United States Merchant Marine Academy - Midships Yearbook (Kings Point, NY)

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A few months of operation of the new plan revealed a defect in the selection process. Despite an enthusias- tic response to announcements of the new system, it was found that approved candidates still had to make direct con- tact with ship operators before they could get appointments and assignments to ships. Because the Maritime Commis- sion was thus left out of the final selec- tion process, the same old pressure tac- tics were being used by interested parties to secure appointments to vessels for specific young men once they made the eligible list. This condition was remedied by General Order No. 28 of the Mari- time Commission, which provided that the eligible list be based on national examinations, and reserved to the Super- visor of the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps the right to appoint and assign Cadets to ships. Commodore Richard R. McNulty, USNR, was named the first Supervisor of the Cadet Corps in December of 1938, and took charge of the new, competitive entrance, national cadet training program. In seeking to establish a strong, highly structured federal system of officer training, McNulty first compiled a report for Congress that sprang from his investigations of the training systems of Japan, Holland, Germany, Great Brit- ain. Italy, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, Den- mark and France. The impact of the report on Congress was to considerably hasten its realization that the U.S. lagged far behind foreign maritime powers both in recognition of the problem and in means to solve it. The study further revealed that eighty to ninety per cent of all officers in the United States Mer- chant Marine had no formal training. The situation detailed in McNulty’s Mari- time Commission was not news to him, for as far back as 1930 he had been trying to convince the country of the severity of the problem. In his drive for better training, the Supervisor held from the beginning that popular recognition of professional status in merchant officers by the people with whom they came in business and social contact was to be had only if their educa- tion were scaled on a truly pofessional level. A second motive for professionaliz- ing merchant officer education was the creation of an admission policy and pro- cedure needed to screen out candidates intellectually and temperamentally unfit for this kind of education. Thirdly, the curriculum was to incorporate the profes- sional maritime courses with classes that approximated recognized courses pre- scribed for degree-level work at engineer- ing schools across the country. Through a long series of essays and arti- cles in the 1930's on the training and per- sonnel problems of the merchant marine, he constantly hammered home the point that the U.S. needed an energetic, aggres- sive officer training program. With the report to Congress, an awareness of the problem and a response to the situation resulted. 6

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CADET CORPS FILLS TRADITION OF COMPANY CADETS The result is an awareness of the uni- que nature of the school and where that uniqueness emanates from. In keeping with and furthering this thought, MID- SHIPS 1977 devotes a few pages to a brief photographic and scriptorial look at the origins of the United States Mer- chant Marine Academy. The quote from President Roosevelt came from his prepared remarks on Dedication Day of the Academy, and followed by less than seven years the leg- islative genesis of the Academy. The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 aimed to revitalize the entire maritime industry, and established the U.S. Maritime Com- mission to achieve this end, which included the training of cadets for the seagoing profession. Admiral Henry A. Wiley, USN, Commodore Telfair Knight, USMS, and Mr. S. D. Schell undertook the development of an organized training plan intended to replace the loosely struc- tured “company cadet” system existing at the time. The backbone of their training plan, and the source of the birthday of the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, was General Order Number 23 of the Mari- time Commission. This ordered all appointments of cadets to government subsidized vessels to be made in the future from eligible lists prepared after scrutiny of applications by an advisory board of the Commission. This same rule prescribed sea training under actual conditions and established rates of pay. This order became effective on 15 March, 1938.

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McNULTY STRIVES FOR PROFESSIONAL STATUS Initially, Congress authorized the pur- chase, writing, and publication of course material for cadet training, solving the problems of standardizing instruction and providing a means of contact between cadets and the administrators of the program. It was the Supervisor’s policy to make periodic trips aboard U.S. merchant vessels to observe first- hand the atmosphere of training for cadets, and it was on these cruises that McNulty gathered much of his informa- tion about foreign training programs and the faults of the U.S. system. Following his inspection voyage of April May 1939, he recommended a system that combined the best features of the British, Dutch and Japanese systems, all or some of which included time in college, on a sailing vessel, on a commercial vessel, and time in a shipyard. OPPOSITE: T V KING POINTER Returns to Hague Basin After Cruise to South America. LEFT: War Memorial Services. Graduation June 1949. ABOVE: Training Vessels VEMA, left, and EMER Y RICE, in Hague Basin.