The American Merchant Marine Today

» Today we depend upon the American Merchant Marine as never before. Our American ships will be as good as — or as bad as — the men who serve them. In the aftermath of the last war we let our ships rust and our service corrupt. But today our green crews are rising to the emergency. Here is one internal victory which the country does not know it has won.

by WILLIAM McFEE

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THE great national weeklies have been carrying a half-page advertisement of the United States Merchant Marine. It is headed by a picture of an extraordinarily handsome young man in naval uniform, holding a sextant and gazing soulfully towards the zenith. His perfect features are a blend of Tyrone Power, John Gilbert, and Roddy McDowall. The caption says: —

BE AN OFFICER

U. S. Merchant Marine offers wartime jobs with a peacetime future. . . . America’s new ships have the finest officers afloat. . . . Are you between 18 and 23? High-school educated? A U. S. citizen? Anxious to get in and pitch for America? . . . Train to be an officer. . . . $65 a month while you learn. . . . High-caliber associates . . . good food, good quarters ... a well-paid, lifetime career. . . . Naval Reserve. . . . Clip coupon today. . . .

To an old-timer, a survivor of the First World War and its submarines, a graduate of that school of rugged individualism, the British tramp steamer, such an advertisement sounds very much like Utopia. It resembles those fantastic, Paul Bunyanish, cock-and-bull yarns we used to tell in the second mate’s cabin during our watch below on a long voyage from Suez to Singapore. Yarns of great, fast ships where junior officers had ham and eggs three times a day and six times on Sunday. Yarns of benevolent skippers who brought bevies of beautiful blonde daughters, all highly educated, to sea with them, arranged marriages with the juniors, and set these happy couples up in shore jobs or appointed the sons-in-law masters of new crack liners. Yarns of messrooms equipped with roast pheasant, iced champagne, and Havana cigars. Yarns in which shipowners ate salt horse and slept in bugridden bunks while their junior officers had suites at the Ritz and took lovely ladies to the opera.

All these yarns, told far out at sea, in a dirty, ill-furnished cabin, after a supper of salt hash and canned potatoes, with a dessert of dried apples washed down with dusty tea, were wish fulfillments. We were really happy — happier by far than the presentday sybarites of the National Maritime Union, with their iced water laid on to all points, their steam-heated messrooms, electric light, and mechanical refrigeration. But we were socially nonexistent. We had no position in the world. Our calling was the last refuge of scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells, social misfits, and boys with neither ambition nor acquisitiveness. No feminine bosom swelled with pride because she was loved by a sailor, whatever the old songs of yesteryear might say. No eager industrialist pushed his way on board to offer us a better job. No government department paid the slightest attention to us, except His Majesty’s Board of Trade, who examined us as to our professional competence and enrolled us as a crew before sailing. As for the Naval Reserve, until the World War put the fear of God into the Admiralty and stripped a few outer layers of social snobbery from the souls of the quarter-deck fraternity, we were told (by an underling) that we were not wanted.

We wanted to be wanted. It is one of the hardest things in the world, if you are a craftsman, if you have a pride in what you can do, to be ignored. It was also difficult enough, in those days, to convince those in high office, admirals and shipowners, that prestige is more than pay.

Men do not go to sea because of the money there is in it. Gentlemen who write advertising copy such as I have quoted at the head of this article will always expect to be paid a higher salary than the commander of a liner. I have heard that many of them make much more than admirals and generals. The announcer who blares forth the heroism of a victorious naval officer would be outraged if he were paid less than four or five times the naval officer’s salary.

That is the American wary. It is accepted by all of us as part of the price we pay for democracy. So seamen of the humbler sort — the sailors, oilers, firemen and their officers, and stewards — expect only a reasonable remuneration. What they have always wanted, but for various reasons have not received, is recognition. They want to be wanted. They want to feel that the public knows what they are doing.

What are they doing? They are creating something the American people as a whole have never quite comprehended. We call it admiralty. Because we are so largely a continental nation, it has not been easy to bring home to Americans the significance of admiralty. Statesmen of an earlier era knew the need of freedom of the seas. Politicians paid it lip service, and big business used to filch incredible subsidies from Congress to secure admiralty.

