Of course, key context is date: 17 june 1917. By that time USA was fresh into the WW1, and the implication of the 3 years of naval warfare included the fact that predrednought battleships was all but useless - slow, weakly armed, and very vulnerable especially to mines. And US Navy had tons of those ships which were incredibly propagandised (like in case of Great White Fleet).

So the US jingos of 1917, differing very little from the US jingos of 2023, were choking hard on the pill that their very expensive toys are just scrap and that resulted, except the usual screeching you could expect from angry jingos, with ideas like this.

Ultimately Washington Treaty from 1922 (signed accompanied by incredible amount of screeching of jingos from all included countries) just send all that scrap to scrap.

The idea itself is of course completely unfeasible from the point of engineering and also tactical nonsense too, which make that right side text even funnier, as you can see not only jingos but journos too changed very little in last century.