Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1901 — IS OUR IN THIRD NAVY PLACE? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

IS OUR IN THIRD NAVY PLACE?

With the expiration of the Fiftysixth congress the work of rebuilding the American navy completed its eighteenth year. The act of March 3, 1883, found us without a single modern ship or gun. On that day we made the modest beginnings of a new navy by providing for the construction of one dispatch boat, the Dolphin, and three small cruisers, the Chicago,* Boston and Atlanta. The Dolphin was not only our first paodern war vessel; she was the first steel ship of any kind built in the United States of domestic materials. Nor did the significance of her advent end there. She was not only the pioneer of our vast steel naval and commercial fleets of today, but she naturalized the now gigantic steel plate industry in America. Just two years later the Forty-eighth congress took another step in advance by authorizing the completion of the double-turreted monitors Puritan, Miantonomoh, Amphitrite, Terror and Monadnock, which had been rusting on the builders’ hands for ten years. That gave us the beginnings of an armored fleet. On August 13, »1886, we ventured to authorize the construction of the two second class battle ships Maine and Texas, but the undertaking was so tremendous that the keel of the Texas was not laid until nearly three years later. The same act that provided for th e Maine and Texas gave us the audacious experiment of the Vesuvius—a daring novelty that has had no successor —and it also began our flotilla of steel torpedo boats with the Cushing, which remained for four years our solitary specimen of a tfpb of which other naval powers had bun-

dreds. And in the same month Secretary Whitney succeeded in letting contracts that created in the United States the industry of producing steel forgings for armor and guns. Our next advance was the armored cruiser New York, authorized on September 7, 1888, snfl followed by an improved mate, the Brooklyn, the next year. Finally, by June 30,1890, seven years after the reconstruction of the navy, had begun, we felt self-confidence enough to prepare to build first class battle ships. On that date congress authorized the Indiana, Massachusetts and Oregon, together with the triplescrew commerce destroying cruiser Columbia, and our second steel torpedo boat, the Ericsson. At that point we may be said to have passed the experimental stage and seriously taken our place among naval powers. But even then our strength was principally on paper. As lately as the time of the Columbian Naval Review, in April, 1893, we could put nothing more imposing than a second class cruiser into line to welcome the united warships of the world. Our first vessel that by any stretch of courtesy could be called a battleship, the Maine, did not have her trial trip until October 17, 1894, a little over three years before she was blown up in the harbor of Havana. We did not have a battle-

ship of the first class in commission until November 20, 1895, when the flag was raised on the Indiana, and if the battle of Santiago had been fought two years earlier than it was the Oregon, the lowa and the Brooklyn would not have been there to take part in it. If President Cleveland’s Venezuelan challenge had been taken up we should have had just one first class and two second class battle ships and one armored cruiser ready to take the sea against the armored fleets of England. Surely Providence must have had its lightning rods up dissipating war clouds in the times when it would have been uncomfortable for us to entertain them. Now we have built, building or authorized, seventeen first class battle ships, one second class battle ship, eight armored cruisers, one ram, eleven modern coast defense vessels, fifty three torpedo boats and destroyers, eight submarine torpedo boats, six auxiliary cruisers and a swarm of miscellaneous craft, the whole making us indisputably the fourth and probably the third naval power in the world. The personnel of the navy has increased from 7,500 men to 25,000. The only thing that has remained stationary is the supply of officers. The Naval Academy is to be splendidly housed in a building of classic magnificence, but the only actual growth in the number of cadets as yet has come from the addition of about thirty representatives in the house under the census of 1890. The new apportionment will make future classes somewhat larger, but still far below the needs of the service. This and the failure of congress to provide for any new ships at its last session are the only clouds on the bright prospect of the navy.