The Unstable Dynamics of a Strategic Technology: Disarmament, Unemployment, and the Interwar Battleship

Abstract

The Unstable Dynamics of a Strategic Technology: Disarmament, Unemployment, and the Interwar Battleship WILLIAM M. MCBRIDE Most U.S. naval officers during the New Era (1921-33) would have agreed with Henry Steele Commager’s and Richard Morris’s descrip­ tion of the period as one of “crisis and failure” and of the character of the Republican administrations as “pervasively negative.”1 The technological basis of the naval profession—the battleship—was threatened by aviation, international treaty, and the attempts of three Republican presidents (especially Herbert Hoover) to negoti­ ate or budget it into extinction. Survival of the battleship during the Republican New Era, and the Democrat New Deal that followed, was part of the larger, often unstable, dynamics of disparate presidential strategic visions, international disarmament, economic depression, and domestic politics. In almost every way, Franklin Roosevelt was the antithesis of Her­ bert Hoover, and U.S. naval officers welcomed the election of the former assistant secretary of the navy in November 1932. Roosevelt actively directed the technological aspects of the navy’s building pro­ gram to a far greater extent than had the nation’s last archnavalist president, Theodore Roosevelt. Between 1937 and 1940, Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the authorization of seventeen new battleships in support ofthe existing battleship-based strategic paradigm. But such support had a price. Battleship construction became ensnared in Dr. McBride joined the history faculty at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1995 from James Madison University, where he was inaugural Edna T. Shaeffer Distinguished Humanist. Research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Hyde Park, N.Y., and by funding as Senator and Mrs. Roman L. Hruska Fellow from the Hoover Presidential Library Association, West Branch, Iowa. The author appreciates the helpful advice ofJohn Staudenmaier and the Technology and Culture referees. ‘Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris, series editors’ introduction to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, by William E. Leuchtenburg (New York, 1963), p. ix.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3802-0004$01.00 386 Disarmament, Unemployment, and the Interwar Battleship 387 New Deal labor legislation, and ship construction was the subject of heavy political lobbying. In addition, Roosevelt routinely meddled in naval ship design. In its New Deal legislation, Congress also abdi­ cated its historical role in the definition of naval technology to the president. This was of minimal concern to naval officers, since Roo­ sevelt thought as they did and defined naval power in terms of the battleship. But he did force the navy to construct the anachronistic T/«.$/t«-class battle cruisers, which the admirals decommissioned soon after his death.2 Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s differing attitudes toward the navy re­ flected disparate strategic visions. Hoover favored a hemispheric de­ fense, while Roosevelt was a globalist member of a navalist thought collective, to use Ludwig Fleck’s term. The various technologically defined subgroups within the naval profession—aviators, submari­ ners, and battleship/surface ship sailors—could be characterized as “lobbies” or “factions,” but Fleck’s definition of a thought collec­ tive as “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or main­ taining intellectual interaction” that provides the “special ‘carrier’” for the thought style, the “given stock of knowledge and level of culture,” is both more precise and more applicable.3 According to his admirers, Roosevelt’s naval policy fell within the framework of the actions of “forward-looking men who saved the country from economic chaos and later spared western civilization from the hands of fascist outlaws.” This contrasted with Hoover’s “denial of global responsibility.” Revisionist and New Left historians, on the other hand, emphasized Hoover’s pursuit of naval disarmament, his non­ interventionist foreign policy, and his “non-coercive military policy.”4 2Battle cruisers, designed as scouts for the battle fleet or as the dominant ship in guerre de course, carried guns as large as battleships, but the large propulsion plants required for their high speed necessitated a significant reduction in their armored protection. Battle cruisers fared poorly at the 1916 Battle ofJutland and senior U.S. naval officers eventually concluded that the type was worthless. See...