Pearson was wrong. FDR, overseeing a recovering economy, easily won the 1936 election, and the Franklins and Vincent Astor tightened their grip on the United States Lines. Yet the shipping industry had not escaped public scrutiny and wrath. Investigations after the Morro Castle disaster, only two years earlier, opened a window on the industry-government nexus. Critics attacked the U.S. Shipping Board and the 1928 Jones-White Act, which threw tax dollars in the form of mail subsidies and construction loans to American-based shipping operations. “A saturnalia of waste,” Senator Hugo Black of Alabama found after a congressional inquiry. “Inefficiency, unearned exorbitant salaries and bonuses and other forms of ‘compensation,’ corrupting expense accounts, exploitation of the public by the sale and manipulation of stocks… the ‘values’ of which are largely based on the hope of profit from robbing the taxpayer.”13
The result of it all was the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, which did away with the old Shipping Board and government subsidies. In their place came a new U.S. Maritime Commission and new, targeted subsidies. Roosevelt’s government would still be supporting U.S. shipbuilding and U.S.-flagged ships, both for the union jobs they could create and the merchant marine fleet’s potential to meet military needs in time of war.
Roosevelt appointed campaign-contributor Joseph P. Kennedy the commission’s first chairman. Kennedy was used to spearheading such government operations. As the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1933, Kennedy had vigorously prosecuted Wall Street malefactors after the 1929 crash (after having been one the worst, of course, before his appointment). His new job was to make sure that shipping companies no longer helped themselves to taxpayer money. Among those who would work with Kennedy was Admiral Land, chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction, the powerful position once held by William Francis Gibbs’s first patron, Admiral David W. Taylor.
One of the Maritime Commission’s first actions was to take a thumbs-down position on the building of a superliner. “This type of vessel,” its report read, “is believed to be economically unsound…. The building of these vessels, at the expense of other, more economical ships, cannot be justified by the United States.” The future of American passenger liners, the commission argued, lay in “fireproof, vibrationless, attractive, and economical vessels of reasonable size and speed.”14
At IMM, John Franklin—who moved up to replace his retiring father Philip as president in 1937—did not disagree. Because Leviathan, IMM’s largest U.S.-flagged ship, ended up a money loser, Franklin was loath to let his United States Lines build another superliner. Indeed, many Americans felt that the nation should leave the superliner race to the Europeans. One newspaper complained that Leviathan and ships like her were “a sample of the waste of taxpayers’ money” and that the merchant marine should “rest on its own keel and rent such ships if they are needed in wartime.”15
Thus, with the Maritime Commission’s report in mind, the United States Lines went in another direction: formally requesting a construction subsidy for a moderate-sized ship as a replacement for Leviathan. Although not in the same size league as Queen Mary or Normandie, the proposed American flagship would be one of the most modern and technologically advanced ships in the world. But the United States Lines needed the government’s help, and she would have to be more practical and cost-efficient than the European giants.
John Franklin called on William Francis Gibbs to design the new medium-sized liner, known in shipping jargon as a “cabin liner.” Although increasingly busy with his work for the U.S. Navy, Gibbs threw himself into the ship’s design. Gibbs & Cox created plans for a liner 725 feet long, 95 feet wide, and of 33,000 gross tons. Judging by the hull shape—flared bow with a slight bulb, a concave forward section, and overhanging spoon stern—it appears that Gibbs put his notes from his secret exploration of the Normandie to good use. Above, two low, raked, tear-shaped “sampan” funnels, both with fins to deflect smoke from the passenger decks, crowned her sweeping superstructure. The ship would have a patriotic name: America.
Incorporated into America were features Gibbs was building into his destroyers. Steam, superheated to 850 degrees, would power two steam turbines, putting out a total of 20,000 horsepower. The vessel could cruise comfortably at the economical speed of 22 knots. If pushed, she might reach 25. Her passenger capacity was 1,438 in three classes. Unlike big liners of the past, America also had no expansion joints in her superstructure—the ship’s relatively short length, the hull engineers calculated, eliminated the need for that risky design feature that allowed a ship to flex slightly in heavy seas.16
Navy secretary Claude Swanson, happy about America’s design, said the liner was “an extremely valuable adjunct to the Navy in time of national emergency.”17 But the U.S. Maritime Commission found itself torn between the Gibbs & Cox design and one submitted by the naval architects at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. The shipyard in its presentation put forth its design ideas, and doubtless also argued that the United States Lines—and therefore the government funders—could save money by keeping all the designing in-house.
William Francis and his assistant Matthew Forrest attended to hear the shipyard’s presentation. When it ended, Gibbs asked for a long lunch break and went back to his hotel room with Forrest. On the spot, just as he had covertly copied data from Normandie, Gibbs worked into the Gibbs & Cox plans every possible advantage of the shipyard’s design. When the meeting at the commission resumed at 3 P.M., Gibbs unveiled a set of reworked plans.18
With support from John Franklin, Gibbs & Cox got the design contract, and Newport News got the contract to build the ship. It is unclear how happy the shipyard was about that result. Newport News management remembered how the perfectionist naval architect had destroyed shipyard profit margins in the past.
Workers at the yard laid America’s first keel plates in 1938. Gibbs & Cox once again retained decorator Dorothy Marckwald and her assistant Anne Urquhart to design the interior. Marckwald created a total of twenty-three public rooms for three classes, all designed with an eye for restrained luxury. The first-class ballroom made use of “light tones of wood and fabric with metal and metal leaf ornamentation.”19 Artwork for the public areas would be made out of lightweight metals and gesso. Among the most fetching pieces was the mural in the bar, depicting stylized Art Deco scenes of shipboard life, complete with white-jacketed stewards, bartenders holding cocktail shakers, and elegant passengers in evening dress.
Gibbs had been fanatical about fire prevention since childhood, and the Morro Castle disaster had only reinforced his obsession. In his designs for America, he partitioned the interiors not with wood, but with a new, fireproof particleboard called Marinite. To test the product, a sample stateroom was built, moved outdoors, filled with wood, and set on fire. The only effect, according one press report, was “slight warping and scorching of the bulkheads.” The wood was gone, but the rest of the unit was left completely intact.20 The secret to Marinite’s fire resistance was simple: it was infused with the miracle material known as asbestos. In addition, America’s fire safety system was completely automated, with the vessel also divided into several fire zones with fireproof doors. Unlike Morro Castle, there were no gaps in the bulkheads and decks that allowed fire to bypass closed fire doors and jump from one room to another.