Jack Morgan made a complete recovery. “The experience was a very disagreeable one,” Jack wrote to his friend Owen Wister. “I was singularly fortunate.”24
Jack Morgan’s place of business was at 23 Wall Street. The House of Morgan lay hidden in a forest of skycrapers at the southern tip of Manhattan, an austere gray limestone building only five stories high. It looked more like a temple than a bank. Yet its power inspired near-religious awe on Wall Street, for it underwrote securities for the biggest trusts in the world, including the International Mercantile Marine.
It was here that William Francis and Frederic Gibbs had their audience with a recovered Jack Morgan and Philip Franklin of IMM.
“My brother and I proceeded immediately to lay out our key designs and blueprints,” Frederic recalled later. “As we did, my brother explained each special feature.”
The drawings called for the two largest and fastest ships ever constructed. Each would cost about $30 million, more than three times the amount J. P. Morgan Sr. had paid to build Titanic several years earlier.
The young designer then launched into the second part of his presentation: the Montauk sea-land terminal would cost about $15 million, and would have easy access to ground transportation, as well as plenty of room to expand.
Suddenly Jack Morgan got up from his seat and walked out of his office. Franklin scurried after his boss, and a door slammed behind them.
The Gibbs brothers sat in Morgan’s office, as their confusion turned into anxiety. “That wait seemed like eternity,” Frederic recalled. “It was about 20 minutes, but each minute seemed like an hour. We stood and looked at each other. I rolled up some of my biggest blueprints. My brother looked at his watch. Neither of us said a word. For the rest of my life I never have endured a wait such as that one.”25
The Gibbs brothers’ stomachs were turning when Morgan and Franklin walked back into the office. Jack sat down at his desk and stared at the Gibbs brothers.
As William Francis Gibbs started to say something, Morgan raised his hand and intoned, “Very well, I will back you. How much money do you need to work up final plans?”26
William Francis Gibbs, aged twenty-nine, and Fredric Gibbs, aged twenty-seven, had convinced two of the savviest businessmen in the country to finance a hugely expensive superliner project. And they were to start to work immediately.
The Gibbs brothers moved out of their family’s Haverford home and into a New York apartment at 31 East Forty-Ninth Street, just off Fifth Avenue. A few months later, they were at the Washington Navy Yard again, staring at a modified scale model of their ship, floating in the Navy’s test tank. This time the Navy model builders had added four propeller bossings (winglike structures enclosing the shafts) to simulate the drag created by the vessel’s quadruple screws. The test proved once again that at 180,000 horsepower, a 30-knot ship was possible.
With Morgan’s bankroll behind him, Gibbs recruited an engineering and design team to work on S-171 at Franklin’s IMM. As work continued into early 1917, Gibbs could look out of his office at 11 Broadway and see several large German passenger ships tied up across the Hudson River. As seagulls wheeled around their masts, marooned German sailors paced the decks, wondering if they would ever make it home. These HAPAG and Norddeutscher Lloyd ships had been stuck at their Hoboken, New Jersey, piers since war broke out almost three years earlier. The German liner that caught William Francis Gibbs’s eye towered over the rest. She was the largest ship in the world, Vaterland, flagship of the mighty HAPAG and the pride of Albert Ballin and imperial Germany.
6. PRIZES OF WAR
As the Gibbs brothers won the support of the House of Morgan, America moved closer and closer to war. On January 31, 1917, a starving, blockaded Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, which meant that all ships carrying supplies to Great Britain could be sunk without warning. On a single day in March, submarines sank three American-flagged vessels carrying supplies to Britain, and the public wanted revenge. In Hoboken, the pro-German charity balls aboard the interned HAPAG flagship Vaterland once attended by the likes of anti-British newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, ceased. Her palatial public rooms fell silent.
On April 6, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany, after which two hundred American soldiers stormed aboard Vaterland to seize what was considered a prize of war. Sixty policemen guarded the pier entrance. Other military units seized several other idle large German liners docked in Hoboken and Boston, imprisoning their now-enemy crews and hoisting the Stars and Stripes on their fantails.1
“You will never run her!” shouted Vaterland’s chief engineer, Otto Wolf, as he was hauled off to Ellis Island to be detained along with the rest of the German crew. When asked if he had sabotaged Vaterland’s engines, Wolf was reported to have laughed. “Ruin those engines? I didn’t have to. They were ruined before she ever started on her first trip out of Hamburg. I will take my hat off to the Yankee engineer that can ever make that rubbish do decent work.”2
The Germans indeed had done some hasty sabotage. Some shipboard machinery had been sliced with hacksaws. Telegraphs had been smashed, and blueprints destroyed. However, an expert from the Brooklyn Navy Yard also determined the engines were poorly designed and that, “the major part of the damage appears to have been due to faulty operation.” The public was not told, but damage from the accidental backing into the Hudson three years earlier had been so bad that on her last crossing, Vaterland was limping along on three propellers.3
Despite her condition, the American government still needed the ship to take troops to the front. During the next few months, construction crews repaired Vaterland’s engines, installed rows of standee bunks, smashed partitions to create open dormitories, and carted away truckloads of furniture. Workers then looted anything of value left—table linens, silverware, paintings, faucets, marble sinks, brass bedsteads, and a bronze bust of the hated Kaiser Wilhelm II. Portraits of German royalty were slashed with bayonets.4 The outraged German public felt that the Americans had destroyed a German national treasure.
When asked for a new name for America’s biggest war prize, President Wilson replied, “Why, that’s easy, Leviathan…. It’s in the Bible, monster of the deep.”5 The former German flagship would eventually transport nearly 120,000 American soldiers to the Western Front, sometimes carrying as many as 14,000 men per voyage. Crew, doughboys, officers, and dockworkers affectionately called her “the Big Train.”
Overseeing troop and cargo transport to Europe was a new government body, the Shipping Control Committee. To head it, President Wilson turned to an experienced elder from the industry: Philip Franklin, who promptly took leave from IMM and moved to the old HAPAG offices in New York, which had been seized by the government. There he spent hours bent over maps and charts, carefully allocating troops and cargo for ships bound for the European front.
Franklin took more than a professional interest in using passenger liners to transport American troops. In the spring of 1917, his twenty-one-year-old son John, then nearing the end of his junior year at Harvard, decided to leave school and serve his country. He was a popular varsity rower but was in dire academic straits. John Franklin saw a way out when Harvard handed out certificates to any student who left to enlist; he got one and did not look back. “It was the only kind of diploma I ever received,” he said later.6