The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism

by Peter Karsten

When this book first appeared in 1972, Karsten, a former naval officer, was taken to task for its portrayal of the Naval Academy and the officer corps. Although his conclusions riled more than a few senior officers, no one denied the significance of the study, and it was named Best Book of the Year by Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honorary society. The work focuses on the period after the Civil War when the United States emerged as a power to be reckoned with and its navy developed into a professional fighting force. This revelatory portrait of the officer corps in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has remained an important reference work for more than thirty-five years. This new edition includes a new preface and foreword.

Genres: History, Military History

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Professor of history, University of Pittsburgh.

b. 7/27/38

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A portrait of the oft-neglected third man in the imperialist trio of Merchant-Missionary-Mariner, as well as a good picture of the commercial-military groundwork laid long before “the vague but abrupt ‘emergence of America as a world power’” around 1898. Though obviously there’s never been a dearth of writing about famous explorers and admirals, and the heroes of single-ship duels, Karsten’s book (1972, reissued in 2008 by the Naval Institute Press) was notable for its focus on the “sons of gunboats” (the punning title of one of their memoirs), commanders of lone ships who showed the flag in foreign ports. Their duties, at the most warlike, embraced bullying the local authorities who would keep their countries closed to trade, and quelling the revolutions that might threaten existing American mines, railroads, fruit plantations, and other capital investments. In short, Karsten’s “Annapolites” were the naval officers who spent their mid to late nineteenth century careers performing reduced versions of Commodore Perry’s “opening” of Japan at gunpoint.

One paradox that Karsten examines is the naval officer’s often negative view of the capitalist he was assigned to protect and advance. On one hand, commercial expansion was synonymous with the “march of civilization” and the righteous supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon, while on the other the US Naval Academy at Annapolis indoctrinated cadets with an austere, self-denying ethos, and an aristocratic disdain for hustling business and democratic politics, those two pillars of American life. Karsten knew the answer – but, “embarrassed for them,” you might say – he thought it too ridiculous to dwell on: most of these men viewed themselves as knight-errants in a disenchanted world, gallants of a service that one admiral called “the mistress I tried to adorn, whose favors I most coveted.” These men were absolutely willing to endure decades of distasteful drudgery, at the beck of grubby traders, for the possibility of a shot at glory, for the unlikely chance of joining, if not Drake and Nelson (it should be no surprise that this caste was extremely Anglophilic, most of them high church Episcopalians who despised the Chinese, blacks, Jews, the recent Irish, all “Latins” save the French, with grudging exceptions made for the Japanese and, oddly, Samoans*), then at least John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur and David G. Farragut in a national hall of fame, a pantheon of supposedly immortal memories.

Captain Caspar Goodrich felt that “love of country” ought “to supply the place of a feudal or monarchial loyalty and furnish an incentive to brave deeds and patient suffering” for all officers. And it did, of course; naval officers were arch-nationalists. But the interesting thing to note is that Goodrich considered nationalism to be a proper surrogate for a more attractive and deep-rooted “feudal or monarchical loyalty.” It was a creed designed to “furnish an incentive” to Annapolites to emulate the Romance of the Rose!

Among the scores of memoirists in Karsten's bibliography, there must be a few who envied the Japanese their emperor, so aloof, perfected, and unreal. As high and notional as God – the “mystique of the state” at its most obscure. As servants of the United States, their need to devote themselves to power subjected them to partisan politicos and vacuous corporations. Their motto was Decatur’s (mangled) “my country, right or wrong,” and with good reason. Serving their country “right or wrong” saved them from seeing it.

Ultimately, Karsten writes, the “naval aristocracy” of the 1880s came round to commercial-imperial expansion because to protect overseas business Congress was willing to upgrade the fleet to a size and maintain it in a style that the officers’ pride required. In the “doldrums” of the post-Civil War years the fleet was small, shabby, and old; Admiral David Dixon Porter hilariously likened his ships – numbering 140, of which only 31 were serviceable – to “ancient Chinese forts on which dragons have been painted to frighten away the enemy.” With a glut of officers leftover from the war, seniority-based promotion was sluggish (for some impossible), and US captains were usually 20 years older than their British counterparts. For Karsten, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of the classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), is less important as a theorist or strategist (though fêted by Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm, and made a cult figure by the Imperial Japanese Navy, he was considered a literary hobbyist by the leaders of the new school like future admirals Sims and Fiske, futurists who were forecasting aircraft carriers and fire-control computers in the years when Mahan still regretted the industrial dirtiness of steam engines**) than as a specimen of “navalism,” that is, his caste’s odd mixture of chivalric idealism and self-protective adaptability:

