I have had a hard time finding a recording of William Francis Gibbs’s voice, as Gibbs & Cox destroyed most of his recorded archives a decade after his death in 1967.  I had seen plenty of video footage of him, but Mr. Gibbs is mute.  In one piece of film footage, taken when the SS United States’s arrived in Southampton,  Mr. Gibbs peers back at the camera with a slight twinkle in his eye and showing the smallest of knowing smiles. I had also read through a few speeches and several pieces of his writing.   His earlier writing was stilted and formal, as if he was trying to break out of some sort of cage, and that expressing himself was a real trial.  For someone rigidly brought up in Philadelphia’s 19th century upper class world of cricket clubs and private schools, expressing one’s feelings was not high on the list of childhood priorities.  It was a closed, formal world that I believe he fought hard to escape.

Although he spent most of his professional life in New York, he always identified himself as a Philadelphian, and he also took the best elements of that world along with him, namely the culture, gentility, and old world tastes in clothing and the arts. As one friend said, he represented the best of the 19th and the 20th centuries, a man who designed the most modern ships in the world but still wore a morning coat, a homburg hat, and striped pants to church. And he maintained a strong policy of hiring without regard to ethnicity or religion, an unusual practice at big firms in mid-twentieth century America.

Yet his speeches, ones that he gave without notes in front of large gatherings, were peppered with irony, dry humor, and wisdom. His became so famous for his dead-pan delivery that he became a popular emcee at awards dinners.

When attending Yankees games, one friend noted, he was completely at ease, and his enthusiasm was infectious.  That dour expression, she said, was just an act; he saved his smile for those he knew and trusted best.

I had heard Mr. Gibbs has having a “very salty tongue,” and that his speech was peppered with short, abrupt Anglo-Saxon phrases.   His voice was one of intelligence and authority.  I heard in my mind a gravely, patrician intonation learned at Philadelphia’s Delancey School and Harvard College, one that I could easily hear quoting Shakespeare at dinner parties and using some extraordinary curse words in the shipyard.

Finally, I have come across a rare British Pathe newsreel of Mr. Gibbs speaking in front of reporters on July 8, 1952, when the SS United States arrived in Southampton on her maiden voyage.   He is dressed in his trademark battered fedora hat, black batwing tie, and gray trench coat.

To hear Mr. Gibbs speak, cue up the video to 2:30.

Selected Originals – BLUE RIBAND FIRST TRY

On Friday I gave a short presentation on the SS United States to about 40 middle schoolers at St. Peter’s School. The space was a lot smaller and more intimate than I had expected.  Rather than an auditorium with sloped seating, it was a  white-washed room with scuffed, honey-hued pine floors and high arched windows.  The chairs were arranged in a horseshoe.  As I set up the laptop and the projector, I felt a cold, anxious hand grab my gut. I had not been in front of a classroom in years, and I know for a fact that kids are the toughest possible audience. My biggest fear was to bore them to death.  At least the sound system worked on the first try.

Yet as I crouched in front of my laptop testing the powerpoint, I overhead one of the kids in the hallway. “The SS United States!” I heard him shout. “Yay! I love that boat. I want to help raise awareness about it.”

I then remembered that ships, like fire engines, are things that kids often latch onto quite easily. The thought reassured me.

As the kids filed into the auditorium, one of the students played the piano.

“Think nice ocean music,” I heard one of the teachers tell the young pianist before the students arrived.

I stood their smiling in my shirtsleeves and blue tie. I had given a similar presentation a few times before–most recently to a sophisticated, bookish audience at the Cosmopolitan Club.

But when I put this presentation together, I found that simplifying and shortening the presentation to fit the interests of middle schoolers much harder than I expected. Technical terms had to be paraphrased, numbers deleted, text cut. More emphasis was to be placed on pictures, diagrams, and most importantly, vintage movies and interviews. Kids, no matter how well-behaved, have short attention spans, and will let you know within thirty seconds if they are bored.

The resulting presentation cut away a lot of the historical background (fat, perhaps) to focus on two things: the dream of Mr. William Francis Gibbs (I would refer to him as “Mr. Gibbs,” just as his employees did), and the magnificent achievement that his ship represented. And it was a dream that started in childhood.

Tim Weymouth, the middle school head who had invited me to give the talk, introduced me as “Mr. Ujifusa.” It was a form of address I had not heard since 2003.

