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The Realignment
575 | Doug Most: Pragmatism in Action - WWII Shipbuilding, the Arsenal of Democracy, and Today’s Challenges
00:40:58
Doug Most, author of Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Doug discuss the untold story of the construction of Liberty Ships, the massive cargo vessels that carried tanks, jeeps, food, and ammunition to allied forces in World War II. The conversation explores the parallels between World War II problem-solving and contemporary debates about infrastructure, industrial policy, and the private sector's role in government, the importance of bringing a "problem-solving" approach to government, and how the pragmatic choice of emphasizing "ugly duckling" ships over Hitler's obsession with engineering marvels made all the difference.
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- [00:01]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Today's episode is an interview with Boston University's Doug Most, but his recently released book Launching the Epic Race to Build the Ships that Took America to War. Launching Liberty is focused on an undertold part of The World War II arsenal of democracy story. Not the conversion of forward auto plants into bomber and tank factories, but the creation of Liberty ships, military massive supply ships that actually took the arsenal of democracy into battle. The crucial part wasn't just the launch of a new class of vessel, but the public private partnership that reduced a year plus long construction process down to only weeks before we dive in, this history focused conversation really brings to mind a couple threads I've been chewing on for the past few weeks. One of my favorite interviews on the Realignment this year was with the author Dan Wong about his book Breakneck China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Dan is really having a moment right now and the book is now a New York Times bestseller. The basic idea is that China's engineering focused state increasingly outmatches America's procedure obsessed lawyerly society when it comes to building the future. As I said during my conversation with Dan though, the New Deal and the arsenal of democracy era America was literally one that was run by lawyers from FDR on down. Studying the story and the massive engineering focus accomplishments of that version of America shows that even lawyers can preside over big things and that democracy isn't inherently incompatible with accomplishment. As listeners will know, I recently took the realignment to the Niskanin center, where I'm now Director of Special Projects. Over a year ago, I recorded an episode with my colleague Jeff Kappasurfis discussing our work on building a new politics of pragmatism at Niskanin. A lot of people code Niskanen as a centrist or moderate think tank. I've never been comfortable with the words centrist or moderate because they suggest a comfort with the status quo, a slowness in response, and a lack of ambition. All things that are dead ends in an era of populist backlash. As Doug discusses on this episode and writes at the start of the book, the Liberty Ship story is fundamentally about problem solving. The definition of an act that requires pragmatism. Not middle of the road, deep default moderation. I'm going to keep thinking about what pragmatism can offer the left, right and center, but this conversation and the era it covers feels like a huge part of that story and understanding. Hope you all enjoy the conversation. Doug Most welcome to the Realignment.
- [02:39]
B
Thanks for having me Marshall, appreciate it.
- [02:42]
A
Really excited to speak with you. So, obviously we're discussing liberty ships and their role in the broader arsenal of democracy during World War II. But when I do a history focused episode, I like to be able to zoom out and connect that history to the sort of challenges people are thinking about today. And sometimes that's a little hard with history books. But you solve this dilemma for me with the first sentence in your author's note, when you say, quote, this is a story about problem solving. Specifically, it's about one problem, that problem being building and constructing the ships that actually allowed us to win the war via shipping, munitions, arms, soldiers, et cetera, from the US out to the Pacific and to the European front. But I would just love for you to start there by just discussing this concept of problem solving, because that's what I really see missing from a lot of our approach to a lot of issues that if we frame them through a problem solving lens, cuts across a lot of the difficulties.