And Mahan was, first and foremost, a navalist. Everything else followed in the wake of his devotion to the service. “Expansionists,” shippers, and businessmen could use a strong navy? Well, Mahan would argue for expansionism and mercantile growth. In 1884 Mahan had “distrusted arguments for manifest destiny” and was “traditionally an anti-imperialist.” Within a few years he was hard at work shaping the ideology of expansionism.

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* Well, not so oddly, I suppose. Samoans seemed to have engaged their aestheticism. One officer called the warriors "veritable living statues," and Henry Adams, whose pages on the War of 1812 are full of salutes to the US Navy's professionalism and esprit de corps, wrote from one of his Pacific voyages that the "Samoans are splendid men and look like Homer's heroes."

** William Reynolds Braisted, I think, argued that the US Navy was successful in the first half of the twentieth century precisely because it did not treat Mahan as a prophet. The Influence of Sea Power upon History was, he said, 1.) a fan boy's love letter to the declining British Empire, and 2.) a dubious guidebook for the upstart Germans and Japanese.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an informative, if very opinionated, compliment to my reading of Alfred Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 a few years ago.

I had checked the Mahan audiobook out of the library in desperation for something to listen to, not expecting much. (He was a career Navy man, who wrote his study in the 1880s while teaching at the US Naval Institute.) But I was totally captivated by the historical case for a strong navy in the British tradition. This meant not just having a lot of ships and guns, like the French, but also a worldwide network of support stations in strategic locations. I subsequently learned that Mahan's book had become a bestseller. It had fueled investment in national navies not just in the United States but also in Europe, thus adding to the preparation for World War I.

Karstan makes the case that Mahan was not the original source of this argument. Naval officers who were disgusted at the condition of the Navy had been writing and lobbying with these arguments for decades. I have no problem with this comment on originality, but it has to be said that Mahan was an articulate, persuasive author who raised the issue to national prominence.

The main thrust of Karsten's book is that that the nineteenth century Navy was an aristocratic, conservative closed institution. It was only when war, technology, and international conditions at the end of the century forced rapid growth and the move to full steam power that sail-focused officers had to give equal status to engineering officers, and candidates from a much broader social spectrum were admitted to the expanded Naval Academy, allowed to advance from enlisted ranks, or entered via the Naval Reserves.

Early chapters describe the almost universal upper and upper middle class Episcopalian background of the officers. Karsten then thoroughly describes the close relationship between the Navy and commercial interests of the United States.

The most interesting chapters cover the gradual stagnation of advancement up the ranks, and the degradation of the ships after the Civil War. Federal spending wound down after 1865 and a lot of ships were out of commission. It became very difficult to advance ranks as the senior officers stayed in place on fewer boats. Junior officers turned gray while still lieutenants, and many junior officers were furloughed. Junior officers wrote article after article lamenting this state of affairs. Moreover, they were chagrined at the antique condition of the ships they served on. Finally the junior officers staged a revolt in the Navy's lobbying groups, displacing their seniors. They proposed forcing out older officers to make room for junior ones. To some extent that worked, but what really turned things around was the sudden spurt in the size of the Navy as the Spanish American war and the growing role of the United States worldwide made a larger Navy seem imperative. But in a sense this ironically backfired on the aristocratic junior officers, as they had to watch engineers, enlisted men, and men from all kinds of backgrounds 'invade' officer ranks.

I think that this is not only a worthwhile study of the Navy. It can also be read as a sociological study of any similar organization that has a select, carefully vetted and trained membership that is charged with a mission that sets it apart from the wider society. It is particularly good about rank and advancement in such a group.

This was published in 1972, when the author was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. (He later served for many years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin.) It is extremely, even viscerally, critical of the status quo, the racism, the elitism, the pro-business activities, and so on of the nineteenth century Navy. I was a student at Berkely at the same time, so I completely understood that this is a reflection of the times. I don't question the criticism, but anyone reading it now might wonder at the personal tone in an academic work. You had to be there.