Our Navy, the so-called Great White Fleet was basically a cardboard fleet. A good description of it was in “Guns Of August” by Barbara Tuchman. She describes how weak those ships really were compared to say the English Dreadnoughts. I forget off hand when we built our first Dreadnought class battle ship. I found this an interesting read: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/battleships/bbhistory.asp
The “Michigan” class had everything but turbine propusion. And while the Brits got the glory of building the first ‘Dreadnought’ the US Superdreadoughts built in 1916 (Arizona & Pennsylvania) were arguably on par with anything the Brits had. Plus the American concept of the “Standard Battleship” — ships designed to operate interchangeably in a common battling — made our fleet very imposing.
... As to the Great White Fleet, the logistics of actually sending a major steam powered battlefleet on a world tour had never been tackled before. Other powers sat up & took notice of that demonstration of naval professionalism.
Tsushima showed a Russian battlefleet arriving in no shape to do battle. The US showed how it might have been done properly. The IJN certainly took notice.