Unhappy crewmen could be aggressive. On one trip, Manning put a coffee cup to his lips, gagged, and spat everything out. A steward had dumped roach poison into his coffee. His hands became scarred by knife fights with stowaways and “various obstreperous members of the crew” who hated his authoritarian ways.28
But Manning also had his conflicts with the authority of management, specifically his boss on Leviathan, Commodore Herbert Hartley. After a few crossings, they despised each other. For Manning, Hartley was a stuffy celebrity worshipper; for Hartley, Manning was an insolent egotist.
One night, First Officer Linder informed Commodore Hartley that a frame section within the foremast mast was rusty and needed inspection. The two men started the long climb to the crow’s nest. After inspecting the frame, the commodore and first officer stepped out onto the crow’s nest and peered over Leviathan’s bow. A cold blast whistled through the rigging, tore at their heavy leather overcoats, and stung their faces.
On the bridge, Second Officer Manning was standing watch.
As he squinted, Hartley saw a large ship barreling toward them. “Must be the Paris!” he shouted to Linder, who picked up the crow’s nest phone to the bridge and told Manning that the French Line’s new flagship was heading right toward them.
“Tell that stupid son of a bitch I can see what I’m doing,” Manning snarled into the receiver.
A shocked Linder told Manning that the captain was standing right next to him and could hear every word coming out of the phone.
Fixing his eyes on the crow’s nest through the bridge windows, Manning shouted, “I can see the bastard!”
“You know Hartley heard every last word,” Linder said.
After coming down from the mast, a silent but fuming Hartley told Linder to report to the bridge and relieve Manning from his watch.
“But Mr. Manning’s watch is not over. It’s only three-thirty, sir.”
“Do as I say,” Hartley said.
Linder saluted and climbed up to the bridge, where he saw Manning standing defiantly at his post, his small, slight frame standing against the bridge’s polished brass and gleaming woodwork. This little man, who wore his cap pulled low over his eyes, glared back at Linder, as if to remind him that he felt completely at ease commanding a ship with three thousand souls aboard.
“You are relieved,” Linder told Manning, adding, “You’ve done it this time.”
In his quarters, Hartley swiveled around in his chair and stared intently at his second officer. “Mr. Manning,” Hartley said slowly, “I am not stupid, I am not a son of a bitch. And I am not a bastard.”
Manning said nothing.
“Now,” Hartley continued, “there are eleven gangways leading off this ship at Pier Eighty-Six. I don’t care which one you take, but you take one and never come back!”29
Manning was unrepentant. “I was an awful son of a bitch in those days,” he recalled proudly.
He left Leviathan on one of those gangways, but he was simply too valuable a mariner to be left “on the beach,” as the sailors would say. By January 1927, he got his first command: the small United States liner President Roosevelt.
The day he came aboard, the Hudson was choked with ice as gray clouds dropped sleet on Manhattan piers. But when Manning took his place on the bridge of the small, sturdy vessel, he was a happy man. “Navigation in bad weather was my specialty,” he said about his first trip as a master, “and we had no trouble on that score.”30
Two years later, Captain Manning’s death-defying rescue of the crew of a sinking Italian cargo ship made him a national hero. By then chief officer of America, he had heard the cargo ship’s distress call in the middle of an Atlantic gale. In the storm, it was impossible to bring the large liner close enough for a rescue, so Manning led a small lifeboat crew that fought the storm for an hour, to get to the Italian sailors just as their ship was sinking.
During most of the 1920s, France, Britain, and the United States were all still operating ships built before World War I. The victorious British quickly absorbed their seized German liners as national symbols. Cunard struggled for a while operating the former HAPAG giant Imperator—which they received as reparations for Lusitania—losing fifty thousand dollars per voyage. Her new owners stuck with the big liner, and in early 1921 renamed her Berengaria in honor of the wife of Richard the Lionhearted. She, along with her big running mates Mauretania and Aquitania, was converted to burn oil instead of coal, and they became the most profitable and famous trio of liners on the Atlantic, running a weekly service between New York and European ports. IMM’s White Star Line also prospered by operating with its German-built Majestic in concert with the popular Olympic. But as the decade ended and the 1930s began, shipbuilders and nation builders began to look ahead.
Germany, which had lost most of its fleet to war reparations, was left with one choice: to rebuild from scratch. By the middle of the decade, Bremen-based Norddeutscher Lloyd had raised enough private capital and government funding to build two revolutionary ships, whose designs were kept absolutely secret. The British, French, and Italians, all of whom were feeling rich thanks to the booming 1920s economy, also started to make grand plans.
Gibbs guessed that the new ships would make all existing liners, including Leviathan, obsolete. In 1927, he wrote of American ships that “there is no vessel that can step into the Leviathan’s place, as her obsolescence—I use the term in its strictly technical engineering sense—increases.”31
The large fee from the Leviathan rebuilding did not translate into financial stability for Gibbs Brothers Inc. William Francis and Frederic Gibbs pounded the pavement looking for naval design work, without much success. Rivals such as professionally trained Theodore Ferris and Ernest Rigg snapped up most of the big jobs.
After a roaring start to the decade, America’s shipbuilding initiative for the transatlantic trade stalled. Content to sit on its fleet of prewar German vessels, the nation’s shipping companies kept sailing older ships rather than build new ones. One way to build his superliner, Gibbs figured, was to get out of the engineering business and find partners to buy the United States Lines from the government.
On top of his financial worries, Gibbs’s family situation was also troubling. His mother, Frances, died in 1921. After her death, an aging William Warren Gibbs and his two daughters moved to the Gladstone, a shabby Philadelphia apartment building once popular with the rich. William Warren later moved to Princeton to live with his youngest daughter, Georgianna, and her family. He gamely continued to look for something new to promote. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted in January 1917 that a former sailor named Lester Barlow had perfected an “aerial torpedo” that after being tossed out of a plane could fly up to two hundred miles before exploding at exactly eight feet above a target on the ground. The paper went on to say that “W.W. Gibbs, a well known financier, is interested with Barlow in his invention.”32