[9] In June 1937 the United States Congress withdrew all maritime mail subsidies, which by then included a total of $450,000 per year for Panama Pacific's three liners.

[citation needed] Each was fireproofed to comply with Federal safety regulations,[10] which had been revised as a result of the fire in 1934 that destroyed the liner Morro Castle.

[2] On 4 October 1938[3] Moore-McCormack Lines contracted to operate California, Virginia, Pennsylvania and 10 cargo ships between the USA and South America[10] as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy.

[3] Moore-McCormack renamed the three passenger liners Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and assigned them to the fleet of its American Republics Lines subsidiary.

[16] In April 1943 Argentina left the USA for Algiers and Oran in French Algeria, then Gibraltar, the Firth of Clyde, Scotland; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Durban, South Africa and back to Casablanca.

[17] [18] In December 1944 Argentina left the USA on a voyage to Naples, Marseille, Oran and Gibraltar, returning to Boston in January 1945.

[3] The next month she brought home from Europe 5,000 troops of the USAAF 454th Bombardment Wing and 15th Air Force, reaching New York on 28 July.

[16] On 16 November 1945 Argentina arrived in New York from Le Havre carrying 4,206 soldiers, 130 civilians, 124 nurses and 88 German scientists.

[3] In an attempt to maintain secrecy the soldiers, civilians and nurses were kept on board while the scientists were disembarked and whisked away in a small fleet of waiting buses.

[3] On 16 January 1946 Herbert Lamoureux, Ex-Sergeant in the USAAF, jumped from the S.S. Argentina Five (5) miles off Plymouth England and tried to swim ashore to see his English wife, Vera, and their baby, Elaine.

[3] Now that she was back in civilian service, Moore-McCormack Lines wanted her crew to return to a passenger shift system of nine hours on and 13 off, but the National Maritime Union disagreed.

Then on 4 November 1946 she entered Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation's 56th St Shipyard in Brooklyn, New York, to be refitted as a civilian liner again.

[3] Instead strike action by Bethlehem Shipbuilding workers delayed the work for several months and it was not until 30 December that she left the shipyard for her final 14 hours of sea trials.

[3] On the same day her library was dedicated in memory of Henry Olin Billings, a former Moore-McCormack employee who was killed on 1 November 1942 when his command, the Liberty Ship SS George Thacher, was torpedoed off the coast of French Equatorial Africa.

[21] On 15 January Argentina left New York on Moore-McCormack's South America run; the first of the three sisters to return to their pre-war civilian route.

[3] On 14 September 1950, two days out of Port of Spain, Trinidad, Argentina met a large schooner that had sailed from Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, with 119 men aboard bound for Venezuela.

[21] When the ship docked in New York he gave ABC a filmed interview aboard about hunting jaguars in Mato Grosso.

[21] In New York in April 1948 the cast of the Broadway play Mister Roberts, including Henry Fonda, judged a fashion show aboard Argentina.

[22] On 5 November 1948 photographer and film-maker Ruth Orkin sailed aboard Argentina to film and write about her passengers for Coronet magazine.

[21] On 18 February 1950 Harry Sandford Brown, Chairman of the Foster Wheeler Corporation, died aboard Argentina while en route from New York to Rio de Janeiro.

[3] The Italian tenor Tito Schipa and his wife Antoinette "Lilli" Michel were photographed sailing on Argentina (date not recorded).