Donald Trump might change his mind from day to day about which tariffs he will apply to which imports from which countries, but, perhaps surprisingly, he has been very clear about one recent addition to his plan to restore American greatness: He wants to get us back in the shipbuilding business.
During his March address to Congress, Trump intoned in classic Trumpian fashion, “We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.” Soon after the speech, Trump signed an executive order tasked the government with finding ways to rebuild America’s moribund shipbuilding industry, and Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative hit Chinese-built vessels with port fees.
Unlike most of Trump’s other policy priorities, shipbuilding enjoys bipartisan support. Democrats and Republicans alike have applauded the president’s moves on the industry, and in the spring, lawmakers reintroduced major bipartisan legislation that would codify many of Trump’s shipbuilding plans.
Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War
by Doug Most
Simon & Schuster 464 pp.
But can America build ships again? The shipbuilding industry is critical for U.S. economic and national security; ships carry the vast majority of U.S. international trade goods and 90 percent of U.S. military supplies. In the event of a war or major conflict, relying on foreign-built ships—or foreign-controlled shipping companies—would be a risky proposition. Yet, despite that fact, the United States produces a fraction of 1 percent of the world’s ships, virtually no U.S. commerce travels on American-built ships, and U.S. shipyards are notoriously plagued with delays and cost overruns. Any revival of the American shipbuilding industry will require a large-scale, comprehensive effort from government, industry, and labor. It will require coordination, innovation, and a national sense of urgency—the kind we haven’t seen in decades.
So, in this critical moment of shipbuilding need, Doug Most’s new book, Launching Liberty, is a welcome reminder of the depth and breadth of the effort the United States undertook the last time it had a world-class shipbuilding program: the Liberty ship program during World War II. Most weaves together a wide range of voices involved in the program, from politicians and industrialists to welders and engineers.
The narrative begins in September 1940, a little over a year after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The British Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were sustaining heavy losses, and German U-boats were mercilessly sinking British merchant vessels, the ships that carried food, weapons, and supplies to British troops. Prime Minister Winston Churchill realized that without a marked increase in the construction of these vessels, Britain would lose the war, probably in a matter of weeks. To sustain their efforts, the British needed to build more ships—and fast. The problem was, as Most explains, British shipyards were already at capacity, and German U-boats were sinking ships faster than the British could build them. To help address the problem, the British sent a secret delegation to the United States, armed with rough sketches of a new type of merchant ship, to appeal for help from America’s shipbuilders. But after the British delegation arrived in America, they quickly realized that U.S. shipyards, atrophied by the Great Depression, were also at capacity. New shipyards would have to be built. The most important of these was sited in the sleepy Bay Area town of Richmond, California, and led by the American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Although Kaiser had no shipbuilding experience, he had extensive government contracting experience, including the construction of the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams.
Most also takes us into the mind of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had the formative experience of serving as assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I. As Most explains, American shipbuilding capacity was so diminished during World War I that even though the United States undertook a massive emergency fleet construction program, many of the vessels were not ready until after the war was over. As a result, American soldiers in Europe were severely underequipped, forced to use British and French weapons and equipment.
When World War II came around, FDR would not be caught flat-footed. Soon after Kaiser’s shipyard and another East Coast location finalized contracts with the British to build Ocean-class vessels, Roosevelt’s Maritime Commission launched the massive Liberty ship program.
Most brings to life the flurry of activity that shipyards, designers, and component manufacturers undertook to begin rapid production of the vessels. Kaiser’s tract of land, a barren mudflat, was transformed into an active shipyard in a matter of months. Ship designers worked to Americanize the Ocean-class vessels. Because the Americans did not have as extensive a network of coaling stations as the British, the American Liberty ship would use oil. But more importantly, it would use welding instead of riveting, saving both man-hours and materials. Manufacturers of critical shipbuilding components, from engines to lifeboats, were given emergency contracts to increase production quickly.
Unfortunately, the rapid mobilization proved insufficient. A few months after the launch of the Liberty program, the United States was drawn into the war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. FDR and the Maritime Commission knew that if production were not rapidly increased, German U-boats would cut off all supply lines from the United States, crippling Allied troops in Europe. They quickly ordered an exponential increase in production. But to speed up their efforts, the shipyards needed workers.
Most’s storytelling from the perspective of shipyard workers is especially riveting. He reports both days of elation, including Liberty Fleet Day, on which the United States celebrated the launch of 16 merchant and naval vessels in shipyards across the country, and days of gloom, including the sinking of the USS Reuben James, the first naval ship taken down during the war. Through stories about Laura Fortier and Lewis Van Hook, “Okie” migrants to California from the Southwest, Most paints a well-rounded picture of the men and women who worked in the shipyards. He takes the reader into the streets of Richmond as tensions between native Californians and migrants flared, as public services, including hospitals and schools, overflowed, and as migrants struggled to find housing, with some forced to live in bedrooms leased from native Richmonders.
