Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (6 page)

—II Chronicles 35:4

 

 

 

APRIL 10, 1912, DAWNED BRIGHT AND CLEAR, AS DID SO MANY DAYS THAT spring. The sprawling docks, piers, and quays bustled with the seeming chaos of a busy seaport. At the White Star Line’s Ocean Dock lay the
Titanic,
plumes of smoke gently rising from her funnels, her white upperworks gleaming in the sunshine, her enormous hull dwarfing every other ship in the harbor. All morning long an endless stream of passengers and crew strode up the gangways and vanished into the bowels of the ship. The rush of people had begun a little after sunrise as the first of hundreds of firemen, greasers, trimmers, stokers, stewards, stewardesses, deckhands, and galleyhands began to make their way up to the giant ship. Every now and then a tremendous blast would issue forth from the
Titanic’s
great steam whistles, rattling windows for miles around, the stentorian tones (the whistles were pitched at C
³
) letting one and all know that this was a sailing day.
¹

A maiden voyage was always cause for excitement in a seafaring town, even one as seawise as Southampton. Friends and families of passengers and crew, along with hundreds of sightseers, crowded down to the Ocean Dock. The Rev. William G. Hurley recalled years later that “on the day it [the Titanic] sailed, all England was merry in the celebration of a holiday for the occasion. Flags were flying in the breeze in every city and hamlet. There was the inevitable speech-making. That gloriously martial air, ‘Britannia Rules the Waves,’ was the mighty theme-song of the day.”
²

It is a scene treasured by thousands to this day, as the great ship was preparing to depart on what would most assuredly be an epic voyage, the throngs cheering themselves patriotically hoarse, while brass bands played and overhead flew the Union Jack, inspiring one and all with the greatness of British maritime accomplishments.

Except it didn’t happen that way. Like so many others have done on other occasions, the Reverend Hurley was recalling those wonderful days before the Great War “with advantages.” Reflecting on the first years of the twentieth century from the perspective of its last, it is stunning to look upon the world of the Edwardian Era, a world that seems so far removed from the present that it is often difficult to believe that it is still a living memory for many. The values, beliefs, motives, the very pace of life seem nearly incomprehensible today. Barry Pitt, in his introduction to John Keegan’s August 1914, caught the essence of this seeming unreality when he wrote:

Yet it was not a Golden Age or Belle Epoque except for the privileged minority of the upper classes. Class defined the Edwardian world. The method of making the distinctions between the classes varied from country to country—it was decided more by wealth than birth in the United States, just the reverse in Great Britain—but in any society the boundaries were usually quite clearly defined, never more so than when distinguishing between “we” and “they.” Usually the classes fell into three categories—working, or lower class; the middle class; and the upper class, or aristocracy. Mobility, especially from the middle to the upper class, was discouraged and restricted, usually by tradition, occasionally by law, although the line between the lower and middle classes blurred occasionally.

It was not an era of unbridled confidence, innocence, comfort, stability, security, or peace, although it has often been portrayed as such. This is not to say that these qualities were not present; they were, but in an ongoing state of flux. People were more confident of their standards, believing in their values, secure in the ideas of progress. But equally present were doubts about the future, created by a complicated system of military alliances coupled with ever-growing expenditures for armaments; protests and demonstrations over appalling working conditions and hours as well as grossly inadequate wages for the working classes; violent confrontations between protesters and police, or strikers and strike-breakers, clashing in street brawls, while anarchists and nihilists carried out a haphazard rash of bombings and assassinations. A new form of hatred and fear manifested itself in bloody confrontations between British police and the IRA, or Austro-Hungarian authorities and Serbian pan-nationalists, or Russian soldiers and Russian revolutionaries.

Yet it would be deceptive to depict the first decade of the twentieth century as too closely resembling the last, for through all the tension and upheaval, there was a constant note of confidence running though the times. Men and women everywhere, of all social classes, readily acknowledged that problems existed in society, though they might differ on how grave those problems were. But even the anarchist with his bomb believed that the problems had solutions; it was only a matter of how and when they would be found. It was that sense of confidence that made the Edwardian Era unique.

Perhaps most tellingly, these were the years of the music of Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky, the philosophy of Friederich Nietzsche and Henri Louis Bergson, the art of Cezanne and Seurat, the writings of Emil Zola and Bertrand Russell—all of them compelling, forceful, and dynamic, almost revolutionary. It was a remarkable expression of art imitating life, the artists and thinkers transforming the external expressions of their disciplines as thoroughly as the external trappings of Western society were being transformed.

This first decade of the twentieth century was the culmination of a hundred years of the most accelerated rate of change in society and technology that mankind had ever known. Between 1812 and 1912, humanity had gone from transportation, communication, production, and manufacturing methods powered by human or animal muscle, augmented by wind and water to a world of steam engines, steamships, and steam-powered machinery. The new century was one of electric lighting and communications (though as yet electricity was common only in the cities, and then only in the middle- and upper-class areas). By 1912 trucks, lorries, and motorcars powered by internal combustion engines were well on their way to supplanting horses as a means of transport.

In less than a century, mankind’s rate of travel overland had more than trebled, while at sea it had more than quadrupled. Where in 1812 the best speed a traveler could hope for would be perhaps twenty miles an hour while riding in a horse-drawn coach, a railway passenger in 1912 would routinely reach speeds approaching seventy miles an hour on an express. A trip across the North Atlantic that once took more than a month was now accomplished in a week or less, and with a degree of safety and comfort unimaginable only a few generations before.

