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

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 Clockwise starting above: Sundial in the Oval. War Memorial by sunset. Raising the Number One. A familiar daily site. Opening 9

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On Tuesday March 15, 1938, a General Order was issued in Washington D.C., by what that year's average American probably thought of as merely the latest in the long parade of New Deal agencies, the United States Maritime Commission. There was nothing melodramatic about General Order 23. In deadpan govenmental language, it stated that the Maritime Commission was as- suming jurisdiction and direction of the fed- eral maritime cadet training system. The sys- tem was already fourty seven years old. This is why the ninety-nine cadets then serving on subsidized vessels, who awak- ened on the morning of March 15, 1938, as supernumerary employees of the steamship companies, turned in that night, on the same ships as members of an organization soon to become known as the United States Mer- chant Marine Cadet Corps and for what be- came its permanent home and fourth federal service college, the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, Long Island, New York. Any child or institution born in 1938 into a darkly troubled yet peversely hopeful world, a world simultaneously recovering from one disease and falling prey to a worse one. America and Europe were finally pulling out of the Great Depression; yet what most civi- lizations regarded as the foundations of civ- lized life at the same time were under attack from almost every point of the compass. Germany was already fully committed to a violent totalitariansim. Federal policy, as enunciated in the Mer- chant Marine Act, called for a merchant fleet adequate to meet national defense needs, and to carry a substantial share of our foreign commerce plus our entire waterborne do- mestic commerce. Inducements to build and operate such a fleet were provided in the form of what Franklin Roosevelt had called honest subsidies. Based for the first time on the differential between American and foriegn costs. All vessels receiving operat- ing differential subsidies were required by law to include in their manning scales a spec- ified number of cadets in training. General Order 23 had been targeted on the three most conspicuous shortcomings of the former shipboard training system: indis- criminate selection, lax supervision, and ab- sence of a uniform curriculum. To correct for the first it directed that subsidized com- panies henceforth choose their cadets from an eligible list complied by the Commis- sion. This new dispensation was widely pub- licized by a Commission release inviting in- terested eligibles to apply for cadetships. This offer proved to be unexpectedly attrac- tive and, in retrospect, ill advised. By No- vember the Special Advisory Board was swamped with 3,725 applications, of which 1,971 qualified their senders for an eligible list. Yet in that month there were only 119 cadets serving, and the total available berths anticipated for the future numbered 300. 10 Opening