In fact, Gibbs was not alone in rejecting conventional collegiate life. Classmate John Reed, who would play a role in the Russian Revolution of 1917, remembered students who “criticized the faculty for not educating them, attacked the sacred institution of intercollegiate athletics, sneered at the undergraduate clubs so holy that no one dared mention their names.”23 Other members of the famous Harvard Class of 1910 were poet T. S. Eliot and future political pundit Walter Lippmann.
Yet for most boys, Harvard was a place to solidify ties begun in a privileged childhood and to extend them into an even more privileged adulthood. This created a powerful ethos of social exclusion and conformity. Future Harvard professor Samuel Eliot Morison, Class of 1908, portrayed the college’s social sorting system as a cruel machine, noting that, “once having ‘made’ a club, you could reassert your individuality; often by that time you had none.”24
As a prep school–educated Protestant, Gibbs had the right background, but the final clubs—exclusive societies that set the college’s social tone—showed no interest in a quiet oddball who shut himself up in his room. For his part, Gibbs relished his difference. Still, there were times he feared that he would be labeled “the eeriest of all the eccentrics in three centuries of Harvard life if it were known that he was busy improving British battleships.”25
In the Class of 1910 album, Gibbs listed no extracurricular activities. But he did serve a socially obligatory stint of service as an usher at Saturday football games. There, with a red usher’s ribbon pinned to his coat, he would shepherd wildly enthusiastic fans to their seats in the recently constructed Harvard Stadium, where they watched matches so fierce that the collisions sometimes killed players on the grassy field below.26 But the only sport Gibbs played himself was tennis—a noncontact, solitary game of individual skill and determination.
The future naval designer had problems in his engineering classes, for reasons that Gibbs never later discussed. He had not been a successful high school student, if success were measured by grades. Years of intermittent schooling, when he was sick as a child, may have trumped the compulsion to do everything by the book. And for all his solitary studying, he did not impress his engineering professors. At the end of his first year, he received C minuses in “Descriptive Geometry” and “Mechanism—Study of Gearing and Gearing Mechanisms.” His best grade was a B in “Steam Machinery,” a subject he knew well from reading trade journals.27 Underlying it all may have been a basic inadequacy: Gibbs had trouble with simple math. An observer noticed the following later in life: “Gibbs is afraid of arithmetic. An eight-year-old child can beat him at adding, subtracting, and dividing. He won’t trust figures until a machine has gone over them three times.”28
Gibbs would later insist he never took a formal course in naval architecture at Harvard or anywhere else: “I studied engineering at night out of books.” For emphasis, he added, “That’s the way to really learn things—by yourself.”29 Highly intelligent, with a powerful visual sense and an astonishing memory for details, he did eventually master the mathematics needed to pursue work as an engineer, something that required singular focus and will.
But the freshman boy was not yet an achiever. At the end of the 1906–1907 academic year, Harvard University recorder George Cram wrote Gibbs’s father a stern letter, warning him that if William Francis did not get his engineering grades up and fulfill his language requirement, “he will have to register again as a first-year student.”30
On October 30, 1907, in his second year, Gibbs withdrew from Harvard College. “On account of sickness,” the college report noted, but that was almost certainly not the case. He and his brother, Frederic, had other plans for November 1907, with Gibbs thinking he could regroup academically later, after a little adventure.
William Francis also must have been worried about his family back in Philadelphia. His parents had swaddled him in protective luxury all his life, carefully ensuring that their son would only associate with people of their own class. But within a few years, the poor little rich boy would have to confront a very unpleasant reality: his father’s success was not as solid as it appeared.
By the time George Cram’s letter arrived on William Warren Gibbs’s desk, the great Philadelphia promoter had big worries of his own. Throughout early 1907, the American stock market had been volatile and falling. Soon enough, the trouble on Wall Street impacted the banks and trust companies, creating a crisis that would come to be known as the Panic of 1907. It was not a good time for companies to be indebted, and the timing seems to have been especially bad for Gibbs’s father.
Although by all appearances financially secure, William Warren Gibbs had skated on thin ice any number of times during his career. As early as 1891, he had found himself $3 million in debt after he failed in a bid to take control of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad. But Gibbs eventually repaid the money, and went on to make more.31 Then rumors began circulating that one of his enterprises was not all it seemed, and the Philadelphia Inquirer hinted that William Warren Gibbs might have crossed the line between aggressive tactics and fraud. “It is quietly likely,” the paper reported, “that some of the shareholders of record of the Alkali Company [will] unite… and make a test case.”32
William Warren had organized the American Alkali Company in 1899 to manufacture bleach and soda powder for use in paper mills. He purchased British patents and built a factory in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. Two years after putting together the company and promoting its stock, he had retired from active management. The accusations began almost immediately. In the April 1902 shareholder lawsuit, plaintiffs alleged William Warren Gibbs had siphoned off an illegal $349,597 in cash, 15,900 shares of preferred stock, and 151,800 shares of common stock in a secret transaction with a British company.33 The “fraudulent scheme” was “concocted by Gibbs,” the New York Times wrote in March 1902, adding that “he misappropriated to himself and his appointees excessive salaries.” Most damning was the allegation that the company’s Canadian plant made nothing at all, and that the patents were worthless.34
The American Alkali Company ended up in receivership with $300 in assets.35 By April 1905, William Warren Gibbs was forced to settle with the preferred shareholders and the receiver; his assets in the company, totaling $50,000, were put up for sale.36 Philadelphia society must have whispered that William Francis Gibbs’s father was a crook.
It is inconceivable that the son knew nothing of the scandal. How much he knew of his father’s declining personal finances is less clear. Life at elegant 1733 Walnut Street seems to have gone on as usual, at least for a while, but sometime around the time Gibbs left for Harvard, his parents mortgaged their grand mansion and asked friends for a $60,000 second mortgage to cover family expenses.37 His father’s slide was on.
As William Warren Gibbs’s fortunes dimmed, his onetime gas company partner Clement Griscom’s brightened, thanks to his close ties with J. P. Morgan. Their shipping trust, the International Mercantile Marine (IMM), was working to put American leadership—if not necessarily American ships—back in the transatlantic game. Their American board of directors was an all-star team of the nation’s smartest, most aggressive businessmen. Among them was Peter Widener, by now the richest man in Philadelphia through his investments in streetcars, electric batteries, oil refining, and gas lines. Much of Widener’s wealth had come from his partnerships with William Warren Gibbs. But neither Widener nor Griscom asked the former wizard of United Gas Improvement and the Electric Storage Battery Company, who was now tainted by the American Alkali scandal, to serve on the board of their new maritime trust.