{"id":78,"date":"2008-11-25T19:24:29","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T19:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.phillyhistory.org\/wordpress\/?p=78"},"modified":"2010-09-13T10:21:08","modified_gmt":"2010-09-13T14:21:08","slug":"from-shipways-to-runways-the-transformation-of-hog-island-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2008\/11\/from-shipways-to-runways-the-transformation-of-hog-island-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Soon after America declared war on Germany in April 1917, songwriter George M. Cohan released his jaunty, rousing call to arms \u201cOver There\u201d.\u00a0But despite the popular fervor to take the fight to Europe, the U.S. did not possess the merchant fleet to make war \u201cover there.\u201d\u00a0With only 430 cargo and passenger ships in its merchant marine, America relied on foreign ships for nearly 90 percent of its overseas trade.[1]<\/sup> Successful German U-boat campaigns in the early months of the war exacerbated the shortage.<\/p>\n

With a meager merchant fleet unprepared to serve its troops overseas, the Wilson administration turned to the private sector for assistance.\u00a0Eventually the government would run 132 shipyards spending over $200 million on ship construction.\u00a0But no yard was more ambitious and controversial than Hog Island, where the Philadelphia International Airport is presently located.\u00a0On 31 July 1917, under the aegis of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the government lavished a multimillion dollar contract on a nebulous conglomerate, the American International Corporation, to construct a massive shipyard on boggy land a company subsidiary had advantageously purchased two months earlier.\u00a0Paying twenty times the assessed value for the land, the American International Shipbuilding Corporation set its dredges to work.\u00a0Ceaselessly throughout the summer and fall of 1917, the dredges bolstered the flat island with millions of tons of Delaware River spoil.[2]<\/sup><\/p>\n

From the perspective of the popular press, the process of turning the 860-acre tract \u201cwhere formerly the song of the mosquito was the only sound to greet the ear of the surveyor or fisherman\u201d into a teeming military industrial complex inspired the same pride in America as Cohan\u2019s martial ditty.\u00a0National Geographic<\/em> called Hog Island a \u201cwonderful industrial center\u201d in September 1918.\u00a0The Historical Outlook<\/em>, a magazine for teachers published in Philadelphia noted where once was \u201ca low lying unsanitary swamp\u2014merely a strip of wasteland\u201d stood forth the next summer \u201cthe greatest shipyard in the world.\u201d\u00a0In many ways, Hog Island was a projection of early 20th<\/sup> century American idealism\u2014capital, technology, and scientific management in the service of progress. \n<\/p>\n

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But in other ways, Hog Island was too big for its own good.\u00a0The contractual obligation to supply \u201cat least\u201d 200 ships meant massive expenditures for site preparation and infrastructure were needed.\u00a0Writers were fond of hyperbolic comparisons of the yard\u2019s infrastructure to major American cities.\u00a0Hog Island\u2019s electrical power plant was sufficient to light the combined needs of Albany, NY and Richmond, VA.\u00a0Its water system could deliver twice the capacity of the city of Atlanta.\u00a0Its sewer system was equal to that of Minneapolis.\u00a0With its 70 miles of rail lines sustaining twenty locomotives and 465 freight cars, 250 buildings, 3,000,000 feet of underground wiring, a hospital, trade school, 12 canteens and restaurants, hotel, 5 mess halls, and telephone traffic equal to a town of 140,000, comparisons to a small city were apt.[3]<\/sup><\/p>\n

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[1] \u201cUgly Ducklings,\u201d Time<\/em>, 13 January 1941.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[2] James J. Martin, \u201cThe Saga of Hog Island, 1917-1920: The Story of the First Great War Boondoggle,\u201d The Saga of Hog Island: And Other Essays in Inconvenient History<\/span><\/em> (<\/span><\/em>Colorado Springs, Co: Ralph Myles, 1977). http:\/\/tmh.floonet.net\/articles\/hogisle.shtml<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[3] Ralph A. Graves, \u201cShips for the Seven Seas: The story of America\u2019s Maritime Needs, Her Capabilities, and Her Achievements,\u201d The National Geographic Magazine<\/em>, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, September, 1918.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Few Facts About Hog Island: the Greatest Shipyard in the World,\u201d the American International Shipbuilding Corporation, 5 August 1918.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Soon after America declared war on Germany in April 1917, songwriter George M. Cohan released his jaunty, rousing call to arms \u201cOver There\u201d.\u00a0But despite the popular fervor to take the fight to Europe, the U.S. did not possess the merchant fleet to make war \u201cover there.\u201d\u00a0With only 430 cargo and passenger ships in its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historic-sites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}