In 1903 the matter was taken up with greater vigor, by President Roosevelt. In his annual message to Congress December 7, the President, "deeply concerned at the decline of our ocean fleet and the loss of skilled officers and seamen," recommended the appointment by Congress of a joint commission to investigate and report at the next session, "what legislation is desirable or necessary for the development of the American merchant marine and American commerce, and, incidentally, of a national ocean mail service of adequate auxiliary naval cruisers and naval reserves."
In response Congress by act of April 28, 1904, created the Merchant Marine Commission with power to make the broadest kind of an inquiry. This body was composed of five Senators and five Representatives, two of the Senators and two of the Representatives members of the minority party. Senator Jacob H. Gallinger of New Hampshire was chairman. Eight months between the adjournment and reassembling of Congress was devoted to its appointed task. All the larger ports of the country were visited, its itinerary embracing the principal cities on the North Atlantic seaboard, on the Great Lakes, on the Pacific coast, and on the southern coast and Gulf of Mexico. Hearings were given in all these places to hundreds of citizens: commercial bodies, shipbuilders, shipowners, shipping merchants, merchants in general trade, manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, editors, doctrinaires. So wide indeed was the investigation, and so liberal the "open door" rule, admitting for consideration any "intelligent suggestion offered in good faith," that "alien agents" of foreign steamships were heard with the rest.[[HR]] While differences of opinion as to methods and policies naturally were encountered, the commission declared that it found public sentiment, as this was sounded throughout the United States, "practically unanimous not in merely desiring, but in demanding an American ocean fleet, built, owned, officered, and so far as may be, manned by our own people." This sentiment was "just as earnest on the Great Lakes ... as on either ocean."[[HR]]
The results of the investigation were embodied in an elaborate report, comprising majority and minority reports of the commission, and the mass of testimony taken at the hearings: the whole filling three large pamphlet volumes, in all of nearly two thousand pages.[[HS]]
The majority reported a bill. This was presented as merely an extension of the principles of the Postal Aid Act of 1891, involving "no new departure from the established practice of the Government." Its ocean mail sections were intended "simply to strengthen the existing act on lines where it has happened to prove inadequate." The subsidies which it granted were termed, inoffensively, "subventions," and its promoters protested that these "subventions" were "not in any opprobrious sense a subsidy or bounty." They were "not bounties outright, or mere commercial subsidies such as many of our contemporaries give." They were "granted frankly in compensation for public services rendered and to be rendered."[[HT]]
The proposed measure, however, was more than an extension of the act of 1891. Its scope was indicated by its title: "To promote the national defence, to create a force of naval volunteers, to establish American ocean mail lines to foreign markets, to promote commerce, and to provide revenue from tonnage." The subsidies offered comprised mail subventions to steamships; subventions to general cargo carriers and deep-sea fishing-ships, both steam and sail; and retainers to officers and men of American merchant ships and deep-sea fishing vessels enrolling as naval volunteers. It opened with provisions for the establishment of a naval reserve.
The new mail subsidies provided for ten specified lines of "steamships of the United States" of sixteen, fourteen, thirteen, and twelve knots speed, to the greater countries of South America, to Central America, to Africa, and to the Orient, with a total maximum subsidy for the ten lines of $2,665,000 a year. In all contracts it was to be specified that the steamships must carry in their own crews a certain increasing proportion, up to one-fourth, of men enrolled as naval volunteers. The subventions to American general cargo carriers, or the "tramp" type of ships, and deep-sea fishing-vessels, steam or sail, were fixed at these rates: those engaged in the foreign trade for a full year, five dollars per gross ton; so engaged for nine months and less than a year, four dollars; for six months, two dollars. These subsidies were conditioned upon these requirements: the employment in the crews of a certain proportion of naval volunteers; one-sixth of the crews to be citizens of the United States or "men who have declared their intentions to become citizens;" ships to carry the mails when required free of charge; all ordinary repairs to be made in the United States; the ships to be in readiness for Government taking for naval service in time of need. The payments in this class were to be made on contracts for a year at a time, renewable from year to year; and no vessel was to receive them for a longer period than ten years. The retainers to officers and men of the merchant marine and deep-sea fishing-ships as inducements to enroll as naval volunteers, were fixed at rates ranging from a hundred dollars a year for the master or chief engineer of a large steamship to twenty-five dollars for a sailor or fireman, and fifteen dollars for a boy, these retainers being independent of their regular pay. The provisions relating to tonnage revenue increased the tonnage taxes on all vessels, American and foreign, entering American ports, with a rebate of eighty per cent of the tonnage duties allowed to American ships carrying American boys as apprentices and training them in seamanship or engineering for the merchant service and naval reserve.[[HU]]
The minority report, signed by three of the four Democratic members of the commission, although outlining measures of relief which, in the judgment of the signers, would "accomplish substantial and permanent good without injustice to any other American interest and without doing violence to any fundamental principle of right or of organic law," proposed no bill. While the minority "saw objections to the entire bill" recommended by the majority, they were disposed to withhold any opposition except to the sections providing for direct subsidies. These they declared to be "so obnoxious to Democratic principles and to the economic sense of the country" that they were compelled to enter their "earnest protest against their enactment into law." Instead of subsidies, the remedial legislation which they outlined included: a return to the discriminating-duty policy; and the putting on the free list of all materials which enter into the construction of ships no matter whether intended for foreign or domestic trade,—thus admitting ships built from foreign materials, in whole or in part, to the coastwise trade, from which they are now excluded. The minority held also that it would probably "be necessary to remove the duties not only for materials but from all materials sold cheaper abroad than at home," meaning steel and iron products. "In this way, and in this way only, will our shipbuilders be enabled to obtain our materials at the prices at which they are sold to foreign shipbuilders."[[HV]]
The report of the commission was submitted to the Fifty-eighth Congress, third session, January 4, 1905.[[HW]] No action was had on the bill in that Congress. It was referred to the committee on commerce; reported back to the Senate with sundry amendments and a minority report against it;[[HX]] was debated tentatively; and finally passed over at the request of its sponsor, Senator Gallinger, who expressed himself as satisfied that the bill could not receive the consideration it deserved at that session. Meanwhile both Houses had directed a continuance of the commission's inquiry. In May the chairman, Senator Gallinger, held conferences in New York with several representatives of the shipping interests who had not been heard; and later sessions were held in Washington, at which other statements were received and considered.
At the opening of the Fifty-ninth Congress, December 4, 1905, Senator Gallinger submitted a supplementary report of the commission, and with it introduced a new bill—the previous bill in a new draft.[[HY]] At the same time Representative Charles H. Grosvenor, of Ohio, the first House member of the commission, introduced the bill to the House.