The Philadelphia Navy Yard: From the Birth of the U.S. Navy to the Nuclear Age (review)

The Philadelphia Navy Yard: From the Birth of the U.S. Navy to the Nuclear Age. By Jeffery M. Dorwart and Jean K. Wolf. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pp. vii+271. $45.

After two hundred years of operation, the naval shipyard at Philadelphia closed in 1996. A significant Philadelphia institution, the yard's importance to the U.S. Navy ebbed and flowed over the years, and its survival, in a continuation of the history of its establishment, often relied more on political and personal alliances than on naval utility. The history Jeffery Dorwart conveys in this well-researched and extensively illustrated account is not why the navy yard was closed but "why it had taken so long to do so" (p. 4). Though located a hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean, up the Delaware River, the Philadelphia yard did have a continual selling point: the surrounding industrial infrastructure and the supply of skilled laborers in the Delaware Valley.

Dorwart first focuses on the navy yard operations at Southwark in Philadelphia, recounting their origins during the Revolutionary War, the manipulations of noted frigate designer and entrepreneur Joshua Humphrey to establish Southwark as the "United States" shipyard, its role in the antebellum navy and the shift to hybrid sail-steam warships, and its activities during the Civil War. In his last six chapters, Dorwart tells of the expansion of the yard and the shift of operations to League Island, its operation during World War I and the interwar period, its further expansion during World War II, its role during the cold war, and the post-Vietnam "culture of closure."

Dorwart draws on sources ranging from American State Papers to accounts from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard Oral History Project as he skillfully parallels the evolution of the shipyard with that of the U.S. Navy, the American shipbuilding industry, and the City of Philadelphia. Some historians, myself included, may disagree with some of Dorwart's characterizations of naval history--concerning the strategic utility of the twelve ships of the line proposed by Secretary Benjamin Stoddert in 1799, for example, or the question of whether or not the 1919 capital ship program was only a Versailles bargaining chip--but factual errors are few. (Two such are Dorwart's attribution of 18-inch armor to the 1916 battle cruisers and his characterization of the tank landing ship Sumter as an amphibious assault ship.) Dorwart seems to downplay the importance of the legislative creation of the navy's bureau system in 1842, and I was surprised at how infrequently the Bureau of Yards and Docks, Bureau of Construction and Repair, and Bureau of Steam Engineering appeared in the history of the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

However, this is a local history focusing on an important regional institution. Dorwart weaves a solid tale of the continual national, regional, and local political wrangling regarding the navy yard at Philadelphia. Many readers will appreciate the irony of a shipyard that, for much of its history, had no building ways and, with the advent of the battleship navy, had difficulty drydocking and fitting out vessels constructed at private shipyards in the region, such as Cramp Shipbuilding Company. As Dorwart observes, this actually worked in Philadelphia's favor during the interwar years, when much of the navy's ship-related work focused on scrapping or ship modifications in accordance with the Five-Power Treaty and the London Naval Treaty of 1930.

The postwar history of the Philadelphia Navy Yard paralleled the ups and downs of the U.S. Navy throughout the cold war. Its inability to deal with nuclear-powered ships contributed to its demise, and the push to privatize warship construction during the 1960s relegated it to the periphery. Finally, strong congressional support, especially in the Senate, for rival shipyards in Virginia and Mississippi made the Philadelphia facility...