Sea Control - Sea Control 447 - Neptune's Commandments with Dr. Heather Haley

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Links1. "Neptune’s Commandments: Invented Traditions and the Formation of USS Alabama (BB-60) as an Imagined Community," by Heather M. Hanley, International Journal of Naval History, December 30, 2020.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Heather Haley returns today to discuss an article she wrote on the Imagine community of the battleship USS Alabama. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on the website at simsec.org, so if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology.

Aloha, shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we are joined by Dr. Heather Haley, and we're going to discuss her paper, Neptune's Commandments, Invented Traditions, and the Formation of the USS Alabama, BB-60 as an imagined community. Heather, thank you so much for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Well, my name, as you mentioned, is Dr. Heather Haley. I received my PhD from Auburn University in December of 2021, so I'm still kind of a baby

historian. And I'm actually a historian for the Naval History and Heritage Command. And so I'm part of a little group called the History Advisory Group. Naval History and Heritage Command is an echelon one command. And so we report to the chief of naval operations. So when they have, you know, research questions in advance of, for example, USS Canberra is going to be launching, I think, next month, if not the month after. And so, you know, when we have research questions about instances like that, that's that's my job.

I get to research and write for a living. So that's pretty cool. And we'll timestamp this for listeners recording this Saturday, May 20th. So you're referencing Canberra there. That may have actually happened by the time by the time we actually air this. So if the listeners are wondering what the time construct is, that's what it is. But as a reminder, then all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So what led you to the topic of the USS Alabama? I would assume it has something to do with the fact that you were attending Auburn University. Correct.

So it was my very first semester as a baby PhD. And it was the very first kind of research and writing class. And this is pre-COVID. We had no idea COVID was going to happen. And I didn't have any research money, you know, to start even kind of doing deep dives into what I thought was going to be my dissertation, which was going to be kind of something along the lines of this particular what ended up being this paper, because I have an interest in the Navy. My husband is a veteran. My sister is a veteran. My mother and my father are both veterans. So it's all in the family. And so knowing that USS Alabama is permanently, the Memorial Park is permanent and in Mobile, I figured, well, let's take a look at USS Alabama. And there it went.

And I've always been interested in the creation not only of memory and how humans, you know, from a historical perspective, how humans remember things and in what context, but I'm also very much interested in how humans, particularly active duty service members, interact with their surroundings and the connections that they make with their environment. And so one of the things that really piqued my interest was just the interest in people, veterans wearing hats with, you know, USS Alabama on the front, Like, where does that how does that happen? And so that's essentially how this topic started. Well, let's start then with the ship. What can you tell us about the Alabama's history? Yeah. So Alabama, if I recall correctly, because, again, I wrote this in 2016.

So it's been it's been a minute. But if I recall correctly, it was a Sandy or excuse me, a South Dakota class battleship. It was approved by Congress for construction in the mid-30s, but as we all know, the Great Depression caused budgets to crumble, and so it didn't actually, they didn't lay the keel, I don't think, until, you know, as the United States is truly approaching the outbreak of war in Europe, and then ultimately what ended up becoming Japan, and so it was launched in 1943 um with a complement of just over 2 000 enlisted and over 200 officers and uh its top speed i think was something around like 28 knots and i think it's one now currently uh one of i think six ships named after the yellowhammer state and that's not including the confederate

sleep but what is an imagined community in this case because you hinted at this a little bit before the the folks with the ball caps so yeah yeah so um again this was my first semester of grad school and i kind of wanted to prove myself um and i know historians are not particularly thrilled um especially um with my interactions with military historians aren't particularly thrilled in working with theory but i'm intrigued i see you chuckling um uh and i'm sure you're Like, look, I, I muted myself, but laughing hysterically is the, yeah, like the theory piece and like touchy feely stuff. It's not like, ah, this unit was here and then it moved here. Yeah. I have observed a lot of the online discourse about more modern historical techniques and things that are being explored by you and other people. So, yeah, sorry, please. No, you're fine. No, no, no. And I do joke about it because while it is kind of partially in jest and partially in truth, I was interested in incorporating all of these theories that I was learning in my first semester at Auburn. And I thought an imagined community was a really great kind of foundational framework. And so essentially imagined communities are these intangible kind of unseen connections between humans. And that's just the very broad kind of understanding of it.