The common people of the nation ignored it. The farmer remained callously indifferent as to the flag under which his grain was shipped abroad or his fertilizer imported. The worker neither knew nor cared about ships. The rich used the latest fashionable British, French, Italian, or German floating hotel, and expressed surprise on learning that their own country had any ships at all.

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So there was here no admiralty. Honest men in Washington held their noses while investigating committees poked with long poles at the bottomless bog of maritime skulduggery. Better let the foreigner do it was the verdict of many to whom the phrases “honest business” and “American shipping” seemed contradictory. No investor could be persuaded to put his money into ships while the Shipping Board was a competitor of the men whose taxes paid the Board’s astronomical disbursements for managing obsolete, bankrupt lines.

You could not, in those days following the last war, convince the great, stately American Federation of Labor that the seamen’s unions were part of a key industry. You might as well have asked a prosperous businessman, whose son was at college, to send that son to sea. There were only a few thousand men on the ships, said the A. F. of L. tycoons. So Andrew Furuseth, who had toiled many years for his shipmates, was left to languish in the shade. He was one of the incorruptibles, unsocial, without the smooth, slick urbanity of the modern labor “executive.” As for the prosperous businessman, how could he let his son go to sea when he would have to wait perhaps fifteen or twenty years for a command with a top salary of $3600 a year. Thirty-six hundred dollars! Assistant vice-presidents in those days started at $7500 when they were thirty. There was no glamour about going to sea for them!

It has been an incredible Via Dolorosa from those days of dropping wages, strikes, new drops in wages, collapse of fly-by-night steamship companies, collapse of Shipping Board routes, and the annual report of a million-dollar deficit in trying to operate the Leviathan. There seemed to be a black jinx on every effort of the United States to build a merchant marine. Consider the fates, for instance, of the Leviathan and her sister ships, the Majestic and the Berengaria. They were roughly the same size and speed, built in Germany for the transatlantic luxury service and taken over by the Allies after World War I. Of the three, the Leviathan (ex-Vaterland) was the most likely to succeed. She was slightly smaller than her sisters, but she had a service speed of 24 knots. Yet she was a hopeless failure. In spite of junkets to Havana, during which she had an advertised speed (coming back) of 28 knots, due to the Gulf Stream; in spite of advertising from coast to coast as the world’s largest ship (which she was not), she lost money all the time to her one-time consorts the Majestic and the Berengaria. For season after season her operators paid harbor dues in Cherbourg on 5000 imaginary tons to enhance their claim that she was larger than the Majestic.

Was this the trouble? Had the United States shipping industry fallen into the trap of believing that maritime trade was like patent medicines and tooth paste? Did they believe that, so long as you shouted, passengers would come rushing aboard your ship, operators would route their freight to your holds? It looked like it. Megalomania was almost a disease in those days. With a thumping subsidy from Uncle Sam, American shipowners would build ships 1200 feet long with a speed of 40 knots and a portto-port schedule of four days, thus scooping the entire transatlantic trade into their hands. It looked easy on paper. It was like making a fortune out of a chicken farm. Every hen laid so many eggs a year, producing so many chickens which became hens, and so on. All that was needed was a subsidy of $12 a mile!

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Meanwhile, what were the seamen doing? Most of them had gone ashore in disgust after the 1920 collapse of foreign trade. No ships except a few tankers had been built in America for a generation. The big ships that filled the headlines were all foreign. It became fashionable to sail in foreign lines. It was to become fashionable, later on, to brag that you would not cross in an American ship — which was an all-time high for patriotism and a sense of admiralty!

The seamen, as trade recovered, found American freighters, Shipping Board relics reconditioned and operated by owners whose chief interest in their business was the subsidy, far from a bed of roses. The food, the quarters, the pay, all were poor. Sixty dollars a month ($15 a week) and all found, when “all found” meant living in a floating flophouse on iron rations, was not a career to draw young men of high-school education, born in good homes and “anxious to get in and pitch for America.” The crews of American ships were then the sweepings of the water front, and the water front was a pretty tough region. It was a front of another sort. By way of the water front, Russian Communism came to America.

It is a curious feature of our times that executive capacity should be considered a sort of black art. It all depends on where you practice it. If you are in the Department of State, it is called diplomacy. If you are a businessman, it is called public relations. If you are a labor leader, you are a traitor to the workers. It is the art of getting things done.

