The Other Side of the Night (25 page)

William Alden Smith, the junior Senator from the state of Michigan, suddenly took center stage amid the public’s fascination with the
Titanic
. A classic Horatio Alger “rags to riches” success story, Smith had been born in 1859 in tiny Dowagiac, a run-down logging town in the southwest corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula. In early adolescence, after his family had moved to the city of Grand Rapids, he developed what would be a lifelong fascination with railroads. He also developed an acute business sense while earning his living at a variety of jobs, including work as a newspaper correspondent and as a page in the Michigan legislature. That position unlocked a passion for politics in Smith; he had studied law and been admitted to the Kent County, Michigan bar, and began a lucrative practice in railroad law. The next step came in 1892 when he was elected to Congress, where he would represent the state of Michigan in either the House of Representatives or the Senate for the next thirty-five years.

William Alden Smith was short, about five feet six, and had a curiously expressive face, capable of changing from fierce rage to warm affection in seconds. He possessed a great deal of personal charm, a remarkable memory from which he could pluck information almost effortlessly, and an oratorical style that was half persuasive, half coercive. Though he was nominally a Republican, within a short time everyone in Congress knew that William Alden was his own man, bound by no party dogma. He was the quintessential political maverick, and Smith gloried in the role. He was an American Midwesterner, writ large, with all the altruism, naivete, dreams, hopes, fears, and prejudices of the American heartland. He was not a dupe, for before he became a politician he had been a successful lawyer and businessman; nor was he a rube, for though largely self-educated, he was a more learned man than many of his colleagues.

Although Smith’s political enemies would attempt to portray his investigation into the
Titanic
disaster as sheer opportunism and self-promotion, the accusation rings false. Then as much as now, Congress was a haven for ambitious mediocrities, leaders prepared to follow where the people led, and first-class intellects and talents were always objects of suspicion and hence ridicule. Many times before and after the
Titanic
Inquiry, Smith was to fight lonely battles for causes—including racial equality and women’s rights—that many considered lost or hopeless. The
Titanic
inquiry would be Smith’s one moment to stand on the world’s stage, and he would make the most of it, not for his sake, but for the ideals and people he represented.

When the news of the
Titanic
’s fate reached Washington, Smith, like everyone else, was aghast at the enormity of the tragedy. It was almost impossible to grasp the concept, let alone the reality, that more than 1,500 lives had been lost in less than three hours. In those innocent days such carnage was unknown, barely imaginable. It was, as historian Walter Lord once observed, as if a violent battle had been fought and lost. Newspaper editors, using charts, photographs, and any other visual aid they could find, tried to give some meaning to the number and to make the enormity of the casualty list comprehensible to the man on the street; but it was no easy task, for there had never been a maritime disaster anything like the loss of the
Titanic
. Compounding this sense of incredulity was the fact that ocean travel had seemed to be so safe: in forty years only a handful of passengers had lost their lives crossing North Atlantic. Within days of the news breaking about the sinking, government officials, newspaper editors, and the public were all demanding explanations as to how such a tragedy could happen.

This was a challenge tailor-made for an analytical mind like Smith’s, and he would not rest until he knew how 1,500 people could be left behind on the decks of the sinking liner. In the years before he was first elected to Congress in 1892, Smith had served as general counsel to two midwestern railroads, and learned firsthand how utterly dependent were the passengers on a railroad’s owners for their safety. He discovered that most railroad owners were inclined toward excessive penny-pinching to maximize profits, with many railroads operating worn-out equipment on poorly maintained rail networks. The results were frequent accidents which left passengers and railroad workers alike dead or maimed, with little if any recourse for their loss and suffering. Aside from a standard track gauge, there was little in the way of industry-wide standards for engines, rolling stock, equipment, or signals; regulation of working hours and conditions for engineers, firemen, and brakemen; or uniform operating procedures. There were no standard tariffs for passenger fares or freightage. The railroads of the 1880s were, by any measure, very much
laissez-faire
operations.

