Weekend, March 20-21, 2021 – THE SHIPPING BUSINESS CHANGED AND DIMINISHED DURING THE 20TH CENTURY

By admin

316th Edition

WEEKEND EDITION

MARCH  20-21  2021

CROSSING THE ATLANTIC, PART 3

BY  STEPHEN BLANK

CROSSING THE ATLANTIC, PART 3

Stephen Blank
Welcome aboard for the final leg of this long voyage.

The second part ended at the opening of the age of the Atlantic superliner. Now, steerage passengers no longer drove the industry. The Atlantic trade would focus on tourism. Grandeur was the new goal, although a new “tourist class” (a step up from steerage) brought in money as well. English dominance – Cunard and White Star – was severely tested by the rise of German competitors, less focused on speed than on elegance. American participation in the Atlantic remained modest, although US lines were active leaders in the Caribbean, South American and Pacific passenger trade.

But New York City was the center of the Atlantic trade, the destination of the largest, fastest and most dazzling liners. Images of a row of superliners docked at Upper West Side piers became an icon of the City.

Competition

In the late 1890’s, competition between the greatest German and British companies intensified. In response, Cunard ordered two superliners – Lusitania and Mauretania – both launched in 1906. Mauretania was the fastest ship across the Atlantic from 1907 until 1929 and highly popular. The White Star Line also commissioned two giant liners, Olympic of 1911, then the largest ship ever built and Titanic of 1912.

Two of these ships ended badly. On its maiden voyage in 1912, Titanic hit an iceberg off the Newfoundland coast and sank within hours, with a loss of 1,500 lives. Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine in 1915 with 1200 souls lost.

Lusitania George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 3g13287u)

World War I and Aftermath

Traffic during the war was severely cut, and ships were repurposed for troop transport. The settlement in 1918 removed German competition as its three superliners were taken as war reparations. Vaterland became the U.S. Line’s Leviathan; Imperator became the Cunard Line’s Berengaria; and Bismarck became the White Star Line’s Majestic.

New immigration laws dramatically cut the flow of immigrants to the United States in the 1920s. Facing a devastating loss of income, steamship companies converted their steerage spaces into low-cost cabins marketed to middle-class tourists and business travelers. Steamship lines also began to experiment with cruising—sending their ships on leisure trips to scenic spots around the world. Mauretania made 54 cruises between 1923 and 1934.

The United States Line

The United States line was formed in 1921 with three ships from the failed United States Mail Steamship Company. Two of them, America and George Washington, were originally German vessels that had been seized as reparations during World War I. Leviathan, formerly Vaterland and one of the largest liners in the world, was acquired in 1923. The line’s finances were never heathy. Debt accumulated and the line was reorganized and sold several times. It flowered briefly in the 1950s with a new superliner, United States.

Hindenburg over New York City NPR

The Golden Age of Passenger Ships

In the day, these ships were well known, at least to those who read society pages. In films of the 1920s and ‘30s, wayward daughters, broken hearted wives, cheating husbands and hungry card sharks were always sailing off to Europe – as were wealthy newlyweds for a two month honeymoon. Passengers’ gowns and ship décor were imitated around the world.

During the prosperous years of the 1920s, tourist travel grew rapidly, generating a new wave of construction, beginning with the French Line’s Île de France in 1927 and gaining fiercer competition when the Germans returned to the race with the launching on successive days in 1928 of Europa and Bremen. But by the end of 1929 the Great Depression had begun; it made transatlantic passage a luxury that fewer and fewer could afford and rendered immigration to the United States impractical.

Moreover, new transportation technologies were beginning to create competition for the passenger liners – airplanes and dirigibles.

Zeppelin airships were the most remarkable, and connected New York with Western Europe. The German company’s fleet included giants like Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg. The first round-the-world flight was completed by Graf Zeppelin in 1929 and the same aircraft inaugurated the first commercial transatlantic service. Hindenburg entered service in 1936, carrying 50 passengers on the quickest transatlantic crossing, only 43 hours. But the age of the rigid airship ended following the destruction by fire of Hindenburg just before landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937, killing 35 of the 97 people aboard.