The Communists studied this art for years. They trained themselves strenuously to assume executive control. They knew what to do. They were familiar with all the complicated business of organization. They knew, if William Green did not, that the maritime unions were of immense importance if the United States was to be revolutionized. The Communist Water Front Party was the spearhead of their active advance to communize America. It was an affiliate of European organizations.

The condition of the seamen, from the point of view of these cool, calculating men, was ideal. It was impossible for the ordinary shipowner, with his tradition of subsidized incompetence, to care very much about building up a personnel. He would shrug off the defective living quarters because the government had built them. He could claim that seamen’s wages in America were higher, often by 50 or 60 per cent, than those of any other merchant marine. This was true; but by comparison with work on shore, and remembering the precarious, seasonal nature of much seafaring, the wages were not good enough to attract men of character, sobriety, and intelligence. An able-bodied seaman forty years old, let us say, married and with two children, received $72 a month. How could his wife keep a home together on $18 a week, even if her husband never bought a piece of soap or a pack of cigarettes? The shipowner’s answer was, that was his lookout. Let him get a better job.

Suppose lie did. Suppose, by enduring a little extra privation, he secured a little private tuition, bought books, possibly a sextant, and got himself a third mate’s license. Suppose he was lucky, and after a few years as quartermaster or bosun he got a berth as third watchkeeper on a freighter. His wages were $110. His superiors would be his juniors in years. That was ten or twelve years ago. In ten years, if he won his grades as second mate, chief mate, master for all oceans, he might reach a chief mate’s billet at $250.

The man who held on until 1940, of course, and who still survives, is lucky. The point is that in the thirties the prospects were so dreary that nobody in his senses would have anything to do with going to sea if he could start in business or the professions on shore. We too easily forget now the hell through which the executives of the Merchant Marine have come during the past twenty years. It was bad enough when the 1920 depression tied the ships up, when harbors were full of abandoned Shipping Board vessels. They were like a horrible fungus growth on the water front. It was worse when things seemed about to get better. The seamen began to mutiny.

Legally, of course, it was not mutiny. It was one of the unfortunate actions of the shipowners when they persuaded Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper to accuse men of mutiny. The charge could not be sustained in any court. It was not sustained.

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What had happened was that the seamen were becoming organized. For years the A. F. of L. union, neglected by the labor tycoons in Washington, had been powerless to drive bargains with the owners for improved conditions and wages. For years the Merchant Marine had stagnated, while the old Hog Island and pre-war ships purchased from foreign owners became obsolete and poor money-makers. For ten years no liner had been launched in America. For years operators of government-owmed ships lay on their oars and collected their subsidies. The major scandals of the industry were being forgotten. And now the seamen suddenly erupted with a new union full of rough, tough, insubordinate individuals, demanding new quarters, new wage levels, improved lifesaving equipment, and even overtime for work done.

Andrew Furuseth, growing old and ailing, was unknown to the younger generation who manned the turbine-driven or Dieselengined vessels of the thirties. Moreover, he insisted on seamen keeping their side of a bargain even if the bargain might have been better. These new sailors had a new ethic, a new ideology, the class war. Where had they got it?

Long before 1930 the Communist International had realized the importance of the seamen in their business, as it was then, of world revolution. The Comintern sponsored a chain of International Seamen’s Clubs. Out of these clubs evolved the Trade Union Unity League. This in turn begat the Marine Workers’ League, which became, around 1930, the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union. These successive reincarnations of the same organism were numerically insignificant. What made them important was the fact that their members were alive and disciplined in the party ideology and techniques. They formed the nucleus out of which grew not seamen but organizers, executives, and propagandists.

