Doug Most glanced at his watch. The Needham-based writer and editor, captivated by a trove of documents at the Library of Congress, had lost track of time. The library was about to close and he had, like all visitors, checked his belongings at the entrance — in another building, connected by an underground walkway. He started running, but, he said, “When you’re sprinting through the tunnel under the Library of Congress, someone might look at you and be like, why’s that guy running?”
Would someone call security?
As a writer, Most has a knack for making mundane (welding?) historical moments come alive, as he does throughout the new book he was researching that day. Launching Liberty, which will be released on August 19, is the World War II-era story of the rushed construction of the hundreds of cargo ships that the U.S. and Great Britain needed in order to get supplies — from millions of tons of food and medical supplies to thousands and thousands of vehicles, tanks and munitions — from U.S. factories to the troops and fronts all over the globe. While heavily gunned and armored Navy ships received the public’s (and often, historians’) attention, Most observes, the mammoth cargo ships were critical to the success of the ground forces that ultimately defeated the Axis armies. It was partly a race to build too many ships, knowing that Nazi submarines were going to prevent a percentage of them from reaching their destinations.
“Shipbuilding,” Most writes, “carried the fate of American democracy on its back.”
Most survived his Library of Congress moment unscathed, and he survived the five-year effort to conceive, pitch and write this book, too. He worked around his day job as executive editor and an assistant vice president at Boston University, where he oversees a staff of writers who report on BU faculty and research. His wife and children — he has a daughter who is now at BU and a son who is a senior at Needham High — gave him leeway to write in the evenings after dinner.
Why take on a huge project on top of a demanding job and a close family? As his career moved from reporting at The Bergen Record to editing and managing at Boston Magazine and for many years at The Boston Globe, Most simply missed writing.
“I wrote my subway book (The Race Underground, about building Boston’s subways, which was published in 2014) because I had felt myself moving away from the reason I got into this business in the first place, which was writing and reporting and research. I’ve always loved journalism and storytelling.
“Then I transitioned to BU in 2018, and I needed time to settle in there. Big new job, new opportunity. So I was there for a couple years and then it was around 2020 when I really focused on finding an idea for a new book and a new project to sink my teeth into.”
After he’d developed the idea, Simon & Schuster gave him a contract — and a deadline. Most said he spent about two years doing the bulk of the work, researching for the entire first year and writing during the second.
It wasn’t building a cargo ship, but it was a monumental task. While focused on the years 1940-1943, the book includes back stories including shipbuilding during the Civil War and the development of mass production. It’s populated by everyday people (there were tens of thousands of women and men of all ages and backgrounds) who relocated to the newly built shipyards, but also Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the industrialist Henry Kaiser and the admirals and generals who directed the war effort. Their combined efforts — including significant marine construction innovations — reduced the time it took to build a 440-foot long cargo ship that could hold 10,000 tons of goods from almost a year to a month, including a one-time “stunt” record of five days.
Rosie the Riveter, Most writes, was also Wendy the Welder at the shipyard. Women were champion welders. One, Augusta Clawson, who couldn’t handle the office job she’d been assigned but proved to be a top-notch welder, kept a diary that became a famous book.
One of Most’s favorite research moments was meeting a worker who’d been part of the Liberty effort at the shipyard in Portland, Maine. Though he’s now deceased, Arthur Babineau was 100 years old and still had a sharp memory.
“I sat with him for an afternoon and walked through everything from how he first learned about the Liberty ships. He was a teenager. His job was to inspect the hulls of the ships for leaks. And he had a great story about being inside of a hull and seeing a leak. He wondered what would’ve happened to that ship if he hadn’t spotted it. It might have launched with a hole in the hull.”
Most said that the determination and organization of the effort along with the spirit and dedication of the workforce impressed him. “It makes me think,” he said, “could we do that today?”
Launching Liberty, by Doug Most. Simon & Schuster, 417 pages. Available for preorder ahead of the August 19 publication date.
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