For Sale or Charter

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The U.S. will come out of World War II with the biggest merchant marine in the world. Its merchant fleet will comprise more than half the total tonnage afloat in the world today—40,000,000 tons of dry cargo vessels (the equivalent of 4,000 Liberty ships), to say nothing of tankers and passenger ships. What will the U.S. do with it all? U.S. citizens over 30 can well remember the pictures of U.S. ships rusting in clusters after World War I.

Last week shrewd, balding Lewis W. Douglas, who as Deputy Administrator of War Shipping helped to operate the U.S. merchant fleet during the most critical period of the war (May 1942 to April 1944), came up with an answer. Said he (in the Atlantic Monthly): sell three-fourths of it at auction.

Lew Douglas, now back at his job as president of Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York, is no wild-eyed New Dealer, and never was. His reasoning: private U.S. enterprise cannot operate a big U.S. merchant marine without Government subsidy. The cost of subsidizing a fleet of even 20,000,000 tons would be upwards of $200,000,000 a year, would put the U.S. hip-deep in the shipping business. Such commercial entanglements, said Douglas, lead governments to nationalism and "its natural offspring the totalitarian state." Such a tremendous involvement in shipping would inevitably lead the U.S. into competition with other countries. After that—"war . . . becomes first a threat and finally a devastating fact."

As for the purely economic aspects, said Douglas, the U.S. derives little nourishment from carrying ocean traffic. Other nations can operate cargo fleets cheaply. Those nations (particularly Britain, Norway, Holland) depend on ocean trade for their life. If the U.S. expects to sell them its goods and support its own economy, the U.S. must encourage its seafaring neighbors, not crowd them out. The U.S. should therefore sell or lease them some 30,000,000 tons of its dry cargo ships (plus tankers and passenger ships) to flesh out their war-depleted fleets.

Ex-Shipping Operator Douglas did not overlook the place of a merchant fleet in national defense. The U.S.'s remaining 10,000,000 tons (to be used chiefly in coastwise trade) would be a sufficient backlog. And on the tonnage sold or leased, the U.S. should tie enough strings to make it available if needed for another war. But it will never be needed, Lew Douglas argued, if his program is carried out.