- [03:46]
B
The best way to maybe answer your question is to tell you sort of a quick story, which was when I traveled down to Baltimore to research this book, there's two liberty ships in this country that are left floating. One is in Baltimore, just outside Baltimore, called the SS John W. Brown, and the other is in San Francisco, the SS Jeremiah o'. Brien. I traveled down to Baltimore and I was given sort of a really sort of detailed tour of the John W. Brown. And there was a moment when I was taken below the deck and we walked into one of these five, what I will call enormous cargo holds that were used to carry the. The arsenal of democracy that FDR had built to our troops around the world. So these were cargo holds that carried hundreds of tanks and jeeps, munitions, supplies, rations to feed millions of troops. And as I stood inside that cargo hold and I looked up at the ceiling, which was so tall and so vast, I thought to myself, in a way, this is where the war was won. And what I mean by that is obviously there nothing can be, nothing will ever diminish the role of the troops, right? I mean, the troops were the troops who fought the war. But the troops couldn't fight the war without the supplies, supplies and the munitions and the tanks and the jeeps and the planes that were brought to them. And the only way those supplies could get to them was by ship. Planes couldn't do it, obviously. Trains couldn't do it, had to be by massive ship. And that was the problem. And so when I stood inside that cargo hold and sort of looked around and Looked up and I realized this is where they stacked hundreds of tanks and jeeps and all those things to bring to the troops. That's the problem that they solved with the Liberty ship.
- [05:48]
A
I'd actually say there are, especially the way you tell a story, there are two problems. Well, I would say there's one problem and then there's one challenge. So what you're describing here, which is how do you. And for example, you give this exact statistics in the opening, but what a Liberty ship, when it's transporting the food, that's one day of food for 3 million men. So if you think about it that way, that's a huge challenge. How do you supply that many men in the field? But the broader problem that the U.S. great Britain, et cetera, were facing were in the wake of the Great Depression, in the wake of sort of like the post World War I demobilization of war industries. It would take up to, and in many cases longer than a year to actually build one of these ships. And prior to the US Entry into the war, though, we of course were sort of in a weird Cold War style situation with the German navy in the Atlantic. The, the Germans were knocking out three to four of these ships a day on average. So the actual problem is, okay, so we know the challenge is how do we need to get this food to people. We need to get the jeeps, we need to get the tanks. But the actual problem is how do you actually build enough of these ships when it's taking too long, when they're knocking out three to four a day. And if it's three to four a day and then it's one per ship, by 1945, you'd have replenished what was going on there. So talk about it from that perspective. So you're sitting in 1939, 1940, the war is broken out. Talk about the problem through that context.
- [07:21]
B
Yeah, I think one of the great sort of unappreciated things about the Liberty ships is that it required. It required a leader to set aside their ego in order to solve a problem. And what I mean by that is Roosevelt could have demanded that his country build the greatest ship ever. The best ship, the fastest ship, the prettiest ship, you name the adjective, right? He could have sort of sought that as a president and said, hey, we have this thing, we need these ships and I want the best ship that our country can build. He didn't do that. Instead, what he said was, I just need a lot of ships. I need quantity over quality, if you will. And I don't care if it's not the greatest ship or the fastest ship or best ship or the most beautiful ship. And Roosevelt, if you remember, was a man who grew up on the water and loved boats and loved ships. Excuse me. He was Under Secretary to the Navy in World War I. But he didn't factor any of that into the equation. And all he told his staff and his team was, we need a lot of ships. Essentially the mission was we need to build ships faster than the Germans can sink them. That was the goal. And so that was an important sort of factor and decision in the process of building Liberty ships was to not try to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, and to build the most beautiful ship. And that's why the ships were nicknamed the Ugly Ducklings. That's why he referred to them as sort of these oblong tanks and dreadful looking objects was another quote that came up. They were not pretty, they were not fast, but we produced 2,710 of them in the span of roughly less than three years, which is a remarkable number.