The violence of the seamen at sea and the sit-down strikes on shore were exactly what the Communist Water Front Party wanted in order to achieve control of the union. Roy Hudson, the mysterious figure in the background of these activities, who bears the same relation to the seamen’s union that Lawrence Dennis bears to the Fascist fringe of our society, never appeared in any of the frantic conflicts between unions and operators. To make matters even more confusing and infuriating to a public bombarded with advertising urging them to “sail American” and “ship American.” the fight became three-cornered. The new unions were as mutinous towards the Bureau of Steamboat Inspection as towards the operators. On occasion the crews defied their own unions, staged sit-down strikes of their own, attacked their officers, and created the impression, in the mind of an impartial observer, of men gone mad. They took over the clenched-fist salute from the Communists, fraternized on shore with their officers, informed shipmasters that their authority was coequal with that of the union delegates on board, and brought on a number of nervous breakdowns among executives, both ashore and afloat.

The explanation of the shipowners, that all this was due to Communism and the Red Menace, was and is inadequate. Their close contact with the Red Water Front Party in their daily work, the devastating efficiency of the invisible organizers of the seamen, so impregnated the minds of the executives that they still see Red plots everywhere, even though America and Britain are allies of Russia. They do not understand that the Reds could never have driven the seamen to such desperation if conditions had not been ripe for it. All the Communists did was to organize the new unions to exploit the conditions produced by years of unimaginative neglect. For a generation American shipowners had drawn their personnel from Europe. Scandinavian, German, and British seamen had manned and officered the ships. Foreigners had even staffed the offices ashore. As time went by and ships increased, while Europeans no longer came to American ports for work, the quality of the personnel declined. A few cadets were carried, but the black gang and sailors were recruited from the riffraff of the water front.

They had nothing to lose when the new ideology of the class war came along. The worst of them took charge for a while. But when the United States Maritime Commission was created the rowdies and plug-uglies, who were using the unions as a cover for sabotage and drink and private vendettas against their fellow mariners, had seen their best days. When the unions got their hiring halls they had to assume responsibility for the men they shipped. That problem was laid in the laps of the genuine unionists. They were no more Red than the men who went to sea, but they had had to turn to the Communists, who had the organizing experience, the cold, impersonal bureaucratic viewpoint, the knowledge of mass psychology and propaganda, to get their union started.

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To the operators, by which is meant not capitalists but the loyal, devoted, sincere executives whose job it is to get the ships loaded and out to sea, they were all Reds. True, there were a few fanatics on the ships, sea lawyers with heads full of half-digested economics and Marxism. One of them, over a friendly beer with his chief officer, urged him “to mix a little Lenin with his Conrad,” though the poor chap knew as little of Conrad as of Lenin. Others, swollen with success, blared out Communistic prophecies in the messrooms, promising to turn the ships over to Joe Stalin. Others gratified private animosities by organizing pinprick “quickies” at the moment of sailing. A ship would be ready to cast off her hawsers for departure. Suddenly the sailors would vanish. A frenzied chief officer would burst into the forecastle to find a meeting called to discuss a defective steam pipe in the oiler’s messroom. Would the chief officer kindly retire as this was a confidential union meeting? The delegation would move slowly to the bridge to lodge the complaint while pilot, passengers, towboats, and engine staff stood by. The captain would promise to have the matter seen to. Slowly, slowly, with winks and grins, the deck hands would cast off the lines. The ship would then proceed to sea, two hours behind her schedule.

This is all over and done with, of course. Instead of staging a strike because a drunk is logged or fired, the union deals with what are called “performers” itself. Men who draw carfare and do not join are suspended or called for trial. Drunks and plug-uglies are prevented from shipping. The union paper publishes a blacklist of these gentry.

Since the invasion of Russia the leaders and their Communist ghosts in the shade have done a complete double somersault politically and are now in full cry for an Allied Nation’s victory against “the Fascist dictators.” This may not be an ideal solution for shipowners who still believe that all members of CIO unions are potential Stalinists who propose to achieve revolution by violence. It is even less satisfactory to the Communist Water Front Party, who see a powerful union slipping out of their control. The West Coast union, the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, under a clever politician named Harry Lundeberg, has never accepted the domination of Roy Hudson and his orchestra of commissars. Another Harry, the Australian longshoreman Bridges, is an equally astute strategist and his scalp has long been frantically sought by shipowners. Not because he is a Communist, a fact not yet decided by the highest court, but because he has outsmarted the most ruthless employers on either coast, the Pacific ship operators. He forced them to pay better wages. California employers have inherited a tradition that fluctuates between vigilantism and a tolerant paternalism, and has kept them backward in recognizing the elementary rights of labor. The very idea of collective bargaining, which was accepted for years in pre-war Europe, is repugnant to the American industrialist and disputed violently by Californians.

