Save the Steamboat
I
THE time was, not so long ago, when the watcher on the hills of the Connecticut shore line could see, in the still clear light of an early summer evening, a placid and leisurely fleet of a dozen or so white steamboats proceeding at various speeds eastward along Long Island Sound. There was the Northland going up to Portland, Maine, the lordly Priscilla bound for Fall River, the Puritan for Providence, the doughty little Richard Peck for New Haven, the New York heading for the Cape Cod Canal and Boston. Two other boats went to Providence, one to New Bedford, and farther along the line came boats for Hartford, Stonington, Norwich, and New London. Unfailing in their nightly courses as the twilight that brought them, they were gracious symbols of the thrifty habits of New England travel. They brought a perennial reminder to New Yorkers that one of the cheapest and safest waterways in the world was at the city’s gateway, and that the public was using it.
But now a strange thing has been happening. All but two of these lines of steamboats are gone, and their puffs of smoke are seen no more on the broad Sound. All but two of the little fleets, some of which have proceeded on schedules inviolate since California discovered gold, lie at their docks, or already have been dismantled or sold. The Boston line and one Providence line keep running. But no year-round passenger service by water visits any Connecticut port to-day. No ship from either New York or Boston goes to Portland. The New Bedford line is no more; and the Fall River Line, after more than ninety years of continuous service, perished ignominiously last summer in a sitdown strike.
Now if you are watching nature’s deserted free highway from the low hills of Connecticut, right at your feet you may see one of the reasons for the change. Searing its way across the countryside, four or five miles back from the coast line, is the great gash of the new Merritt Highway, which may cost close to thirty million dollars to complete through one county of the state, that of Fairfield. It is being built to relieve the almost hopeless congestion of truck, car, and motorbus traffic on land now concentrated on the Boston Post Road, route number one of the nation’s traffic system.
There is more in all this than merely the disappearance of a leisurely and picturesque mode of travel. We have more than fifteen hundred miles of safe coastal inland waterways, and on all of them the same strange evolution is taking place. To-day not a single vessel carries regular traffic between the coast towns of Maine. The Iron Steamboat Company no longer plies to Coney Island; the Albany boats suspend their service from New York long before the winter season. On the Great Lakes, there is still an active service between Cleveland and Detroit; but the Great Lakes Transit Corporation, which traversed the lakes from Buffalo to Chicago, Cleveland, and Duluth, suspended operations last April because of ‘unsatisfactory operating conditions’ and has only restored part of its freight services since that time. In the south the one renewed activity in recent years is in the form of a barge line between New Orleans and Houston. Out on the Pacific Coast it is the same story. From Seattle to San Francisco, or from San Francisco to Los Angeles, no steamship lines are any longer able to compete with rail, motor, and air traffic on a regular and profitable basis, and only up and down the Sacramento River are steamboats in effective competition with other modes of travel.
Such is the distressing picture of our domestic shipping lines to-day. Some of them, which operate relatively long voyages between our ports on the high seas, are struggling to hold their own, as we shall see later on. But the little bay, harbor, and river steamers which ply on the sheltered waterways we have improved for so many years, and at so vast an expense, are steadily dropping off. Our costly interior waterway system must have business to justify it. If the ships are not there to carry traffic, something, indeed, is radically wrong.
Joseph B. Weaver, Director of the Bureau of Navigation and Inspection of the Department of Commerce, reveals one of the shortcomings, which clearly provides us with a clue. By and large, these smaller steamers suffer from age; all the patching up and repainting that may be done to them can only keep them within the margin of safety, and cannot make them either efficient or economical to operate.
By the last report of the Bureau in 1936, we have 944 inland waterway vessels larger than fifty tons, of which 591, or over 60 per cent, are over twenty years old. Only 5 per cent of the whole fleet, through the length and breadth of the country, are under five years old, and only a little more than half of them, or 513, are of steel construction. In other words, although appropriations for rivers and harbors are accounted progressive measures of national development, — and approximately $53,750,000 was carried in the Rivers and Harbors Bill as presented to the House this year, — the steamers that travel most frequently on these waters seem to be operated by an industry which has lost touch with modern conditions.
