This publication is the eighth in the series The U.S. Navy and the Vietnam War. The publication focuses on the sealift and logistic operations during the war and includes a number of photographs as well as sidebars detailing specific people and ships involved in the logistic operations. This historical pictorial reference would be of interest to students, historians, members of the military, specifically the Navy, and military leaders, veterans, Vietnam War veterans, and the U.S. merchant marines.
Considers legislation on merchant marine subsidies, PO authority over ocean mail contracts, special shipping subsidies for US-Philippine trade, and Naval Reserve establishment. Includes H.Doc. 59-564, Feb. 24, 1906, "Development of the American Merchant Marine and American Commerce;" "The West and the Merchant Marine";"What other nations do for their shipping"; "Some facts about the French subsidy system"; "Tonnage taxes"; "The South American trade"; "Philippine trade"; Discriminating duties"; "Proposed ocean mail lines"; "Existing ocean mail lines under act of 1891"; "Subventions to cargo vessels"; "Subventions to the deep-sea fisheries"; "Resolutions of Commercial Associations specifically indorsing the shipping bill of the Merchant Marine Commission"; "Resolutions asking Congress to restore the Mercantile Marine"; "American ships for American commerce" (p. 465-563)
Rough Waters traces the evolution of the role of the U.S. merchant ship flag, and the U.S. merchant fleet itself. Rodney Carlisle looks at conduct and commerce at sea from the earliest days of the country, when battles at sea were fought over honor and the flag, to the current American-owned merchant fleet sailing under flags of convenience via foreign registries. Carlisle examines the world-wide use, legality, and continued acceptance of this practice, as well as measures to off-set its ill effects. Looking at the interwar period of 1919–1939, Carlisle examines how the practice of foreign registry of American-owned vessels began on a large scale, led by Standard Oil with tankers under the flag of the Free City of Danzig and followed by Panama. The work spells out how the United States helped further the practice of registry in Panama and Liberia after World War II. Rough Waters concludes with a look at how the practice of foreign registry shapes present-day commerce and labor relations.
Spanning the centuries from maritime activities before Columbus to the nation's maritime involvement today, this rich, complex archive provides a new history of the United States from the fundamental perspective of the sea that surrounds it, and the rivers and lakes that link its vast interior to the seacoast. 350 photos, 55 in color. 10 maps.
From the Civil War to the Great War, the transatlantic commercial trading system that dated from the nation’s colonial times continued in America. By 1900, the sustainability of this Atlantic System was in the material interest of an industrial America on which its aggregate national prosperity depended. The principal beneficiary of this political-economic reality was the American moneyed interest centered in the Northeast, with New York City at the heart. Author John Fass Morton explains how this country came to put a value on commercial opportunities overseas in support of America’s steel industry. Europeans and Americans alike pursued informal empires for resource acquisition and markets for surplus capital and output. Morton looks at how U.S. policy found consensus around the idea of empire, taking stock of the opening of Latin American and Chinese markets to American commerce as a means for averting socially destabilizing economic depressions. Republican administrations reflected Wall Street finance and America’s other three Madisonian interests—commercial, manufacturing, and agrarian—with the Open Door and Dollar Diplomacy policies to establish fiscal protectorates in Central America and the Caribbean. Undergirding Dollar Diplomacy was their commitment to “a great navy” that would be the “insurance” for an ongoing American interest that Dollar Diplomacy represented. With the strategic arrival of the petroleum sinew and the Wall Street reassessment of the Open Door in China, the Wilson administration tilted toward protecting American investments in the hemisphere—notably in Mexico—with a “Big Navy.” With Wilson, a progressive foreign policy establishment arrived while continuing to reflect the transatlantic internationalism of the Northeast moneyed interest. As a twentieth century progressive institution, the Navy would thus sustain an American expansion that was now progressive. The Navy story from the Civil War to the Great War reveals a truth. The foundational and dynamic sectors of a great nation’s economic base—its sinews—give rise to policy consensus networks that drive national interest, long-term strategy, and the characteristics of its elements of national power. It follows that the attributes of sea power must be material expressions of those sinews, allowing a navy better to serve as a sustainable and actionable tool for a great nation’s interest.
