By 1935, Congress began looking into how government policy had contributed to the disaster. Ferris’s ships, both the two coastal vessels for the Ward Line and the superliners planned for the United States Lines, were all paid for with government money. Critics now pounced on evidence that the shipping companies had fattened their profits with mail contracts and abused construction subsidies.13 Even worse, the Ward Line managed to make a $263,000 profit on the disaster by insuring Morro Castle for more than her actual value, even as the company tapped the government for $500,000 in mail contract collections.14
Besides the misuse of government funds, the Morro Castle disaster also brought to light horrific working conditions aboard American ships. Morro Castle and her sister Oriente in particular had a reputation among sailors as “unhappy ships,” driven hard and fast by their owners. Sailors who had crewed in them took the lessons of that experience far into the future of American shipping.
Only two years after being lionized for his superliner designs by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Theodore Ferris found that his name was forever tied to death on Morro Castle. Public outrage crushed him. By the time Congress wrapped up its investigation, his plans to build two superliners was dead, and his career was finished. He would never design another passenger ship.
“I put everything I had into the ship,” Ferris told a journalist bitterly. “She had every known scheme of fire prevention and was adequately compartmented. A good, strong ship, broad of beam, and with everything modern. That took something out of me. Her total loss staggered me. I somehow felt as if I were to blame for the casualties.” Then he added, “Maybe it was my fault….”15
But as Ferris’s reputation collapsed, William Francis Gibbs’s name was rising anew. Obsessed with fire and fire safety since his childhood—when the family coachman would take the Gibbs boys into the night to watch lumberyard fires—Gibbs never forgot the Morro Castle disaster. Compared to a sinking or collision, fire at sea was profoundly more terrifying and lethal. One day, William Francis hoped to build a completely fireproof ship, one that protected her passengers from the danger of fire at sea, even if it meant that their accommodations would be less plush than those of his competitors.
After the Morro Castle disaster, William Francis decided to hedge his bets in the volatile passenger ship business and try his hand at something steadier. As the Roosevelt administration pumped more and more money into the rebuilding an outdated U.S. Navy, Gibbs slowly maneuvered himself to the center of the transformation. By the mid-1930s, his once-struggling firm was poised to become one of the military’s most successful contractors. Gibbs also realized that the best way to get support for his superliner project was to win the support of the expanding Navy, not the fickle shipping companies, especially if a fast superliner could be a key military asset in a major future conflict.
13. FDR’S NEW NAVY
As the American shipping industry floundered in the early 1930s, European companies forged ahead. In 1932, Fascist Italy stunned the world by entering the transatlantic game with two new superliners: Rex and Conte di Savoia. The two ships would leave from Genoa, call at Mediterranean ports, and then sail the South Atlantic to New York. Both were 50,000 tons, both sported rakish, two-funneled profiles, and both brought Italianate luxury to the high seas. Conte di Savoia boasted a vaulted first-class lounge that would have not been out of place in Florence’s Palazzo Borghese.
To build the liners, Il Duce Mussolini had forced the merger of Italy’s three big shipping companies into one government-backed entity called the Italian Line. He was all but certain Rex would capture the Blue Riband on its maiden voyage, leaving Genoa in September 1932. But by the time Rex reached Gibraltar, the engines had broken down. When repairs were completed, most of her A-list celebrity passengers hopped the train to France, to catch the westbound Europa.
After a year of disappointing passenger loads, the Italian government gave Rex’s captain permission to burn twice as much fuel as normally allotted to get as much speed out of his ship’s engines as possible. When Rex steamed into New York harbor, an exhausted Captain Tarabotto ordered the posting of a notice in the passenger areas: “Notwithstanding great part of crossing hindered by strong opposite winds and heavy fog, Rex beats all preceding records as to speed as well as to time spent in crossing Atlantic Ocean…. Such result entitles the Rex to the blue ribbon.”1
Rex had made the 3,181-mile westbound trip from Gibraltar to Ambrose Lightship in 4 days, 13 hours, and 58 minutes at an average speed of 28.92 knots, beating Europa’s average speed by exactly one knot and a little over three hours.
On the captain’s desk was a cablegram from Il Duce: “Good! Very good!”2
After Rex’s 1933 Blue Riband win, a British MP named Sir Harold Keates Hales commissioned an actual trophy—a baroque pile of silver, gold, and onyx—to be displayed aboard victorious vessels. Around the same time, the European lines agreed upon an official course for the Blue Riband: from Bishop Rock lighthouse off the southwest tip of England to Ambrose Lightship at the entrance to New York harbor. During the summer months, the contending vessels would use the northern track of 2,886 miles. During the winter, liners would take the slightly longer southern track of 2,958 miles to avoid icebergs. Because liners sailing from Europe to America had to fight the Gulf Stream and prevailing winds, the westbound average speed would be the official metric of the Blue Riband contest.3
Mussolini’s ship enjoyed only a brief moment in the limelight. In 1935, Rex was completely outclassed by the new ship from France: Normandie. At 79,000 tons, she was the largest ship in the world, able to carry 828 in first class, 670 in tourist, 454 in third class, and a crew of 1,345.4 Like Leviathan and Bremen, Normandie was designed with split uptakes for the ship’s two working funnels. The resulting open space produced a first-class dining room stretching more than three hundred feet—longer, the French Line claimed, than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Crowned by a coffered ceiling, the room could seat seven hundred diners at a time. On the promenade deck, three of the ship’s first-class public rooms—the Grand Salon, the Smoking Room, and the Café-Grille—were linked by an unbroken line of grand staircases and arched openings. The lounge’s walls were covered with painted Dupas glass panels and its chairs in red Aubusson floral upholstery. In addition to an indoor swimming pool, first-class passengers had the use of a winter garden with caged birds and exotic plants, and the first permanent floating cinema, complete with a modest stage and dressing rooms.
Under the command of Captain René Pugnet, Normandie set sail on May 29, 1935, from Le Havre—among her one thousand passengers was French president Albert François Lebrun. The new liner’s prow cut through the ocean so smoothly that the bow barely kicked up a wave, but as she approached her cruising speed of 29 knots, passengers experienced a problem that had plagued the ship during her trials: bone-shaking vibration. While the first-class passengers lounged and danced in relative quiet, people occupying cramped tourist and third-class staterooms found it very hard to sleep.