But Gibbs had based his very first superliner plans on another technology untested in ships, the Curtis electro-turbine engine. He had made up his mind to use high-pressure, high-temperature steam in his superliner design, freeing American shipyards from dependence on British technology. But the way things were going, it appeared he would never get the chance to build the ship. Among naval architects, Theodore Ferris’s reputation was growing, while Gibbs’s was treading water at best.
Looking for more company revenue, the brothers brought in Daniel Cox, one of the nation’s most respected yacht designers, as a partner. But the Depression was also killing the yacht market. By 1931, Gibbs & Cox was down to twelve men on staff. Frederic paid single men $25 a week, married men $50.32
If things didn’t get better soon, William Francis Gibbs’s firm would fail. Despite the dark times, Gibbs refused to actively advertise his firm’s service in the press, preferring word of mouth. “If you employ a publicity man you will begin to believe what he says about you and then you are lost,” he would tell his employees.33
In 1931, Theodore Ferris unveiled plans for his duo of transatlantic superliners for the United States Lines at a dinner hosted by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineer. Before a large group of naval architects and Navy brass, Ferris laid out drawings for two 970-foot-long, 108-foot-wide liners able to carry almost 3,000 in three classes, and a crew of 1,050. Ferris promised a service speed would be 30 knots, about two knots faster than Bremen and Europa, and a top speed of almost 32 knots in smooth seas.34 The interiors would be stunning, befitting a pair of floating Waldorf-Astorias. And Ferris intended his superliners to be the safest ships in the world, able to stay afloat with any four of their eighteen watertight compartments breeched. Unlike Gibbs’s superliner design, Ferris’s ships had fuller hulls and larger bulbous bows, features that would supposedly add to their speed and stability.
The liners would bear names that not just resonated with the American public, but also were closely connected with the career of William Francis Gibbs: Leviathan II and Leviathan III.35
During the question-and-answer session, Gibbs’s business partner Admiral Taylor spoke up, asserting that the planned liners were already obsolete compared to the new ships being constructed in France and Great Britain. Taylor added that the proposed ships might be too wide to clear the Panama Canal, greatly reducing their military value. “If we are not to have a blue ribbon contender,” Admiral Taylor concluded, “it would seem that a smaller and cheaper vessel would be good enough for a second flight.”36
Ferris’s reply was both caustic and defensive. The admiral, he said, “must be in possession of information concerning the probable speed of the British and French superliners which no one else has.” The speed of his ships, sniffed Ferris, will be “second-to-none as regards any now building or existing.”37
As the meeting neared its end, a member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers’ council rose for a rare encomium.[4] “I move that a rising vote of thanks be given to him as appreciation of his splendid effort,” he declared, “and of his valuable contribution to the art of shipbuilding and the annals of our Society.”
The entire audience stood and gave Ferris an ovation.38
Yet America’s shipping business was still in turmoil. Ravaged by the Depression, Paul W. Chapman had defaulted on his loan payments to the government, just as William Francis had predicted. The U.S. was threatening to repossess his ships even as Theodore Ferris was unveiling his superliner designs to the public in 1931. While Ferris promoted his new ships, a chastened Chapman got together with Vincent Astor and IMM representatives to make a deal for United States Lines.
On the IMM team was thirty-six-year-old John Franklin, the son of the company’s president, Philip Franklin. The elder Franklin, who had backed Gibbs’s first superliner designs, was now ailing. John, the lackluster Harvard student and heroic soldier, had proved himself to his father in the shipping business. After returning from the front, John Franklin cut his teeth at the Norton Lilly shipping company for twenty-five dollars a week.39 Here he began earning respect from leading members of the industry. John Franklin’s experience with the tank regiment also gave him a common touch that allowed him to work with the maritime unions, a talent few maritime executives had. But it wasn’t until John succeeded at Norton Lilly that Philip brought him aboard IMM.
As 1931 ended, Kermit Roosevelt (who had started his own shipping line), John Franklin, and their colleague Basil Harris teamed up to create a new and preeminent American shipping line. According to the New York Times, their proposed 181-vessel fleet would be the “greatest union of steamship companies in the history of this country and will form the most formidable shipping combinations in the world.”40 Roosevelt-IMM made it clear that it wanted to divest itself of its foreign flag companies, and that passenger service, a consistent money loser, would be a minor part of their operations.
It would be the young John Franklin’s first major business coup. With Astor’s influence and Franklin’s business smarts, the United States Lines would start building new passenger ships. After prolonged negotiations, United States Lines fleet was sold to the Roosevelt-IMM group on October 30, 1931, for just over $3 million—a steal compared to the $15 million Chapman paid for the fleet back in 1929.41 Some old liners were returned to the U.S. Shipping Board and laid up; two smaller liners still in construction—Manhattan and Washington—were finished and put in service.
Yet it was not the financial problems of the United States Lines that captured the public’s imagination. As his dreams of building Leviathan II and Leviathan III slipped from Theodore Ferris’s grasp, one of the worst maritime disasters of the twentieth century would forever tarnish his reputation. And Gibbs’s fascination with new technology would change the fortunes of his firm and his life.
12. DEATH BY FIRE
On the early morning of September 8, 1934, people who lived along the north New Jersey shore woke up to find a nor’easter gale sending waves crashing onto their wide sandy beaches. It was after Labor Day and the boardwalks were empty, the beaches largely deserted, the summer cottages closed up. But local residents looking out to sea could see in the distance a pillar of black smoke. Under its shadow, ten miles from shore, frightened passengers huddled at the stern of an ocean liner on fire. The lettering on her bow read MORRO CASTLE.
News of the disaster was radioed to authorities onshore, and the story hit the news. Soon an airplane carrying a newsreel crew swooped over the ship. Their film would later be shown in movie houses across the world. “As we approach the burning inferno, her sides white with heat,” the newsreel announcer intones, “we see many who’ve jumped overboard struggling in the water, whilst the floating furnace casts a pall of smoke over the rain swept sea.”1
The crew of British cruise liner Monarch of Bermuda picked up survivors adrift in the lifeboats and bobbing in the windswept waters. Monarch’s Captain Jeffries tried to secure a towline from his ship to Morro Castle, but rough seas broke the line and the floating funeral pyre drifted toward the Jersey shore, smoke still billowing from her upper decks. “It was a ghastly sight,” a shaken Jeffries told reporters.2
4
A rising vote of thanks was a very rare occurrence at a Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers meeting, according to member William duBarry Thomas in a letter to the author dated October 22, 2008.