The uproar of the thirties, as more and more ships were launched, died down. The attitude of the Maritime Commission, under Joseph P. Kennedy, was bracing, uncompromising, and comprehensible. No nonsense was tolerated from anybody. When the crew of an American ship refused duty at a South American anchorage, the master was backed by the Commission, the crew were tried and sent to jail. When the Dollar Line executives refused to act in the best interests of the industry, they were evicted and the Commission ran the ships (which they owned anyway) themselves.

It was inevitable, of course, that such a Commission, building and operating a merchant navy for the citizens of the United States, should stamp on some tender toes and be called sinister names. There is a fashion in name-calling, and the National Maritime Union, now the largest and best organized, early learned from the Communist Water Front Party the power of invective. Just as every critic of the oldtime operator was dubbed a Red, so Mr. Kennedy, when he supported a shipmaster against a mutinous crew, was stigmatized as a Fascist dictator by the union newspaper. When he cracked down with equal justice upon a shipowner, he received no credit for it. All opponents of the union are Fascists, all seamen loyal to an employer are stooges, finks, scabs, and renegades. When Harry Lundeberg signed an agreement with Admiral Land of the Commission, the CIO union screamed that it was a Munich. As it is patently ludicrous to pin the Fascist label on Admiral Land, college professors and college girls doing social science research on the water front accused him of being “anti-labor.” Left-wingers wrap themselves in the flag (since Russia was invaded) and attribute the heroism of the seamen who are torpedoed to the fact that they belong to the union.

This violence of invective is merely part of the great modern game of publicity. It corresponds to the pamphleteering of the eighteenth century and has no more significance. The neutral citizen is permitted to smile at the vehemence of denials when any union member is stigmatized as a Communist, and at the complete absence of indignation on the part of the party members in the background. The Communist Party in America, if we are to believe the water front gossip, in fact, has achieved the impossible. It is linked with Moscow, yet Moscow never takes the trouble to give it any information. It is all-powerful, yet it apparently has no membership, since no one ever admits having joined it. It sends its Red members to sail in American ships, and plots with Stalin to destroy the American form of government. One sometimes wonders whether some people in the shipping business have not lost their sense of proportion. As a matter of fact the gap separating the successful, power-hungry labor organizer and the ambitious shipping executive is sometimes hard to discern. They are brothers under the skin, but with different ideologies.

All these antics are symptoms of violent growth, of a certain amateurishness in labor relationships. The Commission has had to turn to companies whose executives have the knowledge and the skill to fill the executive posts. The theory so ardently cherished by professorial minds and seamen’s unions, that the employment of ship operators to operate ships is a deep scheme to destroy the unions and bring in Fascism, is wishful thinking. And the sincere and hard-working staffs who keep the ships sailing, who believe that the Reds are getting control of the nation’s merchant marine, are suffering from delusions. Even while they shudder, the socalled Reds are being torpedoed and are scrambling on board another ship as soon as they are rescued, to “keep ‘em sailing.”

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Here we approach that side of the shipping question which has aroused the most painful public anxiety but around which Washington has kept an almost impenetrable smoke screen. It may be said that, while the Pearl Harbor news struck the American public between wind and water, the rebound was rapid. It was a foul blow to begin with, and the ships sunk were old. The fleet was intact, our turn would come soon. Life, if one took care of one’s tires, would go on. The Pacific is enormously vast, and a long way off.

But when the tankers began to be torpedoed within sight of people lying on the beaches; when a Miami businessman could look out of his office window and see the black plume of smoke from a tanker burning offshore; when the crews began to be landed and carried to hospital after days in open boats, the American public began to worry. It was not, as first broadcast, a sporadic raid of a few desperate men who fired their torpedoes and made off. It was an immense, carefully planned, and efficiently supported campaign to sink the American tanker fleet. Brand-new submarines appeared in the Gulf of Mexico and sank ship after ship. Ships sank in clusters from Galveston to the Virginia Capes.

The public began to worry, but they were in the grip of a cruel predicament. The coast along which the tankers crawled is for hundreds of miles devoted to the tourist trade.