Airplanes were slower to develop significant longer-range passenger service, but by the mid-1930s, national flag carriers, such as British Imperial, Lufthansa, KLM, Air France and PanAm had pioneered air travel around the world, except across the Atlantic. (The British resisted providing landing rights until they had a plane that matched PanAm’s huge Clippers. New York’s LaGuardia Marine Air Terminal was opened in May 1939, as the start point for the long over-water flights during the age of the flying boats.)

Zeppelins and airplanes carried a tiny number of passengers, but they competed for most stylish, most modern – and they competed as well for media attention. (Flying Down to Rio in 1933 brought Astaire and Rogers together for the first time. It also showed that flight was safe – and fun.) 

Germany’s return to Atlantic competition in 1928 stimulated again another round of construction – on the eve of the Great Depression. In 1930 the French Line built what was widely viewed as the world’s most stunning large ship. Normandie was designed for speed even in rough weather and offered seven accommodation classes in a total of 1,975 berths. The ship’s art deco style was the last word in Moderne art.

To compete with Normandie, Cunard launched Queen Mary in 1934 and Queen Elizabeth in 1938, the largest passenger liner ever built at that time. Not as elegant as their French rival and a bit slower, the Queens enjoyed longer lives than Normandie.

Remember, Normandie burned in 1942 while at dock in New York, raising fears of Nazi sabotage in the harbor. (Several elements of Normandie are found in the Met Museum, most notably, an extraordinary mural, one of four for the corners of her first-class Grand Salon.) Queen Elizabeth actually entered service as a troop ship during WWII, and only in October 1946 did she begin her intended role as an ocean liner. Queen Mary, too, served in the war carrying troops but then was restored and remained, with her sister ship, the peak of the Atlantic liner fleet.

The US finally reentered the Atlantic competition with America, launched the day before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, setting off WWII. After a brief cruising career, the new ship was converted to the troopship USS West Point. Her speed was her most valuable asset and she spent the war years delivering thousands of troops around the globe. America was refurbished and entered Atlantic service after the war. She was overshadowed by United States launched in 1952. Her construction subsidized by the government, United States holds the record as the largest ocean liner built in the United States. She was the fastest ocean liner ever and immediately set transatlantic speed records. She was seen as spectacularly beautiful.

Ships from other nations, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands, joined the Atlantic passenger market. But it was too late. By the end of the 1950s, another form of trans-Atlantic travel was emerging. Long distance aircraft – the Super Constellation, DC6-B and the Bristol Britannia – created a new market of rapid, comfortable and affordable travel across the Atlantic. 

A New Passenger Maritime Industry

The death of the Atlantic superliners did not mean the death of ocean travel. Lines had experimented with cruises for many years, but the cruise industry boomed in the 1990s. Many cruise liners are huge and the largest are getting bigger as we speak. (All of this, as my daughter says, is “B.C.” – “Before Covid”.) In the two decades between 1988 and 2009, the largest cruise ships grew a third longer, almost doubled their widths, doubled the total passengers, and tripled in volume. Nine or more new cruise ships were added every year between 2001 and 2020. As of March 2020, there were 61 very large passenger ships in service. The total worldwide cruise fleet now numbers 323 ships with a capacity of close to 600,000 passengers. More than liners ever did, the cruise industry has forced the transformation of many ports into tourist havens and created many new associated hospitality industries. In many ways, the new cruise industry combines Atlantic City of the 1930s, Miami Beach of the 1950s and Las Vegas of the 1960s into a single package, all at sea. Finally, I see land. Thanks for joining on this voyage.

Stephen Blank RIHS

WEEKEND PHOTO

(FIND OUT THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO ON MONDAY)
SEND IN YOUR SUBMISSION
ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM

FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

THE ORIGINAL MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

ANDY SPARBERG GOT IT RIGHT

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

Sources

Wikipedia
https://www.britannica.com/technology/ship/The-Atlantic-Ferry
https://americanhistory.si.edu/onthewater/exhibition/5_3.html
https://www.familytreemagazine.com/history/history-of-steamships/

FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

Copyright © 2021 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com