Admiration, Enmity, and Cooperation: U.S. Navalism and the British and German Empires before the Great War

I

If we believe German naval officers, the United States was the exemplary navalist power by the turn of the twentieth century. U.S. leaders had recognized that they needed to turn their country into a premier imperial military power to secure its needs as an “export industrial state (Exportindustriestaat).” ¹ Admiral Otto von Diederichs, the chief of the German Admiralty Staff, wrote admiringly in 1900 that “quietly” the United States had built so powerful a navy that it was now “well-entitled” to “have a powerful say in matters of world politics (Weltpolitik).” ² The German secretary of the navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, noted two years later that America would “move forward in enormous strides (namely: politically);” it would manage to keep abreast of the overall “development towards a few global empires (Riesenreiche).” ³

From their distinct perspective, these German observers responded to the U.S. pursuit of imperial opportunity and maritime force before 1914. Like Imperial Germany, the United States had set out to acquire maritime military resources on an unprecedented level to make itself successful in new global spaces of economic rivalry, political conflict, and military competition among the major industrial nations. Like Germany, the United States had redefined the parameters of great power status and warfare through the practice of new forms of the wartime mobilization of peoples, ideologies, and industries by an integral nation state during the 1860s. Turning continental hegemony and superior industrial production into global power in the face of the “consolidation of global circuits of money, markets, knowledge, and force,” the United States had begun “to fuse the capacities of the national state for mobilization with the logistical capabilities of maritime power.” By the late 1900s, the United States had emerged as one of the world’s leading naval powers. By the end of the next decade, the United States had successfully staked out its claims to become the world’s first super power in the twentieth century. ⁴

This paper seeks to situate the U.S. navalist (and thus imperial) experience at the turn of the twentieth century within a larger transatlantic setting. The focus is on U.S. naval officers as makers and guardians of empire. These officers had promoted an oceanic “commercialist vision” of imperial expansion for most of the nineteenth century. ⁵ At its close, they fashioned navalism, which provided the discursive context for the making of the United States as a premier imperial power. The navy’s new collective ideology served as one important language of empire building by providing a set of terms and ideas about the interrelationship of sea power, economics, international politics, and expansion. ⁶

As champions of a new imperial war state, U.S. naval officers were firmly placed inside the developing industrial and organizational society in post-Civil War America. Naval professionals were part and parcel of an “emergent intelligentsia” of U.S. state builders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was “rooted in a revitalized professional sector and a burgeoning university sector.” ⁷ In general, they considered themselves a political and social elite with a strong sense of a shared collective identity, forged through their naval service and underscored by a distinct lifestyle. Socially, this group was composed predominantly of the scions of the white and Protestant professional, commercial, and manufacturing elites of U.S. society. ⁸

The paper explores some of the ways in which U.S. naval officers frequently looked across the Atlantic toward Britain and Germany as they strove to devise naval policy and strategy and build an imperial war state for their own country as a new “world power,” to use their own term. ⁹ In doing so, the following exploration attempts to insert the United States into a transoceanic world of arms competition and empire building. The making of American sea power under navalist auspices was part and parcel of the broader, truly transnational militarization of the Western world before 1914. The pursuit of U.S. strategy took place in an Atlantic-wide (and transpacific) arena of military politics and great power...