At 4:30 P.M. on June 22, 1951, Newport News workers opened the sluice gates, allowing water to flood the dry dock.
Gibbs’s wife had joined him for the historic day. “I had never seen Gibbs look happier,” Vera Gibbs wrote in her diary. “He was attired in his khaki overalls… [he] sat down on the dock and just looked. It was rather an eerie feeling to realize we were nearly the last people to gaze on the bottom of this big ship.”2
Vera had followed the ship’s progress closely from New York. She coped with an always high-strung husband, obsessive even during weekends when he came back from Newport News to 945 Fifth Avenue. He once stepped into their apartment, Vera recalled, announcing he was completely worn-out. “God, I’m tired,” he said. “I’ve been deciding on the heights of toilets all day long.”3
As water from the James River roared into the dry dock, a Life photographer caught a scene harking back to Gibbs’s childhood: a view from behind of William Francis Gibbs and his older sister, Bertha. The two sat on a hatch cover beneath the ship’s overhanging stern on the dry dock’s edge. Gibbs was dressed in the characteristic khaki coveralls and brown fedora hat, Bertha in a long dress, an old-fashioned hat tilted on her iron-gray hair. Bertha leaned in closely to her brother, as if listening intently; both stared down at the water swirling around the propellers and rudder. The naval architect was no longer “Sir Francis” of Gibbs & Cox, but the simple “Willy” of his childhood.
By five the next morning, June 23, the ship was fully afloat and ready for christening. By the start of ceremonies that afternoon, a crowd of twenty thousand people had poured through the shipyard gates and lined up along both sides of the dock, all the way down the ship’s 990-foot length. The launch had also created the biggest traffic jam in the history of Newport News, and those who had showed up after late morning could not see or hear a thing, so packed were the stands. The temperature was a hundred degrees, and a fierce noon sun beat down on everyone.
Among those in the guest area was mechanical engineer Elaine Kaplan. Just before Kaplan boarded the train in New York for the launching ceremony, her husband gave her an orchid corsage to wear. As the train pulled out of Penn Station, she took it off her lapel and put it away. She wanted to be seen at the ceremony as an engineer, not as somebody’s wife.4
William Francis Gibbs, his thinning gray hair protected from the sun by his fedora, watched the ceremony, not on the christening stand, but from a seat on the sidelines.
Those who read the launching brochure saw a brief message from the ship’s creator. “The S.S. United States represents the combined technical effort of many interests, and the best materials, machinery, outfit and equipment produced by the American people,” William Francis wrote. “I salute, with grateful appreciation, all those who, with heart, head and hand, have helped to make our dream of this great ship come true.”5
As General Franklin mounted the podium, sweat was dripping down his shirt. The scooped-out hull, framed by two latticed shipyard cranes, loomed behind his broad frame. Above him a great red, white, and blue banner billowed from the ship’s prow.
Franklin addressed the multitude in front of him. For the first time since the 1890s, he declared, “when the St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Paul were among the crack ships on the North Atlantic, a ship is being launched that will compete with the finest of the foreign-flag ships…. [T]he same house flag will fly on the United States as flew on the mainmast of these splendid ships.”6
Franklin also said that United States was essentially the same ship that his own father had hoped to build back in 1916, when he met with J. P. Morgan Jr. and two young men from Philadelphia.
The last speaker was Senator Tom Connally, a New Deal Democrat from Texas, whose wife, Lucile, was to perform the christening. Connally matched General Franklin’s size and was described as “the only man in the United States Senate who could wear a Roman Toga and not look like a fat man in a nightgown.”7
With the Korean War still locked in bloody stalemate and Cold War tensions high, Connally painted United States as neither a “mighty battle wagon” nor a “death-dealing aircraft carrier,” but as a beautiful passenger liner built for peace, repudiating “the falsehood of Communist charges that the United States of America is a war-mongering nation.” Yet should communist forces strike, he concluded, United States “would be the difference between victory and defeat for the free nations of the world.”8
After Senator Connally sat down, the 50th Army Band broke out in the snappy “Salutation March.” As the final chords echoed through the shipyard, Reverend Paul K. Buckles of the First Presbyterian Church of Newport News delivered a benediction. The final “Amen,” murmured by thousands, was cut off by a thunderous bellow from the shipyard whistle.
On the stand, Mrs. Connally then stepped forward, clad in a pink dress and hat and holding an enormous bottle of champagne in her right hand.
“I christen thee United States!” she shouted, and smashed the bottle against the bow.
It was a wallop worthy of a Texan. The bottle exploded in her face, spraying her with foam. The cascade also hit Admiral Cochrane’s wife.
A dripping Mrs. Connally faced the crowd with a startled look on her face, and then burst out laughing.
“Sho ’nuff,” decorator Dorothy Marckwald said, mimicking Mrs. Connally’s Texas drawl.
At that moment, all shipyard whistles blasted in unison, echoed by the horns and sirens of ships up and down the James River. The band struck up John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the crowd let loose a mighty cheer, waving thousands of American flags.
Almost immediately, the hull of United States inched away from the christening stand as tugs began pulling her out of the dry dock. The crowd gawked in awe as the graceful ship backed away and swung into the James River, her two finned funnels gleaming in brilliant red, white, and blue.
Unlike ships before her, United States was almost complete on the exterior. Her boilers and engines already lay nested in her hull. Windows and portholes had yet to be cut into her topmost decks, parts of which were still unpainted. But even in her incomplete state, she presented a magnificent face to the world.
The Gibbs & Cox launching party moved on to nearby Chamberlain Hotel for a gala dinner. William Francis shared a table with his wife, Vera, and sister, Bertha. Elaine Kaplan took a seat with Gibbs’s son Christopher, now a private first class in the Army, adopted son Adrian Larkin, and the Zipplers.9
“I could not help thinking she must be a peace ship,” Vera Gibbs wrote in her diary after the dinner party. “She represents America at peace.”10
United States would remain at the outfitting pier for another ten months. Here another small army of craftsmen, artists, electricians, and plumbers would transform the bare mechanical shell into a luxury liner fit to carry the world’s most discriminating travelers. Or, as some would later joke, into the world’s most luxurious troopship.
For the past two years, Dorothy Marckwald and her team had been carefully scrutinizing the reams of blueprints churned out by Gibbs & Cox and interior architect Eggers & Higgins. “We would get preliminary sketches from Eggers and Higgins,” her partner, Anne Urquhart, recalled, “and then we would make our preliminary drawings, suggesting colors and styles.”11 The New Yorker could not wait to turn her team loose on the bare steel and aluminum bulkheads. She had designs ready for 23 public rooms, 395 staterooms, and 14 special first-class suites.