- [09:11]
A
And the thing about this too, and I like you framing this through FDR's approach, because this is where we can kind of talk about a hopefully when we think of today's challenges like American spirit we have, which is the pragmatism, and I think pragmatism is required for problem solving. Let's compare this to Adolf Hitler's approach. Right, so Adolf Hitler is obsessed with the German word like Wunderwaffen. So he's obsessed with just like the best. And we're gonna create this incredible perfect thing. The British historian James Holland has an amazing anecdote at the start of his War in the west trilogy that describes how if you look at World War II through the lens of these incredible weapons, it tells a misleading story. So he tells the story of, imagine you are a Allied infantryman and in the hedgerows of Normandy after D day and you're confronted by a Tiger tank. The Tiger tank is the most powerful tank. It's a better tank. One for one, it's going to beat a Sherman tank. And if you just look at it from the perspective of that infantryman, wow, the Wehrmacht is incredible. Look at all these German engineering, look at all these different achievements. But his point in terms of why Germany loses the war and why the FDR American approach is superior to the German approach is that the question was not who could build the greatest tank ever? Who could build the first jet fighter ever? The ME 262 is the first jet fighter. What really mattered, though, was the Germans could not build enough of them. That was the side of the equation they never got. They were so obsessed with the precision of German engineering. The idea that we were just one specific innovation away from winning. But that wasn't actually what settled the day. So just like the Ugly Ducklings part is so key there.
- [10:55]
B
Yeah. And. And Hitler also really sort of mocked American manufacturing and really just did not believe that we could accomplish what we ended up accomplishing. He sort of. He had this cliched view of American ingenuity. He thought of America as Hollywood and glamour and glitz and sort of all those things. And he had quotes about that. And he just didn't believe that we had the manufacturing muscle and, and ingenuity and know how to really build an arsenal like we ended up building.
- [11:27]
A
So could you actually describe. So we keep talking about the Ugly Ducklings. Really describe for folks because you've actually physically been in them. A Liberty ship.
- [11:36]
B
Right.
- [11:37]
A
So it's longer than a football field, but I think we could go a little deeper than that.
- [11:41]
B
Yeah, it's 441ft, about 100ft longer than a football field, but at the same time, roughly half the length for comparison purposes of the Titanic. So a giant ship. No doubt. When you see it from the side and sort of walk up onto it, you're like, wow, this is a really big boat. The. The way it was designed, and it was also about 55ft wide, the way was designed, and Also I guess 10 stories tall. And the 10 stories tall component is important because so much of the ship was really the. The component of the ship underneath the deck that was the core of the ship. These five cargo holds, which were huge and deep. And when I set foot on the John W. Brown, I noticed that there were numbers along the side of the hull, 1:1 to 30. And those were markings for how many feet were sort of below the waterline. When I set foot on the John W. Brown, the numbers 1 through 30 were almost all visible because it was empty. The ship was sort of, you know, an empty. An empty cargo ship. When the cargo ships were full, you almost didn't see any of those numbers. The ship was sunk so low into the water with weight that it was really, you know, weighed down heavily. That's one of the reasons why the ships were slow. They only traveled up to 11 to 12 knots or so. But the cargo holds were really the essential component of the ship. The deck house, which sat on top of the deck, which is where the crew of 40 to 50 sailors would sleep and eat and live. Was about the size of like a three story building. So it's a pretty big deck house, but nothing fancy. You sort of walk through it and it's pretty bare boned. But yeah, the ships were really bare boned. They were also not heavily armed, which is another component that was debated during their construction. They were lightly armed, which made them in a way, sitting ducks on the ocean. When German raiders and German ships would confront a Liberty ship, they sort of smirked because they knew it was easy pickings, it was slow, it couldn't fight back. And so they sort of saw it as a way to take down one of Roosevelt's signature achievements very easily.
- [14:06]
A
So the real question here, and this is where the sort of engineering part comes in, is how do you go about to the point of. And what also attracts me from a problem solving perspective is how metrics driven this actual thing is in the sense that, okay, so it takes, here's the math, right, which I'm not actually going to do because that's not my skill set. But the problem is it takes around a year to build whatever the sort of norm of the shipping industry was before and during the war. We need to get that number lower. So we make up for the fact that we could on average lose three to four of these a day. Because until you find a way to fight back against the U boat wolf packs, before you find a way to interdict a lot of the sort of German seaplanes that were spotting these things, until you figure out the convoying system, you're going to have that three to four day norm there. How do you get it down? And I believe the one you visited was built in 55 days. And eventually some of the numbers wasn't the record like 24 days or something like that for an actual final Liberty ship.