That is why the placid waters of Long Island Sound are deserted to-day. Here alone the little white steamboats that have disappeared accounted for close to a million travel miles a year. It is not merely that this trade has shifted to the truck, the motorbus, and the railroad. The problem goes deeper than that of a competitive shift between methods of transportation. The wealth of this country’s coast line of more than five thousand miles, its lake and navigable river highways of almost as much again, offer us an abundance of cheap transportation by water which no other nation in the world possesses. At the present time that factor is being wasted, and the men who depended on it for a livelihood are being cast on the community as if from an obsolescent industry.
It is still incontestable that water transportation is the cheapest of all modern transportation. On a general working average it is about one fifth as expensive as transportation by rail. The essential common sense of the programme of interior waterways arises from this fact. Even when oil is the commodity to be transported, ships are less expensive than pipe lines where ships can be used. It still costs less than one fifth of a cent per ton mile, on the average, to move freight by water; and so long as even the debased form of gasoline used by the trucks continues to be their motive power, they cannot touch that figure.
II
In the present anarchy of our national transportation problem, the whole story of the distressing condition of our domestic merchant marine cannot be understood without considering the larger ships as well. The ocean-going domestic fleet is not disappearing from the seas. The Clyde-Mallory Line, the Savannah Line, the Eastern Steamship Company, and their sister companies, have a different problem. They also compete with the railroads and the trucks, and in addition they must bear a steadily increasing cost of operation, reflecting that of our foreign merchant marine, without any subsidy as recompense or any government loans for new ships.
The 487 vessels in our ocean-going domestic fleet amount to a little over 2,100,000 tons, only about one fifth less in gross tonnage than our entire foreign-trade fleet. Yet, of all the ships this nation possesses, these are most nearly out of date by all sea standards. By 1942 as many as 91 per cent of them will be twenty years old or older. Our railroad systems have spent millions on faster, roomier, and more comfortable trains; they have developed new freight cars adapted to compartment shipping, greatly economizing space and cost. The automotive industry of this country has not yet recovered pre-depression levels in passenger-car production; but it produced more trucks last year than ever before in its history. Close to a million new trucks go out on our roads annually. Yet there is to-day not a single ship for general freight and passenger business on the ways for competitive service at sea. Since our war shipbuilding programme was completed in the early twenties, the deep-sea coastal service has added exactly five new ships.
This condition has very serious connotations for our merchant-marine problem as a whole. We have shipyards capable of building as seaworthy and economical ships as any in the world. But if these yards get no domestic building whatever save barges, harbor tugs, tankers, and government war orders, their overhead for ships for our foreigntrade programme becomes unhealthily steep. There are actual cases on record where a bid from an American shipyard has been as much as 80 per cent above competitive costs in Great Britain. Our foreign trade in goods can function effectively because in very many cases huge production for home use cuts down the overhead. With so big a domestic market, we can sell on a mass-production basis and thus make up a very large part of the difference of cheaper living costs abroad. Not so with ships, however. If the vital support of domestic ship construction continues to fail us, it seems impossible for the Maritime Commission to resist the conclusion that the domestic shipping industry, ultimately if not now, will require its assistance to prevent the whole conception of our commerce at sea from becoming artificially lopsided. The efficient and modern foreign fleet we have been promised cannot exist side by side with a domestic fleet only 10 per cent modernized.
This does not mean that the oceangoing domestic shipping lines are, like the little bay and harbor boats, on the verge of bankruptcy. Their record in this respect is probably better than that of their much larger cousins, the railroads. Few Americans realize that one very disturbing element in our transportation setup is still the fact that almost 30 per cent of our railroads, reckoning in terms of mileage, are in the hands of receivers. This situation is a by-product of the depression, and of course does not impair the structure of our railroads to a corresponding degree. But nothing like that proportion of our domestic shipping lines in the ocean-going trade are in comparable difficulties. For one reason, the volume of their freight is, according to 1936 figures, within 14 per cent of its peak before the depression; while that of the railroads, though there has been sporadic improvement since, was more than 40 per cent short of the figures of the last period of good times ending in 1929.
