http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4j49n761 Online items available Guide to the American President Lines Records, 1871-1995 Processed by Roberto Landazuri and Richard Tooker.; machine-readable finding aid created by Roberto Landazuri and S. Taylor Horton. San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Third Floor, Building E, Fort Mason San Francisco, CA 94123 Phone: 415-561-7070 Fax: 415-556-3540 URL: http://www.nps.gov/safr/local/hddquery.html All written inquiries should include your name, mailing address, and telephone numbers. © 1999 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. All rights reserved. Historic Documents Department, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Building E, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA 94123 Guide to the American President HDC 279P96-007 1 Lines Records, 1871-1995 Guide to the American President Lines Records, 1871-1995 Document Collection Number: HDC 279 Photograph Collection Number: P96-007 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Historic Documents Department San Francisco, California Contact Information: San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Third Floor, Building E, Fort Mason San Francisco, CA 94123 Phone: 415-561-7070 Fax: 415-556-3540 URL: http://www.nps.gov/safr/local/hddquery.html All written inquiries should include your name, mailing address, and telephone numbers. Processed by: Roberto Landazuri (1995 Accession) Richard Tooker (1983 Accession) Date Completed: May 15, 1997 Encoded by: Roberto Landazuri, Project Archivist S. Taylor Horton, NPS Staff Archivist © 1999 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. All rights reserved. Descriptive Summary Title: American President Lines Records, Date (inclusive): 1871-1995 Document Collection Number: HDC 279 Photograph Collection Number: P96-007 Creator: American President Lines Extent: Approximately 575 linear feet total. HDC 279: 501.61 linear feet. P96-007: 60.1 linear feet, 85 motion picture reels, and 41 videocassettes. SAFR-891: 1016 items. Repository: San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (Calif.). Historic Documents Department Building E, Fort Mason, San Francisco, California 94123 Language: English. Access Restrictions Collection is open for research. Usage Restrictions The San Francisco Maritime NHP possesses physical property rights through ownership of the materials. However, copyright may reside with the individual or corporate body responsible for the creation of the materials, or with their heirs. It is the user's responsibility to respect the provisions of the copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code). Permission to reproduce or publish from this collection must be secured by the user from the copyright holders. Guide to the American President HDC 279P96-007 2 Lines Records, 1871-1995 Preferred Citation [Item description], [Location within collection organization identified by Collection Number/Series Number/File Unit Number/Item Number], American President Lines Records, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Provenance Documents in these records were created or collected by departments within American President Lines (APL) and its predecessor and subsidiary organizations. No evidence has been found of a records management program before the 1980s. The bulk of these records were assembled and organized as the APL Historical Archives by the APL Archives. Before the APL Archives was created, a variety of offices or individuals functioned as corporate repositories. For many years, the General Passenger Department retained records as part of its promotional and public relations activities. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Research & Development Department used and retained historical material in the preparation of research reports, many prepared by W. G. MacDonald, Assistant Passenger Traffic Manager in San Francisco. MacDonald, who began his career with Dollar's Admiral Oriental Line in 1924, also collected historical materials for a personal collection, which he sold to the company in 1983. Most of these records appear to have been held by their respective creators or by the General Passenger Department until a corporate archives project was begun in 1979, probably in conjunction with the inventory and appraisal of APL's corporate art collection. Around 1981 the project was designated as the APL Archives, within the Office Services Department. Pamela Petersen supervised the APL Archives until 1983, when Colette Carey assumed the role. In 1979 Pamela Petersen inventoried the archival records and produced the "APL Archives Bibliography." This inventory was updated in 1981 as "APL Archives Description and Arrangement". Both documents are found in Subgroup III, Series 5, Folder 2. W.G. MacDonald