I started the presentation with a definition of a transatlantic liner. “A transatlantic liner,” I told them, “is high speed ship that carries passengers and cargo between America and Europe. It was the only way to cross the Atlantic until the arrival of the airplane in the 1950s. They were symbols of national pride. The SS United States is one of only a few transatlantic liners surviving today, and is fastest, safest, probably the most beautiful passenger ship ever built.”

A wide-eyed blond haired seventh grader wearing round glasses, raised his hand and waved it. “And they are really beautiful!” he added. “And big!” Judging by his voice, he must have the same kid I heard in the hallway.

“Yes, young man,” I responded. “The SS United States is over 3 football fields long.  Can you imagine something that big, with nearly 3,000 people onboard, moving through the ocean at nearly 45 miles an hour?  The ship’s engines produced as much power as 1,200 SUVs. And over 100 years in this same city, there was a young boy not much different than you. He grew up on Rittenhouse Square, and attended a school not too different from St. Peter’s. In 1894, when he was 8 years old, his father took him to the Delaware River to see a great ship named St. Louis launched. He watched in amazement as the great hull roared down the slipway, kicking up smoke, and then splash into the water. From that moment on, he said later, Mr. William Francis Gibbs knew exactly what he wanted to do: design beautiful ships.”

I then changed my tone. “But Mr. Gibbs’s father did not want him to be a naval architect,”  I added.  “Why do you think his father objected?”

“They did not not make enough money?”  one of the kids queried.

“Exactly right,” I said. “Mr. Gibbs was sent to Harvard and Columbia to be an attorney, and he hated every minute of the job his father had chosen for him.  In his 20s, he decided to prove his father wrong.  He knew from the time he was about your age that he wanted to design a thousand foot long ship, and he decided he had to take a stand.  By the way, his father had once been very rich but then lost all his money when Mr. Gibbs was in college.”

I then shifted the presentation back to ships.  “How many of you have been to Europe?” I then asked.

About 90 percent of the kids’ hands shot up. I was not surprised. This was a private school in Philadelphia’s Society Hill.

“How many of you have flown across the Atlantic?” I asked.

About the same number of hands went up.

“And how many of you have ever taken a boat across the Atlantic?”

Only about 5 hands went up.

“So why do you think the transatlantic liner disappeared?” I asked rhetorically.

I felt I had shaken at least some of the cobwebs from my presentation skills in front of kids. And it turned out that the vast majority of them had been to the South Philadelphia IKEA and seen the ship firsthand through the cafe windows.

“Mr. Gibbs was a man who dreamed of creating something unusual, something beautiful,” I continued. “And he said that if his father did not lose all his money when he was in college, he would never have had the drive and determination to succeed on his own. Let’s go back in time to the early 1950s, 60 years ago, when America had just won World War II. It was a time when America felt that anything indeed was possible, and that we could indeed build the finest, fastest, most beautiful ship in the world.”

The presentation included footage of the ship being built in the early 1950s, an overview of Mr. Gibbs’s life, an animation of a steam turbine engine (“It operates just like a windmill, only instead of wind it uses hot steam”), and newsreels of the ship’s maiden arrival in Southampton.

“Mr. Gibbs felt that fire was a bigger danger to the people onboard a ship than sinking,” I said. “What’s one material that you think he would not allow onboard?”

“Paper?” one kid asked.

“No, close though.”

“Cloth?”

“Well you are getting close,” I said.I pointed at the floor of the meeting room.  “Wood. No wood was to be used allowed on the ship. And all cloth, bedding, and drapes on the ship were fireproofed.”

The slide then showed some of the rooms in first class. “Who do you think traveled in first class?” I asked.

“Really rich people,” one of the students responded.

“Correct!” I responded. “Movie stars, royalty.  A first class ticket was not cheap, about $10,000 per person in today’s money. But look at those beautiful rooms. Don’t you notice something? No wood at all in the furniture, the walls, the floors. Mr. Gibbs forbade it.”

I then showed them photos of cabin class and tourist class. “How many of you get seasick?” I asked.

About half the hands went up. “Well, you would not want to be traveling in tourist class,” I said. “Tourist class is the cheapest space on the ship, it’s in the bow–or front–of the ship.  It’s were immigrants to America and college students stayed. When the ship goes into the waves, the bow goes up and down a lot. A lot of people there threw up during storms. You will see some video of the ship in a huge storm in a bit.”

