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February 1966 | Volume 17, Issue 2
Examination Of A Legend
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
In December of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent sixteen battleships out of Hampton Roads on the first leg of what turned out to be a cruise around the world. This irritated both the United States Navy and the chancelleries of Europe, gave an unexpected turn to American foreign policy, and indicated that the country had reached physical maturity without entirely shedding its innocence. Baffled but proud, the American people at last concluded that it was a Good Deed, and the fantastic cruise of the new battle fleet passed into a legend that endures to this day.
The trouble with legends is that sooner or later you have to ask what they really mean. This particular legend holds that in addition to making a fine romantic spectacle, the world cruise was a demonstration of American naval authority that induced American friends abroad to take hope and made American enemies take thought and walk softly. Today, more than half a century later, the business does not look quite as it looked at the time. It may be that the legend needs re-examination.
Re-examination it gets in Robert A. Hart’s outspoken new book, The Great White Fleet . A member of the history faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Hart turns a historian’s eye on the whole performance and concludes that it contained a good deal that we never stopped to think about.
Like a good historian, Mr. Hart goes to the sources—Navy Department papers, State Department correspondence, papers of President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root, British and German official documents, letters written by naval officers who made the cruise, and various learned studies of the affair. He finds that the basic reason for the cruise was a simple desire to win prestige—to dramatize American emergence as a world power, to make a big gesture, to impress the American people and to “advertise the United States to the world.” Because relations between America and Japan were badly strained, it was also felt that to get the battle fleet into the Pacific might convey a useful warning to Tokyo: useful, and not really dangerous because the President’s economic advisers assured him that Japan had been so drained by her recent war with Russia that it would be at least a decade before she would be able to go to war again. And so, late in 1907, with naval officers (firmly muzzled, by stern presidential orders) privately expressing grave doubts about the whole matter, the sixteen battleships set sail, all painted white, as spectacular an armada as the world had ever seen.
Reactions abroad were not what Mr. Roosevelt had expected. Great Britain was deeply perturbed. The Admiralty felt that this mighty gesture had to mean something—probably war with Japan, a valued British ally—and even if it really meant something less, the whole venture struck London as a bull-in-a-china-shop affair. The German Kaiser, on the other hand, was delighted.