A camera persons reflections
The CHIPS Act and Liberty Ships
FDR provided us a perfect model for the CHIPs Act in 1940 when he launched the program to build Liberty Ships, a very basic cargo ship that could be built quickly and relatively cheaply by formerly unskilled labor. The problem in 1940 was that German U-Boats were sinking cargo ships that were supplying England at an alarming rate. The only way to compete was to drastically ramp up cargo ship production. The solution was one design that could be built and launched in an average of 30 days.
Our Government funded this program and built a dozen shipyards around the country. The first Liberty Ship, the SS Patrick Henry was launched at the Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore in September of 1941. They had to build the shipyard as they built the ships. When the Liberty Ship program ended in Oct. 1944, the 30,000 workers of Fairfield had built a world record 384 ships. My grandmother christened the last one. By then the Nazi’s were being driven back, U-Boats were being hunted and sunk faster than they could be built and we started building a larger, improved cargo ship, called the Victory Ship.
So the American model exists, to create a manufacturing advantage and win the “war.” We’ve done it. We can do it again. It took Government vision and funding, Corporate know how and facilities from the likes of Bethlehem Steel and a newly recruited and trained workforce…most who had never welded or done electrical work before. A large percentage were women and people of color.
Baltimore has one surviving example that still operates, the SS John W Brown, kept alive by a dedicated team of volunteers.
See also the Army Corps of Engineers historical site in Sausalito California (called the Bay Model, which is hugely fascinating but a different story) that houses a small but rich museum about the shipbuilding site established there in Spring 1942 that christened its first ship within 3 months of starting to build the shipyard. And while there, why not make the trip (by ferry) over to San Francisco and the SS Jeremiah O'Brien, the Liberty Ship built in Portland Maine that was reclaimed out of mothballs by its old sailors and hundreds of other volunteers, made shipshape for its trip to England for the 50th anniversary of D Day, crewed by some of its original sailors, and others. That story is amazing: "Of the more than 5,000 ships that formed the original D-Day armada, the O'Brien was the only ship to return 50 years later (although smaller vessels from many countries also returned)."
https://www.ssjeremiahobrien.org/pages/history-of-the-obrien