This year we celebrate the sesquicentennial—the 150th anniversary—of the founding of the United States Naval Institute in Annapolis. The idea in 1873—and still today—was to provide an independent forum for those who cared about the U.S. Navy and wanted to advance it, promote it, and do so in a venue outside official channels. In that respect, though the Institute inhabits a building on the Naval Academy Yard, it is not a house organ; it is not a conduit for the official view of anything, naval or otherwise. It is instead the one thing every large organization needs and yet few have: a knowledgeable and sympathetic outside voice, one that is often supportive, but one that can be critical at need—a sounding board and not an echo chamber. It may sometimes be annoying, even embarrassing, to the actual establishment, but it is absolutely essential.
For the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Naval Institute is that voice.
The megaphone is much bigger now than it was 150 years ago, and it includes not only the indispensable journal Proceedings, but also books, talks, podcasts, a robust social media, daily highlights of Navy news, and conferences.
The first president of the Institute was John L. Worden, who at the time was Superintendent of the Naval Academy and—famously—commander of the USS Monitor in the Battle of Hampton Roads during the Civil War. In the 1870s, he and the other plankowners of the Institute were concerned about the drawdown of naval forces after the Civil War and the implications that might have for the future of the service and the country.
Those plankowners got a frightening glimpse of the perils of not paying attention almost at once, when a Spanish warship stopped, searched, and interned the steamship Virginius.
Built initially as a Civil War blockade runner, the Virginius had been purchased after the war by a group of Americans sympathetic to the Cuban rebels who then were fighting a war of independence against Spain. The group’s objective was to use the ship to smuggle men, arms, and munitions to the rebels. As her captain, they hired Joseph Fry, who was, incidentally, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and had served during the Civil War as a Confederate naval officer.
On 30 October 1873, 21 days after the founding of the Naval Institute, a Spanish warship intercepted the Virginius at sea and took her into Santiago Harbor on Cuba’s south coast. There Fry and his crew were quickly tried, condemned as pirates, and sentenced to be shot by firing squad. Fifty-three of them, including Fry, were killed.
American newspapers clamored for war. President Ulysses Grant sent Spain an ultimatum and, to underscore that implied threat, ordered the Navy to mobilize.
That was easier said than done. The mothballed Civil War monitors, ordered to assemble at Key West, had old and rusted engines, and, in any case, with their low freeboard and marginal buoyancy, they had not been designed for service in the open ocean. As a result, the mobilization of the U.S. fleet at Key West proved more an embarrassment than a threat.
In the end, the Virginius affair was resolved without anyone going to war. Spain apologized and paid an indemnity to the families of the slain, and the public temperature quickly cooled.
However, to those who were paying attention, such as Worden and the others who founded the U.S. Naval Institute, this was a cautionary note. It was evidence that the traditional American reaction to a crisis—going into it underprepared, then furiously mobilizing, fighting the war, and then demobilizing just as fast—might not be a template suitable for the coming century.
That had, of course, been the American way of war up to 1873. The size and capability of the U.S. Navy had fluctuated wildly since its birth in the late 18th century: adding ships and manpower for crises such the Quasi War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, then swiftly casting them aside with the return of peace. In 1861, for example, the U.S. Navy had only 42 active warships; yet five years later, at the end of the Civil War, it had 671. Five years after that, it was back to 52. This fluctuation—this sine wave of naval power—is what Worden and the other founding members of the Institute worried about.
From that moment to this, the pages of Proceedings have been not only a sounding board to consider the wisdom of peacetime naval policy, but also a place where the newest aspects of changing technology are considered, proposed, modified, and adjusted. Sometimes that has led to the adoption of a new platform; sometimes it has exposed the fallacy of an idea, which is just as important.
In particular, Proceedings has been a place for junior officers to raise questions and issues that otherwise would likely never have made it up through the chain of command to receive serious consideration. And look at who some of those junior officers have been: Lieutenant Bradley Fiske, Lieutenant Ernest King, Lieutenant Chester Nimitz, Dudley Knox, William S. Pye, and Hyman Rickover.