- [15:06]
B
Yes. So basically when it started, when the Liberty ship program began and sort of the end of 19, 1940, 41 is when it sort of started. The first ships took six to eight months to build. So a really long time to build one Liberty ship. And that clearly for the administration was too long. Right. You couldn't just, we couldn't just pump out one ship every six months. So they slowly got better at the manufacturing process. Got it down to three months, got down to two months, to the point where when you look at a monthly chart and there was a good chart that was put together that I was able to use for my book, there were months when say 10 ships came off the lines and then it was 20, then it was 40, then it was 60. There was finally, it peaked in terms of volume, where one month, about 120 Liberty ships were built. So the ships were built faster and faster. And then at a point in the summer of 1942, so this is roughly six months or so after Pearl Harbor. Henry Kaiser, who was really instrumental in the Liberty ship program, and one of the geniuses of Henry Kaiser was that he sort of sparked a competition among shipyards. He had a number of the west coast shipyards. He decided that it would be sort of a way to speed up the process by essentially pitting his shipyards against each other to see who could build the fastest ship. And they entered into almost like a stunt ship competition, if you want to call it that. So a shipyard in Portland, a ship in Tacoma, Washington, a shipyard in Richmond, California. They were all trying to see who could build the fastest ship. So to your point, one ship was built in 26 days. Another ship was built a week later in 18 days. Another ship was built after that in 10 days. And then ultimately the record setting ship, which sort of is a pivotal moment in my book, The Robert, the SS Robert E. Peary, was built in four days, 15 hours and 20, 29 minutes. And that became sort of the standard record setting ship that all other Liberty ships were sort of be held against. So it was a remarkable achievement, if you think about it. To build one ship in less than five days was crazy.
- [17:21]
A
Can you talk about Henry, Henry J. Kaiser? Tell them about for the audience.
- [17:25]
B
Yeah, sure. I mean, Henry Kaiser was born in 1882, just a few months apart from Franklin roosevelt and about 100 miles away from where Franklin Roosevelt was born, interestingly enough, Both born in upstate New York, but they didn't meet and cross paths until 50 years later. Kaiser moved out to the west coast and became a major sort of contractor out there, building roads and bridges and dams. In the early 1930s, he put together a conglomerate of builders and won the contract to build the Hoover Dam. And that was sort of a groundbreaking, big accomplishment and achievement for him and his team because they built the dam and finished it ahead of budget, ahead of schedule and under budget. So they were supposed to be finished in like 1937, and they finished it in 35, and they got it under budget. It was a remarkable achievement building this hydroelectric dam in the middle of the desert. It caught the attention of fdr, who came out for the opening of it and the unveiling of the dam. And it really introduced Henry Kaiser to fdr. Suddenly, what happened is these two men who had been operating on opposite coasts and different universes came to appreciate each other and recognize that they could help each other in big ways. And again, this is sort of the late 1930s. So the depression is, is over. The effects of the Depression are still lingering. We're not yet at war. The war hasn't happened yet, but there are some storm clouds on the horizon, if you will. And Kaiser is a man who's a businessman who needs government contracts to do his work. That's how his work functions. He needs government contracts. So he knows that a man like FDR is a good guy to have in your pocket. Conversely, FDR wants to get things done, wants to create jobs, wants to build the economy, wants to sort of grow things, has his New Deal programs that he's building up. A man like Henry Kaiser who builds things and can create, create jobs and help the economy, becomes an important player for him. So the two of them recognize that they can really help each other. And that relationship sort of blossomed with the Liberty Ship program.