In Congress, William Alden Smith worked non-stop to bring an end to this haphazard state of affairs. To Smith’s mind, because it was the railroads which were the sinews that bound the United States together, and on which the nation’s economy depended, they were as much a public trust as private property. The railroad barons had an obligation to serve the people as much as they had an opportunity to fill their coffers. The first ten years of Smith’s Washington career were spent successfully imposing a body of Federal regulation on the nation’s railways. In the process he made fearful political enemies among men like J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman, and Jay Gould, men who felt that not just their profits but their authority should be privately held, and who fought all of Smith’s proposed legislation hammer and tongs. But popular sentiment was on Smith’s side, not to mention other American business interests, large and small, which stood to benefit from a rationalization of the American railroad industry, and his legislative efforts ultimately succeeded.

Yet Smith was no populist, as some biographers have tried to paint him; nor did he have socialist leanings, although he wasn’t particularly hostile to some of their ideas. Smith was the genuine article, a self-proclaimed “maverick” who would just as readily buck his party’s line as toe it, but one who chose his battles carefully, not for the sake of making a name for himself but rather because of the inherent rightness of the cause.

It was his experience with the railroads that prompted Smith to take a close look at the transatlantic passenger trade in the days following the
Titanic
disaster. A review of the existing legislation showed that the steamship lines on the North Atlantic were run in much the same
laissez-faire
manner which had characterized American railways two decades earlier. When Smith discovered, in particular, the relationship between J.P. Morgan’s railroad interests and Morgan’s holdings in International Mercantile Marine, he became determined to launch a full-scale inquiry. Morgan was still a bitter political foe, and Smith found himself wondering if the same casual, offhand manner in which Morgan had once run his railroads was how he now ran his steamship lines.

In Smith’s view, there was little if any difference between the public trust held by the American railroads and the steamship lines which crisscrossed the North Atlantic. If anything, the steamship lines bore an even greater responsibility, for they served the nations of Europe as well as the United States. He was determined to bring the steamship companies into line much the same way he had done with American railroads, with a healthy dose of practical, commonsense legislation. But Smith’s practical turn of mind would not allow him to take action without first learning the facts, hence his determination for a full-scale Senate investigation to be empanelled. He wasn’t sure if there was any evidence of negligence in the
Titanic
’s navigation, or in her safety equipment, or in how the ship’s officers and crew handled the evacuation of the ship; but if there was, he would find it. Quickly he pushed a resolution through the Senate that authorized the formation of a subcommittee from the Committee on Commerce, of which Smith was a member, naming him as chairman. Smith carefully composed the subcommittee with members chosen to make it a politically balanced body, and he was careful to ensure that it possessed the power to issue subpoenas, including those for foreign nationals.

At 3:30 p.m. on April 18, Smith, the other six members of the subcommittee, and two U.S. Marshals boarded the
Congressional Limited
at Union Station in Washington, D.C. and arrived in New York just in time to be rushed across the city to Cunard’s Pier 54 to meet the
Carpathia
as she tied up. Subpoenas were served to Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line, as well as all of the
Titanic
’s surviving officers. Her surviving passengers as well as the
Carpathia
’s officers were invited to make themselves available for testimony. The hearings would begin the following morning, at 10:00 a.m. in the East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Senator Smith’s inquiry lasted nearly six weeks, during which time eighty-two witnesses were called, including all of the
Titanic
’s surviving officers, as well Captains Rostron and Lord and the wireless operators of both the
Titanic
and the
Carpathia
. Significantly, of the eighty-two witnesses called, twenty one of them were passengers. Smith was determined from the start to find out what really happened on the night of April 14–15, and he knew that the passengers, who owed no loyalty to the White Star Line and so would have no reason to hide, alter, or shade facts, would go far in helping his committee form a complete and balanced picture of the
Titanic
’s sinking. Moreover, and in this he was probably acting on the advice of his colleague Senator Burton, who had considerable experience with maritime matters, Smith was determined that the investigation would not degenerate into an endless round of technical discussions, which would only leave matters more confused, and by introducing the passengers’ testimony he was able to avoid that pitfall.

