Lasker’s decision put IMM’s big investment in Leviathan in trouble and threatened Gibbs’s own work. William Francis decided to do some public relations campaigning of his own. On July 16, 1921, he showed the new chairman all over the big ship, with Philip Franklin and a clutch of newspaper reporters in tow. Lasker saw a row of draftsmen hard at work, as well as a mock-up of a renovated first-class cabin.
The advertising man liked, the way Gibbs sold the project: with firm conviction, utter sincerity, and ardent patriotism. Converted, Lasker felt that he could sell the project to the public. European companies who built big ships like this, Lasker told the press, “did not expect to make money, but considered that owning such fine vessels was the best possible advertisement for the German merchant marine.”14 If restored as an American liner, Lasker said, Leviathan would be “the finest vessel ever turned out in the history of the world, both mechanically and from the standpoint of luxury… an announcement to the whole wide world as to what can be done in American shipyards and by American mechanics.”15
“Does this mean that she will be operated under the British flag?” one reporter asked.
“It most emphatically does not,” Franklin shot back, adding, “It means that she will be under the American flag and the nucleus of a fast American mail service.”16
Lasker then returned to the Shipping Board’s Manhattan offices to begin his plan to sell Leviathan as an America icon.
But relations between Lasker and Franklin were cool. In August 1921, Lasker began to negotiate secretly with shipping men outside IMM. His aim was to create a management team to operate Leviathan, America, George Washington, and other Shipping Board–owned vessels as passenger liners. Lasker felt that IMM, thanks to Hearst’s attack, carried too much political baggage to be part of the team. Instead, the planned “United States Lines” would be managed by three private shipping companies: Roosevelt Steamship Company, Moore-McCormack, and United American, all controlled by four rich and well-connected young men: Kermit Roosevelt (son of the recently deceased president Theodore); Emmet McCormack and Albert V. Moore (two men who ran a lucrative South American shipping business); and W. Averell Harriman (heir to the Union Pacific fortune).17
On October 4, 1921, Philip Franklin was asked to come to the Shipping Board’s New York office for an afternoon of questioning by Lasker and six senators, including populist firebrand Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. The president of IMM, who had thought he had the Leviathan operating contract locked up, quickly realized that Lasker wanted him and his company out of the project and wanted to keep the Gibbs brothers in.
As William Francis Gibbs wrapped up the Leviathan construction drawings to meet the October deadline, he was also planning his and his brother’s exit from IMM. Working for a shipping company that seemed to make political enemies at every turn did not seem to be a good use of his hard work. Maybe the best course of action was to start a new firm to move the Leviathan renovation forward. But he needed political and financial support to make sure Leviathan didn’t end up in a scrapyard and his hard work gathering dust on a shelf. His boss Franklin might have been a prudent businessman, but he was no bold visionary. Gibbs decided to throw in his lot with the government. There was also the chance that Lasker could get the money for Gibbs to build one, maybe two, ships of his own design.
The Leviathan refurbishment plans, all 1,024 detailed pages, were completed at the end of 1921. They covered not only the specifications for the refurbishment, but the materials and workmanship required. As impressive as the plans were, more impressive was their legal impact. Buried in the massive tome was language giving William Francis Gibbs, as government agent, final say over materials and workmanship. Provision after provision included the phrase “with the intent of these specifications and plans.” That “intent” was to be determined by the designer, not the shipyard. “Intent” meant whatever Gibbs decided it meant. The document ensured that any contractor agreeing to use the plans would be subject to Gibbs’s oversight. If he felt a piece of work was shoddy, it would have to be ripped out and done over at the contractor’s expense.
The plans also included clauses to prevent shipyards from throwing in extra charges for “overlooked” items—an easy-to-abuse practice that let low bidders up their profits. Finally, as part of the ship’s final “purification,” the shipyard was required to make “necessary changes to eliminate essentially German subjects from their design.”18 These included recarving of the wood mantel and replacing twenty-four stained glass windows in the first-class smoking room, as well as relettering any signs that had been missed during the troopship conversion.19 By December 29, 1921, there were eight bids from shipyards for the Leviathan refurbishment. The lowest bid came in from Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company: $5,595,000 for the refurbishing and restoration work, and another $500,000 to convert her to burn oil instead of coal. Newport News was hurting badly after the cutbacks in naval construction after the war. Yard president Homer Ferguson had underbid to get what he saw as a plum project.20
But in order to oversee the bidding process, William Francis Gibbs had to temporarily extricate himself from IMM. With Lasker’s blessing, he would be working with a new naval engineering firm, whose sole purpose supposedly was to repurpose the big ship. In February 1922, Lasker announced the formation of Gibbs Brothers Inc., with William Francis Gibbs as president and Frederic Gibbs as vice president. The new company would serve as “owner’s agents” for the Shipping Board, making Gibbs the sole government representative in the design and construction process. For their labors, the Gibbs brothers and their staff would receive $182,000.21
Up against the government, Franklin had no choice but to let his chief of construction go on loan, and Gibbs walked out of the IMM offices with Leviathan’s plans under his arm. A number of top IMM designers also asked for leaves of absence to join him. Most would never come back.
Shortly after the press conference, Franklin relinquished all claims on Leviathan, saying that IMM had “decided to comply with Lasker’s request and we have consented to the cancellation of our contract.”22
Months would pass before the Newport News yard was ready to receive the vessel, but William Francis Gibbs was thrilled to be in charge of the biggest postwar marine construction project in America. On April 7, the night before the ship would be moved to the yard, the naval architect gazed at his giant vessel as the Hudson lapped against her sides and a few lights glowed dimly from her upper works. “Human endurance could do no more,” he told a reporter. “The ship belongs to the people and our responsibility is very great.”23
It was only 270 miles to Newport News, little more than a day’s sail away, but the Gibbs brothers, worried about problems at sea, had stocked a month’s worth of provisions to feed the four-hundred-man crew. They also worried about the ship’s frayed single-wire electrical system, which had not been maintained for years. Every single lightbulb, bridge control, and appliance on board was connected to the ship’s main electrical switchboard by an individual wire. The return, or ground, wire was then bolted directly onto the ship’s structural steel. It was a cumbersome, lethal setup. A short circuit could ignite the flammable insulation placed on top of the wiring.24 Gibbs’s electrical engineer Norman Zippler had designed a safer double-wiring system to end the threat, but it could not be installed until the ship was in the yard. For the voyage down, Gibbs made sure that new fire hoses were installed throughout the vessel, and “fifty streams as large as those of the city fire department can be brought into action at one time if the necessity should arise.”25