George Dewey

American admiral

• Born: December 26, 1837
• Birthplace: Montpelier, Vermont
• Died: January 16, 1917
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

While commanding the American fleet in the Pacific theater of the Spanish-American War, Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay. His triumph in what may have been the most one-sided victory in world naval history made him a national hero. He was afterward considered a serious contender for the presidency but served as senior officer of the Navy until his death.

Early Life

George Dewey was the son of Julius Y. Dewey, a physician, and Mary Perrin Dewey. His mother died when he was five, but he seems to have had a happy childhood anyway, full of high spirits and practical jokes. He enjoyed a very close relationship with his father. After attending a military school in Norwich, Vermont, Dewey sought appointment to the United States Military Academy; because there were no vacancies at West Point, however, he went to the United States Naval Academy instead, graduating in 1858, fifth in a class of fifteen.

Promoted to lieutenant just as the Civil War began, Dewey served with distinction in the blockading fleet and especially on the Mississippi, where his courage and resourcefulness earned for him positions of considerable responsibility, despite his youth. It was also on the Mississippi that he came to admire the daring Admiral David G. Farragut, later famous for the immortal, although perhaps apocryphal, words “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” More than thirty years later, Dewey would have reason to ponder these words.

Dewey reached the rank of lieutenant commander by the war’s end; then, like other career officers, he had to settle down to the dull circumstances of the peacetime navy. On October 27, 1867, he married Susan B. Goodwin, daughter of a New Hampshire governor. She died in 1872, after the birth of their son, George Goodwin Dewey. The bereaved husband remained a bachelor for the next twenty-seven years—and a very eligible one he was: trim, sporting a glorious mustache, and handsome even into advanced middle age. He was also fairly well-to-do by virtue of his holding shares in his father’s life insurance company.

Life’s Work

The post-Civil War U.S. Navy had too many officers for its shrinking and obsolete fleet, yet Dewey managed by seniority and competence to gain his share of promotions and even more: commander in 1872, captain in 1884, and commodore in 1896. He spent fewer of these years at sea than is the norm, preferring duty in Washington, D.C. There he became head of the Bureau of Equipment in 1889 and president of the Board of Inspection and Survey in 1895. He sometimes used these positions to encourage naval progress, but he was too senior—and too devoted to intraservice harmony—to identify fully with the younger, reform-minded officers of that era. Like many other senior officers, he cultivated political connections instead. One of his friends, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, along with a Vermont senator, arranged for his appointment as commodore of the United States Asiatic Squadron in 1897.

Dewey was not an advocate of imperialism, but he knew that the Philippines in general, and the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in particular, would be likely American targets should there be war with Spain. When that war began in April of 1898, his squadron was already well advanced in its preparations for combat. With the declarations of war, Dewey’s ships were suddenly deprived of the services of Hong Kong and all other neutral ports, and they had none of their own. He could perhaps have violated Chinese neutrality by using a port on her coast—and the impotent Chinese government would not have been able to stop him—but that would have been no more than a temporary expedient.

Dewey’s squadron either had to steam out of the Far East or conquer a base for itself in Manila Bay. Leaving was unthinkable: Apart from the psychological and diplomatic consequences of departing without a fight, the United States could hardly abandon its interests in Asia; nor could it allow Spain to keep the Philippines, valuable as they would be as bargaining chips at the peace table—or as the site of a permanent American base in the Far East to assist in the expansion of American interests there.

Flying his flag in the magnificent light cruiser Olympia, Dewey led five other ships out of Hong Kong on his way to battle. Spain’s Admiral Patricio Montojo awaited him in Manila Bay with seven ships, but they were smaller and less well armed than Dewey’s, and with fewer well-trained crews. Some of his ships were in wretched condition. Spanish weakness afloat could in theory be offset by some other factors: If Montojo could disperse his ships, he might be able to harass American commercial shipping indefinitely, or the Spanish could shelter their ships under the guns of Manila and sow mines in Dewey’s path. However, none of these options came to anything: The Spanish ships could not scatter without exposing Manila to bombardment; Manila’s coast artillery was inadequate; and the Spaniards lacked insulated wire with which to arm their mines. Thus, the gloomy Montojo fully expected to go down fighting for honor’s sake alone, even giving up the slight protection of Manila’s guns so as to spare the civil population an enemy bombardment.