There were admittedly times when Senator Smith’s ignorance of nautical matters seemed to lead to him to ask remarkably odd questions, since the answers appeared to be perfectly obvious. At one point in the course of Lightoller’s testimony, when the Second Officer was describing how the
Titanic
’s forward funnel had collapsed, falling on a knot of swimmers, Smith asked anxiously, “Did it kill anyone?” Later, when he was pursuing the subject of watertight compartments, he asked Lightoller if he were able to say “whether any of the crew or passengers took to these upper watertight compartments as a final, last resort?” Lightoller, not believing that Smith had actually asked such a question, replied that he wasn’t sure. Still later, he asked one witness if the ship sank by the bow or by the head, and when the feisty Fifth Officer Lowe was testifying, Smith asked him if he knew what an iceberg was made of. “Ice, I suppose,” was Lowe’s flippant reply.

It was apparent gaffes like these that at first made the Senator look rather foolish, although as the hearings progressed the logic behind his methods gradually became apparent. Far from being the bumbling incompetent or the complete rube that critics of the investigation depicted Smith to be, the Senator was being crafty. When he asked, “Did the ship go down by the bow or the head?” he was effectively depriving the
Titanic
’s officers and owners of one of their more useful defensive ploys, that of falling back on technical jargon and nautical terminology in their answers while hoping to confuse the hapless land-lubber.

When asking Lightoller if any of the passengers and crew might have sought refuge in one of the ship’s watertight compartments, Smith was not asking for his own enlightenment. In 1911, he had been given a tour of the
Olympic
, conducted by Captain Smith himself, and the Senator had seen firsthand what watertight compartments were on a ship. But there were many thousands of Americans who had never seen an ocean liner and had no idea what a watertight compartment was, who had horrible visions of some huddled knot of survivors trapped at the bottom of the ocean, slowly suffocating in the darkness. Smith had asked a question that he knew to be slightly ridiculous simply to allay those fears.

Nor was Smith above taking steps to educate himself on subjects of which he knew little. On May 25 the Senator, along with Rear Admiral Richard Watt, Chief Constructor of the U.S. Navy, and a navy stenographer boarded the
Olympic
in New York harbor. There, escorted by the
Olympic
’s skipper, Captain H.J. Haddock, they witnessed crewmen demonstrate the method for loading and lowering one of the lifeboats. Smith and his party then made a trek down to Boiler Room 6, where they examined the watertight doors and surveyed the sections of the ship that had been fatally damaged in the
Olympic
’s sister.

Similarly, when the Senator asked Fifth Officer Lowe what an iceberg was made of, it was to seek an explanation for those who wondered how an object that was merely frozen water could inflict a mortal wound on a ship with steel sides nearly an inch thick. Fourth Officer Boxhall, when asked the same question, saw what Smith was getting at and replied that he believed that some icebergs did contain rock and such debris, but nothing large enough to matter.

At 10:30 a.m. on April 21, Smith opened the proceedings. Bruce Ismay was the first witness called, and in his cross examination, which ran to fifty-eight pages in the official transcript, Smith served notice to everyone that he was determined to find the truth of what had happened aboard the
Titanic
. The next witness called was the
Carpathia
’s Captain Arthur Rostron. He instantly impressed everyone with his courage, clear-headedness, thoroughness, and his compassion. Rostron’s dignified and disciplined bearing impressed everyone on the committee, and when he described the memorial service held aboard the
Carpathia
, as well as the funeral for four victims who had perished in the lifeboats before the
Carpathia
arrived, there were tears in his eyes. At the obvious sorrow of this sunburnt seaman, many in the hearing room openly wept.