Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (7 page)

Yet there was a side to Astor that the public rarely saw. He was a bit of an eccentric, and something of a tinkerer and inventor who was intensely interested in turbines, and he held patents on a bicycle brake, road construction machinery, and a storage battery. He had even written a science fiction novel,
A Journey in
Other Worlds, whose hero, Colonel Bearwarden, was contracted by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company to make the Earth’s axis perfectly vertical, creating perpetual springtime.

Astor was not invulnerable, though. In 1909 he had divorced his wife of eighteen years, Ava Willing Astor, in order to marry an eighteen-year-old girl, Madeline Force, who was actually younger than Astor’s son Vincent. Divorce in the Edwardian era carried with it an almost ineradicable social stigma—something only the lower orders indulged in—and after being viciously cut by all his friends and fellow socialites, Astor decided that it would be best if he and his new bride wintered abroad. It wasn’t until late 1911 that they had been married, as it had been nearly impossible to find a clergyman willing to perform the ceremony. To make the whole situation more scandalous, the new Mrs. Astor, who had now been married four months, was at least four months pregnant. The gossipmongers were having a field day with the colonel—the scandal, of course, being over why Astor would divorce his wife to marry Madeline rather than simply making her his mistress—and it seemed doubtful if he would ever regain his former social standing. Now he was returning to New York with his new bride, after spending four months in Egypt and Paris, hoping that some of his former stature could be salvaged.

In contrast, another passenger on board the Boat Train, Benjamin Guggenheim, would never have even considered such a socially hazardous idea as divorcing his wife for another woman. Not that he was any model of conservative respectability—after all, he had just finished an extended stay in Paris with his mistress, Madame Aubert, while Mrs. Guggenheim was in New York—but he knew how the game was played. The sexual hypocrisy of the upper classes in those days was astonishing: affairs and liaisons were almost commonplace, the only condition being that no matter how widespread the knowledge of the affair might be, it must never be publicly admitted, or as Vita Sackville-West put it, “Appearances must be respected, though morals might be neglected.”

One of seven sons of Meyer Guggenheim, a Swiss who had moved to America before the Civil War, Benjamin and his brothers ran one of the most closely knit family enterprises in the United States, whose interests ranged from banking and finance to mining and smelting. Benjamin had taken a close interest in smelting, as new industries were demanding more specialized and refined metals than simple iron or steel. By investing heavily, Guggenheim had transformed the American smelting industry, with the result that all the other interests of the family became secondary. Whatever the details of his private life might be, Guggenheim was a gentle, soft-spoken man, whose quiet demeanor and pleasant appearance concealed a will of iron. Though neither harsh nor vindictive, Guggenheim was not a man to be crossed twice.

Neither was Charles Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Railway. By nature, railroadmen—and especially American railroadmen—were a ruthless lot, and to be able to hold his own with the likes of J. P Morgan, E. H. Harriman, or James J. Hill, one had to have certain jugular instinct. A Canadian by birth, Charles Hays was as determined as any of them, building the Grand Trunk into the dominant railway around the Great Lakes, in the northern Midwest states, and in the Canadian provinces. He was looking to expand into the hotel business and had been studying firsthand management methods in Europe. Now he was returning to his native Canada to launch an entire chain of Grand Trunk-owned hotels.

Rarely do characters—in every sense of the word—like Molly Brown come along. Geoffrey Marcus’s description of this remarkable woman is impossible to improve upon—he called her “the wife of the manager of a Leadville gold mine who had ‘struck it rich’ in 1894 and had thereafter prospered exceedingly. She was a middle-aged matron of Irish extraction, Amazonian proportions, and superabundant vitality.” Her one desire in life was to be accepted by the social elite of Denver, Colorado, the descendants of the so-called “Sacred Thirty Six,” but her rough-and-ready manner reminded the Denver socialites too much of their own origins, and they cut her mercilessly. (Admittedly, Molly’s
faux pas
could be memorable, as in the time she referred to herself as “the Hand-Made of the Lord.”) “The newly minted gentlemen had worked with pick and shovel on arrival,” commented Richard O’Connor, “and their ladies had bent over their washboards; but all that was crammed into a forgotten attic of the past.”
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Molly’s husband, James Joseph Brown, didn’t share his wife’s social ambitions, preferring to hold onto his working-class roots; eventually a gulf opened between them and they separated. Molly went east, where she was a hit at Newport, her vitality like a breath of fresh air, and soon she was an accomplished world traveler. After becoming proficient in several foreign languages—although she could revert to basic Anglo-Saxon and “swear like a pit-boss” when provoked—she finally acquired the veneer of culture and civility that the left-behind Denver elite craved, and lacked, so badly. Her decision to return to the United States on the Titanic had been made at the last minute, after she had spent the winter in Egypt, part of it in the company of the Astors.

