St. Lawrence Seaway

The honeymoon of Congress and the first Roosevelt Administration ended, like many a honeymoon, in a quarrel. One cause of the quarrel was a project that President Roosevelt had set his heart on ever since his days as Governor of New York: the St. Lawrence Seaway.

This pet project was gigantic--completed, the Seaway would permit ships of 24-foot draft to sail 2,350 miles from Duluth to the Atlantic in nine days. Among other things it called for two great dams (generating 2,200,000 h.p. of electrical energy) to be built on the International Rapids, where the St. Lawrence, slow-moving through most of its mighty length, falls 92 feet in 48 miles. It called for ten miles of canals and three great locks around these rapids, for navigation improvements through Lake St. Francis and the Soulanges Rapids farther downriver, for dams, locks and canals to by-pass the treacherous Lachine Rapids, where the river falls 24 feet in five miles. It called for the joint expenditure by the U. S. and Canada of $550,000,000 (opponents said $1,350,000,000), for 5,000,000 installed horsepower of electricity, for the development of the greatest hydroelectric project on the North American continent.

In 1934 Congress had given President Roosevelt his way in most matters, but it balked at the Seaway. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty with Canada that had been signed in the last days of the Hoover Administration, although the President had twice sent messages urging its ratification. Last week he let it be known that he would bring up the Seaway again, in time for his prospective honeymoon with Congress during the third Administration. He had Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle publish the banns. In Detroit Mr. Berle read a Presidential message to a conference of Seaway supporters: "The United States needs the St. Lawrence Seaway for defense . . . tremendously needs the power project which will form a link in the Seaway . . . to produce aluminum and more aluminum for the airplane program which will assure command of the air."

One objection to his scheme the President had anticipated. Hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1933 developed a mighty assemblage of opponents to the Seaway--shippers, economists, railroad men, representatives of the Port of New Orleans--speaking for interests that would be injured, or thought they would be injured, if the Seaway went through. And New York State's utilities had fought the Seaway from the start. Said the President: "Selfish interests will tell you that I am cloaking this great project in national defense in order to gain an objective which has always been dear to me. But I tell you that it has always been dear to me because I recognize its vital interest to the people in peace and in war. . . . Had this project been started in 1934, as we urged, it would now be complete and occupying a place . . . among the great national-defense assets of this continent."

Biggest new reason the President advanced for the Seaway was to aid shipping and shipbuilding. "The world's merchant tonnage is diminishing at the rate of thousands of tons a month. . . . Seacoast shipyards are already overtaxed with uncompleted construction. . . . We hope that the world situation may soon improve. But we are bound to be prepared for a long period of possible danger. Who can say with assurance that we shall not need for our defense or peaceful pursuits every possible shipbuilding resource, particularly those that exist and may be developed in the interior of our country? ... I am preparing to press for immediate construction-- of this project."

No violent outcry followed his announcement. Railroad representatives were depressed by the news, which they took as one more blow at rail transportation. The executive secretary of the National Coal Association urged that defense power needs be met with quickly constructed coal-burning steam plants, since the Seaway would be years abuilding. The Middle West, which for years wanted the Seaway, imagining grandiose pictures of ocean liners docking at Chicago and Cleveland, has cooled off. Its big export trade has fallen off, its agriculture is already aided by farm benefit payments.

Deepening the present waterway from a 14-to a 27-foot minimum from the Atlantic through the Lakes would make it possible for all but battleships (which draw a minimum of 26 feet) to be built on the Lakes, once naval yards were constructed. But it would also mean deepening Lake harbors (estimated cost: by opponents, $250,000,000; by supporters, $10,000,000). Another difficulty is that for five winter months each year the Seaway is not navigable; warships completed in Lake yards during the winter would be locked in until the spring thaw. Said the New York Times, scrutinizing both power and navigation problems: "The St. Lawrence project should be judged not as something vitally necessary in carrying out our defense program or aiding Great Britain but as one of many PWA undertakings that ought to be abandoned in favor of more urgent enterprises."

Yet there was something about the St. Lawrence Seaway. Like most gigantic projects of State planning--like Russia's White Sea Canal, Germany's Strength Through Joy automobile factories, France's Maginot Line--it was the kind of Big Job that made a strong appeal to the imagination. The thought of warships abuilding on sheltered inland seas, of ocean-going freighters plowing to the docks of Detroit, appealed to many a hardhead aware of the labyrinthine economic dangers of the project. It was impossible to estimate the cultural consequences of so vast an undertaking, the changed relations with Canada that it would involve, the impact on the traditionally isolationist Middle West in finding its harbors linked to the docks of Amsterdam. If the St. Lawrence Seaway had half the effects claimed for it, the inland U. S. would be a vastly shrunken area, since even Duluth would be part of the Eastern seaboard.

But the scheme was still only a scheme, in spite of the President's determined words. There was bound to be a hot time in Congress when the Seaway came up before it, next session. Public opinion might stop the plan, as it had stopped the Supreme Court reorganization bill. Or, like

Passamaquoddy or the Florida Ship Canal, it might be abandoned in the face of natural difficulties. The U. S. after eight years had learned that the most soaring projects of State planning had a way of shaking down to workable human proportions.

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