ReThink History: The Fourth Arm

society, culture, history · EN-US

Before the United States had a Navy, it had merchant ships. The Fourth Arm, an 11-part ReThink History series, tells the two-century story of the 'Fourth Arm of National Defense' — the civilian sailors who built the young republic's trade, funded the nation's first federal health system out of their own wages in 1798, and died at a higher rate than any uniformed branch in two world wars, only to be classed as civilians and denied the GI Bill. We follow the schoolships and the federal academy at Kings Point; the hardest part of the story, in which Merchant Marine cadets were sent into U-boat waters as students while Naval Academy midshipmen trained safely in the Chesapeake Bay; the Jones Act; the fleet's slow death in the mothball anchorages; the 1990 Gulf War scramble to crew aging steamships; and the 2026 war with Iran that suspended the Jones Act and found the fleet reduced to a 'paper fleet.' Part of it is told from the inside, through the host's father — an orphaned Kings Point cad