- [19:32]
A
Here's something I'm curious about. So just because this area, the broader sort of democracy period, is sort of my quasi academic specialty and obsession, I found myself incredibly in a weird position when it came to like Elon coming into government with Doge. Just in the sense that you got this. You know, my politics are center left, right? So like not happy with Elon on a couple different levels. But I think I was in this weird position of, well, actually there is this model where especially given what the Biden administration tried to do from 2021 to 2024, which is really, we're going to build the next America, we need to do these EV chargers, we need to reshore manufacturing, there's all these different things we need to do. And I think there was always a ver. So when people just generically said letting rich people, letting private business into government is a problem in of itself, I would always say, well, stop there. We've got a very empirical case of where. And I'd sort of relate this to the fact that if you think of the military, we have a civilian led military in our country. So ultimately you have generals and you have the Pattons and the Eisenhowers, but you still have a commander in chief who is civilian, who's on top of that. And I think what went so wrong on the Elon side of things, just even purely from the perspective of the Trump administration or just American political norms, is that clearly the sort of civilian level control over what you were trying to do and was never firmly established or clear. And then secondly, you took the engineering building instinct out of the sort of formula we established at the start of the episode, which is, okay, so there's this goal, there's this number we need to meet, and it's not a problem that can just be solved from the perspective of an office in Washington, D.C. so I'd love to hear your reflections on this.
- [21:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I think that, you know, Elon Musk, love him or hate him, was a disruptor and is a disruptor, and sometimes we need those things. We need people like that who sort of look at what's happening in society and. And sort of think outside the box and try to think of a different way to approach something. So certainly Musk, you know, has been a disruptor in many of the things that he's done. Setting aside the Doge stuff, I think almost a. A better, more recent example in some ways of this. This partnership that can take place. Like the Liberty Ship partnership was maybe the COVID response. So when you think about that, that was a crisis, right, of epic proportion. The government needed a solution and turned to the private sector, the pharmaceutical companies, and the drug makers and all those to help solve a problem fast, rapidly. You know, it required a huge investment from the government, but it also required the cooperation, scientific knowledge of the private sector and of these pharmaceutical companies to sort of solve this crisis. And they did, and they did it fast. So that's a great example, I think, of sort of, that how these partnerships can work when there's a common goal and a common. And a crisis that affects everybody. And. Yeah, and I think that's what happened with the Liberty Shift. There was this sort of, you know, crisis coming to bear, and the government needed to solve this problem. A person stepped up to sort of lead the way. He certainly didn't do all of it. He's not the only person who built Liberty ships. Right. There were a dozen different shipyards around the country building them, but he was sort of the first one to really step forward and say, here, I'll help. And not only will I help, but we'll figure out the design of the ship, we'll figure out a way to build these ships, and we'll find a faster way to do it. And that was sort of what Henry Kaiser's contribution was to this problem.
- [23:21]
A
So I want to read a sentence or a few sentences from the book that really sort of, if I were to define my love of this era and sort of explain A lot of my sort of political pov, you describe the moment during which this Libertyship program is going about and which is also broadly understood as the arsenal of democracy era. This was a time when people from all parts of the country and all corners of society, poor housewives, farmers, plumbers and PhDs, inventors and patriotic handymen, brilliant engineers driving politicians and billionaire businessmen, all came together to solve this problem.
- [24:06]
B
To.
- [24:06]
A
Build giant steel cargo ships faster than the Germans could sink them. So I think it's easy and sort of divided 21st century America to have this whole, like, kumbaya. We come together, we solve America. We can do. It's easy for it to sound vapid and not really mean anything. And just what I love about the story you're telling and like that paragraph I just read is that is an example of what this actually looks like. So can you just like pick apart where are the housewives coming in? We talked a bit, a little bit about the, you know, billionaire equivalents, but the PhDs and the inventors and the handyman, how does this all fit together in a world way that isn't superficial?
