MAHAN, ALFRED THAYER

(1840-1914), naval strategist and historian. At a time when he was drifting "aimlessly" as a forty-five-year-old naval officer, Mahan recalled, his life was transformed in a Lima, Peru, library; he interpreted Theodor Mommsen's history of Rome to mean that the Roman Empire had been shaped by its control of the sea. Invited to the new U.S. Naval War College to lecture (because of a bland history he wrote on Civil War naval battles), Mahan developed his interpretation into The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), which became the single most influential book on strategy and foreign policy in his time. He argued that naval power resulted from geographical position, excess production, proper national character, and a supportive government. Enjoying all these characteristics, Americans, "whether they will or no, ... must now begin to look outward," he wrote. "The growing production of the country demands it. An increasing volume of public sentiment demands it."

He strongly influenced key U.S. officials, especially Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (a close friend), to follow the policies dictated by his insight: continual expansion overseas; the taking of Caribbean islands, Hawaii, the Philippines, and other Pacific territory for bases the navy needed to protect commerce; building an isthmian canal so the fleet and freighters could quickly move ocean to ocean; and, of course, constructing the great navy. The fleet, he preached, must be built around giant battleships that could score decisive victories, not small hit-and-run cruisers on which U.S. naval tactics had long depended. A navy that had ninety small ships (thirty-eight wooden) in 1882 became in the 1890s the Great White Fleet of steam-driven, armor-plated battleships that won the war of 1898 and fought in World War I.

Mahan's history and strategy, spelled out in half a dozen major books after 1890, had other far-reaching implications. Such an expansive policy required a powerful president. Mahan worried that the Constitution's restraints were "a lion in the path" of expansion, and he urged that those limits on presidential power be ignored. Believing that the world was dividing between naval powers (the United States, Great Britain, and Japan) and land powers (especially Russia), he urged the former to unite and defeat the latter, especially in Asia. He was even more admired in Great Britain, Japan, and Germany than in the United States. But when Japan dominated East Asia after defeating Russia in 1905, the Japanese discriminated against U.S. interests. Mahan could only urge Americans to pull back to Hawaii. That was an especially bitter decision, because as a hardened conservative he wanted overseas expansion, not "socialist" redistribution measures (which he hated) to solve the problem of excess U.S. production.

Finally, Mahan believed that modern arms were to prevent war, not wage it: "war now not only occurs more rarely ... [but is] an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy." British historian Charles Webster observed that "Mahan was one of the causes of the First World War." Mahan helped spark a fatal British-German naval race, believing that great bloodshed would never occur. He died just as that bloodshed began.

William E. Livezey, Mahan on Seapower (1980); Robert Seager III, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters (1977).

Walter LaFeber

See also Armed Forces; Expansion, Continental and Overseas.