From the Sea.

Just over a century ago, the United States became a sea power, changing its basic strategic orientation in the course of a few years. Already a world-class agricultural and industrial producer, the United States joined the great power ranks only when it developed a military force capable of projection across the seas. That capability quickly helped to create an overseas empire and then played pivotal roles in both world wars.

This fundamental shift has been explained by “realist” or “revisionist” historians as a continuation of the zeal to fulfill a manifest destiny, variously to spread democracy or capitalism. Still, it is only recently that historians have attempted to understand the lever of that shift. Put bluntly, the U.S. Navy — more than any other single institution — has altered the world’s destiny, and yet it has received less careful historical study than have the villages of eastern Massachusetts. Baer and Shulimson go a long way toward rectifying the relative neglect of the U.S. Navy and its adjunct Marine Corps.

Jack Shulimson, head of the histories section at the Marine Corps Historical Center, has written several histories of the corps’ experience in the Vietnam conflict. In The Marine Corps’ Search for a Mission, 1880–1898, he looks back at the professionalization of the Marine Corps in the era between Appomattox and the new century. From the late 1700s, the corps had provided ships’ guards for naval vessels and honor guards for legations across the globe. As the U.S. Navy professionalized in the 1880s, the status of the corps came under close scrutiny. Navy officials came to see the marines as redundant enforcers — which they were — and attempted to have the corps abolished.

In terms of quality, the corps was on shaky ground. By law, the number of officers was already limited to seventy-five, and it was only in the 1880s that naval academy graduates were included among them. As late as 1894, the promotion rate was so slow that some officers petitioned the secretary to support legislation “that would permit the promotion of captains who had forty-one years of service” (p. 138).

The marines had done themselves no favors. Their ranks were filled with the lowest elements of maritime society: illiterates, liars, drunkards, and ne’er-do-wells — and these were the officers. Shulimson describes the predicament of the unsavory second-ranking officer. In 1894, Col. James Forney “stood trial before a general court-martial, charged on four accounts, from embezzlement, to lying, to using and issuing false papers, and finally to ‘culpable inefficiency in the performance of duty.’ Despite Forney’s foibles,” Shulimson writes, “he still held the sympathy, affection, and even a modicum of respect of many of his contemporaries” (p. 137). The enlisted men were far less reliable, and annual desertion rates generally ran to about 25 percent.

Far more damning for the corps, however, was its lack of mission. During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, it had proven poor at policing labor — a role for which the militia was far better suited and situated. On board ships, naval officers found that sailors policed themselves at least as well as marines could. Furthermore, naval officers would only allow their marines to man the secondary guns, securing the adored main batteries for the sailors. Then, in what should have been the final insult added to injury, even the beloved bandmaster John Philip Sousa left the Marine Corps Band in 1891.

To keep the corps alive, to preserve and possibly even enhance their positions, some officers started to carve a niche within the emerging imperial navy’s power projection mission. After all, they said, marines had landed on the shores of Tripoli in 1805. Eighty years later, they assaulted Colombia’s Panamanian isthmus to quell a rebellion. But it was...