Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I

Chapter 7. Naval Elites and the State

In 1904, the Republican assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, Charles H. Darling, appeared before the House Naval Affairs Committee to denounce a plan for a change in the organization of the Navy Department.This plan, Darling argued,“savors too much of militarism to be consistent with the spirit of our institutions, even in the administration of the Navy Department .”The officers who promoted this measure would “ape the monarchies of the Old World.”1 Other high-ranking civilian policy makers in Progressive Era administrations agreed. John D. Long, the navy secretary from 1897 to 1902, decried the “tendency” among naval officers “to seek undue control and secure legislation that would supplant the authority of the Secretary” and pave the way “towards a military head” of the department .”2 The navy secretary in the Wilson administration, Josephus Daniels, accused officers of being intent on “Prussianizing” the navy. Such officers, Daniels warned, wanted “to name someVon Tirpitz to rule the Navy” and “place the Secretary of the Navy at the top of the Washington Monument without a telephone.”3 Such charges were an active response to the agendas of the U.S. naval elite.While officially paying tribute to the principle of republican governance ,officers strove to renegotiate the subjection of the military to civilian Chapter 7 Naval elites and the state 176 The Quest for Power supremacy in American representative government.They demanded a dramatic reorganization of the Navy Department that would enshrine the dominance of navy leaders and radically reduce the power of the civilian officials at the top. Such demands, in turn, drew explicitly on the example of the German Empire and the space its system of governance allotted to the military. Using the German General Staff as their model,American officers self-consciously set out to remake their naval institutions and politics in a German image. Before World War I, both German and U.S. naval elites combined their call for large battle fleets with far-reaching demands for influence in the domestic area.These navalists not only demanded a massively increased allotment of societal resources and manpower for naval purposes; they also strove to attain independence from politics and minimize their subjection to any outside control in matters of grand strategy, military policy, and funding. This was a far-reaching agenda although it was not a plea for what political scientist Harold Lasswell would later call a “garrison state,” a state, that is, in which military elites (and their corporate peers) would control the entire state and society for the purposes of national security.4 The “enemy” of the navies’ militarist claims to power was not civil society as such,but civilian participation in the making of naval policy and strategy and the supervision of the inner workings of the navy.5 As state-builders who fused together the causes of the navy, elite rule, and global power, the two naval elites pursued a common agenda; yet their terrains and emphases were different.The difference between the makeup of civil-military relations in the German imperial polity and the American civilian republic structured the specifics of navalists’ quest for institutional power and policy control.The political strength and institutional separateness of the German imperial state and the extraordinary autonomy of its armed forces contrasted sharply with the lack of a strong, politically insulated administrative state in the United States and the institutional subordination of its armed forces.To a considerable degree,American officers were forced to seek institutional conditions comparable to those that already existed in Germany and that served as the point of departure for Admiral Tirpitz and his fellow officers. Against the Reichstag In Germany, the navy enjoyed considerable independence from civil society and parliamentary politics as part of the imperial state.To be sure, the Naval Elites and the State 177 navy did not control the sources and amount of its funding, the ultimate decisions over its use in war, or the process of negotiation among various governmental agencies that preceded the formulation of official policy initiatives. But apart from that, the German navy was by and large a selfgoverning institution outside civilian oversight, with a sailor at the helm of the Imperial Naval Office. Officers operated a network of established professional institutions that the constitution of the empire placed firmly within the monarchical sphere of influence.6 Although this arrangement hinged on the institution of a military monarchy, it...