The box that changed the world

"Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed the World"
by Brian J. Cudahy
Fordham University Press,
338 pp., $29.95

"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger"
by Marc Levinson
Princeton University Press,
376 pp., $24.95

Fifty years ago this spring, a colorful, high-rolling trucker from North Carolina sent the world's first container ship out of Port Newark, N.J., headed for Houston. It was an unsightly thing, made from a converted oil tanker and the business ends of truck trailers. But it would revolutionize world trade, help decimate the United States industrial base and break Malcolm McLean's heart.

On the half-century anniversary of the first containerized shipping, two university presses, Fordham and Princeton, are competing to tell the definitive story of the box boat and its inventor. The books deal with the same cast of characters and tell pretty much the same story about the ways in which the world would never be the same after April 26, 1956, the day McLean's ship, the Ideal X, left Newark.

Brian J. Cudahy's "Box Boats" is a precise history in which the historian seems not able to leave anything out. If you're a stickler for dimensions, horsepower, model numbers, graphs of size and weight and the dates of voyages, this is your book. Marc Levinson's "The Box" is more broad-ranging and more readable. It describes not just the amazing course of the container-ship phenomenon but the turmoil of human affairs in its wake.

Levinson is intrigued by the astonishingly wrong guesses of the experts who for two decades after that first voyage of the Ideal X couldn't bring themselves to take containerization seriously. He describes how Harry Bridges, the brilliantly controversial chief of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), fought to gain his members some payback for agreeing to automation of West Coast ports, including Seattle — and missed by a great margin the amount needed to make up for what they would lose.

As both authors make clear, no one came close to guessing the size and scope of the shipping revolution that would make the word "outsourcing" part of our daily discourse, bring us Wal-Mart and the World Trade Organization, turn backwater cities into super ports and leave New York City's famed waterfront a quiet and lonely place.

Little is told in either book of how the ports of both Seattle and Tacoma rode the containerization wave to worldwide prominence and a combined third-place ranking among U.S. seaports. Levinson affords less than a page to the terrorism threat presented by the millions of container boxes imported into the U.S., and Cudahy barely mentions it.

Both books were written before the fuss over a bid by a Dubai company to take over operation of six major American ports. They also preceded a study, pushed by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., that revealed great holes in security at U.S. ports (security at Seattle and Tacoma looked good in the study, compared with East coast ports). Both books were also written before security officers found 22 Chinese stowaways hiding in a container at the Harbor Island terminal of the Port of Seattle on April 5.

Central to each book is the compelling story of McLean, the tough, risk-taking trucker from Maxton, N.C., with a grammar-school education, who knew nothing about ships and had little interest in them. On a haul from the Deep South to New York City he waited with growing irritation for his truck to be unloaded, piece by piece, at New York Harbor.

In the days before containers, cargo was stored one item at a time near the docks, removed from storage, piled in a jumble beside the ship, lifted by crane into the hold, and stored piecemeal with a forklift or by hand.

Driven to distraction by the slowness of the process, McLean cooked up his scheme for carrying loaded trucks aboard cargo ships. He became immensely rich and powerful by creating, buying and selling the world's largest container-ship companies, until he went bankrupt with United States Lines in 1986.

McLean died in 2001 and, Levinson reports, "container ships around the world sounded their whistles in his memory."