In 1936 these domestic shipping lines made an aggregate profit of about $3,600,000 out of a gross income of some 81 millions — close to 5 per cent, or approximately twice the average rate of profit of our lines in foreign trade. These figures are the best seagoing accounting in our domestic trade since the depression. They should not, however, lead to the conclusion that they provide means for building new ships. The coastwise lines have fallen so far behind any proper and logical programme of replacements that it would take almost one whole year’s gross income to give it a substantial start. This would replace with new ships only a fraction of the outworn hulks which keep operating costs on an uneconomical basis at the present time. In view of this fact, the favorable earnings of the companies at the present time are deceptive illusions leading toward a very uncertain future.
III
In essence the battles between different forms of transportation in this country are battles between masses of capital. The truck and bus industries have passed the stage when they were small and scattered operators. They have automotive capital behind them, and in their struggle with the railroads they often command influential friends. Thus, when the Chamber of Commerce of the United States launched its campaign against bus competition with the railroads a few years ago, it found a surprisingly formidable opposition to its insistence on a greater measure of regulation for the motorized carriers. The result was the secession, amid pronounced ill feeling, of the Automotive Manufacturers Association from the national Chamber, a severance of relations which still exists.
No such sponsorship seems possible for domestic shipping. Compared with the immense power wielded by railroad bondholders through the great banks and insurance companies, even through foundations and colleges, the influence of the domestic shipping lines is small indeed. More than a few of them are admittedly, and others covertly, controlled by railroad capital. Among the smaller lines, the steamers owned by the New Haven Railroad would certainly not have disappeared in such summary fashion had they not been owned by their principal competitor. Incontestably they made money when they were independent, ran thriving services with extra freight ships acting as a second section during many seasons of the year, gave land competition a real run for its money. The Fall River Line in the old days became a byword for a vigorous, well-conducted, and prosperous service.
Now that the surviving lines are still so definitely outsiders in the general scheme of transportation, it is fair to ask what they need to bring them to life again with profit and service to the average American citizen.
For one thing, there is government help. The railroads are ‘regulated.’ They do not always like their regulation; but under the Interstate Commerce Commission they have acquired stability and have begun to receive that precious jewel they so long lacked, the confidence of the public. They were treated, some say, handsomely by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Their enforced reduction of passenger rates has undoubtedly broadened the stream of travel, besides arresting the drift to the public highways. By and large, regulation has protected both the public and the railroads; and the loans which have made possible the renewal of equipment have been a wise disposition of public money.
Since the domestic steamship lines will have their chance at government loans for new ships only when the foreign-trade shipping programme is fully launched, they have, not unnaturally, sought government aid in another way. Congressman Cochran of Missouri introduced a bill at the last session of Congress which would insure mortgages on new shipping or on reconditioned shipping up to as much as $100,000,000. The definition of such domestic shipping was so unskillful as to draw criticism from the Maritime Commission to the effect that this was no time to spend money on showboats or dredges or other ‘floating property’ which might have been covered by the bill. But the essential objective, to put the power of the government behind the renewal of our domestic merchant marine as a vitally necessary common carrier, was salutary and practical. In its next appearance the bill may substitute for the indirect mortgage a straightforward and frankly acknowledged government loan, for a definite case can undoubtedly be made for the public advantage. Please note again that the sum asked for is greater than the annual income of the industry to be assisted — a clear symbol of the wholly abnormal and unusual kind of distress it is sought to relieve.
Far more than government aid, however, the time-honored American industry of domestic transportation by water needs new and modern ideas, a new power of adaptation to modern conditions. It needs the kind of startling departure from old formulas that was found by a brilliant young student in one of Professor Herbert Seward’s engineering classes at Yale. This young man specialized in transportation problems, and puzzled exceedingly over the fact that practically one third of the cost of railroad transportation of freight was eaten up by shifting and shunting at transfer points. There were three such transfer points between New York and New Orleans; and to the young man occurred the entirely revolutionary thought : Why not carry freight trains between New York and New Orleans by sea?
It took ten years to do it, but Graham M. Brush is now president of Seatrain Lines, Inc., and to-day these great hulking dories carry one hundred freight cars, deck-stowed on four tiers of tracks, between New York and New Orleans, with one day’s turn-around to load them on and off, competing with railroad time at less than 40 per cent of railroad cost. There are no derailments and no transfer points, and cargo comes straight through, with a lucrative side route to Cuba which sets American freight on Cuban rails for transfer intact as far as eight hundred miles east of Havana to Santiago.