- [24:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, getting back to sort of the time period that we were talking about, right? It was the. The depression was over. The economy was slowly recovering. But one thing that the war did was it created a demand for jobs. There was a wartime economy that was created out of what was happening. People saw an opportunity. And so when Liberty ships were born and a need was put out there for shipbuilders, people were like, you know, I've never built a ship in my life, but, you know, I know how to swing a hammer or I know how to, to use a tool, or maybe I'm a plumber, an electrician, or I'm a good manager of people and I can do that. So it created this economy and these thousands of jobs across the country that people. And at the beginning it was mostly men, but then women answered the call too, because as more men were called to war, of course then the women had to step up and they did. And women played a critical, critical role in the building of the Liberty ships. Really can't be understated how vital they were. And so women and men came from around the country to the shipyards. They hopped on trains, they drove their cars, their families picked up their kids and left their homes to go to these shipyards and to basically start anew and to start all over again and to build Liberty ships. It was a rapid response. I tell the story of a couple of these People who sort of just picked up their lives from Mississippi, from Arkansas, from Oklahoma, from Texas, and just sort of uprooted themselves for the common good and for the patriotism of the country. And it was sort of a very uplifting story. I was struck by it. I was able to. Fortunately, when you're writing about World War II, of course now we're talking about, you know, 80 years after the. The end of the war. At this point, it's hard to find people who are alive from that time period. They're going to be, you know, upper 90s, maybe 100 years old. I was fortunate in my research to find a 102 year old. Wow. Man who lived in Maine, who worked on liberty ships in Portland, Maine, Arthur Babineaux. I found him through an article that had been written about him up there, reached out to his daughter and basically said, can I come up tomorrow? You know, because he's 102 years old and I didn't want to waste any time and I was able to get up there and interview him. And it was sort of a. It was a moving moment for me to sit down with this guy who was sharp as attack and to just talk to him about what it was like working on liberty ships. His job was to inspect welds. To inspect the welds on the ships. And he told me these great stories about that which I included in the book. So it was hard to find too many people, like I said, but I was able to find that man. And I found a lot of children of people who worked on liberty ships who shared their stories with me. And that research was really enjoyable for me and humanized the book in a way that was very important to me.
- [27:41]
A
I'm curious, so looking at your previous books and you're at Boston University, what got you into this story in the first place? It's not like you're writing World War II military books every other week. That's not an insult of other people, but people just said. But I'm just curious, like, because it's a. Well, it's a great book. It's super well written. I love the original research. But what got you into this story?
- [28:03]
B
Yeah, you know, it's funny, you get asked that question a lot. So I think that a couple of things. My last book, which came out about nine years ago or so, was about the race to build the first subway in America, about Boston and New York and. And building the first subways in America. That was set roughly in the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s. So I didn't want to write about that time period again. That was one thing I knew. Other than that, I think what I will say is, at my heart and at my core, I'm a storyteller and I like writing about people. So I'm always looking for ideas that are built around interesting people doing interesting things. When I first read about the Liberty ships, one of the things that gave me pause was it was about World War II, right? I mean, there have been only 10,000 books written about World War II. And so I think I was a little worried that this is going to be a well torn, a well tread subject, and that maybe, you know, it'll be hard to find something original. But the more that I dug into it, the more I found that, you know, there had been some books written about the Liberty ships, but really not that many that told what I felt like was a soup to nuts sort of story. There was one book that was called Liberty by Peter Elphick, which was a tremendous book, book published, but it was published by a small press, in a small naval press, and he was British. And it didn't look like the book got a huge audience. So that book became a valuable research tool for me. But really the book and what I look for when I'm looking for research topics and book topics is about people, because that's what's most fun to write about. You know, the human nature and human element of things getting done. My Subway book was certainly about that, about people digging the first subways in this country and how that came to be. And this was about a war and a crisis that had to be solved. So I think that's sort of how I settled on the book. It wasn't like I was looking to write about World War II or wasn't looking to write about ships. I was looking to write about people. And then you go from there.
