“We are determined to fight it through,” he vowed, even though, by company estimates, the strike cost the United States Lines $500,000 in lost revenue, as well as $700,000 in wages for the crew. Franklin, used to settling NMU disagreements over a scotch and soda with Big Joe Curran, found his powers of persuasion slipping away when faced with leaders of other maritime unions.8
The strike was eventually settled and the ship made her next crossing. But the unions felt they had won. If passengers were inconvenienced frequently enough, they figured, the United States Lines had no choice but to give in.
Because of her $12 million annual operating subsidy and her status as a naval reserve vessel, United States remained impeccably clean and well maintained, even as her passenger revenues fell. But the company’s influence in Washington waned when Vincent Astor, the company’s most powerful stockholder and director, died of a heart attack in 1959, leaving his third wife, Brooke, his entire fortune.
In 1960, the company’s passenger business suffered another blow when the Department of Commerce ended the transportation of military personnel aboard the ships of the United States Lines. More and more troops would be taken by air to bases abroad.9 The days of United States as an unofficial troopship were over, even though her federal operating subsidy remained safe for the time being. Scrambling to make up the lost revenue from the cancellation of the armed forces transport contract, the United States Lines drastically revised the Big Ship’s sailing schedule. The company added Bremerhaven, Germany, to the ship’s summer schedule, hoping to pick up more passengers, especially European immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, had opened America’s borders to more people from Eastern Europe and Asia, reversing the discriminatory provisions of laws passed in the 1920s.
The year his company lost its military personnel transport contract, General Franklin stepped down as president of the United States Lines to become chairman of the board, appointing William B. Rand, the husband of his daughter Emily, in his place. But Rand’s tenure was short-lived. The shipping dynasty that began with Clement Griscom and J. P. Morgan and was carried forward by Philip Franklin, Vincent Astor, and John Franklin ended in late 1967 when Walter Kidde & Company purchased a controlling stake in the company once known as the International Mercantile Marine.10 The conglomerate had little interest in keeping United States in service if she continued to lose money.
By 1964, the United States Lines had decided that one of its two money-losing passenger ships had to go. America was sold to the Greek-owned Chandris Line for just $4.5 million. (Chandris would convert her into a one-class immigrant ship that sailed between Europe and Australia.) The sale left United States without a running mate, cutting into the schedule of sailings the United States Lines could provide the public. That same year, Commodore Anderson retired from United States and was replaced by his executive officer, Leroy Alexanderson, another graduate of the New York Maritime Academy. A large number of the ship’s crew turned over shortly afterward, as Alexanderson had a reputation as an authoritarian.
As the 1960s wore on, the labor disputes grew more frequent. In January 1965, the New York longshoremen walked off the job. To keep United States sailing on schedule, a small army of United States Lines employees, from office boys to senior executives, trooped over to Pier 86. As the winds howled and the temperatures dropped into the twenties, men accustomed to office work loaded 32 automobiles, 13 tons of beer, 19 tons of vegetables, 3 tons of ice cream, 490 pieces of heavy luggage, and 3,500 items of hand baggage. Of course, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor traveled the way they always did, with their customary 83 pieces of baggage.11
Still, with the 1960s stock market boom putting money in people’s pockets, the shipping lines believed that a market existed for travelers to destinations more exotic than Europe. Pleasure cruises, where the shipboard experience was half the “destination,” were becoming popular. The United States Lines lobbied the Maritime Administration to let the company divert United States to cruises during the winter months, as the Cunard ships were already doing. After much grumbling, the Maritime Administration relented. By the mid-1960s, United States was sailing on winter jaunts to Bermuda, the Caribbean, and Rio de Janeiro.
The cruises were popular, but were not enough to keep the United States Lines from bleeding red ink. Meanwhile, as passenger lists slipped, operating expenses—especially the burning of 600 tons of fuel a day—remained significant. In 1966, the United States Lines lost a staggering $8 million. On one eastbound voyage, the Big Ship left Europe carrying only 202 in first class, 263 in cabin class, and 296 in tourist class: 941 crew members looking after 761 passengers.12
Such dismal numbers became the norm. United States, the Queen s, and the remaining big liners found themselves competing for the one traveler in twenty-five who still crossed the Atlantic by ship. Although consuming $12 million a year in government subsidies, United States was losing $4 million annually by the late 1960s. The government subsidy translated to $400 for every passenger ticket sold.13
The company even tried a rather sad new slogan to sell tickets: “Travel with the Unrushables” replaced “The Fastest Ship in the World.”14
The liner’s government subsidies were scheduled to end in 1977, when she turned twenty-five. However, there were rumblings in the press that neither the company nor the Maritime Administration wanted to wait that long to retire her. “I am as much a romantic as the next fellow, as an admirer of a truly great ship,” the new president of the United States Lines, John P. McMullen, told the head of the Maritime Administration. “But I am also a practical shipping man.”15
In the spring of 1967, the Cunard Line announced that Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary would be retired and sold to the highest bidders. The two liners would be replaced by a single, modern ship that would spend half the year on the Atlantic and the other half cruising. Most guessed the old Cunard Queen s, fading symbols of Britain’s maritime might, would be sold to the wreckers of Taiwan or Japan.
About this time, the eighty-year-old William Francis Gibbs suddenly fell ill. His condition worsened, and by August he was confined to a bed at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital. For the first time at 21 West Street, the stool at his drawing board was empty, his phone silent.
Shortly after noon on September 7, 1967, Commodore Alexanderson raised his right hand in salute as United States sailed past 21 West Street on the start of Voyage 353. The ship’s other officers, assembled on the bridge, followed suit, and United States’ three whistles let out a blast.
William Francis Gibbs had died the day before. The cause of death was congestive heart failure. He had just turned eighty-one.
As United States passed the Statue of Liberty, she was trailed by another outbound vessel. The Greek liner Queen Frederica was a small prewar relic, old and worn by service. As she steamed past 21 West Street, the captain of the ship once named Malolo gave a series of short, husky blasts to salute the man who had designed her back in 1927.
The funeral was held on September 11, at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, where William Francis and Vera Gibbs were married forty years before. The longtime rector of St. Thomas, Dr. Frederick Morris, wrote Vera Gibbs that he had a “real disappointment and hurt in William Francis’ final attitude and decisions. But we are all determined to forget and to lay it to infirmity and illness. A goodly number of us will attend the funeral in a body.”16