MARAD Report 1974

Did I miss a week (or two)? Forgive me, it's tax season, and also a crunch time on a data management overhaul I am working on for an arm of the Military Sealift Command. In national news, President Trump seeks to impose million-dollar port fees on Chinese-built ships calling in US ports. These fees are similar to Panama Canal charges. I suppose it is easier to quantify the user-fee basis of a singular infrastructure project, than it is to consider the large amounts of money invested by the federal government for port improvements in locations around the country. These include new port facilities and harbor dredging for ever larger containerships flying foreign flags. In contrast, American flagged ships in the Hawaii and Alaska trades, as well as those tramping government cargoes around the world, tend to be smaller than 650 feet in length, and never larger than the old Panama Canal locks (950' long and 106' wide). As part of the data management project, I broke open a 1974 Maritime Administration yearbook (then under the Department of Commerce, instead of Transportation) in hopes of finding information about the construction of the C7 ships- specifically the hull now known as SS Cape Intrepid. Among the lists of subsidies doled out to shipping firms were pictures of innovative technologies underwritten by the government and trialed on American ships. They included advanced autopilots, electronic monitoring, and ballast control. Another report on women in the maritime industry found them filling 2% of shipyard jobs, a celebrated increase from 0.2% in 1968. (Today, the number is 16%). The editors forgot to mention that women had begun to enter license-granting maritime academies in the summer of 1974. Nixon's maritime policy for the 1970s involved large subsidies from government coffers. It preserved, and maybe even increased the size of the maritime workforce, while giving opportunities to once-forgotten demographic groups. The ships built when the Boomer generation entered the workforce would continue to sail until their generation's time to retire, a span of about 40 years per hull. At present, it appears that President Trump will rely on sticks rather than carrots to handle multinational shipping groups. Under the plan, those companies, rather than Congress' purse, will be funding the American maritime renewal. Hopefully.