After the death of Robert Dollar in 1932, the Dollar Shipping Company became declining at the point in 1938 the S.S. President Coolidge was arrested (seized under admiralty law) in San Francisco for a £35,000 unpaid debt. At this point in 1938, the company was $7 million in debt, with interest increasing this by $80,000 per day. In August 1938, two months after the arrest of the S.S. President Coolidge, the United States Maritime Commission judged the Dollar Shipping Company unsound and assumed control over it, and the first order was renaming the company to the American President Lines, marking an end to the Dollar Line.

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Just before the American Entry into the war, the U.S. Government commissioned 16 new ships for APL in 1940, which continue the tradition of naming the ships “President”. By 1942, during the war, APL became one of the agents of the new U.S. War Shipping Administration along side American Export Lines. After the war, the company was privatized but continued making passenger services, though in 1958, as the Boeing 707 was making headaches to Passenger Shipping Lines, APL started investing in containerization.

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With this, and the increasing in air travel, APL last ocean liner, the S.S. President Wilson, made her last voyage in 1973. After that, APL started focusing only on cargo ships and trains to transport between ports. In 2016, APL became a subsidiary of the Compagnie maritime d'affrètement - Compagnie générale maritime, or just CMA-CGM, which until 1978 were two French companies: Messageries Maritimes (MM) and Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT or French Line).