“The job that William Francis Gibbs’ firm does is titanic,” the Time editors wrote. “On one multiple order of ships, they may issue 6,700 purchase orders daily. Not a day goes by that the company does not contract for at least $1,000,000 worth of materials.”25
William Francis Gibbs was somewhat unnerved at being hailed as a “technological revolutionist” by the nation’s biggest news magazine. He felt that too much publicity could backfire and cause the entire enterprise to collapse. Even so, Gibbs & Cox had come a long way. The company offices now occupied thirteen floors of 21 West Street. Two thousand engineers and draftsmen sat at rows of desks under the glow of harsh fluorescent lights for hours at a stretch. The wartime blackout of lower Manhattan meant that all of the windows had to be covered at night with curtains or cardboard, further adding to the claustrophobic atmosphere. Some windows were painted out entirely. But the measure saved lives: without it, prowling U-boats could pick out silhouettes of American ships against New York City’s bright lights.
During these long days, William Francis would startle his employees by sneaking soundlessly up behind them while they sat bent over their drafting tables, then pointing out something he didn’t like.
“Take it away,” he would growl when shown work that did not meet his standards. “Bring me the best.”26
Many of his staff resented his overbearing management style. “Sir Francis,” some called him under their breaths.27
The firm’s Spartan austerity extended into William Francis’s own corner office, and the demands he placed on others he placed on himself. He worked just like his junior engineers, with a simple drawing board in front of him. His drafting table was topped with cheap wood and had legs of green metal. The drab gray walls of his office were covered with models and photographs of his ships. He cracked down on any extravagance in office décor, claiming that it was “the first sign that your company is getting muscle-bound.”28 For ten hours a day, or more, three secretaries struggled to take everything the boss said verbatim, including his spectacular cursing streaks.29
And his work style, if autocratic, was far from remote. His office—glass enclosed on three sides so he could observe the goings-on in the main drafting room—had a sign on the door identifying it as “The Glass Menagerie.” Rather than checking with his secretaries to see if the boss was free, employees could simply walk in and interrupt him, even in mid-dictation. Gibbs would listen to what the employee had to say, respond, and then resume whatever he was doing as if nothing had happened. “The place sometimes looks like the box office of a Broadway hit because of the line of men and women waiting to talk to him,” a visitor noted.30
His brother, Frederic Gibbs, maintained a separate office, at One Broadway, where he could quietly handle the firm’s business affairs. Unlike the “Glass Menagerie,” Frederic’s office was quiet, neat, and uncluttered, its walls almost bare. A massive black adding machine sat on the left side of his desk. A visitor thought that like the potted plants he grew from seed, the painfully shy, introverted Frederic did not feel isolated at all, but “thrived in his special spot—he is looked on around the shop as an anchor to windward.”31 Frederic was so tight with money that he even charged office furniture to the client.32 Gibbs could not have been more pleased with his brother’s skinflint ways. Frederic’s financial acumen, which first began to show itself forty years ago in their parent’s attic, was now really bearing fruit.
As a master organizer, purchaser, and procurer, William Francis crisscrossed the country, using his Liberty ship method technique with hundreds of small contractors. Many of them, such as the American Bridge Company, had never before built a ship component. Dressed in work overalls and holding blueprints under his arms, he would take a group of midwestern contractors to a docked ship and shout, “Look her over, find out what you can make, ask our guides what it is called and come back with your order.”
The results were remarkable. As his friend Frank Braynard observed later, “Countless small plants all over the nation began making air funnels, life rafts, hatch covers, and you name it.”33 Gibbs’s techniques pulled their skills and productive capacity together, making a national army out of individual plants and offices across the country.
All the while, Gibbs’s political allies continued to lobby on his behalf. Just before America entered the war, William Francis Gibbs and Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison had presented President Roosevelt with drawings of a fearsome “battleship-carrier-cruiser combination,” a ship that in Edison’s words would have “more speed, more guns and more protection than anything afloat” and could act as a “lone wolf.”34 (It was similar to what Gibbs had shown to the Soviets a few years before.) A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Edison, now governor of New Jersey, wrote Roosevelt urging that if Gibbs was “given a free hand, two such ships would float before the war ends.” Edison also added, “Gibbs knows nothing of this letter.”35
The president agreed that such ships would be worthwhile, but ultimately nothing came of the proposal. It was judged to be impractical and too expensive.36
Yet as business boomed, the resentment of the Maritime Commission for William Francis Gibbs continued to fester. The boiling point came in early 1943, when Admiral Land let it be known that he was going to replace the Liberty ship with a new design. Around the same time, the War Production Board asked Gibbs to become its comptroller of shipbuilding.
The War Production Board, created by presidential executive order, was the nation’s highest authority over wartime distribution of goods and services; everything from consumer rationing to the allocation of industrial supplies fell under its purview. Gibbs’s new position gave him supervision of the production of naval vessels such as destroyers and cruisers. But he hoped to extend his influence into merchant ships, his greatest passion, and an obviously important factor in the war effort.
Even the president and his top economic advisors could not help but notice that William Francis Gibbs, although a brilliant organizer and designer, was incorrigible when he operated outside the controlled world of his firm. After ten months in Washington, Gibbs was summoned to the White House for a meeting with Roosevelt and Land. At issue was Gibbs’s refusal to accept a replacement for the Liberty ship, a stance that threatened to disrupt wartime production.37
After the meeting, Roosevelt sent Bernard Baruch, famed financier and FDR economic advisor, to meet with Gibbs. Baruch advised the naval architect to leave his government post and return to New York. An angry Gibbs quit, resigning as comptroller of shipbuilding on September 11, 1943.38
Despite the humiliation, Gibbs could look with pride on his triumphs, namely the ships he had designed so well. The destroyers and cruisers with the Gibbs & Cox stamp could outsteam, outmaneuver, and outrun all else on the seas. “When our fleet went to war no one had the faintest idea what the possibilities were for superb logistics,” he boasted about his ships’ performance in the Pacific Theater. “The Japanese to their amazement found [Admiral] Halsey’s ships doing things they did not dream possible. It was a complete tactical surprise to the enemy.”39