Gibbs had a vision: to reconvert the world’s biggest liner into an American-flagged superliner. He would then oversee the construction of two even bigger running mates, built according to his own S-171 designs. Ultimately, his reconstruction of Leviathan, the famed World War I troopship, would catapult him to fame and gain him much-needed professional respectability.
Yet as he worked on the reconversion of Leviathan, Gibbs realized that his employer, the International Mercantile Marine, was losing interest in building a superliner from his own designs. If IMM was getting cold feet, Gibbs would find someone else, and he was determined to gamble his brief career on it.
The months following the armistice had kept William Francis Gibbs busy. All during the spring and summer of 1919, as Leviathan carried thousands of victorious American doughboys home, Gibbs set sail in the other direction, bound for the Paris Peace Conference. His boss had loaned him to Shipping Board chief Edward Hurley, who was impressed by the young man’s encyclopedic knowledge of the arcana of the European ocean liner business. Just four years after becoming known as an amateur with a ship plan drawn up in his attic, Gibbs was making a name for himself deciding the fate of America’s biggest war prize: the captured German passenger liner fleet.
He also got his first look at the German shipyard of Blohm & Voss in Hamburg, builders of so many of the great Teutonic liners he had read about as a teenager. Gibbs had seen the third and final ship in Ballin’s trio, Bismarck, which everyone at the shipyard anticipated would be turned over to the British as reparations. German workers, still working at various heights aboard the unfinished giant, saw a knot of British and American shipping executives below them. Gibbs heard a loud clank. An iron wrench slammed onto the pavement not far away. Thinking it was an accident, Gibbs walked on. Moments later, another wrench barely missed him. The workers were not happy about how the war had turned out and even less happy to see Americans in the shipyard.
After nearly having his head bashed in, the American naval architect met with the Blohm & Voss executives and asked them to supply IMM with Leviathan’s original construction drawings. The shipyard demanded $1 million for the complete set. Gibbs said no thanks, and sailed back to New York.5 Meanwhile, Philip Franklin was negotiating with the Shipping Board, which managed government-owned merchant ships, to take control of Leviathan. With the troops home, the Navy decommissioned the former German liner and tied her up at the same Hoboken pier where she was laid up from 1914 to 1917. On November 5, 1919, the Shipping Board announced that Leviathan and two smaller liners would be assigned to IMM for “management and operation on behalf of the Shipping Board.”6 For their services, the U.S. Shipping Board would pay IMM a handsome $15,000 a month.7 For Franklin, the government had effectively sold the ships to IMM, creating the core of a new transatlantic service.
But Franklin decided that the reconversion of Leviathan was enough of a strain on his company’s resources. He announced that the acquisition of Leviathan meant the S-171 superliner would be put on indefinite hold. Instead, he would look into rehabbing the medium-size former German liners George Washington and Amerika, both of which were almost fifteen years old.
Gibbs was furious. Why use three older, slow liners instead of building two modern fast ones?
Nonetheless, the Gibbs brothers set to work on reconditioning Leviathan, the former German imperial flagship Vaterland and still the largest ship in the world.
As William Francis Gibbs and his team toiled away on the battered troopship, Leviathan became the center of an intense public controversy, one that nearly destroyed the ambitious project. On January 17, 1920, IMM president Franklin sent the U.S. Shipping Board a down payment against a total price of $28 million to secure full ownership of the ship and several other former German liners. At that point in stepped the bombastic, populist journalist William Randolph Hearst, who had decided that the IMM was getting a sweetheart deal that needed to be exposed to the American taxpayer, the owners of the ships. The pro-German, pro-Irish, and anti-British Hearst had long hated Woodrow Wilson. For Hearst, a secret, no-bid deal between the Wilson administration’s Shipping Board and J. P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine had all the elements of a damning scandal that would sell a lot of papers and advance his own presidential ambitions. Hearst planned to tell the story as America giving away the captured German fleet, the nation’s great prize of war, to IMM, the owner of the British White Star Line and thus a British company in all but name. Eight years earlier, Hearst had bashed IMM after the Titanic disaster.
A month after Franklin’s down payment arrived in Washington, Hearst’s flagship New York American charged that the sale of Leviathan would cause “great and irreparable harm to the present state of national defense and will destroy the Army transport reserve.”8 Hearst also filed a taxpayer lawsuit against the Shipping Board, claiming that it had no right to sell Leviathan and the other twenty-nine seized German vessels for only $28 million.
Franklin fought back. The day Hearst filed suit, IMM reduced its offer to $14 million for Leviathan and only a few of the other ex-German liners. “We again agreed to undertake to recondition the steamers and to comply with other terms with regard to their being operated in specified trades and remaining under the American flag,” Franklin announced.9
Franklin’s hopes were dashed when on February 19, the judge sided with Hearst, granting a formal injunction on the sale of the ships to IMM. The next day, President Wilson denied all rumors about selling the ships to Great Britain.10
The stalemate continued, and William Francis Gibbs, still on IMM’s payroll, continued to work on the Leviathan plans. “This situation makes me mad,” he fumed to a reporter about how Hearst had caused the Wilson administration to cave. “Here America has the brightest chance she ever will to compete with and excel British shipping in their chief boast: the transatlantic trade…. Here is the chance for the United States to run the finest ship on the ocean, and a few million dollars is holding her up.”11 Terrified about fire breaking out or board, he refused to cut maintenance expenses. “Considering the value of this steamer and the fact that it is practically irreplaceable,” he wrote one government official, “I feel strongly that the expense for guarding is well justified.”12
In 1921, however, a new president took office, and Gibbs, frustrated at the impasse his project was facing, decided to reach out to the Harding administration. Although Warren G. Harding assuredly did not possess Woodrow Wilson’s intellect, he made at least one smart political appointment: an advertising executive named Albert Lasker, who had almost single-handedly put the small-town Ohio politician in the White House. The founder of an influential school of advertising, Lasker had provided Harding with a simple campaign slogan: “A Return to Normalcy.” This was a presumed state of the country before the war, which state had been subverted by the fervent “Make the World Safe for Democracy” idealism of Woodrow Wilson.13
A grateful President Harding named Lasker chairman of the United States Shipping Board. Although he wanted to be secretary of commerce, Lasker took the job. He promptly fired the four Wilson appointees on the six-member board and took control. Lasker knew next to nothing about ships, but intrigued by Leviathan, he decided not to sell her to IMM. Instead he would keep her under government ownership and lease her to a private operator.