- [30:01]
A
And I think the thing that's so interesting about World War II, and this is obviously where you kind of ended up, which is that it's not that the subject of World War II is no longer coverable because it's just been written about exhaustively. It's just that World War II is going to mean different things to different people in different generational moments. So I think the reason why we're really seeing a real pickup of books on this arsenal of democracy, period, is that a lot of today, putting aside just the rise of authoritarian powers like China and Russia, a lot of what we're going through today, both from a Trump and Biden administration perspective gets at the core of the challenge here, which is, is you have these foreign policy objectives, you have a foreign policy environment that's like increasingly perilous and just really dangerous. But the way that we're choosing to respond to that situation, namely by building involves labor, involves real workforce questions. It involves the intersection of our sort of unique American model of business and the private sector achieving these different goals. Like we're not the Soviet Union where they had like Soviet government led design bureaus producing the AK47 for example. So I think it just is so interesting that we're just seeing all these books because it's funny. Arthur Herrmann, who wrote Freedom's forge back in 2012, so that's about the broad arsenal of democracy story. What's so funny about that book is you know this as an author like sometimes and I suspect your Subway book. I'm actually going to buy your Subway book right after this because I do a lot of work on the Abundance agenda. I've had Ezra Klein on the show. So this big challenge of like oh, how do we build things? Things in urban environments that really feature big challenges. So there's this weird moment where when Arthur wrote the book in 2012, he's a popular author. So I'm like sure it did fine but really in 2022 the book just exploded and Arthur's told me that now he's getting emails from tech founders saying this is the book that's on my bedside table. So it's just so interesting that this just iteration of the World War II story. I love Band of Brothers, but I don't think we to need need like another Stephen Ambrose book. This version is what's really new here. So two last questions. So one, I've been a little unfair and you've referenced the Brits, but I think the other thing that rhymes with this moment too is that we could focus on America, but the story actually starts in Great Britain because this is actually a example of the need for the US to work with our allies to accomplish these big goals. And it's kind of funny like Arthur has a follow up paper that he's written about this topic where he describes how this arsenal of democracy in World War II is kind of a misnomer for our current challenges because we actually can't just do all this building ourselves. We don't always have all the innovation. We are not the country of GM in 1939 anymore. So what we need is an arsenal of democracies, not just in a democracy. So to that spirit. The Brits play a huge role here. Let's bring them in.
- [33:00]
B
They do. And the book sort of opens with them, right? Because what happened was the story starts with a shipbuilder in outside of London by the name of Robert Thompson, Robert Searle Thompson, who had designed a big cargo ship there. And the British, who were before America, they were in the war first, right? They were the ones who were attacked by Germany. And so they desperately needed cargo ships to fight the Germans. But all of their shipyards were occupied and were being used to build battleships and naval ships and fighting ships. So they needed a partner to help build cargo ships. And so the British Admiralty sent Robert Thompson to the United States to essentially find a partner to help build British cargo ships, right? The United States was Great Britain's biggest ally. And so they sent Robert Thompson over there, they gave him a budget, they said, here's how much money you have to spend. Go find a partner. And that began the partnership with the British. Ultimately, what came of that barnstorming trip that Robert Thompson made around the country, traveled 17,000 miles in three weeks, visiting shipyards around the country. What was born from that was a deal to build 60 cargo ships in America, 30 on the East Coast, 30 on the West Coast. So 30 in Portland, Maine, and 30 in Richmond, California. Henry Kaiser was going to be at the center of that building project, and they were going to build these ships, and they were called ocean class ships. They were essentially the Liberty ship in its infancy. So that was the Liberty ship beginning. The United States then decided, we need to build our own version of this ocean class ship. And FDR, a few weeks after that contract was signed on January 3, 1941, announced the beginning of United States cargo shipbuilding effort. And he said, we're going to build 200 merchant ships, and they were essentially going to be the exact same ship as the British design with a few very mild modifications. But that's how the program was born. It was born with a British shipbuilder and a British design that had to be Americanized.
- [35:09]
A
So for the last question here, I'm actually pulling from the, you know, positive review blurbs at the end of the book. I'm personally just like obsessed with this arsenal of democracy story. And I think that it really needs to be adapted into a film, a television show, something. The quote here is from AJ Bayme, who wrote another great book on this topic, literally titled the Arsenal of Democracy. And that's focused on the. It's focused on forts, it's focused on Detroit, it's focused on converting those pre war automobile factories into the factories that built the B24 Liberator and built the Sherman tank. So he says, quote, launching Liberty has all the setup for a Hollywood film, which it probably will be. It's well reported and meaningful book that should be on every history buff's bookshelf. How would you. I think so I'd just be curious, like, why hasn't this been turned into like a film, a movie, something, and if it were to be, like, how would you go about doing it?
