When asked by reporters what that meant, Gibbs deadpanned: “That means we’ve made over 28 knots and broken the world’s speed record. It means we can trim the best the British have got or anything else afloat in the class of big merchant ships.”3
Gibbs then sent a cable that was published in the New York Times the next day. “If the Majestic, the world’s next largest liner, was here, the Leviathan would pass her by a knot and a half every time.” But in regular service, he added, the operators of Leviathan would not try to capture the Blue Riband from Mauretania “unless the others start some fancy business. Then we will use our untouched reserves.”4
Gibbs failed to say that the warm water current of the Gulf Stream probably added about two to three knots to her speed. And unlike Mauretania’s trials eighteen years earlier, Leviathan’s trials did not consist of runs with and against the wind and currents. As for the British, speed and distance meant nothing unless the ship achieved the highest average speed between the British Isles and New York.
Gibbs and his team left nothing to chance to make sure Leviathan’s maiden voyage would be a sensation with the public. A brochure featuring glamorous models boasted that “the airiness and spaciousness of Leviathan interiors is apparent. And the absence of expensive bad taste is notable.”5 Newspaper ads claimed that Leviathan was “the World’s Largest and Most Beautiful Ship.”6 The Charleston craze was sweeping the country, and the ship’s orchestra released a set of dance records. The maiden voyage was scheduled to begin on the Fourth of July.
When the day arrived and as Captain Hartley and the engine room staff got up steam, ten Army and Navy biplanes whizzed over the ship’s three red, white, and blue stacks, even as a hard rain pelted the ten thousand flag-waving spectators crammed onto the pier. Thousands more well-wishers jammed against the street railings. The cheers and shouts were met with three window-rattling booms from Leviathan’s whistles as the huge ship backed into the Hudson River.
At the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, Gibbs spent years transforming the big German liner into the finest and biggest passenger ship ever to fly the Stars and Stripes. As an American wartime troopship, Leviathan had been well-known to an entire generation of World War I veterans. Now she was, in the eyes of the public, Americanized from stem to stern, and ready to compete. No matter for the time being that she lacked comparable running mates and that her bars were dry.
For her first voyage as the flagship of the United States Lines, Leviathan carried more than 1,700 passengers and a crew of 1,100. Taking in $520,000 in passenger fares and carrying mail worth another $20,000, the crossing was going to be a profitable one.7
The country that had built her nine years earlier did not share in the jubilation of the American public. After the Treaty of Versailles, ships that the Americans had not taken were seized by the British as war reparations. Germany’s once-mighty commercial fleet had been reduced to the mechanically defective Hansa—the former Blue Riband holder Deutschland—and a few small cargo vessels. Racked by inflation and political unrest, the Fatherland’s days of North Atlantic shipbuilding supremacy seemed over. So did its days of industrial and military might.
The first afternoon out, hundreds gathered in the first-class Social Hall, filled with the happy sound of a jazz band and the clink of crystal ware. Alice Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, unveiled a life-size portrait of President Harding by Howard Chandler Christy to polite applause. Senator Reed Smoot of Utah was led to say that it was the first time he had not become seasick on a transatlantic crossing. Among those watching was Vincent Astor, traveling to England to oversee the transfer of some family money to his younger sister. As night wore on, people moved to the first-class dining room, where soft lighting showed off a sweeping grand staircase leading down to richly decorated tables, capable of seating seven hundred.8
It was the Prohibition era, and Captain Hartley had insisted that the government-owned Leviathan would be “as dry as a bone.” He said he kept a close eye out for any alcohol that might have been smuggled aboard. A reporter for the New York Times was skepticaclass="underline" “There were some gay little parties in private suites, and if someone produced a bottle at a public meal no official notice was taken of it.”9
That night, President Harding wired Albert Lasker, who was on board. “I hope the prestige the great ship is giving the merchant marine will prove a compensation to you for your wholly unselfish service rendered to the Government for two years,” he wrote. “Accept assurances of warmest personal regards.”10 Less than a month later, the ailing Harding would be dead, his administration embroiled in scandal.
Leviathan dropped anchor in Cherbourg, France, on the morning of July 9, 1923. Captain Hartley had driven her at an average speed of 23.65 knots and made the 3,239 mile voyage in 5 days, 17 hours, and 7 minutes. This was over a day longer and three knots slower than Mauretania’s record passage fourteen years earlier.11 As planned, the United States Lines was not planning to break any records on this trip.
On the other side of the English Channel, residents of Southampton had been awaiting Leviathan’s arrival. After tugs nudged Leviathan into her dock, stewards set up the first-class dining room for a six-hundred-person luncheon on July 12. The guest of honor was the mayor of Southampton. Ever on the lookout for city revenue, he challenged America to build even more Leviathans; the Port of Southampton, he promised, would be ready to receive them.12
“We are going to compete with you to the best of our ability,” William Francis Gibbs told his audience, “but we will never do a single thing which would not be considered fair on a British football field.”13 This description was not, of course, a fair characterization of how he had recently inflated the size of Leviathan.
Though no liquor was served and the summer sun turned the dining room into a steambath, the audience stood and applauded the president of Gibbs Brothers. Yet William Francis chose not to bask in his newfound fame. During the actual reconstruction work, he avoided the press as much as possible. He authored no major articles or papers in the shipbuilding trade journals promoting his achievement. Gibbs thought publicity “treacherous,” and he avoided it so as “not to get bitten.”14
Gibbs did have enemies jealous of his sudden fame: other naval architects, who resented his lack of formal training and knack for forming tight connections with government officials. Those inside that closed world thought of him as an amateur interloper and called him “the Parvenu” behind his back. Proper Philadelphians of his childhood would have said “north of Market.”
On the trip back to New York, the liner carried 1,174 passengers—less than a third of her capacity. She did not make notable speed, either. She entered her home port on July 23, having made the return trip in 5 days, 12 hours, and 11 minutes at an average speed of 23.9 knots, still well behind Mauretania’s westbound Blue Riband performance.15