Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (48 page)

Pulpits on both sides of the Atlantic would ring with the strident rhetoric of an angry clergy denouncing misplaced faith in material objects and human accomplishments. The Titanic, it was said, was a heaven-sent warning against the complacency and smug self-satisfaction of the day. “When has such a lesson against our confidence and trust in power, machinery and money been shot through the nation?” asked the Bishop of Winchester. “The Titanic, name and thing, will stand for a monument and warning to human presumption.” While perhaps not always spurring the masses to flock to churches on Sundays, the sermons drove home a point: humanity had severed its ties with spiritual absolutes, and now its newfound faith in material certainty had been tested beyond the breaking point.
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Similarly, privilege would never be the same. As never before, death was perceived as the great leveler it had always been. Forty-two hundred dollars might buy passage in the most opulent suite on board the Titanic, but it could no more purchase a seat in a lifeboat than could the thirty-six dollars paid by the lowliest steerage passenger. When John Jacob Astor’s crushed and soot-covered body was pulled from the sea, the lesson to the millions who had been adding a touch of vicarious glamour to their lives by faithfully following the actions and antics of the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic was of the utter senselessness of it all. If almost limitless millions of dollars or pounds sterling could not assure preferential treatment on the decks of a sinking liner, why should it gain the monied and titled classes absolute deference ashore? It would take the cataclysm of World War I before the barricades of class and privilege would begin to crumble, but their foundations were irreparably weakened that April night.

It would be going too far to say that the sinking of the Titanic marked the end of an era: the Edwardian Age and the Victorian Era could not be disposed of so easily—but in a way it sounded their death-knell. For centuries the huddled masses had been told that the rich and titled were different, and for a few hours that cold April night, many of them were different. There were boors, like Sir Cosmo, but there are always boors. There were cowards, like Dr. Frauenthal, but there are always cowards. There were those whose nerves failed them, like Ismay, but his lack of courage was a deep-rooted character flaw—Bruce Ismay didn’t have it in him to be a hero, and it was his lasting misfortune to find himself in a position where he was asked to be one. But they are the exceptions. Instead, the picture is presented over and over again of men in First Class behaving the way the ideal of an upper-class gentleman should, but not always did.

There was Daniel Marvin, reassuring his eighteen-year-old bride of two weeks, “It’s all right, little girl,” as he helped her into the lifeboat; or Colonel Gracie, working as hard as any crewman to help launch Collapsibles A and B. There were Lieutenant Steffanson and Hugh Woolner helping Purser McElroy, stop a rush on Collapsible C. There was John Jacob Astor, meekly turning away when Lightoller refused to make an exception to “Women and children only” for him; or Isidor Straus refusing to get into a boat before any other man; or Benjamin Guggenheim, dressed in evening clothes, determined to be a gentleman to the end. The coterie that formed the heart of the First Class passenger list took a beating: the last anyone saw of John B. Thayer, Arthur Ryerson, Clarence Moore, George Widener, or Walter Douglas was of them standing in a small group near the portside railing on the forward Boat Deck, none of them going anywhere near a lifeboat.

It was almost as if they had some collective feeling that part of the price for living well was an obligation to die well. It was with a barbed pen that Elbert Hubbard wrote a eulogy for John Jacob Astor, but the barb was meant for those who had been the first to cast stones:

Critics would be quick to point out that almost as many First Class men were saved as Third Class women, but statements like that can be misleading and manipulative: what they do not say is that more than two-thirds of the First Class men were lost, and that most of them stayed behind voluntarily. Nearly all of the First Class men who got away left the ship in the first four or five boats, when there was little sense of urgency or danger and only a handful of officers knew that there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone on board. Though it is true that none of the First Class men who made it into a lifeboat would later relinquish his place to another passenger, it is significant, perhaps, that not one of the First Class men would demand that someone else give up a seat in deference to him.

It would take too much effort, though, to sustain the image, and by the end of the Great War, the monied and titled upper classes, shocked at having the myth of their own infallibility exposed to the world—and to themselves—had dropped the mantle of leadership. It was a process that didn’t begin with the
Titanic-if
there was a moment when the mantle can be said to have begun to irrevocably slip from the shoulders of the upper class, it was the Parliament Bill of 1911. The night the Titanic went down was, in effect, their last stand. That some of them botched the job was inevitable, but it shouldn’t detract from those who met their obligation in the style their position demanded of them.

Yet more than simple class discrimination was responsible for the deaths of so many Third Class passengers: in the words of Wynn Craig Wade, a clinical psychologist from Michigan State University, “Undoubtedly, the worst barriers were the ones within the steerage passengers themselves. Years of conditioning as third-class citizens led a great many of them to give up hope as soon as the crisis became evident.” It was this apparent helplessness that August Wennerstrom, a Third Class passenger himself, had observed and later bitterly commented on, when so many of his fellow passengers in steerage seemed to make no effort at all to save themselves—generations of being at the bottom of the social strata, being told where to go, what to do, and when to do it, had produced a mentality of stoic passivity among many of the peoples who were in Third Class.
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This doesn’t mean that the steerage passengers simply stood by and let themselves be drowned because they couldn’t think of anything better to do: Third Class never got the chance to show their own peculiar brand of courage and self-sacrifice. Unlike the crew, they lacked leadership and an example to action, because no one inside or outside Third Class provided it for them. A handful of men and women in Third Class did succeed in reaching the Boat Deck on their own, but they were lucky—when they left steerage they had no clear idea where they were going or how they would get there. No one will ever know how many others who tried to do the same got lost inside the ship or were trapped in dead ends and taken down with the Titanic when she sank. As for the rest, they fell back on old habits, and simply waited in vain for someone “in charge” to come along and lead them to safety.

