Friday, December 30, 2011 Part III: Enter the All Steel Navy
(1866-1917) By Jan Herman and Mr. Grog If he were still alive in
the years immediately following the American Civil War, French
magistrate Alexis de Tocqueville may have observed a nation
devoted to uniting its “house divided” through free enterprise
and Western expansion. The U.S. Navy did not fit into this
equation for national healing. After the Civil War, it lapsed
into a period of dramatic decline as naval appropriations were
cut and the number of ships and men on active duty shrank
dramatically. The Navy and Navy Medical Department were, in a
true sense, landlocked. Medical Department resources were deemed
“entirely inadequate to the proper support of the naval medical
service, however prudently administered.” Because of inadequate
remuneration in pay, low entry rank, and scant opportunity for
promotion, few young physicians joined the Navy. In his 1867
annual report to the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of the Bureau
of Medicine and Surgery, Dr