The accelerating rate of change was most marked in the last decade. In 1900 there had been fewer than 8,000 automobiles in the entire United States, but by 1910 there were close to a half-million. In 1903 the first flight of a heavier-than-air craft lasted twelve seconds and covered 852 feet; in 1909 Louis Bleriot had flown across the English Channel, a distance of twenty-six miles. The years between 1900 and 1910 had seen the introduction of the phonograph, wireless telegraphy, turbine-powered steamships, the electric light, the original Kodak “brownie” camera, heavier-than-air flying machines, motion pictures—all of them as reliable apparatus rather than mere technical novelties.

The Edwardian world would witness revelations in the physics of Roentgen’s X-rays, Marie Curie’s radium, and Einstein’s E=mc
²
; in the psychology of Jung, Freud, Pavlov, and Adler; and in medicine, where the secrets of vitamins, genes, and hormones would be unlocked. Science had been transformed from a dalliance for eccentrics into a systematic discipline, becoming the foundation of industry.

At the same time these changes unintentionally began an erosion in the nineteen-centuries-old faith in God as the source of all certainty and stability. The authority and infallibility of the Bible were no longer universally regarded as absolute, and the solid core of religious doctrines and dogmas that had bound Western civilization together was slowly crumbling. The industrial society that created and supported the multitude of innovations also built up new pressures in both prosperity and poverty, raising questions about the validity of the established order that churches could no longer answer convincingly, while growing populations and densely crowded cities created new antagonisms between classes, new problems for industry owners, and new opportunities for radicals and rabble rousers. Far from wallowing in its own decadence, as is all too often depicted, the Edwardian world was dynamic, even exciting, driven by the momentum of centuries of accumulated tensions and energies—industrial, economic, social—that created such contrasts of wealth and poverty, opulence and indigence such as no society had ever known before. It was this era that Mark Twain christened the “Gilded Age.”

It was undeniably a time marked by money-grubbing and ostentation on the part of the upper classes, when “excess” and “success” became interchangeable. Just over one percent of the population of Great Britain controlled 67 percent of the nation’s money, a proportion that held equally true for the United States. Of the two societies, the more ostentatious were the Americans, more than a handful of whom had accumulated fortunes greater than the world had ever seen. However, it was undeniable that these same Americans were better at making money than at spending it: like most
nouveau riche,
their hallmark was conspicuous consumption, with little discrimination or taste. They literally had more money than they knew what to do with, and the desire of American plutocrats to spend lavishly, coupled with a sense of insecurity due to the very rapidity that most of them had made their fortunes, drove them irresistibly to Europe, and ultimately to London.

It was inevitable that this upstart leisure class should be drawn to the greatest city in the world. Finding themselves among kindred people, these wealthy Americans discovered what they craved—and what America as a nation and the humility of their individual births could not hope to give them: the pomp and grandeur of a 1200-year-old monarchy, with all the stability, nobility, and grace that were its trappings; the company of men and women who carelessly and comfortably wore names and titles that were a part of history; and a society that was relaxed, mature, and secure in its own longevity.

“The Season” of 1911, perhaps the most wonderful in memory, had provided the Americans with the unforgettable splendor of the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary; the first performance in Great Britain of Diagilev’s Russian Ballet, led by the legendary Anna Pavlova; long processions of motorcars down Park Lane in the evenings; and endless glittering balls and dinner parties in Belgravia. The stormy passage that summer of the Parliament Bill, which deprived the House of Lords of its veto power over the Commons, added yet another dimension of fascination for the visiting Americans. From Opening Night at the Royal Opera House Covent Gardens, in April, to the Cowes Regatta in July, the numbers of those from across the Atlantic attending threatened to equal or exceed those of their English friends and relatives—the latter the result of a spate of transatlantic marriages that was rapidly approaching epidemic proportions.
⁴

The Boat Train that pulled out of Waterloo Station that Wednesday morning was laden with several such Americans. Leaving with traditional British punctuality at exactly 9:30 A.M., the train left behind the fussy Victorian muddle of smoke-streaked buildings, now covered by a new steel and glass roof, that had made Waterloo Station at once a national joke and a national treasure. Within its deep blue broadcloth-upholstered cars with gold-tasseled trim and mahogany woodwork, or in a similar train in France simultaneously bound from Paris to Cherbourg, were more than a dozen men whose total net worth exceeded £300,000,000-men like John J. Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Charles M. Hays, or even the occasional woman like Mrs. J. J. Brown of Denver, Colorado, better known as “Molly” Brown.

Perhaps the epitome of the American plutocrat, John Jacob Astor, he of the long, narrow face and aquiline nose above which sat dark, sad eyes, was once described, not unfairly, as “the world’s greatest monument to unearned increment.” He was the great-grandson of the first John Jacob Astor (the family repeated the name through several generations; the man who would be sailing on the Titanic was John Jacob Astor IV), a poor Schwabian who had emigrated to the United States in 1783 and amassed a fortune in the fur trade, in turn investing his money in property in and around New York. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Astors held title to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including the Astoria Hotel in New York, as well as some of the most deplorable slums on both sides of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, since the Astors seemed to conduct their business with an attitude that stopped just short of divine right, this singular state of affairs neither alarmed nor embarrassed the family a whit.

Astor himself was certainly ambitious and, when need be, ruthless. Joseph Choate, one of the family’s lawyers, once remarked of him, “He knew what he wanted and how to get it.” He was also possessed of a great deal of vanity: during the Spanish-American War he had raised a regiment of volunteers (with himself as colonel of course) and though the unit saw only brief combat, ever afterward Astor enjoyed attending official functions in his uniform, and preferred to be addressed by his rank. Conspicuous consumption was nothing new to Astor: in his mansion at Newport, Astor had an eighteen car garage; and once, to satisfy a whim, he had even driven a locomotive on his private railway that drew a coach filled entirely with millionaires. His attitude toward money was suitably cavalier: he was once heard to remark that “a man who has a million dollars is almost as well off as if he were wealthy.”