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The speech Moreell gave that day is quite simply stunning. It is among the most remarkable talks about human nature, and the nature of government, ever delivered by anyone, anywhere. It rises above politics, as all serious discussions on human life ought to (but lately do not).
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It is a bit difficult to accept Mr. Gannon's assessment of the speech's historical significance given the fact that his own father requested a copy of the speech but then put the copy in a box and proceeded to forget about it.
Moreover, the speech itself merely echoes the intellectual criticism of the social sciences (including the "new history") that was evident during the American progressive era.
Third, one should recall that the pre-eminent advocate of social engineering was an obscure 'scientific engineer' named Herbert Hoover. It was Mr. Hoover who directed the President's Research Committee on Social Trends to produce the multi-volume
Recent Social Trends in the United States. Were it not for the Great Depression, it was Hoover's intent to use that work as the blue print for the re-ordering of American society.*
Penultimately, today's readers should be mindful of the fact that the historical scholarship on modern Germany calls into question ADM Moreell's assertion that Hitler viewed himself as a social engineer or that he was the only driving force behind the Nazi dictatorship. (ADM Moreell's attempt to link the Nazi dictatorship's public policies to social engineering as practice in America during the New Deal would have been more teneable had he focused on specific professions and only until the early 1930s.)
Finally, any celebration of a naval officer for being critical of social engineering might be tempered by first revisiting A.T. Mahan's
The Influence of Sea Power upon History and the history of modern American navalism. Those ships didn't exactly build themselves.
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* David M. Kennedy,
Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, The Oxford History of the United States, vol. IX, C. Vann Woodward, general editor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 10-13.
See? My use of Mr. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book proves that I'm not bitter over the fact that Kennedy rejected my application for graduate study at Stanford in the 1990s. Nope, not the least bit bitter.