In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote an open letter to the British press. “The Queen with a Fighting Heart” was a eulogy for the Cunard liner RMS Mauretania, a British ship built in 1907. For 22 years, Mauretania held the transatlantic speed record, and was a darling of the traveling public. By the mid-1930s, the grand old ship had become a victim of changing fashions and the Great Depression.
After a year of idleness at a Southampton pier, the ship’s fate was sealed. The Cunard Line announced that the outdated liner, once at the cutting-edge of Edwardian engineering and luxury, was to be stripped of her fittings and dismantled for scrap.
Franklin Roosevelt felt this was a heartless fate for a ship that had been the favorite of so many passengers and had served the British nation as a troopship in the Great War:
But why couldn’t the British [have] remembered the Mauretania’s faithfulness – taken her out to sea and sunk her whole – giving her a Viking’s funeral, this ship with a fighting heart? It would be more inspiring to those who come hereafter to know that a ship that was a ship received decent treatment at her death.
Roosevelt even lamented that her steel plates would be recast into shot and shell for the next war.
Even a letter from the President of the United States failed to move the Cunard executives. She was beached at Rosyth, Scotland and over the next year broken up and melted down for scrap. Bits and pieces of her interiors still survive in hotels and private homes throughout England.
Ninety years later, the SS United States, once the pride of the American nation and still the fastest ocean liner ever built, faces a similar fate. After 17 years of flawless service, she was laid up in 1969 and faced half-a-century of neglect, abuse, and the stripping and sale of all of her contents. It was a decline and death far more drawn out that Mauretania’s, with many reprieves and hopes for a revival along the way. At each step, more materials and dollars were wrung out of her. It took not just the transatlantic jet to bring her down, but several financial crises, a global pandemic, and the dying off of a generation that remembered the “Big U” in her prime.
The SS United States will depart Philadelphia under tow for Norfolk, Virginia this December. There, across the James River from where she was built, she will cleaned, decontaminated, and prepared for sinking. Her radar mast and iconic stacks will be removed, to be saved for use in a future museum. Then, the hulk of what was once the SS United States will be towed to the Gulf of Mexico, just offshore from Destin-Fort Walton, where she will be deliberately sunk as the world’s largest artificial reef.
This time, Franklin Roosevelt, a president who loved ships and the sea more than any other, will get his wish for a ship that he didn’t live to see but doubtless would have loved.
Had Roosevelt not died in 1945, on the eve of the Allied victory, he would have been infinitely more proud of the SS United States, the flagship of a nation he led through the Great Depression and World War II.
The SS United States deserves to be preserved alongside the USS Constitution, the USS Intrepid, and the RMS Queen Mary as irreplaceable monuments to maritime genius and our collective history. This sadly, for a variety of tragic and intractable reasons, did not come to pass. Watching the SS United States being ripped to pieces on a beach in Texas would be like reliving the jackhammers knocking down New York’s Penn Station in the early 1960s. As the late historian David McCullough said, it was “one of the worst things that ever happened to an American treasure.”
For those of us who love ships, the sea, and American history, this is a tragic fate for the grand old lady. Perhaps we can take a bit of comfort in the fact that in a year or so, the SS United States will be given the “Viking’s Funeral” denied to RMS Mauretania and so many other great ocean liners before her, to be reclaimed whole by the sea she once conquered.
Steven Ujifusa is the author of A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the SS United States.
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