'Launching Liberty' a humane, richly reported epic of wartime capitalism

Despite careful planning and a tightly stage-managed ceremony, “Pat,” the star of the show, made its splash prematurely.

It was Sept. 27, 1941, when thousands of people turned up at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore to watch the first of a new class of cargo ships hit the water after a speech by President Franklin Roosevelt. Ilo Wallace, the wife of Vice President Henry Wallace, held a bouquet of roses as the chairman of the Maritime Commission gave a speech before she was to crack the ceremonial bottle of champagne across the hull and christen the SS Patrick Henry.

But the chairman was still talking when the ship began descending into the water 10 minutes early, and in a frantic moment someone shoved the bottle into Mrs. Wallace’s hand, she leaned over a rail and just managed to smash the bottle over the ship’s bow as it lumbered past and a band struck up the national anthem.

So went the send-off of the first Liberty ship, the mass-produced cargo freighter critical to America’s success in World War II: Rushed and haphazard at times, tightly planned, audacious and proud. In his speech that day, Roosevelt praised the shipworkers and said, “We must build more cargo ships and still more cargo ships — and we must speed the program until we achieve a launching each day, then two ships a day.”

“Launching Liberty,” journalist Doug Most’s new history of the massive emergency shipbuilding effort that resurrected a declining industry under state direction and produced the Liberty ships at unprecedented speeds, is rich with personal stories, from the White House and corporate boardroom to the shipyards and workers’ tenements.

The book emerges as President Donald Trump’s newly launched effort to revive American shipbuilding, which has withered since World War II, and compete with China’s seafaring dominance, is running into headwinds.

The story of the Liberty ships is familiar history, but Most offers a rich and thoroughly humane account. It is sometimes vulnerable to lionizing captains of industry such as Henry Kaiser, the builder known for delivering the Boulder Dam but with no experience in shipbuilding.

It also simplifies, for streamlined storytelling, the motivations and relationships between private capital and the government’s war effort, which would prove contentious and complex as central planning and state appropriation of industrial plants were enacted to build the storied “arsenal of democracy.”

It was no miracle, but the scope of these achievements in the face of material limits, uneven luck and human inconstancy command awe all the same.

Most is humane enough also to report on conditions for the workers building these ships, the hazards of workplaces and the dynamics among laborers who were abruptly integrated, men and women working together in a vast, multiracial workforce, as well as a burgeoning health care industry tasked with keeping the workers and the ships moving. This account also includes the social upheaval in communities adjacent to shipyards and the inequities that led sometimes to strife among workers and, at other times, to successful organizing and bargaining.

“Launching Liberty” offers extensive detail of the design and construction of the ships, including the flaws in materials and haste of production, but the ensemble of human characters across social classes is what makes this a compelling, sympathetic narrative and reminds us that great industrial accomplishment is achieved by humanity.