I then showed them a British Pathe newsreel covering the arrival of the SS United States arriving in Southampton after capturing the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage. “After hearing that movie, how do you think the British felt when the SS United States took the Blue Riband of the Atlantic?” I asked.

“Not too happy,” one girl said.

“You’re right,” I responded. “The Queen Mary was the pride of their nation, it was like losing the World Cup Soccer match in those days.”

I showed them an interview of the son of the longest serving captain of the SS United States. “I just telling my son that I wish we could go back to those days so that he will be able to stand on that bridge also,” Charles Anderson said.

Anderson’s 13 year old son then appeared on the screen. “I never did actually get to meet my grandfather,” he said with the rusted ship looming behind him. “But having seen the ship, I feel I have met him in a way.”

My presentation went about 3 minutes late, as these things tend to do.

The junior version of Mr. Gibbs piped up again before the assembly was dismissed. “My grandfather was in the Navy and on a destroyer at the time of the ship’s first voyage,” he said excitedly. “The SS United States went so fast that it passed his ship on the way over. And it passed his ship on the way back, too!”

As I biked down Lombard Street back towards Rittenhouse Square, my laptop strapped to my back as if I were a traveling salesmen, I felt an immense surge of not just relief, but joy about the afternoon. My biggest regret was that I did not leave enough time for question and answers.

At least I knew for a fact that I did not bore all of them to death.

By Steven Ujifusa

Dr. Willliam Pepper, Jr. "The most persuasive man in Philadelphia."

William Francis Gibbs spent the later part of his childhood in a big yellow mansion on the corner of 18th and Walnut Streets.  In 1900, Rittenhouse Square was Philadelphia’s “silk stocking district,” an address that announced one had truly “arrived” in Gilded Age, industrial Philadelphia.  This is a snapshot of the vanished world of this exclusive enclave, inhabited by men such as the famed provost of the University of Pennsylvania: Dr. William Pepper, Jr.  This seemingly secure, “money-insulated” world proved all too fleeting.

After his retirement as Provost of the University of Pennsylvania in 1892, the patrician Dr. William Pepper  made the construction of of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology his pet project.  Founded in 1887, the museum housed a growing collection of art and artifacts gathered on university-sponsored expeditions to Polynesia, Latin and South America, Africa, and the Far East.   The collections needed more space.  Architect Wilson Eyre Jr. had drawn up a magnificent set of plans for a massive, brick Byzantine-style building to be erected at 32^nd and South Streets, on the eastern edge of the university’s West Philadelphia campus.

From his townhouse at 1811 Spruce Street, in the heart of Philadelphia’s fashionable Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, he organized the fundraising campaign for the proposed Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with missionary fervor. His obsessive searched for beautiful objects for the museum’s grand halls once took him to Mexico, where Pepper dined with a Mexican millionaire whose most prized possession was a Moorish vase. An American woman visiting the afternoon of Pepper’s visit glanced at the vase and remarked, “Now if Dr. Pepper sees that vase, he will want to have it, so look out.” “No one that lives can have that,” the vase’s owner snorted in reply. “It is dearer to me than any other possession.” A few days later, the American lady made another call on her host. “How was that vase?” she asked. The millionaire nearly burst into tears. “Oh, he has taken it for the University Museum; I must have been hypnotized, but alas, it is so.”

In his quest to finance the construction of an edifice worthy of such treasures, Pepper spent much of 1896 sitting at his desk scrawling lists of rich men from Philadelphia and New York. Pepper not only went after men with distinguished Philadelphia names such as Pepper (his relatives), Biddle, Gratz, and Newbold, but also a new crop of industrialists who had never stepped foot in a university but had made their millions by sheer will and drive. Many became rich using skullduggery and skirting the law. They had names like Vanderbilt, Widener, and Carnegie. In his notes, he often added descriptions of his potential targets, underlining some for emphasis: “Write Andrew Carnegie re: Museum” “Horace Magee is rich and has no occupation.” “Would not Sawyer 4243 Walnut St. help both Museums.” “Jno. Gill is rich—2036 Spring Garden Street, Joseph Caven West Phil. is rich.” “Rich Jew Blum—Market Street Nat. Bank” He would pay a visit, usually to their place of residence, and make his pitch. Most of the time, he walked away with a check in hand.

Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood boasted one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in America. It was the undisputed epicenter of Philadelphia’s old money aristocracy, a serene residential enclave far from the noxious factory smoke and impoverished squalor that blighted so much of the city. The square and its adjacent streets were lined with grand, stately, yet restrained townhouses of brownstone, brick, and marble standing four to five stories high, with sweeping stoops leading up to polished walnut front doors. Their rooms resonated with the sounds of the clocks ticking on marble mantelpieces, the clink of crystal and silverware, and the shuffling feet of Irish maids and liveried footmen.

According to Philadelphia sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, Pepper and other residents of Rittenhouse Square prided themselves not just being wealthy, but as being part of a special, insular, and unchanging world:

The “Anglo-Saxon” ladies and gentleman who developed the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood during and after the Civil War (even the new rich that at that time were primarily of colonial stock) definitely felt themselves to be different, aloof, and apart, part of the rapidly developing heterogeneity of the rest of American society. While their ancestors in the days of the new republic came to the fore in public and military affairs, the Victorian gentlemen tended to withdraw from the world of public service into the counting house and factory. Their wives and children lived in a money-insulated world of the great houses, private schools, and fashionable churches surrounding the Square.

Every Sunday, accompanied by the tolling of the church bells, a parade of rippling horseflesh and glittering carriages would proceed down Walnut Street. Famed lawyer George Wharton Pepper, who grew up a few blocks from his uncle at Sixteenth and Locust streets, would later recall that the Sabbath day parade of wealth “made upon the onlooker an impression of urbanity, of social experience and of entire self-satisfaction. If during church-time they had confessed themselves miserable sinners, by the time they appeared on parade their restoration to divine favor was seemingly complete.”

During the hot summer months, the residents of Rittenhouse Square closed their townhouses and decamped to secluded estates on the Main Line, the Jersey Shore, or Maine to pursue cricket, golf, and equestrian sports, far away from the sweltering masses living in the city’s row houses and tenements, and a world away from the noise and smoke of the shipyards and factories crouched along the Delaware River.

The Wilstach-Drexel-Gibbs mansion at 18th and Walnut. Built 1847, demolished 1913.

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/brendan-calling/Ante-Up-on-the-SS-United-States-82563577.html

Ante Up on the S.S. United States?
By Brendan Skwire
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 18 | Posted Jan. 25, 2010

Ka-ching? Is the rusting hulk the next place to put a Philly casino?

I have a proposal to save the rotting hulk of the United States.

No, no, I don’t mean the country. I mean the S.S. United States, that glorious liner that’s decaying slowly on Pier 82 off Columbus Boulevard, where it’s been dry-docked for over a decade. It was the fastest ocean liner ever built, and although it was never used for military purposes, it was capable of transporting 14,000 troops per trip and traveling up to 10,000 miles non-stop. The ship’s history is Pennsylvania’s history, made of steel from Coatesville, designed by Philadelphia native Francis Gibbs, and included on the Pennsylvania Register of Historic Places. Nothing has been done to restore this national treasure, though and it may be sold for scrap.

Butit looks like the state is determined to shove casinos down our throats, and I say make lemonade from lemons. Sell the ship to Foxwoods and open it as a casino!

One of the main beefs with the proposed new casinos has been location. I used to work in Fishtown and drove past the Sugarhouse site almost every day and saw the potential problems: too close to residential neighborhoods, too small streets, too little parking and too far from highway access. The original Foxwoods site, between Tasker and Reed, had were similar problems but that’s moot at this point. And the awful designs! Sugarhouse looks like it took design cues from Philadelphia International Airport, while Foxwoods’ proposal looks like what happens when an architect used to designing Wal-Marts eats too many magic mushrooms.

It’s probably a little too late to stop construction on Sugarhouse, but Foxwoods is a different story. Before they spend money on another ugly-ass building, why not buy the United States?

It isn’t really near a neighborhood, cut off by both the Ikea Plaza and the Snider Shopping Plaza. It’s convenient to both interstates and accessible by Packer and Pattison avenues — both of which travel through uninhabited industrial areas and already serve the stadiums. Furthermore, since the ship was originally a luxury liner, it has all sorts of amenities: a ballroom, well-appointed guest rooms, a promenade deck, and a swimming pool. Heck you could probably put in a theater and even a maritime museum on top of the table games and slots. That would be the corporate nod to community relations and support for the arts.

