Secondly, for war: The influence of the government will be felt in its most legitimate manner in maintaining an armed navy, of a size commensurate with the growth of its shipping and the importance of the interests connected with it. In any one of these ways the influence of the government will be felt, making or marring the sea power of the country in the matter of peaceful commerce upon which alone, it cannot be too often insisted, a thoroughly strong navy can be based.
To turn now from the particular lessons drawn from the history of the past to the general question of the influence of government upon the sea career of its people, it is seen that that influence can work in two distinct but closely related ways.įirst, in peace: The government by its policy can favor the natural growth of a people's industries and its tendencies to seek adventure and gain by way of the sea or it can try to develop such industries and such sea-going bent, when they do not naturally exist or, on the other hand, the government may, by mistaken action check and fetter the progress which the people left to themselves would make. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm had copies of Mahan's books placed on every ship in the German High Seas Fleet and the Japanese government put translations in its imperial bureaus. But control of the seas would also require the acquisition of naval bases and coaling stations. To become a major naval power, the United States began to replace its wooden sailing ships with steel vessels powered by coal or oil in 1883. "Whoever rules the waves rules the world," Mahan wrote. Mahan, a naval strategist and the author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, argued that national prosperity and power depended on control of the world's sea-lanes. Several ships, including the USS Mahan, were named in his honor. He emphasized the importance of sea power and was inspirational in establishing navies around the world. This complex narrative thus illustrates the manifold influences on the creation of any classification system and asks us to consider that multiplicity of influences, whether we as librarians teach about existing systems or work to build new ones.Alfred Thayer Mahan was influential in helping to build-up naval defenses before World War I. Specifically, we argue that the Naval Science class resulted from a concerted effort by naval theorists to raise their field to the status of a science, the interest in Washington’s political class in this new science as a justification for imperial expansion, and a publishing boom in naval matters as the American public became eager consumers of such work during the Spanish-American War. The present article examines the history of a single class by looking at the ideological and political assumptions behind that class and the means by which these assumptions were written into the LCCS. Prior scholarship has neglected the means by which ideologies are encoded into classification systems, however. Previous work on the history of classification and especially of the LCCS has looked closely at the mechanics of the creation of such systems and at ideological influences on classification schemes. Abstract This article is a history of the creation of the Naval Science class within the Library of Congress Classification System (LCCS) during that system’s fashioning and development at the turn of the 20th century.
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