Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of the Modern Navy

“HERE is an attempt to show the rise of the American Navy as it is known today. In this growth Theodore Roosevelt played a major role, for while he neither started the “New Navy” of steam and steel nor brought it to perfection, he did perform a valuable service by indicating the direction of future growth. His administration saw the opening of the era of the super-battleship. By his unparalleled personal activity he made people “Navy-conscious” and assured a better informed, if not always sympathetic, audience for future requests to meet the needs of the Navy.

The limits of this study obviously make it impossible to develop in detail the political motives behind the President’s naval program or the Congressional politics involved in carrying it out. Therefore, I have confined myself almost entirely to the presentation of a simple account of the development of the United States Navy from 1901 to 1909.

I have attempted to get at both the official story of the subject as found in the Annual Reports of the Navy Department, Congressional hearings, official documents, etc., and also the views of outsiders and the unofficial opinions of men in the naval administration. These were to be found particularly in newspaper and magazine articles of the time, memoirs, letters and more general books. These two stories were often at variance, but by experience I found that the truth usually was someplace between the two extreme claims. This was Roosevelt’s opinion and was nearly always borne out by later events.”-Introduction.