itself into an imperial service equipped with modern battleships, a professional officer corps, and an elite corps of sailors, as well as a new battle fleet strategy. The course of these changes had been laid out by navalists--naval enthusiasts who constructed historical justifications, cultural encouragement, and finally Congressional authorization. They found the historical justifications mostly in new interpretations of the war of 1812 which indicated to them the importance of sea power, as well as the Jeffersonian sins of unpreparedness. They elicited the cultural encouragement through an extraordinary array of media, including parades, expositions, exhibitions, and martial music, as well as the stories of adventure and heroics which they contributed to books, newspapers and magazines. Burying the roots so deeply in the American political discourse, navalists were able to procure congressional authorization virtually without lobbying; politics, as well as the particular economic and technological situations of the 1880s and 1890s, created the ships of the new navy. The new politics and new ships had one more effect, in creating for the officers a new imperial worldview in which the oceans became merely a set for the war games. The new navy, in turn, provided the nation with an imperial service suited to the needs of an emerging great power.