The Americans could not have been fully aware of the extent of Spanish weakness. Although the United States consul in Manila had indicated Montojo’s dilemma, his information might not have been complete; it was, in any case, many days old by the time Dewey set sail. The Spaniards might yet score heavily with lucky hits from their guns or with the few makeshift mines they had managed to sow, thereby making an American victory, if it could be achieved, either incomplete or dreadfully Pyrrhic.

Dewey himself had nothing but contempt for the Spanish defenses. He was more than willing to “damn the torpedoes,” that is, the mines. His final words on the subject were perhaps not as stirring as Admiral Farragut’s, but just as decisive: “Mines or no mines, I’m leading the squadron in myself.” When his ships got in range of Montojo’s, he gave his soon-to-be famous order to the captain of the Olympia: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” The result was the total destruction of Montojo’s squadron in the Battle of Manila Bay, May 1, 1898; there were no American combat fatalities. Dewey subsequently maintained a blockade of Manila and cooperated with the newly arrived United States Army so as to force the city’s surrender.

Two long-term international problems arose during the Manila Bay campaign. One was the American relationship with the anti-Spanish Filipino insurrectionists. Their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, claimed that Dewey had promised freedom for the Philippines in return for the insurgents’ help in defeating the Spaniards on land. Dewey denied agreeing to anything but a purely military alliance, with no commitments regarding the future of the islands. Given his—and Aguinaldo’s—political naïveté, it is perhaps likely that they had genuinely misunderstood each other. In any case, their disagreement was a minor milestone on the road to war between the United States and the Filipino rebels.

Dewey’s other political problem during the blockade concerned the attitude of Germany. The kaiser’s Asiatic fleet visited Manila Bay and openly displayed its sympathy for the Spaniards. Americans wondered if the Germans wanted the islands for themselves. It is true that the Germans sometimes behaved as if the rules of blockade simply did not apply to them, and their ships far outclassed Dewey’s. Fortunately, the matter was resolved, but Dewey, and many other Americans, carried away from this experience a lingering suspicion of Germany’s intentions all over the world.

In 1899, Dewey returned to the United States, where he was lionized to an incredible degree. There were Dewey hats, cigarettes, canes, songs, and even paperweights. Congress elevated him to the rank of admiral of the Navy, making him the senior officer of the two armed services, with the right to remain on active duty for life. In 1900, he was appointed head of the Navy Department’s General Board, and in 1903, he became the chairman of the Joint Army-Navy Board.

Meanwhile, there had been a Dewey-for-president boom, looking toward the election of 1900. Disliking public adulation, Dewey nevertheless allowed himself to be talked into running; his candidacy soon fell flat, however, mostly because of his own political ineptitude. For one thing, his cause was damaged by his comment about how easy the job of president would be. For another, his political ideas were few and ill-considered: He declared himself a Democrat, yet he despised the radical wing of that party; although he had originally wanted nothing in the Philippines but a coaling station, he nevertheless officially associated himself with the Republican president’s decision to seek the annexation of the entire archipelago.

Dewey’s second marriage, on November 9, 1899, also worked to his political disadvantage. He was the nation’s darling, and for him to marry at all was bound to arouse popular jealousy; his choice of bride made the situation all the worse: She was Mildred McLean Hazen, a wealthy widow with the image of a snob. Worse yet, she was a Protestant who had turned Roman Catholic, apparently for no better reason than to please the best social circles in Austria, where she had once happened to live. Anti-Catholics in the United States therefore claimed that she might someday donate Admiral Dewey’s house to the Roman Catholic Church—a house that had been purchased for him by subscription by the people of a grateful nation. It was all very silly, but the fuss engendered by his marriage nevertheless contributed to the collapse of Dewey’s political hopes, such as they were, and he eventually withdrew from the presidential race. (His wife later turned Protestant again.)

