IntroductionFollowing the Civil War, the U.S. Navy finished a few design projects on the cutting edge, including the fast Wampanoag class cruisers that had Great Britain in a sweat. They needn't have worried; like so many inspired designs of the era, the Wampanoags ran up against technological barriers that would not be solved for a generation: mainly fuel efficiency at speed and the limited fuel capacity of 1860s wooden warships.
More broadly, naval rivals of the U.S. had no need to worry, since after the end of the war emergency the U.S. Navy quickly degenerated into a third-rate operation. The corporate "robber barons" steering the country had no use for a naval defense force, and used the Navy as a convenient source of ready funds, selling off new ships to foreign powers and ordering inferior vessels from cronies in sweetheart deals which led to obscene profits for the contractors -- but unseaworthy, poorly jobbed ships for the Navy. The corruption of the Grant years (dubbed the "Gilded Age") spread to every corner of the government, in a pattern later repeated in the McKinley, Harding, Reagan, and Bush II administrations. More broadly, following the Civil War -- which had witnessed the wholesale destruction of the Northern merchant and whaling fleets at the hands of Confederate raiders -- national priorities shifted to the completion of the transcontinental railway and the settlement of the West. Exploiting the mineral and renewable wealth of the West -- or making a pile on stock market manipulation -- became the new national focus, not building character by sailing before the mast.
Typical new U.S. construction: the ram Alarm, completed 1874, spent 21 years in reserve.
Eventually, the corruption in procurement and the backwardness of the American fleet (which compared unfavorably to the contemporary navies of Brazil, Perú and Chile) spurred reformers in Congress into action. In 1883 the legislature authorized the creation of four steel cruisers to form the nucleus of a modern fleet -- and the training ground for officers and seamen to operate a larger fleet, should it be built. Domestic construction was mendated in order to nurture America's capacity to construct technologically advanced warships and naval guns -- an art which had been almost entirely lost since 1865. Congress pinched pennies on new construction so obsessively that the Navy resorted to naming new ironclads after existing Civil War monitors. This way they could appropriate funds from the maintenance budgets for existing ships and use them for new ironclads. At this rate, it could take as much as 21 years to build a warship! These practices did not lead to an up-to-date, mission-capable fleet. Contractors often went out of business altogether because of the government's slow-pay or no-pay practices. In the Eighties, reformers sought to remedy this distressing situation. It was slow going at first.
 Authorized in 1883, the first four vessels of the "New Navy" came to be known as the ABCD ships because their names began with the first four letters of the alphabet. However, the smallest of the four, the yachtlike Dolphin, was the first to enter service. This was because of a major hiccup in the production of the ships. The construction contract was awarded to John Roach of Philadelphia -- considered well qualified by virtue of the long string of poorly built and unsuitable ships it had produced for the USN during the Gilded Age. Roach came in as the low bidder at $2.44M and was awarded the contract; but the firm caused heartburn all over Washington by going bankrupt in 1885, when only the Dolphin was completed. The other three ships were finished elsewhere: the Atlanta and Boston at the New York Navy Yard, and the Chicago at Roach's successor company, the Delaware River Iron Shipbuilding Works. The financial mess caused by Roach's bankruptcy extended the build times for all four, but did not scuttle the entire project, as had been feared at first.
By the standards of European navies, these were not impressive ships. But they were a compatible set of domestically produced, steel-hulled warships, far more modern than anything in the American navy at the time. With an 1889-90 voyage to Europe, the ABCD squadron announced to the world America's return to naval competitiveness after decades as a floating joke. The ABCD ships captured the popular imagination in Europe, where they were dubbed "the White Squadron" by admirers. At home, the ships were objects of patriotic pride, celebrated in thousands of chromolithographs, stereopticon slides, postcards, embroidered souvenir patches and pins. Moreover, as a training school for the officer corps of the New Navy, the new squadron was invaluable.
As it happened, within ten years of the commissioning of the Dolphin, the urge to grow the Navy and reach out for empire had become contagious. With the West officially settled in 1890, the nation was casting about for new horizons to conquer -- and empire fever was in the air. This made continued naval expansion seem desirable. By 1895, the U.S. Navy was operating two second-class battleships and three modern armored cruisers, with three heavy battleships only a year from completion and another laid down. Meanwhile, a swarm of smaller cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo boats issued from America's busy shipyards, providing more possibilities for training and maneuvers for the navy; below, period illustration of the 'New Navy' from Harpers (1889).
The 'White Squadron' (ABCD ships) in mid-ocean, with Chicago in the van.
Woodengraving after a painting by Rufus F. Zogbaum.
Then in 1898 came the stunning naval victory over Spain, bringing with it a sizable overseas empire and recognition as a world power. Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League could grumble all they wanted; priority funding was guaranteed for naval expansion. With former Assistant Navy Secretary and arch-imperialist Teddy Roosevelt in the White House from 1901 to 1909, naval spending and construction accelerated through the final years of the pre-dreadnought era, then redoubled as America hustled to stay competitive during the dreadnought arms race leading to the First World War. Ardor for naval competitiveness did not flag until the backlash against foreign involvement following WWI. U.S. disillusion combined with Europe's need to spend on reconstruction, not armaments, to give birth to the Washington Treaty of 1922. By that time, the U.S. Navy was second only to Britain's Royal Navy, and America's power and influence had begun to eclipse the mother country's -- an outcome that would have seemed far-fetched forty years earlier when the USN commenced its comeback.
 
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