This has been the most brilliant seafreighting idea of our generation. It proves that the water can more than hold its own against the land, for not only have the seatrains succeeded, but others are contemplated to other points on the Atlantic and Gulf seaboard, taking advantage, as sea transportation is meant to do, of the new system of interior waterways which has continued to grow very rapidly since the depression.
Yet, brilliant as the idea is, it has imperfections whose correction may lead to still greater use of the sea as a common carrier in the interest of the consumer. The cheapest freight rates in the world are on the Rhine, partly because the Germans have perfected the practice of container loading. From the dawn of time, in the conservative institution of the sea, stowage below decks has been done by a crew which packed in the separate freight as it came, allowing only for trimming the ship and for priority of unloading. Only a tanker can be said to be full below decks, with no spaces between. Even the seatrain is accused of wasting more than half its space between cars, above and below them, and at other necessary intervals.
If freight is packed in uniform-sized containers fitting snugly between the decks, however, each container protected against spoilage and pilferage, a far more complete cargo can be carried in each ship than at present, and at lower rates because of the economy of space and handling. The Germans have abundantly proved this, and have greatly added to loading economics by using trucks built to container dimensions. Although this is far ahead of us, container loading is already used on several of our intercoastal lines in shipping furniture and household goods. Contemplate a miniature moving van packed as a container on board ship, and remember how tight a load a skilled moving man can achieve, and you will understand the revolution in loading ships that is now in process.
Not long ago a man appeared in Washington with a plan to transport freight trailers from Chicago to South Haven, Michigan, in a ship specially built for them. This is another modern idea which uses water transportation to coördinate rather than compete with automotive power on land. Short-haul shipping lines with their own fleets of such trucks, imitating the pick-up and delivery from door to door of the railroads, can give an all-distance trucking service some very punishing competition. For it is at the loading and unloading end, where stevedoring operations very often absorb a third of the voyage cost, that the link between land and water transportation is most costly.
IV
We have spent uncounted billions of dollars perfecting our waterways without practical assurance that ships will use these cheap lanes of traffic and economize on the freight bill that plays so large a part in our cost of living. Planning for actual ship use has been extremely haphazard. Oregonians say that only one ship has used the Celilo Falls Canal on the Columbia River, a marvelous tributary to the Inland Empire. That project was finished in 1914. Since 1930 as many as ten more of the vital links of the Atlantic coastal interior waterways system have been constructed, yet not a single new coastwise ship has been built to encourage the traffic.
This country is spending, largely by state appropriations, roughly a billion dollars each year on its highways, about half of which is going to new road construction. Within our 5000 miles of coast line we have 50,000 miles of improved and surfaced highways for motor use, and a quarter of a million miles of railway under current operation. We arc transportation crazy, exceeding the world in all phases — except that of our ancient heritage on the water. While our Mississippi River steamers languish, the Standard Oil of Louisiana builds one of the finest river tankers afloat, the Jack Rathbone, and operates her constantly and profitably as the spearhead of an increasing fleet. Other industrialists are also showing the way. While shipowners complain of the high cost of ships, Henry Ford completes the arc-welded new motorship Norfolk, cheaper than the same-size vessel riveted, and carrying three hundred tons more cargo per voyage. This adaptable ship travels from Detroit over the Great Lakes, through the New York State barge canal, and down through the open ocean to Norfolk, one of the most economical ships afloat, and designed by the man whose life work has given sea traffic its stiffest competition.
Yes, Americans have new maritime ideas, plenty of them; the trouble is that the domestic maritime industry has not yet produced its share.
Our domestic shipping lines have an essential place in the scheme of lower living costs. A growing body of consumers insist that the logical development of cheaper transportation should not be retarded by competitors, but should be given a fair deal by the community, even to the extent of government assistance. Our haphazard attitude toward the big steamers and the little steamers on our coastal waterways cannot endure. The domestic maritime industry needs very badly to be outfitted with new and up-to-date ships, but it needs still more to be furnished with bold and adequate new ways of ensuring its own survival.