In many ways, the Institute—and Proceedings in particular—is a mirror: one that reflects the issues, of all kinds, that dominate naval planning, policy, and performance. But it is a two-way mirror. While it reflects contemporary issues, it also projects possible futures: proposing, predicting, and even propelling future platforms, policies, and procedures.
All the past issues remain available in bound copies. Today, a lot of people access articles online, but for those who are old school, it is possible to thumb through hard copies of the older issues and get a real sense of the time. Sometimes one article will lead to the next to reveal a whole smorgasbord of ideas. What, for example, were Navy officers thinking about, or worrying about, in the 1930s before the outbreak of war? What did they think naval warfare in the Pacific would look like? How would amphibious operations fit into that planning? What was the future of naval aviation? Of war itself? Here are officers struggling with questions about the validity, or the humanity, of submarine warfare and aerial bombing of civilian targets, as well as more practical issues about targeting and dive angles. A young Lieutenant Hyman Rickover asks whether the tactical role assigned to submarines is compatible with existing international law.
Sometimes, there are articles about programs and platforms that ended up as dead ends, but they, too, show the fluid character of naval thinking. Here are the back-and-forth arguments about the relative merits of lighter-than-air dirigibles versus fixed-wing aircraft. And, much later, arguments about the relative merits of guns versus missiles for air defense.
Absent these discussions, how much longer would it have taken the United States to perceive and, much more important, respond to new realities?
No doubt, Navy officers would have thought about some of these things—maybe all of these things—even had Proceedings never existed, but absent a platform to express their views, and an audience to consider them and then to argue back in future articles, would they have had the kind of impact needed to effect change? We all know the old question about a tree falling in the forest: Does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it? In the same way, does an idea in the mind of one man make an impact absent a venue to share it?
Proceedings not only reported on events and ideas in the U.S. Navy, but also kept naval officers abreast of events in other countries and in other navies, at a time when most Americans paid little or no attention to events beyond our shores. There are articles on the tactics and strategies used in the Russo-Japanese War, as well as multiple—indeed, sometimes interminable—considerations of the Battle of Jutland.
There are many reflections on naval history in Proceedings, but since 1987, most of the historical pieces that otherwise would have appeared in Proceedings appear in the Institute’s other journal, Naval History, the leading periodical of its type and my personal favorite.
The Institute’s periodicals are at the core of its mission, but the Institute also has played many other roles.
In 1926, the Institute provided the seed money to create the Naval Historical Foundation. Its check was for $1,000. That, in itself, is an example of how much things have changed. Today, a copy of the 1917 Bluejacket’s Manual, another important product of the Institute, sells for that same amount.
In addition, of course, there is the Institute’s book-publishing arm, the Naval Institute Press. Founded in 1898, only 25 years after the organization itself, the press has published literally hundreds of books, none more important than the Bluejacket’s Manual, first published in 1902. A copy was handed to me when I was in boot camp in 1970. And, of course, it is still published today.
The Naval Institute Press publishes many other professional books, some of which are also manuals of a sort, including The Petty Officer’s Drill Book, The Manual of Wireless Telegraphy, and the Division Officer’s Guide. Others have explored more philosophical topics, such as How Navies Fight by Frank Uhlig, or Wayne Hughes’ series on Fleet Tactics. The press also has rescued a number of classics from the out-of-print dustbin, including Julian Corbett’s Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, J. C. Wylie’s Military Strategy, and Samuel Eliot Morison’s multivolume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.
And, of course, the Institute has published, and continues to publish, important books on naval history. Any serious naval historian discovers early that when you need a reliable, authoritative book on just about any topic of naval history, 80 percent of the time it will have been published by the Naval Institute Press. And this year the Naval Institute released Denis Clift’s book on the history of the Institute itself, aptly titled The Pen and the Sword, in which he goes into far more detail about its rich history.
Let me end by simply repeating what Captain Roy Smith said a hundred years ago in 1923: “With the possible exception of the War College at Newport, no other source has so greatly furthered the material development and professional advancement of the Navy than the Naval Institute.”
Congratulations.
Editor’s Note: Adapted from a speech presented at the Naval Institute’s 2023 Annual Meeting on 10 May.