As America was being born, another great ship was being put to rest. “As the maintenance of this ship is a useless burden and its continuous maintenance is of no value to the company,” a 1937 IMM report read, “it is our desire to immediately dispose of the Leviathan by selling her for scrap.”21
On January 25, 1938, tugs pulled the dirt-smeared Leviathan away from her Hoboken pier. Workers had already sliced ten feet from her three stacks and cut down her two masts—she had to pass underneath the Firth of Forth Bridge on her way to the breaking yards of Rosyth, Scotland.
Just before her final departure, Leviathan received one last well-wisher. A feeble, aged Philip Franklin stood on a tugboat that drifted around Leviathan’s stern. His son John Franklin, new president of the United States Lines, stood atop their headquarters at One Broadway, glad to be ridding his company of this “damn wreck.”22 The ship was dark except for her mast and running and bridge lights. A single tugboat bearing Philip Franklin followed Leviathan all the way to the Battery before turning back.
Sometime after the Scottish wreckers started to rip Leviathan apart, William Francis Gibbs pasted one last article into the scrapbook he had started nearly two decades earlier. “Now they have ripped out her fittings—the tapestries which the craftsmen of Gobelins took two years to weave,” the piece read, “the paneling made especially for her adornment by a famous artist. Aching, scarred, her gutted timbers gape at a pitiless heaven.”23
As Leviathan was reduced to scrap and Normandie and Queen Mary battled for the Blue Riband, propeller-driven airplanes were making their first scheduled flights across the Atlantic. Even Harry Manning, now commodore of the United States Lines, bought himself an airplane. He and millions of others read about Charles Lindbergh’s solo Atlantic flight in 1927, and Manning began to wonder if someday, sea travel and the Blue Riband would be part of history.
Soon after he became president of the United States Lines, John Franklin was appointed a director of the fledgling Trans World Airlines. Its president, Juan Trippe, asked all new directors to make a transatlantic trip aboard one of the new Clipper planes to Europe. Franklin was terrified by the prospect. “The airplanes in those days didn’t have such impressive safety statistics then,” he recalled.24 He made the flight, and then decided to stay in the shipping business.
Airships seemed to open a new, safe door to passenger air travel. On October 11, 1928, a 776-foot-long dirigible, Graf Zeppelin, left Friedrichshafen, Germany, for the United States. The airship had space for twenty passengers, housed in jewel-box-like living quarters (known as a gondola) slung beneath its belly. Four and a half days later, Graf Zeppelin touched down at Lakehurst, New Jersey, creating a sensation. A bigger, faster, more luxurious version of the Graf, the Hindenburg, was commissioned in 1936. Able to carry about sixty passengers, it was still travel only for the superwealthy. But if costs came down and more passenger space were added, airships might be able to compete more directly with ocean liners. That dream ended when the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst on May 6, 1937.
Other wildly popular aviators followed Lindbergh. One of them was Amelia Earhart, who, after a celebrated transatlantic flight in 1928, sailed back to America aboard the United States Lines’ President Roosevelt, commanded by Captain Harry Manning. En route Earhart and Manning became friends. The sailor’s interest in flying and his knowledge of navigation kept them bonded. Nine years after they met, Manning was Earhart’s first choice to be the navigator on her attempt to be the first person—man or woman—to circumnavigate the globe along the equator.
Manning left his ship to join her and they took off from California in March 1937. But on the second leg of the flight, Earhart’s Lockheed L10 Electra blew a tire and crashed on takeoff from Honolulu. The plane had to be shipped back to California for repairs. During the wait, Manning resumed command of his ship.25
When Earhart took off again, on June 1, it was not Manning but his replacement, navigator Fred Noonan, who accompanied her. A month later, July 2, their flight famously vanished over the western Pacific. Its fate is still a mystery.
Still, despite his fascination with flying, Manning believed that the safest and best way to cross the Atlantic was by ship. He, like most people, did not see the propeller-driven airplane as any threat to the supremacy of the huge transatlantic liners. Naval architecture was on the cutting edge of technology—and its greatest advances were still to come. Or so Manning thought.
On August 31, 1939, thousands of reporters and spectators packed the shipyard of Newport News for the christening of America. Amid great fanfare, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt smashed the bottle of champagne against her bow and the new flagship of the American merchant marine slid down the ways. A reporter wrote: “Officials looked everywhere among the gathered celebrities for Gibbs. He had vanished. They finally spotted him. Bored by speechmaking, he was perched like a bald eagle at the top of a scaffolding to get a better view of the ship when she hit the water.”26
The following day, September 1, the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began. The United States would not be part of it for more than two years. But America’s maiden voyage to Europe was canceled by the passing of the Neutrality Act, which forbade American liners from engaging in transatlantic trade.
John Franklin’s new flagship had cost his company and the government more than $17 million. He could not afford to simply tie her up. To skirt the Neutrality Act, Franklin thought about transferring all ships of the United States Lines to Panamanian registry. So did other shipping companies in international trade.
The possibility of the move sparked outrage from the National Maritime Union. Its new president was Big Joe Curran, a sailor who had been galvanized into union activity at the time of the Morro Castle disaster. He was a born organizer and leader. As a young man, Curran claimed to have a recurring dream that he later recalled for a Time magazine reporter: “Little Joe—now Big Joe—waved his hairy paw, whereupon the great ports of New York, Boston, Marseilles, San Francisco, and Antwerp were paralyzed. All over the world shipping was paralyzed. Then the President of the U.S. called Joe and said: ‘Joe, you have paralyzed the world by a wave of your hand. What do you want?’ Said Joe (in the dream): ‘More pork chops.’”27
As a young sailor, the square-jawed Curran despised the rich men who controlled America’s shipping industry. To Curran, they were oppressors of the workingman. The owners of the shipping lines drove their crews like slaves, and skimped on safety and comfort all in the name of profit. Described as a “loudmouthed, naive and slightly bewildered young man with a genius for organization,” Curran was one of many vocal seamen who complained about the long hours, abysmal pay, and horrible food on American-flagged vessels.28