And so when you think about the United States broadly, that is, you know, not necessarily imagined because it exists, but the connections between the humans themselves, regardless of where they are physically in the United States, in Hawaii, you could even throw Guam into that kind of community as well. um, that those are all connections in this imagined community that is the United States, right? And so it is a term that was coined by Benedict Anderson, and hopefully I will never have to say his name ever again. And so I was interested in using this as the framework to identify, is this how sailors as humans are identifying themselves with using USS Alabama as an example because the archives were so close to me um in montgomery and i was in auburn so yeah yeah i mean i just got done with some time in the navy recruiting and that this is one of the things that we would always talk with future sailors about is like those folks who they've

sworn their oath but they have not yet shipped to boot camp and we talk about the navy family all the time and this sort of unspoken bonds like you're going to come back in your uniform and some old guy is going to come up and talk to you about his service in the navy and like so the imagine community thing is is real exist uh definitely like not not theory practice i would say yeah and you you bring up something interesting as well in terms of like going from the macro to the micro right so you've got the macro of the united states you've got the semi macro that is the navy or department of defense broadly and then even getting down to the navy then getting down to um your ship if you're on a ship or your shore installation and so on and so each of those are

individual communities within communities. And so it's a really interesting framework that I think was a really great place to start. So, you know, you use nationalism or nationalistic a few times throughout the paper. And I think the general conception of those terms is kind of negative as we look back through history. But do you assign any value positive or negative to those terms? Are you just trying to capture a feeling? Yeah. So, again, not to beat a dead horse, I wrote this in 2016. So I think the phrase nationalism has a little bit of a renewed understanding of nationalism in terms of, you know, Nazi Germany, fascism, you know, the extreme of nationalism. Right. And so I was thinking about this this morning that the military has to do a very balanced job, I guess, of establishing and reinforcing nationalism, the imagined community within their sailors. right um because you don't want to get to the extreme of othering everyone else right because

we do have allies do we not um and uh those allies may not look like us they may not share all of our values um but they uh ally with us for economic reasons um generally uh political reasons um and for you know the broader safety of the the entire earth which is yet another imagined community um uh your listeners from now on will never not think of any community that they live in as as not an imagined community and i apologize for that but all of that is to say in this context um in the context of what i wrote um it is more on the positive side um but it like i mentioned And there has to be a really good balance to ensure that it isn't taken to the extreme. How did the Navy foster that community?

Well, as you mentioned earlier, there are a number of ways that can happen. It happens in the recruiting station as they're attempting to recruit potential sailors. It happens in boot camp. I would even argue, um, kind of witnessing my sister as she was, was, um, recruited, even her little recruit group in San Jose, California was a little imagined community because they all got recruited together. They all kind of prepped for bootcamp together and then they all shipped off together. Um, and then after that, they go off to bootcamp, there's the next one. Um, and in that sense, they're fostering a community because you got

to survive for the next you know 90 120 days um and then uh then there are these rather how do i want to say this unsponsored events uh which is the main event of the of the paper itself um these these events that are not officially sanctioned by the united states navy um and i mentioned three of them in the in the paper the um order of the blue nose the crossing the line ceremony and then the um it's escaping me oh it's the one for the international date line um and it's something about the red dragon but anyway um all of that is to say uh i did see on linkedin this morning um that one ship is actually going through their their um order of the blue nose uh today so i thought that was very interesting they were being covered in in ice cold water and i i did not

envy them uh as i sit here in this beautiful uh 75 degree weather in virginia um so these are different so even those even though those aren't sanctioned um all officers all enlisted participate um which is also incredibly important because it crosses um what could be divides not just in rank or you know billets but in race class you know um someone's education um their social kind of status on the ship um and so it's i can see why the the navy broadly would not would not you know um sanction you know a crossing the line ceremony but i can see how as an exercise it would be very beneficial to the creation of a really strong kind of cohort so that way you can trust the sailor that you're standing next to in a in the heat of the moment

i definitely can't comment on like the u.s navy portion of that only because So while I crossed the international dateline on U.S. Navy vessels many times, we never did the Golden Dragon ceremony. Golden Dragon. Yeah. I had to look it up on my phone as you were talking about it because I couldn't remember. We didn't do anything with it. And I think that's fairly common for West Coast ships to cross. That one does not seem to be as much of a big deal.

