Commander in 1905, and circumnavigated in the 1907-09 Great White Fleet as navigator and executive officer of the battleship USS Rhode Island.

[1] In July 1917, Captain Oman was given command of the former German ship, the SS Vaterland, now claimed by the United States.

During the 1918-20 flu pandemic, he created "Camp Admiral Oman[3]" on the Vanderbilt Farm outside Newport to safely quarantine a thousand sailors in open air tents.

He is credited as having one of the most efficiently running of the early colonial governments and the island prospered, largely thanks to exports of rum.

[4]: 111 Oman was... liked by all who met him [and] had recently done me a singular service by persuading the Navy Department to waive my sea duty requirement and grant me permanent appointment as bandmaster.

I left Government House with a wonderful feeling of gratitude, and as I walked down the hill, fragments of a march came to my mind and persisted.

It won considerable praise in the United States from bandsmen like Herbert Clarke and John Philip Sousa, and for several years it was used as the official march for commencement exercises at Howard University.