- [36:11]
B
So I'm not a filmmaker. I think the challenge, if I were to think about it, is for a movie, you really need a thread.
- [36:18]
A
Yeah, right.
- [36:18]
B
You need like a. First of all, you need a character who's going to drive the story that number one. And then you need sort of a narrow thread. Right. The arsenal of democracy is broad. Liberty ships is more narrow. It's one element of that. So I think that that's the biggest challenge. What's. If you're going to do a movie about sort of the arsenal, democracy, and about sort of the effort to. To defeat the Germans, you need sort of a narrow thread. And there have been some movies that have been made over the years about World War II, but it's a period piece. Right. That's a challenge. Yeah. You know, making movies about the period is never easy. I think if I was going to try to do it, I don't know, maybe. Maybe what I would do is zoom in on the Robert E. Peary, you know, a ship that was built in four days. And how did that come to be, you know, a thing? So you can. You can start broad and then sort of narrow down to this sort of one ship. And the idea of building a ship in four days and launching it was sort of an exciting moment for American history and a big deal. So I don't know. It's a. It is a good question. I know A.J. bain, who wrote that Arson Democracy you mentioned. And yeah, he's written some great books over the years. And like I said before, when you write about World War II, you rely on the people who came before you to tell some of these stories because there have been so many of them.
- [37:34]
A
Yeah. And I will say the thing that's been funny just because I host a podcast called Arsenal of Democracy, so I get outreach from people. I think the other challenge of adapting this story, though, is just that you have to recognize in this moment we're in, people are skeptical of war. People are skeptical of getting involved internationally. So the mistake there's just been a couple people have reached out about, like, how would you sort of do this? And I think the problem in too many of their interpretations, it comes off like war porn. Or it comes off like, the point of this movie is you're going to leave the theater saying, okay guys, let's kick China's ass. And separate from, I do think the US military needs to be capable of kicking China's ass. So like, that's where my foreign policy views come in. But I also recognize that that's not the vibe that moviegoers are really looking for right now. But I think you've actually narratively. So I just know that there are some certain Hollywood people who are listening. So this is me just broadcast to them through the means of the podcast. I think you actually have solved the problem literally at a narrative level with the opening sentence of the book, which is, this is about problem solving. So think of the movies like Apollo 13. Think of first man. Like there's this genre, Ford versus Ferrari, all these different movies. There's a certain type of dad garage movie where it's actually not about, you don't have to be obsessed with space to love Apollo 13. You don't have to be obsessed with auto racing to find Ford vs Ferrari to be really important. Because the key thing is these are character driven stories about this American spirit of being attracted to and motivated by solving problems. So like, my just suggestion for those of you that are listening or thinking about how you could adapt and think about this space is it's not about the war. It's not about World War II. It's about what happens when people are confronted by seemingly intractable problems, yet are able to work together collectively to solve something. So I just really genuinely appreciate that first sentence. Cause I actually think you just kind of cut to the core of what is this actually about. So I really appreciate that.
- [39:47]
B
It's funny you say that because giving credit where credit is due. When I first started this project, it was my editor at Simon and Schuster who I think said that to me in some form or another, that this is a book about solving a problem. He said that to me literally. And that line stuck in my head as I was thinking about how to open the book and how to sort of explain what the book was about without feeling like I was trying to lecture them or trying to, you know, speak to them in a certain way. But in the end I was like, you know what? That's actually a good line. I stole it from my own editor.
- [40:24]
A
I appreciate people when they credit people. Doug, this has been really great. The book is Launching Liberty. It is out now. I really recommend a everyone needs to read the sort of six to eight books that are sort of in this arsenal of democracy canon, but like, specifically focused on the shipbuilding aspect, especially when the US Is trying to really shipbuilding's a huge priority both in the Biden and in the administration. So folks really need to engage and read books like this. So I appreciate it.
- [40:51]
B
Doug yeah, thanks for having me on, Marshall. It was a fun conversation. I enjoyed it, and I wish you luck with things, but thanks.