Abstract
In 1977, the late Robert Seager published a 732-page biography of the American naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914). Against the grand theorists who deified Mahan as the progenitor of modern United States naval doctrine, Seager sought to present a more human figure.
It is the portrait – warts and all – of a historian, strategist, tactician, philosopher, Episcopalian, theologian, diplomat, imperialist, mercantilist, capitalist, Anglophile, patriot, Republican, racist, Social Darwinist, journalist, polemicist, naval reformer, adviser to presidents and legislators, teacher, academic administrator, social climber, egoist, introvert, swain, husband, and father. (p. xi)
Like his near-contemporaries Peter Karsten and Kenneth Hagan, Seager held that Mahan’s importance had been exaggerated. Yet he was no vulgar debunker. For him Mahan was a man of his times: an unusual figure in a service that elevated brawn over brains, to be sure, but not a particularly seminal thinker. The Mahan myth mattered, of course: his teaching and writings imbued the United States navy with a sense of its destiny that impelled it to victory in 1898, 1918 and 1945. But it was precisely that myth that made Seager’s iconoclasm so necessary.
This matters because Suzanne Geissler presents her new book as an attempt to set the record straight. The result of 17 years of work, God and Sea Power begins provocatively: existing scholarship, Geissler asserts, has either ignored or misunderstood Mahan’s religion, which was not merely personal but infused his public writings and utterances. He was a lifelong worshipper in the Episcopalian Church whose worldview was ‘inherently Christian’. ‘Most scholars’, she declares, ‘have overlooked this’ (pp. 1–2). Geissler is especially scathing about Seager, whose ‘intense, even visceral dislike’ she reckons to have warped his analysis (p. 3). Nowhere is this truer, she maintains, than in his remarks about Mahan’s beliefs, which present his faith as ‘a pernicious trait that made him arrogant and self-righteous’ (pp. 3–4). Granted, Seager had little time for Mahan’s moral censoriousness, and perhaps underestimated the extent to which his beliefs were fairly characteristic of the naval profession and of American society more generally. But Geissler’s comments are still puzzling given that he, like earlier biographers, took Mahan’s convictions seriously, whether he agreed with them or not. He wrote extensively about his ideas regarding providence and his scholarly mission to lay its operations bare, and was at pains to underline that Mahan’s anti-pacifism was rooted in readings of the Bible which, although idiosyncratic, were not unusual for the time. If scholars of strategy understandably think Mahan’s beliefs irrelevant to their task, this cannot be said of work on his life and context. To speculate (with no evidence whatsoever) that Seager’s ‘animus’ might indicate rebellion against his Episcopalian upbringing, as Geissler does, is not just misleading; it is insulting (p. 4). His was a revisionist biography that employed evidence and interpretation to draw warrantable conclusions. If he was occasionally caustic about Mahan, he preferred above all to let him speak for himself. It is a shame that Geissler feels the need at every turn to exonerate her subject from real and imagined accusations, reassuring us, for instance, that he was culturally condescending rather than biologically racist (pp. 143–144), that he supported imperial expansion for geostrategic reasons rather than as an end in itself (p. 134), and that Mahan was unmoved by the accolades of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was an avid reader of his work (p. 122).
What of Geissler’s central contentions? Her insistence that Christianity played a central part in Mahan’s life is demonstrably true. In chapters on his family, his upbringing, his time as an aspiring cadet and then officer, and his marriage and early writings, she draws out his religious development in detail. We encounter his religious reading, his churchgoing, and the agonized spiritual struggles which ended with his marriage. Mahan is sometimes made to fit a preconceived mould: given his pronounced high churchmanship it is unclear what to make of Geissler’s insistence that his conversion was an evangelical one, a conclusion based on cryptic references in talks given decades later (pp. 71–72). Readers should be aware, moreover, that this is more a biography than a monograph. While there is plenty to interest naval scholars regarding life in the young Naval Academy, the divisive impact of the Civil War, shipboard life and Mahan’s reception abroad, the detail often digresses away from the main theme. Geissler’s second claim, that Christianity was the keystone of his writings on Nelson, British seapower and host of other topics, is difficult to substantiate. While Mahan certainly had a providential conception of history, coupled with a pessimistic view of human nature founded on the doctrine of original sin, it is a strain to find much evidence of this in his publications, as Geissler herself admits (pp. 102, 186). If he larded essays with biblical quotations, advocated the spread of a dimly defined Anglo-Saxon ‘Christian civilization’ and worried about the moral consequences of material progress, so too did plenty of others who did not share his beliefs. While it is refreshing to read an analysis of a naval figure that places religion so centrally, this book also serves to underline the importance of interpreting belief according to the standards of a time when most aspects of quotidian existence smacked of Christianity, rather than seeing it in our more black-and-white terms.