inventoried the collection he sold to APL in 1983 (Subgroup IV, Subseries 11.2, Folder 5). Neither the order nor the contents of the records transferred to San Francisco Maritime NHP in 1995 corresponded to these inventories. Materials were boxed, moved, and placed in storage between 1983 and 1995, and staff continued to use them. Some items were borrowed but not returned or were removed by collectors within the company. To the extent possible, the order of the records in the APL Archives has been reconstituted. Some records simply have been lost, probably due to moves of the corporate headquarters (1961, 1976, 1984, and 1991). Immediate Source of Acquisition Douglas Fonda (1983 accession). American President Lines (1995 accession). Processing Information Processed by Roberto Landazuri (1995 accession) and Richard Tooker (1983 accession). Completed in 1998 Agency History American President Lines, for many years the largest American shipping company in the Pacific, was formed in 1938 from the remnants of the Dollar Steamship Company. Organized in 1900, Dollar spent its first two decades in the transpacific trade as "essentially a tramp operator, whose main cargoes were bulk, low-value merchandise not suitable for the larger and faster passenger-cargo liners of the Pacific Mail Steamship Lines." [1] Both APL and Dollar traced their corporate origins to the famous Pacific Mail Steamship Company (PMSS) formed in 1848. Pacific Mail dominated stateside transpacific trade from 1867 to 1915. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company took control of the company in 1893. After the passage of the Panama Canal Act of 1912 and the LaFollette Seamen's Act of 1915, Southern Pacific Railroad began to liquidate the Pacific Mail fleet and withdraw from the transpacific trade. International Mercantile Marine purchased four Pacific Mail transpacific steamers; the remainder of the PMSS fleet and the company name were acquired by W.R. Grace & Co. As a subsidiary of Grace, Pacific Mail continued to operate coastwise service under its own house flag and purchased three new vessels with which it resumed transpacific service (and, briefly, round-the-world service) between 1916 and 1921. Pacific Mail Steamship Company officially ceased to exist in 1925 when Dollar acquired the company's name, house flag and goodwill from Grace. As PMSS withdrew from transpacific service, Dollar expanded steadily in a slow build-up to the creation in 1924 of its own permanent round-the-world service. Dollar, and later APL, based its claim to PMSS as a direct predecessor company on its assumption of the "shell" of the old company--its name and its unused transpacific and round-the-world routes. This service, along with profitable intercoastal cargo business, gave Dollar and its American Mail Line (AML) [2] subsidiary a near monopoly on U.S. shipping in the Pacific Coast. This dominance did not come without a price. As its debt grew through the 1930s, Dollar's fortunes declined. In August 1938, faced with insurmountable debt and probable foreclosure, the company entered into an agreement that its creditors felt was the best alternative to bankruptcy. The U.S. Maritime Commission acquired the 93% stock interest in the Dollar Guide to the American President HDC 279P96-007 3 Lines Records, 1871-1995 Line held by the Dollar family. As payment, the U.S. Maritime Commission assumed all debts and personal obligations of the Dollar family in the line, began to pay off the debts and to rebuild the deteriorated Dollar fleet. Based on this arrangement and a large loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the revitalized company, renamed American President Lines (APL), played a significant part in the war effort of the U.S. merchant marine during World War II. The end of the war coincided with the repayment of the old Dollar Line's last creditors and with the initiation of the Dollar Line Case, a lawsuit brought by the Dollar family in an attempt to force the government to return the now profitable company to Dollar control. The litigation dragged on until 1952, when the government sold its stock in APL, keeping half of the proceeds and giving the other half to the Dollar family. APL returned to private ownership under APL Associates, a group of venture capitalists headed by Ralph K. Davies, a former executive of Standard Oil of California. Davies had been acquiring blocks of APL stock since 1944, and helped influence the 1947 appointment of former Democratic National Committee treasurer George Killion as APL president. The two men shaped the company's direction for nearly thirty years. Killion left APL in 1966, and Davies was a major figure in the APL organization until his death in 1971. APL Associates was originally formed as a holding company but was converted to a public corporation through its 1956