Scores of cities live on the people who come by car to lie on the beaches. The sea fronts used to be a wonder to the seaman steaming south offshore. The night scenes were dazzling. The enemy submarines, whose crews must have dreamed sometimes of such luck, but who certainly never believed it would ever come, beheld lines of tankers silhouetted against the glare of amusement parks, giant hotels, and night sports fields, and sent them to the bottom as easily as they would shoot sitting birds. As the American yards speeded up in their launchings, the enemy submarines kept pace with them. It began to be touch and go.

Some say bad matters were made worse by typical American recklessness on the part of seamen who ignored blackouts on board and demanded this and that before they would take the prescribed precautions. This I do not believe. Undoubtedly there was loss of life due to inexperience. Consider the situation. Ships were sliding off the ways at a rate never known before. Fifty-seven were launched last May. But ships do not go to sea without crews. Where, do you suppose, were the crews coming from? A year ago the Maritime Commission’s training schools had a total enrollment of 1240 officers and 5000 unlicensed seamen. Those men, many of them, have gone into the enormously enlarged Navy. The rest are at sea. The new ships had to take green hands.

That is one reason why the number of men lost in American sinkings has been higher than the average. Another serious problem, and there is no way of evading responsibility for it, is poor stowage and inefficient supervision in port.

Take, for instance, the case of the S. S. Eastern Sword of the Sword Line. She signed on in May and sailed when ready for sea. She met bad weather, and five large cylindrical tanks, carried on deck, came adrift. Eight times the crew had to turn out to struggle with these things. The ship began to take water in the hold and there was obviously water in the fuel oil tanks as the engines slowed and stopped without warning. The lay reader will understand that, with oil fuel, if the burners go out the steam pressure drops like a stone. With coal the bed of hot fuel holds the steam quite a while even if the firemen stop working.

More than this, the blackout on this ship, unless the crew’s report is a pack of lies, was nonexistent. The second night out from New York, even the red and green side lights were burning. The side scuttles of the machine shop, which is in an engine room ‘tween decks, were open and showing lights at night. The captain and mate lit their cigarettes on the bridge, and the crew indignantly report that the captain was slow to close his cabin portholes. Next morning, at eleven minutes to four, the Eastern Sword was torpedoed and sunk with a loss of eleven men, including the captain.

To a survivor of World War I this attitude of the bridge officers is not at all surprising. In fact it is in character. Ship after ship was lost in the Mediterranean in that war simply because the masters of those vessels refused to obey the explicit orders given them by the Navy before sailing. They were instructed to sail on a certain course, which was being patrolled. Would they do it? They would not. They took the course they had always taken and were sunk and died. There was no doing anything with them.

Something of this sort has been going on on our coasts, but not so much as before. We have to take into consideration the attitude of the United States Navy towards the Merchant Marine. Owing to the long series of strikes in recent years the reputation of the merchantmen has been low. Moreover, the sudden switch in the alignment of the union leaders the moment Germany attacked Russia was bound to smell in the nostrils of service men. Before that attack the union line was: “This is an imperialist war. Let Britain and Germany fight it out.” Ships for Britain were delayed for flimsy reasons. Now the slogan is “Keep ‘em sailing! ”

That too may be a Russian plot, to lull us into false optimism! I am unable to think so. It is time for us, the public, including the Army and Navy and shipping officials, to recognize that the American Merchant Marine personnel has radically changed in recent years. It is not only largely native-born; it is characteristically American in awareness. Sixteen hundred seamen registered under Selective Service at Seamen’s House (Y.M.C.A.), of whom only 9 per cent were born outside the United States. One of the amusing features of the Pilot, the union newspaper, is a personal column, in which seamen are ordered, by name and number, to get in touch with wives, mothers, or sisters. Almost always the mother lives far inland, in Kansas, Dakota, or Wisconsin. The American Merchant Marine is American.

It is also, at the present writing, too intelligent to be taken in either by the extreme left-wingers or by the business-asusual brigade. They will never be Communistic, as our friends in the office so much fear and as our other friends in the Communist Party so fervently hope. Nor have we any reason to suppose that the executives, whose hair turned white and whose nerves were badly frayed by the lunatic behavior of crews in the thirties, are any more Fascist than ordinary citizens.