There were many others: Isidor Strauss, former Congressman and advisor to the President of the United States, part owner of Macy’s and well-known philanthropist, returning with his wife Ida from a holiday on the French Riviera; George Widener, son of P A. B. Widener, the tramway magnate from Philadelphia; and his son Harry, who already had a reputation as one of the eminent bibliophiles of the day, having just purchased from Sotheby’s a very rare copy of Bacon’s Essaies, remarking as he slipped it in his coat pocket, “If I am shipwrecked it will go down with me.”

Philadelphia society was further represented by John B. Thayer, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, traveling with his wife and teenage son Jack. Another Philadelphia family preparing to cross on the Titanic was that of steel magnate Arthur Ryerson, his wife Emily, and their three youngest children, Susan, Emily and John. They had embarked earlier that month on what was meant to be a rather lengthy tour of Europe; their luggage amounted to sixteen trunks, each carefully packed by Mrs. Ryerson’s maid, Victorine, who had also come along. Their passage back to the States had been entirely unplanned, brought about because their eldest son, Arthur Jr., had been killed in an automobile accident near Philadelphia a few days previously. Mr. Ryerson cut their European trip short and booked passage for his family on the first available steamer to New York, which happened to be the Titanic.
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Col. Washington Augustus Roebling was also returning home, but this was at the end of what could best be described as a working vacation. Roebling had served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the American Civil War and was now the president and director of John A. Roebling’s Sons, the engineering and steel firm founded by his father. Roebling was known the world over as the man who had completed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, a project begun by his father, and he had been in Europe studying the latest engineering developments in suspension bridge construction.

The American theater was represented by producer Henry B. Harris, who, along with his wife Renee, had been in England hoping to find new British productions that he could introduce on Broadway to maintain his string of successes. Harris owned a half dozen theaters in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, as well as part-interest in a number of others, and he was a brilliant theatrical agent as well. Over the years Harris had managed such international stars as Lily Langtree, Peter Dailey, and Robert Edeson, and he was always unusually mindful of the image his actors and actresses presented to the American public: he had been one of the handful of producers who had struggled to lift the American theater out of the pit of disrepute into which actor John Wilkes Booth had plunged it when he shot President Abraham Lincoln.

One of the better known Americans on board the Boat Train that morning was Maj. Archibald Butt, military aide to President William Howard Taft. A born adventurer, Butt in his time had been a soldier, a news correspondent, a novelist, and a diplomat. He possessed an easy charm and graciousness, equally at home with prince and peasant. An elderly black who worked at the White House once remarked of him, “There goes the man that’s the highest with the mighty and the lowest with the lowly of any man in this city!”
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The Major was returning to Washington after an extended visit to Italy that had been ostensibly a diplomatic mission to the Vatican for the President, but had actually been a convalescence. For years Major Butt had been a close friend and confidant of Theodore Roosevelt, and had become close friends with William Taft while Taft had been Roosevelt’s vice president. Once close political allies if not actually friends, Roosevelt and Taft began feuding almost as soon as Roosevelt left the presidency and Taft filled it. What this did to Archie Butt was put him in between the two men, and he found it nearly impossible to maintain his loyalty to Taft, his commander-in-chief, without turning his back on all the years he had spent as Roosevelt’s friend. The situation had grown worse as Taft and Roosevelt, who had come to bitterly dislike each other, began vying for the Republican nomination for the Presidency in the upcoming election in November. In the end the strain had proven more than Butt could take, and he had asked Taft for a transfer to another posting. Taft instead gave him the assignment to the Vatican, hoping that the trouble with Roosevelt would die down in Butt’s absence, and his jangled nerves would recover. Apparently Butt was unable to completely shake off his depression: in a last letter posted to his sister-in-law before the Titanic sailed, he wrote, “If the old ship goes down, you’ll find my affairs in shipshape condition.”

