Commanders & Commissioners

Largely because of the impetus of the War, the U. S. merchant fleet remains the second largest in the world. It is also the oldest and slowest collection of tubs owned by any important maritime nation. To replace it with a top-notch fleet, Congress last spring passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, offering the most liberal seagoing subsidies in U. S. history, including payments to shipbuilders of as much as 50% of construction costs and payments to ship-operators sufficient to put them on an equal basis with foreign competitors (TIME, July 13). To administer these important projects, the Act provided for a five-man Maritime Commission, gave it some $200,000,000 cash and powers over shipping similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission's powers over rail roads. Last week, when President Roosevelt "temporarily" appointed three* of the five Commissioners, their major duty was to make the U. S. Merchant Marine fit for competitive war with all comers on the high seas. This work lies ahead of them. Meantime, under their noses last week raged a bitter internecine war within the U. S. Merchant Marine itself, about which the Commission soon found it could do very little.

On the Pacific Coast this week expires the agreement made at the close of San Francisco's bloody general strike in 1934 between the waterfront employers and the waterfront labor unions led by Australian Harry Bridges. For over a month both sides have been bickering about a new agreement. The unions demanded higher wages, maintenance of the six-hour day, refused to arbitrate. President Bridges of the International Longshoremen's Association set about doing his best to involve the Atlantic Coast in a nationwide dock-strike to scare shipowners into accepting his terms. To his chagrin, fortnight ago Atlantic longshoremen reached a tentative compromise agreement with their employers for a slight raise in pay.

Last week the longshoremen offered to continue under the 1934 agreement until a new one was reached. The shipowners refused, announced that after Sept. 30 they would raise dock wages from 95-c- to $1 an hour, lengthen the working day from six to eight hours and temporarily abandon the use of hiring halls, the winning of whose management was the dockworkers' 1934 victory. If men would not work on those terms, the shipowners declared, they would shut down all operations.' Snarling that this would be "a lock-out," Leader Bridges declared: "Every port on the Pacific, the Gulf, and the Atlantic will be tied up."

A clause in the Merchant Marine Act gives the Maritime Commission jurisdiction over labor matters on ship lines accepting a Federal subsidy. There are no such subsidies yet in force, the old mail subsidies continuing until June 30, 1937. Nevertheless, hopeful that it might help solve the Pacific crisis, President Roosevelt had hastened to pick a skeleton Commission which would shortly confer with him about the threatened strike. What Admirals Wiley and Taylor and Treasury-man Landick, none of whom had ever been directly connected with the Merchant Marine, could do about the situation was anybody's guess last week. How the Labor side felt about their appointment was shown by Longshoreman Bridges, who sped to Washington day before the trio's appointment to tell Secretary of Commerce Daniel C. Roper that, among other things, he thought the Commission had too much power over Labor matters. Maritime Commission Chairman Wiley amiably conceded: "It looks like the problem is one for the Department of Labor."

Needing little more urging than this, the Department of Labor sent its famed troubleshooter, dapper Assistant Secretary Edward Francis McGrady, hotfooting to the Coast to see if he could duplicate his success as settler of the 1934 general strike.

* The three: Admiral Henry Ariosto Wiley, 69, retired, onetime Commander-in-Chief of the, Fleet; Rear Admiral Harry Gabriel Hamlet, 62, commandant of the Coast Guard, due for retirement Oct. 1; George Landick Jr., 52, chief of the planning section of the procedure division of the Treasury Department. Few days later because Admiral Hamlet found that he would lose his Coast Guard pension if he quit before Oct. 1, President Roosevelt replaced him for a few weeks with Rear Admiral Montgomery Meigs Taylor, 67, retired, onetime commander of the Asiatic Fleet.

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