The time when I crossed the equator, though, I was actually on a German ship and had all the same, at least as far as I've heard, because we don't share a lot of those anecdotes about like what the crossing the alliance ceremony is like. So I think a lot of that similar things happen there on the way through as far as what you're being asked to do or the course of your day. You wrote scholarship on naval vessels rarely engaged with oral history as a central methodological practice. Why is that? So and this is something that I think in the in the years since I've penned this paper has changed. And that has to do with, to some degree, the prevalence of oral history projects. Our veterans are getting older. um the uh quote-unquote greatest generation is is you know dying off um and so there's this

really great kind of fever pitch interest to get their stories um told and recorded um and as a podcaster yourself i'm sure that you can can um you know understand the importance of of that um and the one that was most important to this particular piece is the one that's conducted by the library of congress and so i find the library of congress one has expanded um in in recent years and the website is much more navigable uh some of the oral histories can be pretty kind of standard questions right but if you've got the patience to sit and either read the transcripts or listen to the veteran themselves, it is a really rewarding kind of plethora of information. But as I've mentioned, I just actually just finished reading a book called

Plutopia, which is not a military history book, but she did her own oral histories. And she comments quite frequently in the book that one of the reasons I would say previously that historians are so perhaps hesitant to use oral histories is, you know, you could forget or you could misremember something from, you know, popular media could affect your memory and that comes out as the retelling occurs, which means you have the added kind of weight of verifying all of that data, Right. And so what was nice about this was, you know, I had the oral histories. Thankfully, the Library of Congress had a little database of documents that are associated with these veterans. So I could verify some information and then cross reference between veterans and so forth.

So, yeah, I definitely feel as though we're moving out of the practice of not necessarily neglecting, but just perhaps making a pointed choice not to use oral history. So I'm glad we're moving away from that. So I'd like to talk about some of the more specific instances you cited for the ways that crew built their own communities. I'd like to focus on crossing the line. What is the significance for the listeners who aren't familiar of the crossing the line ceremony? Yeah. So as I mentioned before, I'm very interested, like I mentioned before, in in in spaces and how humans interact with spaces. Part of me is saying I should go back and get a sociology degree. But in this ceremony, when a vessel crosses the equator, the captain, an officer, transfers their power, power, I'm using that loosely in air quotes, to Neptune, who is ceremoniously, you know, dressed. there are costumes um in some of the really old photos we have on the navy yard um some

uh like Neptune's wife um looks uh as though he could be a she and it was from like the 1930s the dress was gorgeous it was amazing so some go all out um and then you get into the 70s and then they're using you know mop heads as as you know wigs but all of that is to say um Neptune comes aboard in this very ceremonious fashion uh and then there are a series of punishments that quote polywogs um these are individuals who have not crossed the equator before um have to go through in order to get quote shellback status so that way they don't have to go through this humiliation humiliation again um and some of them used to be pretty raunchy um so oh you know um um rotted food you know um there were a number of kind of gauntlet type things where um sailors

had to i saw photos from the 60s where sailors were running through like a gauntlet of of men with paddles and they would like kind of just whomp them on the butt um it looked a little painful um and then of course as we move into the present uh the present day um it's gotten much more tame um for obviously for for safety reasons um but uh it is it is a tradition that goes back centuries this is and it goes across um uh communities you know cultures uh because it involved the greeks it involved the romans it involved as you mentioned germans the french um the english in particular so a lot of these western cultures um are are heavily involved in this and so having the certificate um on your wall is definitely a point of pride

why was it important on board the alabama um well on alabama it occurred in wartime so it had kind of this additional significance of one it's a form of entertainment let's face it because Alabama, I was reading, had to go through the Panama Canal. That's a long journey to go from Norfolk around, even through the Panama Canal. And we'll be talking at another time about the voyage of the USS Oregon, you know, 70 years before, and how long and boring those could be. And so so it's a form of entertainment, but it's also kind of a way for sailors to be kind of more in a relaxed state as they travel to a place where there is the possibility where some of their comrades might be injured or die. Who knows what would happen in the case of the Alabama?

There's so many unknowns. As we know, it has a long and storied history in the Pacific, which is which is wonderful. But, yeah, like we mentioned before, it's a it's a way for all of these sailors to kind of form a camaraderie and trust. Now, the crossing the line ceremony is performed irrespective of rank. for those who don't understand that means the captain's a wog the captain is with the wogs for the day until he's you know received the blessing from king neptune so does that flat social structure uh even if it's just for a one day really contribute to the manifestation of the community oh absolutely that was one of the things that really kind of drew me to this kind of tradition um is because crossing the line ceremonies and the others you know are are

equalizers right um and so once you once you cross the line you make it through um all of these various you know humiliations everyone who's on that ship has gone through that in some iteration They've all kind of gone through that, that all of those hijinks and having your superior officers standing next to you in their skivvies crawling through the muck is endearing. right um and there's there are other instances in which there's kind of group activities involved and so that's you know um that also kind of fosters this this community in which these folks who are going to be you know working in the underbelly of the ship are going to trust someone who's on the bridge right um especially as they're moving into you know combat situations and the unknown and so having that experience together just solidifies that relationship i think

