Transport: Kennedy In

In 1861, when Patrick Kennedy was born in East Boston, U. S. clippers were carrying 66% of the nation’s trade. By 1888, when Pat Kennedy was running a saloon in and the politics of Boston’s Ward 2, ironclad steamers manned with cheap labor had sent U. S. shipping to Davy Jones’s locker and only 13% of U. S. foreign trade was being carried in U. S. bottoms. That year Pat Kennedy’s son

Joseph Patrick was born. By 1914, when Joe Kennedy was a hard-working Massachusetts bank examiner two years out of Harvard, U. S. shipping had hit bottom, was carrying only 8% of U. S. trade.

The War gave an artificial boom to U. S. shipyards, and at 29 Joe Kennedy became boss of Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River Shipbuilding Corp. After the War, as the U. S. merchant marine began to go under for the second time, Joe Kennedy cut loose to make millions on Wall Street and Broadway. In 1935, when President Roosevelt asked Congress to revive U. S shipping, Joe Kennedy was the nationally acclaimed chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission, the New Deal’s most successful reform to date. Last summer Congress passed the Ship Subsidy Act, authorizing a five-man Maritime Commission to govern U. S. shipping as the Interstate Commerce Commission rules U. S. land transport. Mean time, Joe Kennedy had resigned from SEC because he wanted to see more of his wife and nine children. Last week President Roosevelt again dragged Joe Kennedy out of private life to head the Maritime Commission.

Last autumn, to comply with the law which required that the Commission be appointed within 90 days after its passage, President Roosevelt “temporarily” named three men : Admiral Henry Ariosto Wiley, Rear Admiral Harry Gabriel Hamlet and Treasury Official George Landick Jr.

When the President got around to choosing a permanent commission, he could not find a chairman. The late Senator James Couzens declined twice. Onetime Federal Coordinator of Transportation Joseph Bartlett Eastman refused in hopes that he may become coordinator of air transport.

Marvin Mclntyre, the President’s secretary, wanted the job but was too intimate with shipping lobbyists. Finally the President turned to his most effective and trusted extra-Cabinet friend, red-headed Joe Kennedy. Every night for two weeks a White House limousine met Joe Kennedy as he landed from Manhattan at the Washington Airport, whisked him off to be cajoled by that persuasive pleader, Franklin Roosevelt. As a final objection to being given the job, reluctant Joe Kennedy revealed that he has 1,100 shares of Todd Shipbuilding Corp. stock. Would not that prevent his choice? The President got the Solicitor General to rule that it would not, if the stock were, sold. The 48-year-old Irishman gave in, took the job on condition that he may quitas soon as it is running smoothly.

To assist Chairman Kennedy, President Roosevelt appointed Admiral Wiley of the original Commission; onetime Shipping Board Vice President Thomas Mullen Woodward; Rear Admiral Emory Scott Land, chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair; and Congressman Edward Carleton Moran Jr. of Maine.

These five men have two main functions: 1) to terminate by June 30 the 44 old ocean mail contracts costing the Post Office $26,500,000 this year, replace them with a direct subsidy large enough in each case to put a U. S. ship operator on equal footing with his foreign competitors; 2) to stimulate the building of new U. S. ships by giving subsidies up to 50% of a vessel’s cost to equalize the high price of shipbuilding in the U. S. with the low price abroad. Other tasks include getting rid of the rusting Wartime fleet of 162 ships left by the Shipping Board. The temporary commissioners announced in January that none of these 17-year-old tubs, unused for ten years, would be sold since that would be a “deterrent” to new building. Most will be scrapped, some kept afloat in case of war.

The Commission also will regulate wages and working conditions on subsidized ships, sell or charter five Government-owned lines and decide whether the U. S. should help finance a fleet of airships like the Hindenburg.

To do all this the Commission has $200,000,000. Said Columnist Hugh Johnson last week: “Chairmanship of that commission is just about the most important administrative job in the Government.

. . . The chairman is singularly on the spot. His authority is so great and the means placed at his disposal so ample that there is no room left for alibis.”