Dewey’s service as senior officer of the Navy showed him to be a conscientious but uninspired leader. He sought compromise, no matter what the cost, to prevent arguments within his beloved navy. He tried to please both sides in the controversy between the partisans of Admiral William T. Sampson and those of Admiral Winfield S. Schley concerning the latter’s role in the Caribbean phase of the Spanish-American War; but his efforts along these lines led only to an obvious self-contradiction.

In another matter, Dewey supported the young reformers who wanted to establish a general staff within the Navy Department, yet he turned against them when their tactics offended his sense of propriety. He wanted the Navy to have modern battleships, yet he refused to make full public use of his prestige in order to acquire them because he disliked arguing with naval conservatives. Like many others, he suspected that the next war for the United States would be with Germany, but in this case he carelessly allowed his opinion to become public knowledge, thereby embarrassing his country.

Old age and arteriosclerosis finally took their toll on him, especially after a slight stroke in 1913. He died in Washington, D.C., on January 16, 1917.

Significance

Dewey’s career from 1865 to 1897 was only somewhat more lustrous than those of many other officers. He was resourceful and courageous enough, in 1898, to make his ships ready and then to seize the opportunity for glory in Manila Bay, yet the praises and promotion that followed were all out of proportion to his achievement. Sampson and Schley, after all, had commanded more and more heavily armed ships than Dewey had ever possessed, and in a more important theater of war, the Caribbean; moreover, they defeated a Spanish fleet that was stronger than Montojo’s. Dewey, it is true, had displayed a certain phlegmatic panache; clearly, however, what made him so much greater than Sampson and Schley in the public’s eye was the mere fact that his triumph came at the very beginning of the war, before anyone else’s victory could claim the headlines.

Dewey’s postwar career did not provide much justification for his elevation to the highest of ranks. His judgments in the realm of politics were often ludicrous, and even in strictly naval matters they were sometimes flawed, largely because of his obsession with intraservice harmony. Perhaps Dewey’s most important contribution after 1898 was his support for the modernization of the battle fleet, but even in this case he was simply on the side of an irresistible trend, and halfheartedly at that. Avoiding conflict within the Navy came at the cost of a more forceful and forward-looking role as his department’s most senior admiral.

Bibliography

Cosmas, Graham A. An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Despite its title, this book sheds much light on all aspects of the Spanish-American War. It is very scholarly, but also readable.

Herrick, Walter R., Jr. The American Naval Revolution. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966. Another scholarly and well-written book. Herrick covers the political events that led to the building of the modern U.S. fleet during the 1890’s; this was the program that gave Dewey the qualitative edge he enjoyed in Manila Bay.

Honan, William H., ed.“Fire When Ready, Gridley!” Great Naval Stories from Manila Bay to Vietnam. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. A collection of journalistic accounts of significant naval battles compiled and edited by a reporter for the New York Times. Joseph L. Stickney, a reporter for the New York Herald, was standing next to Dewey when the admiral ordered the command to fire, and the book includes Stickney’s eyewitness account of the Battle of Manila Bay.

Karsten, Peter. The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism. New York: Free Press, 1972. This is an important book that reexamines the naval officer corps of the late nineteenth century, including the generation of reformers whose projects Dewey sometimes endorsed.

O’Toole, G. J. A. The Spanish War: An American Epic, 1898. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. A very enjoyable popular account.

Potter, E. B., and Chester W. Nimitz, eds. Sea Power: A Naval History. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960. This is the standard textbook on all naval history, used, for example, at the United States Naval Academy. The editors are, respectively, an eminent naval historian and a great World War II admiral.

Spector, Ronald. Admiral of the New Empire. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. This is the only modern biography of Dewey; fortunately it is a magnificent, albeit brief, account. The author is a very prominent scholar as well as a good stylist. The brevity of his book is a result in part of a lack of existing source material.

Sprout, Harold M., and Margaret Sprout. The Rise of American Naval Power. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946. An older but highly respected survey of American naval history.

Traxel, David. 1898: The Birth of the American Century. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1998. An analysis of the significant events occurring in 1898, focusing on the Spanish-American War. Traxel describes how the events of that year transformed the United States from a rural, isolationist society to a major world power. The book includes an account of the Battle of Manila Bay and Dewey’s heroic reception after his victory.