Maritime Administration

History of the U.S. Maritime Administration

MARAD traces its roots to the Shipping Act of 1916, which established the U.S. Shipping Board; this was the first federal agency with the mission of promoting maritime interests and regulating U.S. commercial shipping.

The Shipping Board created a naval auxiliary, naval reserve, and merchant marine. The Shipping Board also created the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) just days after the United States officially entered World War I, to oversee ship construction and to acquire, manage, and operate ships. After the war ended, the Shipping Board continued to build ships until 1921, having produced nearly 2,300 ships. This surplus of vessels, in turn, created an industry depression. In 1928, the EFC was renamed the Merchant Fleet Corporation (MFC), and in 1930, the Department of Commerce absorbed the MFC and the Shipping Board and reinvented the two agencies as the U.S. Shipping Board Bureau.

The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 established the U.S. Maritime Commission, which assumed the duties, functions, and property of the Shipping Board Bureau, and was assigned the task of advancing and maintaining a strong merchant marine to support U.S. commerce and defense. The commission regulated ocean commerce, and designed and constructed 500 merchant ships over a 10-year period. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., father of future president John F. Kennedy, as the commission's first chairman.

When war broke out again in 1941, the construction program was in full swing, and the Maritime Commission's peacetime purpose changed, just as the Shipping Board's had in 1917. In 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9054, separating the Maritime Commission into two agencies: the Commission to Design and Construct Ships and the War Shipping Administration (WSA), which would procure and operate them. Working closely together between 1941 and 1946, the Maritime Commission and WSA built nearly 6,000 merchant vessels and naval auxiliaries. The WSA was also managing the operations, repair, and maintenance of thousands of ships. In 1946, the government dissolved the WSA and transferred its operations back to the Maritime Commission. Thousands of ships were sold or scrapped under the Merchant Ship Sales Act, but the Maritime Commission retained a group of reserve ships called the National Defense Reserve Fleet.

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