"For the Gallant Men of the Merchant Marine" Wartime Training at the Seamen's Church lnstitute's Merchant Marine School by Johnathan Thayer
"No man knows what the brooding future may bring, but this we do know; that such humane services as we can render, we shall do so, willingly, for the gallant men ofthe merchant marine. " - The Seamen's Church Institute, 1he Lookout, O ctober 1939 he Seamen's Church Institute of New York and New Jersey (SCI) Center for Maritime Education traces its origins to 1899, when US Navy Commander W. H. Reeder wrote to the chairman of SCI's Committee on Navigation, J. Augustus Johnson, to request 100 pounds of hemp rope, twenty-five pounds of hambroline, stopping blocks, and grummets to equip the institute with materials required to train aspiring seamen in the Port of New York. By 1916, after a brief partnership with the New York Nautical College and the YMCA, SCI officially established the Navigation and Marine Engineering
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School, with Captain Robert Huntington serving as the school's head. At first, SCI's Navigation and Marine Engineering School primarily concentrated on preparing young men for enlistment in the US Navy, bur when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the school shifted its focus to producing qualified men to enter the merchant maritime fleet: "SEAMEN WANTED as Officers for the New Merchant Marine," read one advertisement distributed throughout Lower Manhattan that promised an accelerated route to the quarterdeck; another read, "Now is the Chance to
Better Your Condition and Help Your Country at the Same Time." The school had trained close to 2,000 men by the end of the war, inspiring SCI board member and then assistant secretary of the navy Franklin D. Roosevelt to write a candid letter in April 1918 to SCI director Rev. Archibald R . Mansfield, thanking SCI for "raking into the Navigation and Marine Engineering Schools, 'without money and without price,' the junior officers attached to the mine sweepers." Roosevelt continued: "It might interest you to know that the Navy Department appreciates the fact that, in doing what you have done, you have filled a need, which has caused us no little concern .. .. May I ask you to say to Captain Huntington that we feel under deep obligation to you all?" After the war ended, US shipping fell into a prolonged slump precipitated by the marker crash of 1929 and the ensuing years of the Great Depression. As tensions and conflict escalated in Europe and Asia throughout the 1930s, the US government took severe measures in an attempt to stay neutral. The Neutrality Acts placed strict regulations on US shipping, which were intensified in 1939 when Roosevelt banned American ships
When the Seamen's Church Institute outgrew its floating chapel (a church built on a ferryboat hull) in New York Harbor, it raised fonds and built a hotel-like building at 25 South Street to offer a safe place far seamen to stay in port. 1he headquarters was more than a hotel far seafarers, it was a full-service center where mariners could come to relax, get a meal, find entertainment, and conduct personal business. Inside was a post office where mariners could receive mail that would be waiting far them when they arrived in port; it also had a bank, a gymnasium, and, of course, a chapel. Later, it housed a training center far mariners-the subject ofthis article.
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SEA HISTORY 144, AUTUMN 2013