Why the 'U.S.S. Olympia' matters

I was shocked to learn recently that scuttling may be the fate of the cruiser Olympia, Admiral Dewey's flagship at the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898. Its destruction simply can't be allowed to happen.

The U.S.S. Olympia, launched in 1892 and decommissioned in 1922, has been a fixture on Philadelphia's waterfront since 1957. More important, it's one of the sole surviving examples of early modern naval architecture: the world's oldest steel warship afloat (with one possible exception, saying this, if the Russians are still preserving the cruiser Aurora.). Thus it has great value as an artifact.

If the Olympia were a wooden hulled ship, few people would question its historic significance. But because the Olympia looks sort of like the U.S.S. New Jersey, docked just across the Delaware, its uniqueness is not so evident.

But the Olympia is important for another reason: It's the sole surviving example of a turning point in America's life as a nation.

Today we look at China with a mixture of fear and envy— as a rising new player on the world stage. But the United States was the China of the 1890s.

Challenging Britain

Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, through his 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, convinced opinion-makers that America needed to emerge as a great naval power if it wished to tread the world stage with mighty Great Britain. The Olympia was an example of the new "two-ocean navy" that would extend our influence beyond our borders as well as the three-mile maritime limit. In the Spanish-American War the Olympia was the flagship of a fleet that secured the sort of unequivocal smash-mouth victory that Americans can only dream about today.

In an old book that I purchased at a second-hand shop, I came across a hastily scrawled note on a piece of hotel stationery. It conveyed word of a splendid victory gained half a world away at a place called Manila Bay. "Not any killed," the note marveled. (This was an error: A senior officer named Charles Vernon Gridley, was hit by shrapnel while standing at his post on the conning tower of the Olympia and later died of his injuries.)

So the Olympia is the last relic of a fated time when America's leaders, for better or worse, chose to roll the dice and assert our intention to become a world power. Dewey's splendid victory, masterminded from the bridge of the Olympia, lit the fuse that led to Vietnam and beyond. For this reason alone, the proud old ship deserves to be preserved and held in our regard, not turned into an artificial reef.

Remember Old Ironsides

Now, $10 million— the apparent cost to preserve the Olympia in dry dock— is no small sum. But it's said that that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s 1830 poem, Old Ironsides, inspired Boston school children to donate their pennies to save the beloved frigate U.S.S. Constitution, whose fate was similarly in doubt. The Constitution, launched in 1797, survives in its Boston berth to this day. I wonder if the citizens of Philadelphia— veterans' groups, maybe even schoolchildren— might not launch a drive to save a ship that helped rewrite the book on how we look at ourselves as Americans.

In the past Philadelphians have rallied to keep great art works like Maxfield Parrish's Dream Garden and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia. Is it too much to ask us step up to preserve an honest-to-God turning point in our nation's history?

If Cape May needs a reef, dozens of dry-docked transport vessels at the old Philadelphia Navy Yard can serve that function. But let's not scuttle the Olympia. It means too much to us.♦


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