Down to the Sea . . .

The U. S. merchant marine can be defined as 3,475 ships weighing 12,474,693 tons and comprising about a tenth of the world's vessels. It can be defined better as 957 ships, for only that many actually engage in foreign competition. By the most significant definition of all, the U. S. merchant marine is the ricketiest collection of tubs owned by any important nation--85% over 17 years old, carrying less than 40% of U. S. foreign trade, grossing an estimated $200,000,000 a year or about as much as the soft-drink business. But soft drinks make money, while the merchant marine operates at a tremendous and apparently perpetual loss.

The neglected subject of this neglected industry received last week such attention as it has long deserved when FORTUNE published (for the third time in its history) a whole issue devoted to one subject--U. S. Shipping. Virtually a 104,000-word book, this September issue of FORTUNE was the first thorough investigation of "an entirely new principle which has been injected into U. S. business on a gigantic scale . . . the principle of direct subsidy." It was described by Chairman Joseph P. Kennedy of the Maritime Commission, which will administer the subsidy, as "the first concise, comprehensive and colorful presentation of that many-sided venture heretofore known vaguely as the 'merchant marine.' "

That foreign trade is a losing game, for them at least, is the shipping man's plaint the world around, for the following reasons : 1) there are too many ships; 2) depressions, tariffs and a thousand unpredictables hobble it; 3) profitable trade routes fluctuate as the breeze but commerce demands regular schedules. U. S. shipping men face the added complication that U. S. ships cost more to build and operate than foreign bottoms because of the higher wages of U. S. Labor. Astraddle this situation, which the Government has at last given full recognition after years of such temporizing as the mail subsidies, sits ruddy Joseph P. Kennedy, onetime stock speculator, cinemagnate and SEC chairman. What he has already done with his powers to subsidize shipbuilding and ship-operating and what he plans to do form the basis of FORTUNE'S many-sided treatise which includes:

The emergence of Secretary of State Cordell Hull as the New Deal's most successful liberal and the integral relation between his 16 foreign trade treaties and U. S. ships; how the Matson Line has edged the wave-ruling British from the South Pacific; how American Export Lines almost made money without Government aid (see p. 30); how Lykes Bros, could lose $7,000,000 in the Gulf in seven years and still net $4,200,000; the diligent falderol and doubtful fun of a cruise to Havana; Maritime Labor; eight typical U. S. ports in paint, seven typical seamen in prose, twelve Margaret Bourke-White photographs of that pride of the U. S. seas, the old S. S. Leviathan, lying rust-bleared and indecent at a Hoboken dock.

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