Gibbs Brothers Inc. would operate Leviathan for two more round trips before the U.S. Shipping Board forced the company to relinquish control of what was now regarded as the greatest ship in the world to its government-backed United States Lines. For the three trips run by the Gibbs brothers, during the high season of 1923, Leviathan earned a profit of $277,406.01.16
But during the next ten years, few crossings made money. The postwar world had brought new challenges to passenger shipping, especially for American vessels. First there was Prohibition, which had proved so troublesome to Captain Hartley to enforce on Leviathan’s maiden voyage. America’s ban on alcohol had become law on New Year’s Day 1920. Not only Leviathan but all U.S.-flagged ships had been required to stop serving liquor, a deficiency that pushed many passengers to choose the more spirited accommodations of foreign-flagged shipping lines.
Then there were the moves to restrict American immigration. The refurbished Leviathan could carry 4,505 passengers, nearly half in third class and steerage—a class of passenger not welcomed by American anti-immigration forces. In 1924, U.S. laws would slam the country’s doors shut to eastern and southern Europeans, dealing a huge blow to the transatlantic liner business. To survive, many lines turned steerage into “Tourist Third Cabin” or “Tourist Class” to appeal to passengers who considered themselves respectable, to travel on the cheap. A White Star advertisement trumpeted the virtues of traveling economically: “The fittings of course, will be somewhat less luxurious, but no less pleasing.”17
The public still hoped that Leviathan, which supposedly had attained over 28 knots on her trial runs, would use those “untapped reserves” of engine power about which William Francis Gibbs had boasted. The editors of the nation’s premier naval architectural journal, Marine Engineering and Shipping News, wanted to see “the greatest sporting event on the ocean that the world has ever seen.” This would be a transatlantic race between Leviathan and Majestic. “All English-speaking people go in for a fair sport,” an editor wrote, “and, instead of engendering any ill-feeling between the two great Anglo-Saxon nations, the reverse, would undoubtedly result…. Let’s be game!”18
That the two ships were German-built didn’t seem to bother the people promoting the race.
Nor did the magazine seem to care that it was Mauretania, not Majestic, that still held the Blue Riband. After her 1920 refit, Mauretania was even a faster ship, now capable of reaching 27 knots in spurts. But no competent master would ever think of pitting Leviathan against Mauretania in a head-to-head race. The German-built hull could not withstand the punishment of moving at 25 knots in rough seas for long stretches. Despite all the improvements Gibbs Brothers had worked into her, she still had poorly designed superstructure expansion joints and a design flaw in the funnel shafts (called uptakes). Rather than have one continuous shaft from boiler to smokestack, Leviathan’s German designers split these uptakes in half and moved them to the sides of the ship. The two uptakes then merged into one exhaust near the top deck, and smoke was then ejected from the funnel. This allowed first-class public rooms to be bigger and gave passengers broad, uninterrupted views from one public space to the next.19 However, this innovation greatly weakened the integrity of the hull.
The design flaw did not become apparent until 1924, when crewmen of Leviathan’s sister Majestic noted stress fractures in upper decks just forward of the first stack. Management chose to ignore the problem. That December, however, as Majestic hurtled through a storm at full speed, passengers heard a terrific noise “like a cannon shot.” The main deck had cracked open along its entire width, just beneath the second funnel’s twin uptakes, and another crack had opened up along the ship’s port side. Majestic limped gingerly into port, and underwent expensive repairs at Harland & Wolff. When Gibbs got the news, Leviathan was quickly pulled out of service so that the same weak area around her split funnel uptakes and expansion joints could be shored up with additional plating and bracing.20
“It was a poor design,” Gibbs’s electrical engineer said later about Leviathan’s funnel design. “Too many sharp corners. We didn’t know it until we drove her hard.”21
One of the officers on Leviathan’s maiden voyage would ultimately become the best American skipper on the high seas. He loved the rumbling of the turbines beneath his shoes, how her red, white, and blue funnels towered over every ship in sight. Like William Francis Gibbs, he saw great ocean liners not as mere machines, but as living beings. “You know enough to meet a ship as an individual,” he said, “a thing with idiosyncrasies and temperament. Every single ship has personality.”22
Hot-tempered and cocksure, Harry Manning had no shortage of personality himself. He was just twenty-six when he was appointed second officer of Leviathan in the summer of 1923. He had been on the ship for the first time in May 1914, when a group of cadets from the New York Maritime College had toured what was then the Vaterland. It was he who overheard German commodore Hans Ruser sneer that America would never have a ship like this.
Now she did, thanks to William Francis Gibbs.
Manning was born Harry Luelker in Germany. However, Harry’s mother remarried a British Foreign Service officer on assignment, and the young boy took his stepfather’s name. When Harry was ten, he moved with his family to New York City.23 The neighborhood kids found it easy to bully a brainy, fragile-looking child with a lisp, and Harry often came home with a bloody nose.24 After high school, Harry chose the New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx: the Harvard of the sailing world, perched on an outcrop above Long Island Sound.
At five feet, six inches, Manning was the smallest member of his class. By then he was quite capable of defending himself. He rounded out his academic regimen by getting into fistfights with classmates who made fun of him. After graduation and a stint on a small sailing ship, he signed on the aging American Line’s liner St. Paul as an able seaman for fifteen dollars a month.25 When the United States Lines was formed in 1922, Manning jumped at the chance to serve as first officer of George Washington, which like Leviathan had been seized at the outbreak of World War I. He then received an appointment to the biggest and fastest ship flying the American flag, Leviathan. As second officer, Manning spent most of his day either on the bridge or in the chart room, and did not socialize with passengers. He was a teetotaler and never smoked, but he taught himself the tango and took boxing lessons. Boxing, he said, was like the North Atlantic in winter. “She will strike you if you get careless,” he said. “You must be watching all the time. She lunges in and probes at you.”26
Second Officer Manning’s reputation as a boxer helped him to manage the ship’s crew of one thousand, which was packed into a rabbit warren of dark corridors, mess rooms, and machinery spaces in the lowest reaches of Leviathan’s belly. Manning kept an emotional distance from the crew. He hated the radical left-wing union activities that were emerging in the shipping business, and he had refused to join the Masters, Mates & Pilots union of the American Federation of Labor. “I’ll starve before I join,” he said.27