Their sacrifice, then, would be measured in different terms from those of the officers and crew or the men in First Class who stayed behind—terms far less glamorous, far more harsh. There would be no monuments built or memorials raised to the men and women who faced a cruel fate dictated by the standards of a long-established order. They had put their trust, however misplaced, in the belief that their “betters”—the people in charge, whoever they might be—knew what they were doing. It had always been thus, and they had been raised to believe it would always be so. The steerage passengers didn’t know, couldn’t know until it was too late, that the circumstances had overwhelmed the very people they were relying on to protect them.

This too was an attitude that would begin a slow but accelerating process of change, as the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic began to exercise more direct control over their lives. In part this would come about because the upper classes would begin their abdication of responsibility for giving direction to the masses, but more so because the working classes would discover for themselves, for the first time in a millennium, and especially during World War I, that the capacity for leadership was not exclusive to the aristocratic and monied men of the world. The age of egalitarianism had begun.

And it would be terribly wrong to imply that the capacity for dying well was the sole preserve of the upper class. The devotion of the five postal clerks, two American and three British, in their vain effort to save the mail from the encroaching sea has been almost forgotten, but the last anyone ever saw of them they were still struggling to bring the sacks of registered mail to the upper decks when they were overwhelmed by the rising water somewhere forward on D Deck.

Likewise the thirty-four engineers and assistant engineers who were released from duty by Chief Engineer Bell sometime before 2:00 A.M., while there was still time to reach the upper decks. None of them left the engine room. The Titanic had power and lights until the very end because of the choice made by those electricians, plumbers, artificers, and engineers. Even the Crown was moved by their sacrifice: His Majesty King George V would issue a decree allowing British marine engineers to wear their rank insignia on a background of royal purple, as a tribute to the gallant men on the Titanic.

Just as Chief Engineer Bell had done with his engineers, Bandmaster Hartley told the men of the orchestra that they were released, but none of them laid down their instruments. The orchestra continued to play until the
Titanic’s
deck dipped into the water beneath their feet. Like the engineers, none of the band members survived, but they gave birth to a legend of devotion that made them immortal.

Add to that list the firemen, trimmers, stokers, stewards, and assistant stewards, bellboys, deckhands, galley hands, and quartermasters. The death toll among the crew was so high that it could scarcely be believed—678 out of 892. Yet because there are so few references to crewmen involved in the handful of attempts to rush one of the lifeboats—unless it was to help drive the offenders away—the only explanation can be that they deliberately stayed away from the boats.

And perhaps it might have been better for many of those First Class men who survived to have gone down with the ship. Though none of them would suffer the public humiliation of Ismay, few would escape with their good name and reputation intact. Several would be accused of putting on women’s clothing in order to get into a lifeboat; one of them, William Sloper, actually contemplated legal action against the New York Journal when it identified him as “the man who got off in woman’s clothing.” He was completely innocent of the slur—all of them were, for there wasn’t a single confirmed case of a man in any class getting into a lifeboat dressed like a woman. (At some point young Daniel Buckley acquired a woman’s shawl and used it to disguise himself as he sat in Boat 14, but he wasn’t wearing a woman’s clothes.) For still other First Class men, divorce court awaited. In the proceedings against both William Carter and Dickenson Bishop their wives would cite their conduct the night the Titanic went down as part of the supporting evidence for their petitions. In the case of Carter, the rumor began that his wife left him simply because he happened to survive.

At the same time, the sterling performance of women like the Countess of Rothes, Gladys Cherry, and Molly Brown helped gain a good deal of credibility for those who were beginning to explore the idea, novel at the time, that in many roles a woman could be just as effective as a man. Nowhere was this idea being more loudly espoused than within the ranks of the women’s suffrage movement. Nevertheless, the loss of the Titanic was a grievous blow to the movement and the related cause of women’s rights (a concept that, unlike suffrage, existed only in the most nebulous sense, and would not be articulated for another half century). The cry of “Votes for Women!” lost much of its potency when set against that of “Women and children first!” and what could not be denied was that the effort had been made, however ineffectually or haphazardly, and that most of the women aboard had not challenged those words.

The romanticized though not altogether incorrect picture of the male passengers on the Titanic standing quietly aside, giving place to the women and children, was so indelibly etched in the public’s collective mind—an inevitable and inescapable picture of self-sacrifice—that the protests of the suffragettes went unheeded at best, or met with outright hostility at worst. A huge protest march scheduled to take place in New York City on May 4, 1912, was roundly condemned by some of the suffragettes and their most ardent supporters. Annie Nathan Meyer, who founded Barnard College, summed it up best when she warned the march’s organizers, “After the superb unselfishness and heroism of the men on the Titanic, your march is untimely and pathetically unwise.” Theodore Roosevelt, as always extraordinarily sensitive to which way the political winds were blowing, politely sent his regrets to the march’s organizers and withdrew his promised participation.
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In England, Mrs. Cecil Chapman might claim that it was the duty of every woman on the Titanic to refuse to enter the lifeboats without the men as well, but the sad truth for the women’s suffrage movement was that, as Mrs..John Martin of the League for the Civic Education of Women put it, “We are willing to let men die for us, but we aren’t willing to let them vote for us.” She was merely underscoring the basic hypocrisy of the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, a hypocrisy that the Titanic exposed and that the suffragettes had not considered: equality of rights also entailed equality of risk. The suffragettes lost much of their credibility as a result, as too many of their number, unlike the women of sixty years later, were eager to secure rights without accepting responsibility.
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