Navy. The enlisted force numbered between sixty-five hundred and ten thousand from the 1830s until about the Spanish-American War of 1898, with an upward turn during the Civil War. After the ending of hostilities in 1865, the numbers of enlisted went back to normal.4
Despite the international pool of trained mariners that served as the Navy’s enlisted force, the naval leadership was dissatisfied with the type of men the service attracted. The Navy’s Bureau of Equipment and Personnel admitted that many of the senior enlisted men were alcoholics. The work of the enlisted force was hard, dangerous manual labor that did not require much technical skill, and living conditions were bad, sometimes in the extreme. The naval leadership viewed the enlisted men as hard drinking and uneducated, capable only of manual work, and this view became ingrained in the leadership’s collective thinking, lasting throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, even as the enlisted force slowly changed. This is not to say no officer opposed this view, but not enough thought differently to sway the general consensus. Members of the American public showed their agreement with the naval leadership, posting signs that read, “Sailors and dogs keep off the grass.”
The Navy finally began to modernize around 1889, replacing wooden sailing ships with steel vessels powered by steam. The new ships led to changes in the enlisted force. For years officers had complained that few of their sailors were native-born Americans. The officer corps worried about the loyalty of the foreigners in combat. Steam ushered in a need for men able to learn the technical skills demanded by the new propulsion technology. The naval establishment addressed the officers’ concerns and steam’s demands by changing how and whom it recruited. Recruitment efforts moved from the port cities to the midwestern United States, hence the major recruit-training station at Great Lakes, Illinois. Considering the Navy’s conservativism, these changes were revolutionary. Historian Harrod, who has studied the changes in the Navy’s enlisted force from the end of the nineteenth century until 1940, pointed out, “As revolutionary as [the changes] were, they were undertaken surprisingly rapidly—virtually all were begun within a decade after the Spanish-American War.”
Harrod noted that new recruitment efforts began to shape the enlisted force’s structure between 1899 and 1910, with only minor adjustments until World War II. In 1890, for example, 49.7 percent of the Navy’s enlisted sailors were foreign born. Nine years later, the number dropped to 20 percent, and by 1910 1.8 percent of the U.S. Navy were noncitizens. By the time of McKenna’s enlistment in 1931, only 0.1 percent of the Navy was foreign born. Filling the ranks with landsmen from the Midwest required new ideas about training. During this period on-shore training of new enlisted men began to replace the traditional on-the-job training at sea.
World War I and the patriotic fever that accompanied the first global war caused many native-born Americans to rush to serve in the Navy. By the end of 1921, the Navy enlisted force had returned to its normal size of between 80,000 and 90,000 men. Few changes were made to the new recruitment and training methods between the world wars, and these methods, in place since the end of the nineteenth century, have lasted until modern times.5
The new enlisted force showed a marked downward trend in desertion. Not too surprisingly, desertion reached its lowest ebb during the Depression. For obvious reasons the Depression-era Navy McKenna entered also showed an upward trend in reenlistments.
The eighteenth-century English poet and essayist Samuel Johnson wrote, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Improvement of living conditions on U.S. naval ships moved slowly, but still, Navy recruiters touted them with enthusiasm. Recruiting posters before World War I tended to focus on the enticements of material benefits, training, and travel, without mentioning what life at sea held in store for the new recruit. In McKenna’s novel The Sand Pebbles, which takes place in the 1920s, the author aptly described what many fleet sailors endured before the beginning of World War II: “Holman was used to sleeping on narrow pipe-and-wire shelves stacked four high on either side of pipe stanchions. You were practically in a double bed with the guy across from you. Somebody’s rump sagged in your face and someone else’s feet were next to your pillow. The air was always thick with bad smells and strangled snoring. Bunking like that was supposed to work you out of any private and personal notions you had about yourself.” When you grew “to like living that way, you were a good bluejacket and Uncle Sam loved you.” Living conditions in the river gunboats on China’s Yangtze River were better than those in the ships of the Fleet Navy, and thus, many sailors requested duty in the Middle Kingdom. Again, all this does not mean some senior officers did not try to improve conditions, but these officers remained in the minority. One politician of the 1920s, however, is noted for trying to improve the sailors’ lot.6
Newspaper editor and politician Josephus Daniels was born in Washington, North Carolina, on 18 May 1862. Although admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1885, he did not practice law; instead, he worked as a newspaper editor and eventually owned a number of papers. He became an influential member of North Carolina’s Democratic Party and was appointed the chief clerk of the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1893 to 1895 under President Grover Cleveland. Daniels left this post to work to strengthen the party in his home state. His strong support for Woodrow Wilson’s successful presidential campaign in 1912 earned Daniels an appointment as Secretary of the Navy on 5 March 1913. He held this post until 4 March 1921. His assistant was the young and energetic Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a rising star in the Democratic Party.
Most of the twelve Navy secretaries who held the position from 1897 to 1939 had no impact on the enlisted force; their annual reports provided only boilerplate comments in praise of sailors. Because of their lack of knowledge of the Navy, the secretaries usually allowed the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation to handle enlisted matters. Two secretaries proved the exception to the rule: George von Lengerke Myer, secretary from 1909 to 1913 under President William Howard Taft, and Daniels.
Daniels, like most Secretaries of the Navy before 1939, had no naval experience. Unlike his predecessors, however, Daniels came from a “modest background.” Despite his background he decided to control the Navy, “and . . . did so to a surprising degree.” Ernest K. Lindley recalled, “Daniels entered the Navy department with the profound suspicion that whatever an admiral told him was wrong, and every corporation with a capitalization of more than $100,000 was inherently evil.” Daniels’ reforms ran the gamut from banning alcohol from ships (1914) to outlawing prostitution within a five-mile radius of naval installations (1917) to making sure enlisted men were issued two pairs of pajamas and wore them.7
One of the most controversial orders Daniels issued was General Order 63, of 16 December 1913, which provided mandatory shipboard instruction for all men. The secretary pronounced “every ship a school,” but as the Navy had already started training programs, including advanced courses, the new secretary’s experiment met with mixed Navy support and stopped altogether during the Great War. After hostilities ceased, Daniels did not try to reinstate the program.
Unlike previous secretaries, Daniels had “an unprecedented and abiding concern for the men,” but he was not above making himself seem the font of all changes in the Navy—so much so that Harrod noted the secretary’s glowing annual reports give the impression that “Daniels must have invented the enlisted man.” Historian Ronald H. Spector wrote, “In fact this [that is, Harrod’s comment] is correct.” Both Daniels and Roosevelt realized the enlisted force had to be reinvented for the new Navy. According to Spector, the Daniels-FDR leadership should not be looked on as a “period of well-intentioned but naive and futile experiment but as the beginning of a modern approach to enlisted policy. . . . [They] laid the foundation for the competence-based, technology-oriented, specialized, and meritocractic navy of the twentieth century.”8
Although Spector is correct in his observation, it is instructive to know how some of the enlisted force felt about Daniels. CTM Harry S. Morris, for example, recalled the secretary was not “a navy man, more of a southern Preacher trying to make men and officers things his [own] way.” Even while Daniels boasted of his improvements, life at the enlisted level changed little, as a