SHIPPING: Master Plan

What’s wrong with the U.S. merchant marine? After the late President Roosevelt’s “bold and daring” plan for its development was dropped late last year (for lack of building materials), President Truman appointed a committee of five non-shipping men to find a new answer. Last week, after eight months of exhaustive study, the committee reported that the main trouble with the merchant marine was that there just was not enough of it.

The committee, headed by K. T. Keller, president of Chrysler Corp., recommended to the President the immediate adoption of a program to build 46 passenger vessels in the next four years. Two of them would be 50,000-ton express liners of 2,000-passenger capacity, designed to compete with Britain’s Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.

Prospect. Among the other additions would be three large ships for the New York-Mediterranean route, and five round-the-world cruisers. The committee urged that the Government start the program with a flat 50% subsidy of all costs, estimated at some $500 million.

Most of the merchant ships knocked together during the war (e.g., Liberty ships) are uneconomical, so the committee asked for the construction of a new fleet of highspeed dry cargo and tanker vessels. But it sensibly warned the U.S. against trying to hog world shipping. Said the committee: “Many maritime nations are far more dependent [for income] on shipping than is the United States. . . . Any attempt on the part of the United States to monopolize a large part of world shipping . . . could constitute a threat to world peace,” by further impoverishing some nations and drying up world trade.

Obstacle. The committee had hard words for the unwieldy, badly organized independent Maritime Commission, “the most serious obstacle standing in the way of the development of the merchant marine.” It proposed dropping the five maritime commissioners in favor of a Maritime Administrator of sub-Cabinet rank, under the Secretary of Commerce, with a Maritime Board to perform the present agency’s legislative and judicial functions. The committee also recommended 1) continuation of operating subsidies and training programs; 2) a program to revive the nation’s coastwise and intercoastal shipping, through surplus ship sales and the elimination of discriminatory rail rates.

As in the case of the Roosevelt plan, tight supplies of materials were likely to pigeonhole the plan, for a while, at least. But before long the U.S., owner of more obsolete ships than any country except Britain, was going to have to go back to shipbuilding again.