yeah i should say the other thing we should probably make clear is like a lot of the things that we're referencing as far as what the ceremony and conclude includes are no longer the case you mentioned it came down significantly um and it is definitely that uh i know again like having not experienced it in the u.s navy i can't really speak to it but i do know that like you are able to completely opt out uh if you don't want to participate in the ceremony now and then like a lot of the things you read about that alabama would have been doing back in world war ii are no longer the case here like i don't think the baby exists and some of that right some of the other unpleasantness uh that's associated with the day so like yeah it is uh you know there there

are some challenging aspects to it but i don't think it is anything uh close to what it used to be um you also wrote about the exclusion of african-american sailors from the crew zone narrative is this are you against the alabama as an imagined community or is there some more context that explains this here so i will be the first to admit when i when we get more information we generally like to update our our findings um and i worked on a project for the Naval Academy for a lecture I gave a couple of months ago. And so some of the I based that statement off of just images that I could see, because the USS Alabama has a war diary. And of course, the diary itself is segregated as each of the sections were segregated. So, you know,

the cooks and and I'm thinking of also, so what is it mess? And I think for the listeners, like rather than breaking it down into the specifics but basically different areas of the ship had their own portions the war diaries that sure the way you're getting out of here yeah yeah and so and they're of course segregated um by race um by african-americans and white folks and so uh and that's all i could really tell um and of course the photos are grainy because they're from the 40s but as i uh or i looked into other ships from the same era that was not necessarily the case which i thought was really interesting um there was a a cruise book from another another ship in i want to say in the 1940s or 1950s um in which an african-american the caption said

you know the the shellbacks are planning you know the festivities and there was an african-american in the photo which implies to me that he had already gone through the ceremony right so which meant that whether it was on that ship previously or on another ship he was assigned to, African Americans were involved. It might not necessarily be that it could be that I didn't physically see any in the photos that I was provided, or perhaps they weren't involved. But I have evidence to the contrary that African Americans were involved, but it could also be dependent on ship. And uh i did have an oral history of a sailor who purposefully made uh an african-american uh the baby uh so that way the there were there were two men on the the teenagers he called them who were

um keeping it real um were racist and so they purposefully made the baby african-american so they had to kiss his belly um even though they protested um and so that's a really kind of interesting another great anecdote from oral histories so yeah and then a final question for you you wrote and i quote sailors assigned to alabama associated the vessel with place not space and you kind of use this term earlier unquote um but what do those terms mean to you and what's the significance of that statement yeah so i like i mentioned and i think one of the things that's kind of the the thread through all of this is looking at a ship um i mean you can look at it as an object as a space like just physically a space where you store your stuff you

rest your head you work um and uh as a mode of transportation that goes to other places so you know ships are are really interesting um vessels because they can embody so many different things And in this particular piece, I associate it with place also because in the to kind of round this out really nicely, it is now a memorial park. So now it's it's literally parked in Alabama in its namesake. And so much like when you are listening to music and you heard that song for the first time and you remember the space you were in, or that one summer this song came on and now it is you associate it with that summer and that place very much the same kind of situation with alabama and the experiences of these men um when they you know see photos or even go on to the alabama for a um veteran event

all of the they're associating themselves with this place because it has become a place it was a space um in the 40s and now it's a place where their memories are kind of stored and where they can also um relive some of those memories and then tell us as historians um so that way we can learn from them well unfortunately that's all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guest dr heather haley heather where can we find you online and what are you working on next oh good golly um so my uh i'm a historian of the cold war so i did not do this for my dissertation um i did this and said i'm good i'm gonna leave this where this where this lies um but i am a historian of the cold war and i do um research on lgbt sailors in the cold war and my manuscript

tentatively entitled queer in the cold war is um out with peer review right now so hopefully i'll hear something uh uh very soon um but all of that is to say i am with the naval history and heritage command but you can find me on twitter at gallifreyan g-a-l-l-i-f-r-a-e-a-n if you are a dr kufan you will know what that means well thank you again for joining us to our listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time © transcript Emily Beynon Oh, boy, that's right. Oh, boy, I'm in shambles now.

Oh, help me, oh, I'm pulling the alleys. Why, I'm pulling the alleys. Help me, oh, I'm pulling the alleys. Oh, boy, I'm in shambles now.