The Roosevelt administration’s program to stimulate the economy, provide jobs, and pull the nation out of the Depression was the first step in Charlestown’s transformation into a true ship construction yard. Under FDR’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, 32 new warships were authorized, 20 of them destroyers, of which two were assigned to Charlestown. The following year, growing worries about Japanese aggression moved Congress to further expand the Navy. The yard kept a rapid pace in the 1930s, laying two keels simultaneously in Dry Dock 2 in 1934 and again in 1935. (As the shipways was inadequate for destroyers, all keels were laid in this dock until 1939.) After floating, the hulls were moved into Dry Dock 1 for completion, the whole process taking about two years. Repair work was much reduced in the 1930s by federal economy measures specifying lengthened maintenance intervals. As both dry docks were in any case usually tied up in construction work, and because most of the ships in for repair were relatively small, many of these vessels were floated into a large cradle and hauled from the water up the tracks of the yard’s marine railway. Others were taken across the harbor to the South Boston dry dock. Technological change transformed many of the yard’s oldest trades by the 1930s, while the growing size and complexity of ships required more and more workers. Such large government employers as shipyards were seen by policy makers as places to both promote economic stability and save money. Early in the Depression these two goals were addressed, respectively, with lower and upper limits for each yard’s workforce—at Charlestown, 1,500 and 1,800. The workforce stayed generally within these limits until 1935, when it began growing, reaching some 5,000 workers by late 1939. (During hard times the yard kept its eye on the future, exempting apprentices from layoffs.) By the time war had begun in Europe in 1939, with “readiness” again America’s watchword, the yard was operating at an even faster rate of production than in the mid-thirties. With the shipways enlarged to handle destroyers, six ships were in some stage of construction that summer. In October four destroyers were floated out of Dry Dock 2 on the same day. The yard also prepared 18 of the old World War I four-stacker destroyers for transfer to Britain under the 1940 destroyers-for-bases agreement. Then came the war. If the thirties had been a period of gearing up, wartime pushed the yard into overdrive. It took a great war effort for the yard to realize its true shipbuilding and manufacturing potential, confirming a statement by Secretary of the Navy George von Meyer in 1910: “Navy yards are primarily for war and only incidentally for peace.” One historian’s conservative estimate: under the goad of war the yard built, repaired, overhauled, converted, or outfitted some 6,000 vessels between 1939 and 1945.