When war broke out in Europe again in September 1939, the United States was able to remain neutral for twenty-seven months precisely because much U.S.-owned shipping had rapidly shifted to foreign flags; when some of those foreign-flagged ships carrying petroleum and other cargo to the Allies were sunk, the American flag was not endangered, and national honor did not require U.S. involvement in the war. The handful of episodes directly involving U.S.-flagged merchant ships did not generate the crisis that had arisen in 1917. The nation entered the war only after Japan’s direct attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, an attack characterized by President Franklin Roosevelt as “dastardly” and perceived by the public as a stab in the back. The flag and the nation had been struck, not on merchant ships but on Navy ships, a naval base, and U.S. airfields without warning, even as peace talks supposedly proceeded in Washington. During U.S. participation in World War II, official U.S. policy further endorsed the use of the Panamanian and other flags for some U.S.-owned or -controlled ships.
Aside from diplomatic and military considerations, the straightforward business and profit lessons U.S. ship-owning corporations learned in the period of neutrality (1939–1941) and during World War II led them in the 1950s and 1960s to greatly expand their flight from the flag, primarily to the flags of Panama and then Liberia. Operating a ship with a foreign crew under a foreign flag was simply cheaper. Despite the protests of American merchant mariners and their unions, the courts ruled that U.S. law did not apply to labor conditions on board American-owned, foreign-flagged ships; instead, the laws of the flag state applied. In these decisions, the courts reflected an obscure 1905 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague regarding the grant of the French flag to slave-trading dhows in the Indian Ocean operating out of the sultanate of Muscat. The flight from the flag and the flight from U.S. labor law have become firmly and legally established.
In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the decline in the number of ships flying the U.S. flag remained a concern to American mariners who found employment opportunities greatly reduced; cruise ships, tankers, and freighters, owned by American corporations or American investors in foreign corporations, fly foreign flags and hire very few, if any, Americans. The dismay at the decline of the U.S.-flagged merchant fleet is shared by many Americans who take pride in the national maritime heritage, not from any personal economic motive but as part of their sense of national identity.
The attraction of operation under foreign flags in the late twentieth century produced a new generation of flags of convenience that drew shipowners from the major maritime nations of Europe as well as from the United States. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century, the face of the world’s merchant shipping is entirely altered, with a large percentage of ships now registered under flags of microstates around the world.
From time to time in recent decades, one of the few merchant ships flying the U.S. flag has set off an international incident, requiring a short display of U.S. military force that echoes the honor code of the earliest days of the republic. However, since 1939 the United States has avoided becoming involved in war to defend freedom of the seas and the honor of the American flag because of the flight of American-owned shipping from flag to flag. This work unfolds that tale.
Naval officers in the United States in the first two decades of the nation’s independence were drawn from the self-defined gentleman class. Speaking of gentlemen in southern folkways, David Hackett Fischer noted that status “could be shattered by loss of honor.” An honorable gentleman never “lied, cheated, stole, or betrayed his family or friends.” However, when a gentleman was accused of such behavior, he was obliged to defend his honor. The honor code was a widespread phenomenon, influencing public discourse not only in the South but also in the North. Among historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in A Warring Nation, described the honor code’s national power in the early republic. The language, rhetoric, and values of honor shaped national discourse on matters of international relations and the personal conduct of prominent figures.1
Among several recent studies of the honor code’s influence is Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic by Joanne Freeman. As Freeman points out, “Far more than directives for negotiating a duel, the code of honor was a way of life.” She continues, “The code of honor did more than channel and monitor political conflict; it formed the very infrastructure of national politics, providing a governing logic and weapons of war.”2
Paul A. Gilje, in Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812, sees the British challenge to national honor and the way it evoked the principles of the code duello as forming the basis for the rhetoric of political leaders in the era. He argues further that the fundamental causes of the War of 1812 were British challenges to national honor, especially affronts against American shipping and merchant sailors. Hence, Gilje shows, the motto of the war, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, perfectly captured the central importance of defending national honor.3
In the early days of the republic, most naval and political leaders lived by the underlying values of honor. Few New Englanders participated in duels, although one, Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine, felt obliged to respond to a personal challenge in 1838. His death in that duel led to widespread efforts (largely unsuccessful) to suppress the practice of dueling in the years before the Civil War.4 As Joanne Freeman points out, “Northerners were as well versed in the code as southerners; it was in their utilization of violence that they differed most noticeably. . . . In a sense northerners and southerners spoke different dialects of the language of honor, balancing the conflicting value systems of honor, religion, and the law in regionally distinct ways.”5
Naval officers, southern or northern, were conscious of a gentleman’s code that applied both in private life and in naval warfare.6 Among naval officers, honorable behavior on board a ship or ashore was so well understood that its principles did not need to be articulated in a formal statement. Historians can glean the maritime application of the gentleman’s code from contemporary and historical accounts of events of naval warfare, which suggest that naval officers were expected to behave at sea in accord with many of the same principles that governed their personal lives. By twenty-first-century standards, the values of the gentleman’s code were not only redolent of class arrogance but also deeply rooted in sexist and racist attitudes. Because these values are so scorned in the modern era, it is difficult to recognize how natural and coherent they were at the time and how they shaped discourse between individuals as well as discussions of national politics, international commerce, foreign affairs, naval engagements, and military preparedness. The early status of the maritime flag for merchant ships was intimately connected to these broader systems of the honor code and the rhetoric of honor.
Honor was associated with the flag even though there was no specific design for either the national flag or the maritime flag