Word: roosevelted
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Phew! Who was saying this? The writer in question was none other than Theodore Roosevelt, then a mere 24 years old. He was just a short time out of college when his book was first published, in 1882, but already making waves. Here is one of the few examples in recent history--Churchill is another--of a young, highly ambitious man who could foresee his own impact on the future international order. From early on, Churchill seemed to have possessed a premonition that he would lead his nation and empire in an age of great peril. In much the same...
...Roosevelt was, for an American, unusually familiar with naval history. Two of his uncles, brothers of his Southern-born mother, had been involved in the Confederate navy in the Civil War. (One of them, James D. Bulloch, was a Confederate naval agent who commissioned the C.S.S. Alabama, the famous commerce raider on which his younger brother Irvine served.) The young Theodore had grown up with stories about earlier naval battles and eagerly read works on the history of war. Yet it would be fair to say that his notions about sea power--build bigger warships, concentrate the fleet--were primitive...
Mahan's book, which Roosevelt devoured in one reading, is at first sight a detailed account of the many battles fought by the British Royal Navy as it rose to become sovereign of the seas. But it is much more than that, for Mahan claimed to have detected the principles that underlay the workings of sea power, and had determined the rise and fall of nations. With great skill, the author showed the intimate relationships among productive industry, flourishing seaborne commerce, strong national finances and enlightened national purpose. Great navies did not arise out of thin air; they...
Here was a road map for the rest of T.R.'s life, or at least the part of it that would be focused on foreign affairs. In Roosevelt's future naval policies we see the embodiment of Mahan's larger principles. Moreover, this conjuncture of Mahan the theoretician and Roosevelt the man of action arrived at just the right time in the history of the U.S. Its industries were booming, its commerce thriving and its merchants fighting to gain markets overseas in the face of tough foreign competition. All of that pointed to the need for a strong Navy...
...Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who turned U.S. sea power into the manifestation of the nation's outward thrust. His first demonstration of that counts among his most famous decisions. By 1897 he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position in which he could act out his ambitions, especially since the Secretary, John D. Long, was a rather sick man and President William McKinley had no great interest in naval matters. On Feb. 15, 1898, when news arrived of the sinking in Havana harbor of the U.S.S. Maine--the event that effectively set off the Spanish-American War--Roosevelt...