I called up the S.S. United States Conservancy, an advocacy group dedicated to protecting and preserving the ship, expecting that my idea would be shot down with extreme prejudice. To my surprise, the person I spoke to, Jeff Henry, was open to the suggestion. “We just want to see something happen,” he said. “We want to work with the owners to ensure a good future for the ship. Any kind of productive use is welcome.” Henry explained that the interior of the ship is kind of a blank slate at this point, although the ship’s power plant is still in working order. There’s still potential.

Rehabbing and maintaining the S.S. United States would be a big task: that means jobs for a city hard-hit by a struggling economy. Done right, the ship would be so much more than a craptastic slots parlor: it could be a real destination.

To me, it’s just common sense: someone’s gotta pony up the money to save the ship from the scrap, Foxwoods needs a place to put their casino now that the last two sites have been rejected, and since the city and state are determined to foist these things on us, we might as well make the best of it. The S.S. United States Casino: a unique metaphor for USA in the 21st century: where suckers go to lose all their money chasing after get rich schemes, never realizing that the house always wins.

by Steven B. Ujifusa

SS "Leviathan", flagship of the United States Lines during the Roaring Twenties. Originally built in 1914 as the Imperial German flagship "Vaterland," and seized as a war prize in 1917. Her conversion from US troopship to American luxury liner was William Francis Gibbs's first big project.

As second officer of Leviathan, Manning reveled in the fact that he was third in command of the one of biggest, fastest ships on the ocean. One day, he hoped, he would command a ship like Leviathan, maybe bigger, and hopefully faster.

“You work as an officer,” Manning explained, “then you become chief officer, learning from the marine masters who are your senior officers. Then the time comes, and you know.”

Manning spent most of his day either on the bridge or in the chart room, perched at the front of the ship’s superstructure and high above most passenger areas. He had little time to socialize with the grand dames, politicians, flappers, and financiers that were swarmed onboard the Leviathan in New York, Southampton, or Cherbourg. But during his rare moments of spare time, the rough-hewn little man, gold-braided cap tucked under his arm, would go on the rounds. He would walk through the towering double doors of the Social Hall–still crowned with a gilded, wrought-iron “V” from the ship’s former life–and watch European and American café society on the move. This grand space could intimidate many a less-confident soul. The two deck high room, paneled in carved oak and bedecked in brocade, brimmed with bobbed hair, cigarette holders, white tie, diamond tiaras and evening gowns. Conversations peppered with witty repartee and barbs, often in many languages. A magisterial portrait of the soon-to-be-disgraced President Harding stood at the head of the room.
Following the strains of distant, syncopated music, Manning passed through the Social Hall, perhaps glancing at the 17th century paintings depicting the Pandora myth. The seventeenth century canvases had originally from the Kaiser’s private collection. Manning then passed into the towering Winter Garden, a glistening white-and-gold space that also soared two decks high. The high summer season of 1923 was when the Charleston swept onto the American dance floor. Peering over tables and palm through fronds, Manning would listen to the ship’s hot jazz dance band. On the checkered dance floor, American’s gilded youth kicked and gyrated away. Sometimes, the orchestra would slow down to a sensual tango or a sentimental waltz. Many had stuffed a hipflask into their purse or dinner jacket pocket.
“Because liquor was seen aboard the Leviathan,” Commodore Hartley recalled, “I was accused by some ambitious individuals of selling the stuff aboard the ship. That accusation was nothing short of an unvarnished lie. After a thorough investigation, I was completely unexonerated. But I did not deny that passengers brought their own goods with them. Of that practice, I neither encouraged nor discouraged. I simply turned my head. One thing I learned, however, was that in passing the Volstead Act, Americans had voted dry but they traveled wet.

Ritz-Carlton Restaurant aboard SS "Leviathan."

As Leviathan approached the 12 mile territorial line that separated International and American waters, Hartley and the ships officers had to deal with a number of trunks that no passengers would claim: those with the “sound of tinkling glass inside.” Hartley then had to preside over the “funerals…one of the most heart-rending problems with which I was confronted with as ship’s master.” The officers would open the trunks and drop the offending booze seventy feet down into the churning ocean. “I am sure no less than a million dollars worth of the world’s choicest whiskies are resting at that hallowed spot on the floor of the Atlantic.”