As Most shows, migration alone could not single-handedly fulfill the demand for labor. Shipyards had to expand their pool to Black and women workers, to the anger of the predominantly white, male workforce. Most explains the attempts to recruit and integrate the new, more diverse workforce in shipyards across the country.
In his attempt to portray comity within the ranks at the shipyards, Most occasionally papers over dissension and discrimination, particularly in the case of Black laborers facing racial discrimination from both shipyards and labor unions. Nonetheless, he deftly describes shipyards’ paternalistic attitude toward women and the efforts to change those attitudes through symbols like Rosie the Riveter and Wendy the Welder and through the federal government’s subtle nudges.
As Most reports, a key feature of the Liberty ship program was the rapid speed of construction, which was critical to ensuring sufficient tonnage on the seas. At the beginning of the Emergency Shipbuilding Program, the average time needed to construct a Liberty ship was 241 days. Just two years later, the average construction time had fallen to a mere 42 days. The construction of the SS Robert E. Peary, which serves as the climax of the book, took just 4 days, 19 hours, and 52 minutes.
How was it assembled that quickly? Most explains the shipyards’ improvement in speed, correctly attributing it, in large part, to assembly line–style production and prefabrication methods. The techniques were created when Kaiser dispatched his right-hand man, Clay Bedford, to observe Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line in Detroit and figure out how to apply those principles to shipbuilding. After observing how the sub-assembly of the Ford chassis was finished before it was joined to the body, Bedford devised the idea of pre-assembling the ship’s deckhouse before welding it onto the ship’s deck. It was the right call. By pre-assembling the deckhouse—a three-story building on the ship that contained the staterooms, kitchen, lounge, and hospital—shipyards saved hundreds of hours of labor.
But while Most’s version of events is compelling, he frequently understates the importance of the government’s involvement in the Liberty program. For example, he only briefly mentions the groundwork for prefabrication that the Maritime Commission laid during World War I. The shipyard in Hog Island, Pennsylvania, for instance, pioneered many of the prefabrication techniques—at the behest of the Maritime Commission—that Kaiser’s shipyards would adopt during World War II. It wasn’t simply the genius of industrialists that contributed to the speed of production; government-led innovation was crucial.
Most is also eager to credit “titans of commerce” such as William Francis Gibbs, a renowned ship designer, for the speed of the shipbuilding program. But he has very little to say about the Maritime Commission bureaucrats who did the painstaking work of designing a ship that could be quickly produced in unique American shipyards. The impetus for welding instead of riveting and using one centralized deckhouse instead of two smaller deckhouses, for example, came from the commission. Over the course of the war, these innovations allowed for extensive prefabrication and sub-assembly, cutting the time required for assembly by nearly three-quarters. Rather than giving it the credit it deserves, Most describes the Maritime Commission team working with Gibbs as “bickering and micromanaging.”
Most also radically understates the commission’s role in housing and transporting workers. He discusses a government grant Kaiser received to build housing for his shipyard workers in Portland, but says nothing about the large-scale Maritime Commission collaboration with the National Housing Agency to build more than 1,000 units of affordable housing for shipyard workers. Similarly, Most doesn’t mention the commission’s role in expanding and creating new rail lines, ferry services, and bus services so shipyard workers could commute to work. Without a comprehensive government support program, the shipyards likely would have failed.
Perhaps most glaringly, Most gives short shrift to the centralized materials and parts management system deployed by the commission. A single Liberty ship contained over 250,000 parts produced in more than 800 factories in 32 states. Organizing the flow of these components to ensure that each shipyard received just enough parts to maximize its production was a monumental undertaking. Although occasional component shortages limited the rate of production, on balance, the Maritime Commission’s management role was key to the program’s success.
Ultimately, Launching Liberty is a lively and accessible account of one of the most ambitious industrial mobilizations in American history, and it succeeds in capturing the drama, pace, and human grit behind the Liberty ship program. But by placing the industrialists at center stage while minimizing the government’s role, Most risks leaving readers with a skewed understanding of how the United States built a world-class shipbuilding system, and how it might do so again. If the past can teach us anything, it is that revitalizing industry will require an approach far more comprehensive than Trump’s haphazard program of tariffs and port fees. It will demand the kind of sustained public investment, centralized coordination, and logistical mastery that the Maritime Commission achieved during World War II. Without recognizing that truth, any modern effort to “make ships very fast, very soon” will likely prove as shaky as a ship without a rudder.
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