Before the break of dawn on April 8, 1922, smoke billowed from Leviathan’s funnels for the first time in nearly three years. Tugs pushed the liner back into the Hudson and Leviathan, propellers churning, headed out to sea. The Gibbs brothers had signed on as members of the crew. Two days later, Leviathan, having averaged 17 knots, arrived with the dawn in Newport News, Virginia. “Everything was done exactly according to schedule,” Gibbs said to the press. “There was not a hitch anywhere. The engines worked beautifully.”26
William Francis worked at site for the next fifteen months, taking the train back to New York for weekends. Dressed in his black derby and overalls, “Iron Hat,” as the workers called him, roamed the ship at all hours, construction drawings tucked under his arm. Meanwhile, Homer Ferguson, the president of the Newport News yard, grew more nervous as every day passed. Gibbs was blocking every proposed change order and revision in the original project specifications. Racking up charges for change orders was how Ferguson had planned to make up for his original below-cost bid. The two men began to absolutely hate each other.27
Gibbs didn’t care. He had the full backing of the Shipping Board and work progressed rapidly. An army of two thousand workers nailed door frames together, screwed brass light plates in place, and ripped out the substandard electrical wiring, as mountains of supplies were brought on board every day. A set of Yorkshire pudding pans for the galley. Asparagus tongs for the ship’s Ritz-Carlton restaurant. A Santa Claus clock for the children’s playroom. Twenty typewriters and 160 gramophone records for the passengers.28 Four seventeenth-century Flemish canvases, plundered from the ship in 1917, were located and rehung in the first-class Social Hall. From the silver library inkwells to the silk-shaded dining table lamps, no expense was spared.
Down in the bowels of the ship, machinists carefully converted each of the ship’s forty-six boilers to burn oil instead of coal. This would not only increase the ship’s speed, but also eliminate hundreds of stokers from the crew roster. The four great turbine casings were lifted open, and thousands of blades were repaired, replaced, or cleaned. No longer smeared with coal dust and grease, the cathedral-like engine and boiler spaces, crisscrossed by ducts, stairwells, and piping, now gleamed in antiseptic white paint. Standing on scaffolding slung over the side, workers carefully brushed layers of shiny black paint on the hull and white on the superstructure. The smokestacks remained coated in red primer until the spring of 1923, just before Leviathan’s trials, when Gibbs gave the order to paint the stacks in the new United States Lines colors: a red base, followed by a white band, and a blue top.
By this time, Franklin and IMM had purchased Leviathan’s younger sister Bismarck from the British Reparations Board, completed her, and registered her as an English vessel. The new White Star flagship Majestic was billed as the largest ocean liner in the world.
In response, Gibbs put together a public relations trick. On April 22, 1923, the Shipping Board announced that when Leviathan entered service on July 4, she would top the Majestic’s size. Gibbs knew that the White Star flagship had a gross tonnage of 56,551. In ships, as noted earlier, this is a measure of size, not weight, and it is calculated by multiplying ship volume by a numerical constant. As built by HAPAG, Leviathan measured in at 2,000 tons smaller than Majestic. But using a different, U.S. tonnage multiplier, Gibbs recalculated Leviathan’s gross tonnage at 59,956.65.29 After receiving this news, White Star chairman Harold Sanderson snorted that “there was a ship which it was claimed could blow herself out as with a bicycle pump and then claim to be the largest ship afloat.”30 Gibbs struck back. At a press conference held with Lasker, the naval architect belittled a planned new flagship of IMM’s White Star Line. “Even the new Majestic… will not be in the class of the Leviathan.”31
The U.S. Shipping Board scheduled the maiden transatlantic voyage of the United States Line’s flagship for July 4, 1923. But for the first few voyages, the board decided that Gibbs Brothers Inc., not the new United States Lines, would train the crew and operate the vessel. Shipyard management continued to protest Gibbs’s tight hand on the contract. When asked by a congressional committee about how he had been able to convince the shipyard to sign the Leviathan reconditioning contract, Gibbs replied, “The specifications are drawn so that no contractor can possibly take this contract believing that he can take it at one price and make his profit on the contract out of possible extras.”
“Now, if I were a contractor,” one congressman asked, “why, it does not seem as though I would be induced to sign a contract like that. I am putting myself absolutely in the hands of the owner.”
“That’s right,” Gibbs said proudly. “I say this, you could not get me to stand between the Government of the United States and a private contractor on work involving the amount of money that this work involves, unless that provision is in the specifications.”32
Gibbs also faced criticism for his fees. For its time, the $182,000 he had negotiated with Lasker was a large amount for two brothers’ role as owner’s agent. “The question is very naturally provoked,” Marine News wrote in May 1923, “as to what charm Gibbs has over the Shipping Board or what influence he controls that brings to him these juicy retainers.” The article failed to say that the $182,000 payment was for the entire design team, not just for the Gibbs brothers.33
As the ship trials approached, a distraught Homer Ferguson, now facing a $1.25 million loss on the project, met with Collis Huntington, owner of the Newport News yard. Ferguson offered his resignation. But Huntington refused to accept it. “My wife owns most of the stock in the shipyard,” he said, “and she has not been feeling too well recently, so maybe we should say no more about it.”34
By September 1922, Philip Franklin heard that Gibbs Brothers Inc. was not a one-project firm, but was to become part of a private-public partnership with the United States Lines. Franklin found out in the newspapers that William Francis Gibbs had taken the same plan he had promoted to Jack Morgan six years earlier and sold it to Albert Lasker and the U.S. Shipping Board. The rumored arrangement—Leviathan, Gibbs’s two planned superliners, and a Montauk terminal all financed at government expense—could easily drive the privately controlled IMM out of business. Lasker hinted that he would hire “a managing staff of experts who had experience in handling the super liners to serve for a fixed fee.”35 It would not be IMM, but Gibbs Brothers Inc.