Despite all the improvements William Francis Gibbs had packed into the Leviathan, her crew of 1,000 was still packed into the lowest, noisiest, and darkest corners of the Leviathan’s belly, a rabbit warren of corridors, service rooms, mess rooms, bunks, and machinery spaces. Aside from the engine room, a popular destination for curious dignitaries, below-decks was a realm that few passengers ever saw. The contrast between the civilized, almost stiff opulence of first class and the dark, raucous recesses of the crew quarters was not lost on a crew member named Vincent Wilbur. A door from the three deck high first class dining room led to the main crew service corridor, which ran almost the entire length of the ship. A sailor opening the door to this corridor would enter “a different world” remembered Wilber, where the smells of linens, cigars, French perfume, and filet mignon vanished, replaced with the stink of “fuel oil, dried sweat, and stale food.”

The focal point of crew life aboard Leviathan was an intersection known as Times Square, where the main service corridor intersected with another one running the width of the ship. Here, Wilbur said, you could “have a cigarette with a shipmate,” or “have a chat with the old blind woman who used to sit there and sell pocket knives, pencils, shoe-strings, and other gadgets necessary to a sailor’s happiness.” Times Square, the focal point for the men that made this floating their permanent home, “was in many ways more nearly in the heart of the ship than the Bridge itself.” During their precious few hours of free time, the engineers, seamen, stewards and cooks of the Leviathan retired to the mess rooms and cabins that honeycombed her lowest decks. Some “glory holes” were more desirable than others. “One of the Levi’s so-called ‘glory holes’ or crews quarters, as they are more properly named, was in a pretty noisy place,” Wilber recalled of the miserable cabin he was forced to share with several other shipmates. “Right under us we had her propellers and her shaft alley. Right over us we had the steering engine, and in the room we had a lot of empty bunks that rattled an accompaniment to the ‘oong, yoong’s’ of both the former very necessary sets of equipment.” The vibration and groaning made it nearly impossible for Wilber and his fellow seaman to catch any sleep, although “the dead silence that replaced it when we were in port was equally disconcerting.”
Aside from the able seamen, who constantly polished, painted, and scrubbed the Leviathan from stem to stern, few of the crew could spend much time in the fresh ocean air. During hot summer crossings, the crew’s quarters became an airless, stifling inferno. When the Leviathan’s men could snag a few moments outside, they retired to a tiny patch of space on the fantail. Here, “with the sea breeze cooling you off after a hard day’s work and the sun just going down over a smooth summer sea, and maybe one of the boys playing his guitar, a man really had worthwhile thoughts. I’ve heard extemporaneous philosophy expounded that would do credit to Plato himself, although I don’t suppose many of the passengers leaning over the rail above us and occasionally giving us a ‘wonder what kind of animals those are’ stare would have suspected it.”

Corner of the two deck high first class Social Hall aboard "Leviathan."

