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Having fulfilled the nation's new "manifest destiny," in 1899 ships of the U.S. Fleet sailed in triumph into New York Harbor. Cuba had been liberated; the Philippines had been seized. The U.S. had ended its isolation from the world and become a great naval power. Thanks were due to Admiral George Dewey—in whose honor New York City decorated its buildings and declared a two-day holiday—and to Colonel Theodore Roosevelt of the Rough Riders, who had fought horse, foot and dragoon (as prewar Assistant Secretary) to modernize the Navy and make it fit for war.
Nineteen years later, on a foul winter's day, New York Harbor became the scene of another celebration, when the battleships of the Atlantic Fleet returned, their manifest destiny also fulfilled. The world had been made safe for democracy (folks said) and Woodrow Wilson was off for the Versailles Conference.
Last week, in the smoky haze of mid-October, the ships came home again.
Carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines steamed into East Coast, West Coast, Gulf Coast ports—Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York—while landing ships waddled up the rivers and canals to inland cities like St. Louis, Cairo, Ill., Dubuque, Iowa, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
It was a spectacular return to the people of the people's fleet, 90% manned by civilians in uniform. Aboard the veteran carrier Enterprise, berthed in New York's crowded Hudson River, bespectacled Vice Admiral Frederick Sherman interrupted his breakfast to observe: "Ships of the greatest fleet in the world have dropped anchor in the greatest city in the world." Thousands from the city clambered aboard his ship. Aboard the destroyer Foote, six-month-old Timothy Sexton came face to face for the first time in his life with his seaman father, home from the Pacific. On a New Orleans dockside R. H. Bryant and his wife stood and looked at the spot on the quarter-deck of the battleship Mississippi where their son Jim had died. They wept and went away.
This week, in a proper climax, plain Harry Truman will climb aboard the Missouri, eat lunch and review the 50 war ships moored off Manhattan. The day —Oct. 27 — is Navy Day, the birthday of the late Theodore Roosevelt, whode clared: "The Navy of the United States is the right arm of the United States. . . . Woe to our country if we permit that right arm to become palsied. . . ."
Fair to Foul. In Washington, Navy Secretary James Vincent Forrestal, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and other Navymen wondered about the effect on the U.S. public of this stirring performance and great publicity show. An epoch was ended. As any sailor knows, every fair wind sooner or later blows foul. In the aftermath of every major war which the U.S. has waged in the past 80 years, public sympathy has veered; in the fog of na tional policy, overtaken by its own rust, the Navy has all but foundered.