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Seamen, however, will no longer be inarticulate and suppressed. When, for example, a ship leaves New York in wartime so badly equipped that the engines break down two days out, the crew report that fact. When her speed is only six knots, so that she becomes a certain victim, they register a protest. There have been many cases in which the responsibility for loss rests squarely on the shoulders of the staff on shore or the military authorities behind them. The Normandie has not been forgotten by the seamen, by any means.

Another unhappy result of ignoring the men who sail has now been corrected, but it must have helped the enemy far more than fifth columnists on shore; in fact, when the United States first went into this war fifth columnists were unnecessary. I refer to the failure of the authorities to deal with radio apparatus on board ship. Thousands of miles before a ship entered the danger zone the master would order the radio officer to cut out the transmitter. But nothing was done about the receiver, the auto-alarm, or the broadcast receivers in the men’s cabins. Fifty signals emanating from regenerative receivers, auto-alarms, and broadcast receivers on board vessels in a convoy would act as radio beacons for submarines within a twenty-mile radius. Fifty such beacons all concentrated on one conning tower would make the convoy a perfect target. Radio receivers emit signals. It has taken the Navy and the Federal Communications Commission a long time to realize this fact.

Those who have lived in an Atlantic coast resort during the past winter have witnessed the struggle between Army and Navy on the one side and the business-as-usual element on the other. For weeks after ships were reported sunk near by, Florida resorts maintained a blaze of light to seaward. For weeks after the public was compelled to drive at twenty miles an hour with parking lights only, and all street lighting reduced to a minimum, vast neon advertising boards were left on full. Dog tracks and golf ranges retained their blinding glare. When the authorities in Miami finally obtained compliance from the former industry the season was over.

The seamen, who know all about this, for they see the lights as they sail by, have sought to gain publicity for their views. Last June they sent a delegation of seven survivors to Trenton, New Jersey, to attend a meeting of mayors and chamber of commerce officials who were seeking a relaxation of shoreline dimouts in the interests of resort business. When the seamen protested that the lights would cost them their lives and lose the ships, the secretary of the New Jersey Advertising Council accused them of “Communist talk.” An Army officer, representing the commander of the Second Corps Area, confirmed the seamen’s statements. The rules were not relaxed. But a large number of men who earn their living by publicity in coast resorts have not been cordial or coöperative. They have pooh-poohed the whole business as unnecessary. One ingenious gentleman in New York declared the curve of the earth’s surface prevented the glare of New York being visible at sea.

Not much has been said about American ships carrying guns, for obvious reasons. Some ships have guns and more are being armed as guns become available. As a general rule the gun crews are naval men with naval pay. The relations between these men and the union members on board is for the most part entirely satisfactory. Crews often collect money from themselves and present it to the gun crews to show their appreciation. Regular seamen are learning to use the guns. Earl Wolfe, able-bodied seaman on board S. S. Larranaga, was the first seaman to sink an enemy submarine, last Christmas Eve — a sinking confirmed by the British Admiralty.

Conrad’s old seaman said, “Ships are all right. It’s the men in them.” We can amend that statement today: American ships and seamen are all right. It’s the men on shore who think the war will not change conditions. They imagine they can escape criticism by calling seamen subversive. But the seamen regard this as unintelligent. They do not see anything subversive in being aware of what is going on. They fail to understand a policy that deports Harry Bridges while signing a treaty with Mr. Molotov.

In one of the rooms at the British Board of Trade, which corresponds to the United States Department of Commerce, there is an inscription which I reproduce here because it expresses, in stately seventeenth century phrases, the spirit of a seafaring people, the spirit of admiralty: —

As concerning ships, it is that which everyone knoweth and can say, they are our weapons, they are our ornaments, they are our strength, they are our pleasures, they are our defense, they are our profit; the subject by them is made rich, the Kingdom through them, strong; the Prince in them is mighty; in a word, by them, in a manner, we live, the Kingdom is, the King reigneth.

Substitute for the earlier idea of kingship our present conception of government, and the above words express what we are striving for. We have not yet attained it, and it will be some time before we do, but we are on our way. That way will be all the easier if we abstain for a while from name-calling.