The question of marksmanship had been burned into Roosevelt's mind
in those days when the Spanish War was brewing. He has related in his
"Autobiography" how it first came to his attention through a man whose
name has in more recent years become known the world over in connection
with the greatest task of the American navy. Roosevelt's account is as
follows:

"There was one deficiency... which there was no time to remedy, and of
the very existence of which, strange to say, most of our best men were
ignorant. Our navy had no idea how low our standard of marksmanship
was. We had not realized that the modern battleship had become such
a complicated piece of mechanism that the old methods of training in
marksmanship were as obsolete as the old muzzle-loading broadside guns
themselves. Almost the only man in the navy who fully realized this was
our naval attach at Paris, Lieutenant Sims. He wrote letter after letter
pointing out how frightfully backward we were in marksmanship. I was
much impressed by his letters.... As Sims proved to be mistaken in his
belief that the French had taught the Spaniards how to shoot, and as
the Spaniards proved to be much worse even than we were, in the service
generally Sims was treated as an alarmist. But although I at first
partly acquiesced in this view, I grew uneasy when I studied the small
proportion of hits to shots made by our vessels in battle. When I was
President I took up the matter, and speedily became convinced that we
needed to revolutionize our whole training in marksmanship. Sims was
given the lead in organizing and introducing the new system; and to him
more than to any other one man was due the astonishing progress made by
our fleet in this respect, a progress which made the fleet, gun for gun,
at least three times as effective, in point of fighting efficiency, in
1908, as it was in 1902" *.

*Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 212-13.

Theodore Roosevelt was a thoroughgoing, bred-in-the-bone individualist,
but not as the term is ordinarily understood. He continually emphasized
not the rights of the individual, but his duties, obligations, and
opportunities. He knew that human character is the greatest thing in the
world and that men and women are the real forces that move and sway the
world's affairs. So in all his preaching and doing on behalf of a great
and efficient navy, the emphasis that he always laid was upon the men
of the navy, their efficiency and their spirit