The Big Ship incorporated all of Gibbs’s design breakthroughs: the troop-carrying capacity of Leviathan; the extra compartmentalization that kept Malolo from sinking in 1927; the high-pressure, high-temperature steam turbines of the Mahan-class destroyers of the 1930s; the sweeping lines and fire prevention measures of America; the prefab parts assembly of the Liberty ship. William Francis Gibbs saw that commercial innovation can have military application—and deserves equal support and secrecy.
Yet the Big Ship that Gibbs willed into existence was more than a sum of the lessons he learned in a forty-year career, and definitely more than a mere machine. She was his masterpiece, a supreme expression of his artistic vision, a symbol of excellence for the world to see. The fastest, most beautiful ocean liner ever built had a soul—the soul of her creator and the nation whose name she bore. No other ocean liner—perhaps no other ship in history—was so bound up in the life of her designer.
In life and business, Gibbs defied convention and thrived, deftly working conventional corridors of power to finance his dream. But for him, the deepest satisfactions in life lay in work and creation. And to live that life he first had to re-create himself, from a shy young man who isolated himself in his college dorm room to a charismatic and self-assured leader of men—confident enough to win the long fight to build the Big Ship, a creation that reflected the United States in its full postwar glory, flush with prosperity, military might, and industrial supremacy. “This ship is the product of explosive power—American industry,” Gibbs proudly said, adding that the workers who built her were “trustees for the people of the United States.”11
Gibbs saw his creative journey as something larger than himself. “Humility and belief in divine guidance; belief in your fellow man,” he once asserted late in life, “and what they have done for you, and the little part you can play yourself, are characteristics that all of us can embrace and employ.”12
But in a private moment as United States neared completion, William Francis Gibbs took a breather from his relentless inspection tours. He found a secluded area on a deck and lay down. Clouds drifted by and seagulls wheeled above him. The clatter and din of the shipyard filled his ears, and the spring sun bathed the length of his thin frame.
He turned to a friend, an enormous grin on his face.
“Boy!” he shouted. “Don’t we have fun!”13
Epilogue
The future of the great ship United States remains uncertain, but she continues to fascinate thousands of people. Those who helped create her, worked on her, traveled on her, or knew someone who did make the story of United States not one of a ship, but of the people whose lives she touched, transformed, and inspired.
Frederic Gibbs devoted his last years to preserving his brother’s legacy. In 1978, after the ship’s design features were declassified, he donated two immense volumes to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. Hundreds of memoranda and diagrams, which catalogue every aspect of the ship’s design and construction, were titled Design 12201, “S.S. United States—Design Particulars and Information,” and marked “confidential.” He finished his work just in time. Shortly after Frederic’s death, new Gibbs & Cox management destroyed most of William Francis Gibbs’s personal archive, including his Leviathan scrapbook and correspondence not donated to the Mariners’ Museum. Frederic also gave the Straitsmouth Island portion of the Rockport, Massachusetts, property to the Audubon Society as a wild bird sanctuary. It was here that his brother and best friend used to sit and watch the ocean for hours. Frederic Gibbs died in 1980.
Vera Cravath Gibbs, eleven years younger than her husband, remained a fixture in New York social and artistic life after his death. She remained devoted to the future of the opera music her soprano mother loved, as a supporter of the Metropolitan Opera. She moved to Rockport permanently in the 1970s, and died of a heart attack in 1985 at the age of eighty-nine.1 After his parents died, son Francis Gibbs returned to the Northeast and moved to Maine, where in his off hours he would cruise the Atlantic in a Grand Banks motor yacht.2 Granddaughter Susan Gibbs, born in 1962 and raised in near-total ignorance of the Big Ship and William Francis Gibbs’s accomplishments, would become a passionate proponent of the ship’s preservation. Susan is now executive director of the SS United States Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “the protection and restoration of the SS United States.”3
In 1960, General John M. Franklin retired from the United States Lines, and regretted it. According to his daughter Laura Franklin Dunn, the dynamic former shipping leader quickly became bored with life at his Hayfields estate, with bridge being his only diversion. “He was very sad when United States was no longer in service,” his daughter Laura recalled. “It was a different world coming along.”4 Franklin died on June 2, 1975, at age seventy-nine.
After his forced retirement in August 1952, Commodore Harry Manning settled in Saddle River, New Jersey. He was unhappy that the United States Lines never built a sister ship for United States. “She should have had a sister ship,” he said after his appointment as an admiral in the U.S. Maritime Service in 1967. “This business of putting it all in airplanes is nonsense.”5 He died in 1974.
In 1973, after thirteen terms as president, Big Joe Curran retired from the National Maritime Union under heavy criticism for his lavish lifestyle, including one of the highest salaries of any union leader, and allegations of corruption. Today very few ships sail under the American flag, and the unionized American sailor—there were once one hundred thousand of them—is almost extinct. Just before Curran’s death in 1981 in Boca Raton, Florida, a court ruled that there had been “no evidence of improprieties” involving NMU funds.6
After teaching high school math on Long Island for many years, Elaine Kaplan returned to Gibbs & Cox as a marine engineer in the 1980s. She died in 1996, proud to the last of her “first baby.” A model of the ship is displayed in her daughter Susan Caccavale’s home in Smithtown, New York.
One of the ship’s spare five-bladed propellers has been placed at the entrance of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia—the repository of the William Francis Gibbs Collection—where it is set atop a granite fountain. After sunset, the floodlit eighteen-foot manganese bronze propeller casts a shimmering glow across the fountain basin.
The lay-up of United States did not save the United States Lines. The company floundered during the 1970s, burdened by outdated tonnage and high operating costs. The once-mighty shipping operation—with roots dating back to 1871 and stewarded by Clement Griscom, J. P. Morgan, the Franklins, and Vincent Astor—went bankrupt and sold off its remaining ships in 1986. In its last year, the company had an annual loss of $67 million and was burdened with $1.4 billion in debt.7