Accompanying Major Butt was his close friend Frank Millet. Like Butt, Millet had been many things in his time: one-time drummer-boy in the American Civil War and war correspondent in the Spanish-American War and several of the innumerable Russo-Turkish wars. His world travels had enabled him to become a well-known author and raconteur, but Millet was best known for his paintings. Historical subjects were his favorites, and copies of his work, such as “Wandering Thoughts,” “At the Inn,” or “Between Two Fires,” hung in homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his American birth, Millet now lived in the Cotswolds, by all accounts a happy man.

There was one other American officer aboard the Boat Train, Col. Archibald Gracie. An amateur military historian of private means, he had just published a book on one of the lesser known campaigns of the Civil War, called The Truth About Chickamauga. Although it was the sort of book that only another military historian could love, filled with seemingly endless accounts of troop movements and dispositions, and the comings and goings of countless officers and men, it had entailed a tremendous amount of detective work, and now Colonel Gracie was taking a well-earned rest.

Not all of the famous passengers aboard the Boat Train were Americans. There were several Englishmen of note as well, among them Henry Forbes Julian, one of the leading metallurgists of the day, who had created new processes for recovering precious metals from ores, and Christopher Head, former mayor of Chelsea and currently a member of Lloyd’s of London. But there was one among them who, at the height of his powers, wielded more influence than even J. P Morgan.

William T. Stead was characterized by Geoffrey Marcus as “half charlatan—half genius.” Barbara Tuchman called him “a human torrent of enthusiasm for good causes. His energy was limitless, his optimism unending, his egotism gigantic.” In the 1880s Stead had been the editor of the
Pall
Mall Gazette, a Liberal daily, and his crusades had garnered a readership for the Gazette so great that at one time it even included the Prince of Wales. The range of his campaigns included railing against life in Siberian labor camps, decrying Bulgarian atrocities in the Balkan wars, and denouncing slavery in the Congo. He espoused with equal passion the causes of baby adoption, housing for the poor, and public libraries. Stead became the center of a national scandal when he published an article entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” in which he described how for £5 he was able to purchase the services of a thirteen-year-old prostitute. The article resulted in Stead’s arrest and conviction on a charge of abduction, for which he was compelled to serve a brief prison term, but the resultant public outcry over his sensational revelation resulted in his quick release and a subsequent act of Parliament that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.

In 1890 Stead founded his own monthly journal, the Review
of Reviews,
and quickly made it one of the most influential publications of its day. He had interviewed Tsar Alexander III, Cecil Rhodes, Adm. John A. “Jackie” Fisher, and Gen. William Booth of the Salvation Army. He was a friend of men like Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and James Bryce, and even had lunch with the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. His mission, as Stead saw it, was to champion all “oppressed races, ill-treated animals, underpaid typists, misunderstood women, persecuted parsons, vilified public men, would-be suicides, hot-gospellers of every sort and childless parents.” Short, ruddy-complected, with piercing blue eyes and a reddish beard, habitually dressed in tweeds, Stead presented almost a caricature of the quintessential English eccentric. “He was very nearly a great man,” Truth would later declare of him, “and certainly a most extraordinary one.” To T. P. Connor, he was “a Peter the Hermit preaching the Crusades out of his time.” Now he was in his sixty-fourth year, his energy still as boundless as ever, but an increasing fascination with spiritualism was slowly robbing him of his influence and eroding his credibility (he regularly communed with a spirit known only as “Julia.”) But even in decline, William Stead was still formidable. Even now he was traveling to New York, at President Taft’s personal invitation, to speak at a great international peace conference scheduled to open April 21.
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