The Hopes of a Realist (July 2024)
The letter below from Commander William S. Sims (later admiral) is a fascinating complement to the previous post, a letter from President Theodore Roosevelt. The two pair so well because both are written in mid-1907 in response to a war scare with Japan begun several months earlier by, of all things, the decision of the San Francisco to school board to segregate Asian-American children. That racist decision had caused outrage in a Japan that was at once proud from its decisive military victory over Russia in 1904-1905 and resentful of the less impressive diplomatic outcome of the Treaty of Portsmouth brokered by Roosevelt. Although the severity of the 1906-1907 crisis had been to an extent cynically overblown by various parties on both sides—including Roosevelt—for their own purposes, it had been real enough to focus the attention of American statesmen and military strategists on just how vulnerable the still newly acquired American colony in the Philippines was to a Japanese attack.
What I love about these letters is the juxtaposition of the views of the naval officer and the politician: they share the same military strategic assessment—in Roosevelt’s wonderful phrase, “The Philippines have become our heel of Achilles”—but differ in their understanding of the domestic political situation.
As one might expect, Roosevelt had a better sense of political reality. In 1899 he seems to have hoped that the act of taking the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam would help create public support for the brand of assertive, progressive imperialism he envisioned; the “if you build it, they will come” approach to domestic politics. But by 1907, Roosevelt had reluctantly come to the realization that there was no political will to either allow the Philippines to fully prosper or become a bastion for aggressive foreign policy.
Sims’s letter, on the other hand, displays at once political realism to the point of pessimism and a quintessentially Progressive Era naiveté.
The realism is displayed on the first page. Sims is writing to his friend, Commander James H. Oliver, one of the navy’s leading strategists. At the time, much of the U.S. Navy’s operational and strategic planning was actually done by faculty at the Naval War College. I do not have Oliver’s original letter to Sims, but the timing of the note and Sims’s response suggest that it had been a draft of the War College’s study of a potential war with Japan. Oliver’s portion of that work is described by Edward Miller in War Plan Orange. According to Miller, Oliver’s plan was premised upon the expectation of the United States creating fortified bases at Pearl Harbor, Guam, and the Philippines. These bases would serve as a foundation for a slow, step-by-step advance across the Pacific that would be logistically feasible, minimize costly (and risky) naval battles, and largely bypass the powerful Japanese army. Miller contrasts this with a 1909 plan created by a different Naval War College planner that was a “politically more realistic” quick drive across the Pacific, but which would have been enormously risk if it had been logistically feasible (which it was not). Sims’s analysis of Oliver’s plan, which is expressed with his characteristic wit.
The optimism, however, comes out on the last two pages. Before letting you get to those thoughts for yourself, there is some important context. As most readers will be aware, one hallmark of the Progressive Era was “muckraking” investigative journalism pioneered by journalists like Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell for McClure’s magazine. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin argues that many of Roosevelt’s greatest political victories over entrenched interests were due to public pressure created by these journalistic exposes of political corruption and the excesses of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller. Sims hoped the same magic could move public opinion to favor a bigger navy. So shortly after telling Oliver that his war plan would never work in a democracy, Sims expresses the hope that “one good, short and easily understood magazine article” would completely alter the political scene by placing pressure on congressional opponents of a bigger navy, like Eugene Hale and George Foss.
This was not a hypothetical musing on the sailor’s part, who had by this point in his career earned a reputation as perhaps the navy’s most brazen maverick. For several years, Sims had been feeding information about naval deficiencies to Harry Reuterdahl, an editor for Jane’s Fighting Ships, with the possibility in mind that the journalist would write just such an article as described in this letter. With Sims’s consent, Reuterdahl published the article—in McClure’s, naturally—just a few months after this letter.
Contrary to Sims’s hopes, the article did not dramatically change the service’s political fortunes, but it did nearly wreck Sims’s career. Roosevelt was furious and ordered the Secretary of the Navy to investigate the leak, as the “officers of the navy who are guilty of such conduct deserve grave rebuke.” By that time, Sims was actually serving as the president’s naval aide, making the matter especially fraught. The always bold Sims confessed to Roosevelt, but rather than begging for forgiveness he pointed out that Roosevelt had resorted to similar methods himself in the past. With that, the president called off the investigation.
Sims, however, retained his faith in the pen to sway public opinion. During my last research visit to the Library of Congress I found a 1924 letter in which he is pondering writing a letter for McClure’s to warn of the danger of Japan to the Philippines. Hope springs eternal.
(Copy of letter from William S. Sims to James H. Oliver, Washington, D.C., 1 May 1907, Box 16, Sims Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC)
