Financing the project appeared impossible, especially since they had no formal training in ship design. Nevertheless, the Gibbs brothers felt this was their chance to change the direction of their lives and their country’s merchant marine. Passenger ships flying the American flag, such as the nearly twenty-year-old St. Louis, were obsolete and unable to compete for passengers. To realize their improbable dream, the brothers needed to sell their project to people with the money and know-how to finance its construction and operation.
There was only one American company that could do it: the International Mercantile Marine, then struggling to get out of bankruptcy. Somehow they had to get a meeting with the man in charge: John Pierpont Morgan Jr., son of the man who had financed the ill-fated Titanic. Clement Griscom, the company’s other cofounder and their father’s onetime business partner, was dead—the Gibbs brothers had to get to Morgan on their own.
As Gibbs’s superliner was just beginning to take form on his drafting table, Europe was on the precipice of a major conflict, one that would unleash the full force of mechanized warfare. Britain and Germany knew that their big, fast passenger liners could be converted into powerful military assets: troop transports and hospital ships. Across the ocean, American shipping interests like IMM feared a world war would disrupt trade and trigger the seizure of their European-flagged vessels.
Despite the war clouds, Germany’s mighty HAPAG, ignoring the possibility that the North Atlantic would become a war zone, dazzled the world with the first of three superliners, ships bigger and more luxurious than any the British had built. Even while Albert Ballin knew that Europe was moving toward war, all three of his ships were given provocative, even militaristic, names: Imperator (Latin for “Emperor”); Vaterland (Fatherland) and Bismarck (named for the nineteenth-century German “blood and iron” chancellor). The first ship, Imperator, was at 52,000 tons easily the largest ship in the world. Commissioned just a year after Titanic’s sinking, she had enough lifeboats for all of her nearly five thousand passengers and a massive searchlight to help spot icebergs. But critics were quick to point out that all the luxurious marble and heavy wood in her upper decks made her a terrible roller.
By building Imperator and her sisters, Ballin reneged on the profit-sharing agreement he had made with J. P. Morgan, an arrangement that had long irked German nationalists. Kaiser Wilhelm II called it a “scheme by the American plutocracy to prostrate Germany, if not Europe itself.”4
When the second sister, Vaterland, arrived in New York for the first time in May 1914, a group of cadets from the New York Maritime Academy at Fort Schuyler toured the vessel. As they passed by Commodore Hans Ruser, Vaterland’s captain, Ruser turned to one of his officers and snickered in German, “These boys, of course, will never have a ship like this.”5
One of the cadets, Harry Manning, was German-born, and overheard Ruser. Manning was furious. He would always remember the sting of the commodore’s arrogance. Years later he would have the satisfaction of helping William Francis Gibbs get the last word.
Commodore Ruser might have regretted arrogance of any sort as he prepared Vaterland for her return trip to Hamburg. As the ship’s band serenaded hundreds of well-wishers on the New Jersey pier, a mechanical failure caused Vaterland’s astern turbines to engage at full speed. The giant ship—with over two thousand passengers aboard—shot backward across the Hudson. Ruser’s crew somehow brought it to a halt before her stern rammed into the New York side of the river.6 When Vaterland returned to New York in late July, company headquarters ordered she remain there. War was imminent. Better the German flagship remain in a neutral American port than risk a mad dash across the Atlantic to Germany. Or so they thought.
When war did break out in early August 1914, the British Admiralty commandeered most liners for wartime trooping and hospital ship duty. By the end of the year, Cunard’s greyhound Lusitania was the only big British liner left in commercial service, and was run at low speed to save coal. The outlook for passenger business, especially for big liners, was bleak.7 Even so, Jack Morgan’s international shipping trust, IMM, continued to thrive under Philip Franklin, who loved the cutthroat, high-stakes game of shipping. He saw that with careful management, IMM might be in position to survive the economic crisis of war. The company’s diverse holdings could help it weather the temporary loss of its commandeered British ships. In fact, the boom in wartime cargo shipments to Britain became a nicely profitable business. In 1916, the shipments netted a profit of $26 million, a fourfold increase from the year before.8
Still, Franklin knew that IMM would have to avoid the mistake Morgan himself once made—basing future financial health on atypically high yearly revenues. For IMM’s longer-term outlook, Franklin decided the company needed to shift its focus away from Europe and become an “American,” not an “international,” mercantile marine company.
Cunard, IMM’s biggest British competitor, was having problems of its own. Most of their vessels were requisitioned for war service, but their two biggest ships proved to be problematic as warships because of their heavy fuel consumption. As a result, Lusitania remained in regular service and Mauretania became a hospital ship, and later a troopship. Both were designed to British Admiralty specifications, requiring bulkheads that ran lengthwise, parallel to the keel, and athwart ship, or side to side. At least one official at the British Board of Trade had argued that such compartmentalization made ships less stable when breached, and made lowering all the lifeboats impossible.9
He turned out to be correct. On May 7, 1915, Captain Walter Schwieger of German submarine U-20 sighted Lusitania off the west coast of Ireland, loafing along at 18 knots to make Liverpool on the tide. Schwieger launched a single torpedo that slammed into Lusitania’s hull, sending up a plume of steam and flames. Shortly after the strike, a much larger explosion blew her bottom out. The ship’s power and steering then failed, trapping dozens in jammed elevator cages. In twenty minutes, Lusitania smashed onto the sea floor, a twisted wreck. Only 6 of her 48 lifeboats got away. Of the 2,000 passengers and crew on board, nearly 1,200 died. One hundred and twenty-eight were Americans, including millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt.
What caused the second explosion became a matter of intense controversy. The British press charged (incorrectly it proved) that it was a second torpedo. The Germans said that munitions—possibly purchased by the House of Morgan acting as a British agent—exploded in her cargo holds. Whatever the case, Lusitania’s longitudinal compartmentalization—bulkheads that ran parallel to the keel—hastened her end and those of the people who drowned.
The sinking of Lusitania galvanized American public opinion against Germany and spurred legislation providing government support for American shipbuilding. The Shipping Act of 1916, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, authorized the building of commercial ships to transport American goods abroad in times of war. The bill also created a five-man governing body, known as the United States Shipping Board, which would operate the government-owned ships as well as regulate freight and passenger rates.10