Edward N. Hurley

Edward N. Hurley was an American industrialist and public administrator who led the United States Shipping Board after the country entered the global conflict of 1914-1918. J. B. Lippincott published The Bridge To France in 1927 as Hurley’s account of creating and operating a wartime bridge of ships. Its chapters follow the Shipping Board and Emergency Fleet Corporation through shipyard expansion, the Hog Island project, worker housing, material supply, convoying, and Allied transport problems. Hurley writes from a participant’s perspective, joining administrative recollection to the pressures created by industrial mobilization. The Bridge To France also identifies the limits that inadequate merchant shipping placed on moving and supplying forces overseas. The work is therefore closely tied to Hurley’s public service, but it reaches beyond personal memoir by preserving a detailed institutional history. Government agencies, shipbuilders, manufacturers, workers, and transport networks all enter his explanation of how a national shipping program was assembled under severe pressure.