Transport: Cutthroat

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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. (subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel Corp.), because it is grabbing so much business on a preferential freight clause which I.S.F.A. unwarily gave it in 1936.

Last week, American-Hawaiian and Luckenbach Steamship companies, largest and most potent in the conference, indignantly withdrew. They hoped that the U. S. Maritime Commission, having failed to persuade intercoastal lines to regulate their own rates, would end throat-cutting for all time by exerting its power to fix minimum tariffs, which dates back in 1933 but has never been exercised.