Seapower - May 2009

FDR and the Naval History Society

By DAVID F. WINKLER

Upon completion of the world cruise of the Great White Fleet a century ago, a meeting was convened at the New York Yacht Club to discuss formation of an American naval history society. The senior attendee, Rear Adm. Caspar Goodrich, had recently retired from the post of commandant of the New

York Navy Yard after previously serving two tours as president of the Naval War College. Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the time a lawyer in New York City, served as the meeting’s secretary. John Sanford Barnes was unanimously elected president.

As with other American naval institutions, the Naval History Society had a British forebear. Founded in 1893 by a small group of historians, naval officers, publicists and states-men, the British Navy Records Society sought to publish original materials on the history of the Royal Navy, as the basis for the development of policy and doctrine. American naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan joined as one of the Navy Records Society’s first overseas members.

The Navy Records Society would persevere as a resource for serving officers, scholars and all those interested in British naval history and the development of naval power. Details about the organization can be viewed at www.navyrecords.org.uk/.

The Naval History Society’s founding president, ironically, was born at West Point, N.Y., in 1836. The son of an Army officer, Barnes entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., at the age of 14 and graduated with the class of 1854. After several sea tours and a stint teaching ethics at the academy, he left the Navy in 1858 to pursue a career as a lawyer.

However, with the onset of the Civil War, he rejoined the Navy and held commands of several Union warships. In 1863, he married Susan Bainbridge Hayes, the granddaughter of Commodore William Bainbridge and great-grandniece of Commodore John Barry.

After the war, Barnes returned to the Naval Academy as an instructor and wrote the first major work on the use of torpedoes, titled “Submarine Warfare.” Although he left the Navy again in 1869, he began collecting memorabilia

of the Navy from its early years. Before he died in 1911, Barnes edited the first volume of the Naval History Society publication “The Logs of the Serapis, Alliance and Ariel.”

Barnes’ son, James, remained involved with the organization and arranged for the transfer of his father’s manuscript collections and library in 1915 to the Naval History Society, which had as its stated mission “the purpose of publishing and preserving manuscripts, documents and writings relating to our naval history, naval art and science, and the surroundings and experiences of seamen in general and of American seamen in particular.”

With the collection coming into the possession of the Society, finding a space to house it became a challenge. Initially, the Society rented space in Aeolian Hall on West 42nd St. in New York. On Jan. 10, 1916, the John S. Barnes Memorial Library of the Naval History Society opened to the public at Aeolian Hall.

In 1918, James Barnes became the president of the Society — a post he would hold until his death in 1936. In 1923, Franklin D. Roosevelt contacted the New York Historical Society about hosting the Naval History Society’s collection and, with the expansion of the Historical Society’s facility, the two organizations reached an agreement in 1925 to move the collection.

For several more years, the Naval History Society continued to publish works on naval history. However, a combination of factors — primarily the death of James Barnes — led to the organization’s demise in the late 1930s. Another was the presence of a new upstart organization — the Washington-based Naval Historical Foundation.

Though the Naval History Society is long gone, its collections remain thanks to the initiative of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Recently, the New York Historical Society cataloged the entire Naval History Society collection and placed the finding aid online at http://dlib.nyu.edu/ findingaids/html/nyhs/ NHSColl.html. ■