Of his fellow ‘animals,’ Wilber found them to be a rough, colorful, but sometimes dangerous bunch. “It was a pretty well-scrambled gang we had down there, and I suppose some of the people we had down there were pretty tough,” Wilber recalled. “However, we even had a sort of black sheep of a noble Austrian family with us in the stewards department. He marked the upper end of the social scale, you might say, and at the other end we very definitely touched bottom, but what of it? There wasn’t one of them you couldn’t find something good about if you looked hard enough, and those of them that you’d call bad weren’t for the most part, really bad.”
Others had a much less placid view of the working conditions and conversations heard in the Leviathan’s mess rooms and glory holes. Some crewmembers preferred discussing radical political issues to playing guitars on the fantail. Able Seaman Vincent Boslet noted that “Among the Americans,” Boslet continued, “there were a few Communists, a couple of Wobblies—remnants of the International Workers of the World—and the rest were Democrats. I do not remember a single Republican on the Leviathan.” Most of the stewards department, such as Otto Bismark (no relation to the Iron Chancellor), were native Germans. Some of them complained bitterly of the hardships the Fatherland had been subjected to under the Treaty of Versailles. For his long hours and time away from home, Boslet received wages of $45 a month, about $500 in present day currency.
For the crew, the ship was more than just a machine. For a bunch of “big kids that never grew up,” the Leviathan was their hometown, their college, and livelihood all rolled into one. And despite the differences in rank, wages, and backgrounds separating the 1,000 strong, almost entirely male crew of Leviathan, nothing united them more under the banner of their ship them more than whipping a worthy rival.
On August 18, 1923, the Leviathan pulled away from her berth at pier 86 and headed towards the Verazzano Narrows. The 46,000 ton Olympic, Titanic’s famous sister and one of the crown jewels of the hated I.M.M., had backed into the Hudson River forty minutes earlier.
Although officially racing was illegal, Hartley could not resist challenging so worthy a rival.
William Francis Gibbs, although not aboard, would have reveled in the challenge. From the Gibbs Brothers offices on the southern tip of Manhattan, the proud naval architect and his brother might have watched the two steamers follow each other down the Hudson River and out to sea.
“I don’t know of anything that gives a crew a greater kick than passing a competitor!” Gibbs would have chortled.
At 1:13pm, the Olympic glided past the Ambrose lightship, the beacon marking the limits of New York harbor, and then picked up speed. Hartley kept the Leviathan close on the Olympic’s heels. As the boat carrying the New York harbor pilot pulled away from the Leviathan’s side, her officers on watch saw the smoke trailing from the Olympic’s black and buff funnels ahead of them. Hartley ordered all four turbines full ahead, and the Leviathan sprung to life and pushed ahead. Over the next several hours, the captains of the Leviathan and Olympic steered their vessels in a graceful northeastwardly arc towards along the South Shore of Long Island and towards Nantucket. The ocean swells began to pick up, causing both ships to gently heave and pitch. The skies turned gray and Grand Banks fog began to wrap its gauzy tendrils around both vessels. Hartley and David blasted their ship’s melancholy foghorns as they pressed on. The Leviathan’s passengers lined the railings and promenades, straining for glimpses of the British vessel as they thundered ahead at full speed.
Hartley drew the Leviathan closer and closer to the Olympic, and after seven hours out of New York, Hartley gently guided her alongside of the White Star vessel. But Captain David was not about to give up. His four city block long ship was straining, smoke pouring out of her funnels, her triple screws kicking up a furious white wake, the Union Jack flapping at her sternpost.
But David could not squeeze a desperately-needed one extra knot out of his engines. Over the next hour, the Leviathan’s officers stood on the bridge and watched as they slowly and painful crept past the Olympic. Passengers in both ships leaned over the railings, hollering and shouting, and cheering. By sunset, the “Big Train” (as her crew called) had left “Old Reliable” in her wake.
To Ray Green, the Leviathan’s radio operator, the despair of the Olympic’s passengers and crew was palpable as he watched her four funnels fade out of sight. “It killed them when we overhauled them one or another of their big ships, ran hour after hour abeam and slowly passed them.” he would gloat later. “They took it hard.”
Leviathan dropped anchor in Cherbourg, France at 5:00 pm on August 23, discharged her passengers, and then crossed the channel to Southampton. Her average speed was a swift 24.35 knots. Fourteen hours later, the Olympic pulled into the French port. A passenger on the Leviathan send a telegram to a friend on the British vessel: “I will be in Paris when you reach Cherbourg!”
The White Star Line, I.M.M., and Franklin were furious at the very idea that their captain had accepted Hartley’s challenge to a race. A race, between two crack transatlantic liners, the company officially stated, “was a fantastic implication. No White Star captain would race his ship, for as experienced and careful seamen they know the follow and risk of racing, or of trying to force a ship beyond her normal speed.” If the captain of the Leviathan wanted to have an equal match, then they should challenge the Majestic, “which made the existing New York-Cherbourg record in five days, six hours, thirteen minutes without racing or being forced. It is suggested that the beating of this record would be better evidence than an imaginary race with the Olympic.”
By the time they had reached Southampton, news of the mid-ocean derby had hit the British papers. Hartley also denied reports that he had raced. Claiming ignorance, Hartley said that he had first heard of “the so-called unofficial race” in a Paris newspaper. Whether or not Hartley and David had been racing, the idea of the pride of the British and American nations in a high seas duel was simply too good a story.

RMS "Olympic", pride of the White Star Line and sistership to "Titanic." One of the most popular liners of the 1920s and known as "Old Reliable."