The Shipping Act of 1916 and Emergency Fleet Corporation: America Builds, Requisitions, and Seizes a Merchant Fleet Second to None
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord Expeditionary Force (AEF) to Europe, sustaining the Allied economies, and essential to the success of the Entente powers.The United States proved ill-prepared to assume this vital maritime role.Aside from the inadequacy of both army and navy maritime transport branches, one of the major reasons for this situation had to do with a clash in personalities between the head of the newly formed US Shipping Board (USSB), William Denman, and the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC)-the entity created to construct the wartime fleet of cargo ships-under the man who had overseen the Panama Canal's construction, General George Goethals.They continually bickered over each other's authority, leading to administrative gridlock, until both resigned on 24 July 1917.In their places, Wilson appointed Edward Hurley to head the USSB and eventually Charles Piez to the EFC.The program that each inherited was in chaos, but they managed to overcome the greatest problems and thus allowed General John J. Pershing to get his troops into action by early 1918, thereby averting possible Allied defeat in France. 1 Following the initial German unrestricted submarine offensive, and the deaths of 128 Americans on board the British passenger liner Lusitania (7 May 1915), the Wilson administration initiated legislation to create the US Shipping Board -the first government agency assigned the task of regulating and promoting the commercial merchant marine.The president hoped that a renewed American fleet would supplant Britain's in the Western Hemisphere and thereby promote his idealism through "an arm of commerce." 2 The Shipping Act gave the government the power to build and operate ships during the existing emergency, and up to five years after its conclusion.For the first time in its history, therefore, the American government aimed to challenge the supremacy of the world's largest naval power and engaged directly in the construction and operation of merchant vessels along with a navy second to none, a substantial change in the United States' maritime policy and with long-lasting implications.3 Germany's first unrestricted submarine campaign, highlighted the danger to America's status as a neutral and the vulnerability of the nation's trade.Wilson altered his strategy for a national merchant marine by highlighting its importance as a naval auxiliary force.By creating a large commercial fleet, Wilson could direct ships into trade routes vacated by the British, a fact not adopted by American commercial shippers since the domestic market for ships remained so active.These measures, in conjunction with the National Defense and Naval Acts of 1916, represented a distinct effort by Wilson to protect the nation's neutrality, and also to 1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".