Transport: Cutthroat

The intercoastal steamship trade is a roughhouse, cutthroat business. Its brawling history has been marked alternately by ruinous rate wars and periods of comparative calm in which shippers between Atlantic and Pacific ports of the U. S. have banded together in voluntary associations to keep cargo rates profitable.

Currently the Intercoastal Steamship Freight Association, organized in 1936, is in a frightful row because a nonmember, Shepard Steamship Co., which hauls lumber to the Atlantic Coast, undercuts conference rates to attract return freight rather than send its ships back in ballast.

Angry, too, is the conference at one of its members, Calmar Steamship Corp....