Everyone is pretty much familiar with the Titanic disaster as numerous books, documentaries, and films have detailed the causes of this monumental shipwreck and the tremendous loss of 1,514 lives which resulted. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how this tragedy could have been avoided: if all the warnings of ice fields in the Titanic’s path from other vessels had been heeded during that day, if it had not been traveling at high speed that night when visibility was not optimal, if it had not struck the iceberg in the manner in which it did, had there been enough lifeboats for all the passengers and crew onboard…these and so many other “what ifs” that would have been simple fixes. If any one of these things had been done differently – then the Titanic likely wouldn’t have gone down in infamy as one of the worst maritime disasters outside of a war zone.
The focus of this post, however, delves into the harsh criticism and public ill-will that some of the shipwreck’s survivors had to endure in the aftermath of the rescue efforts and the inquests which followed. Quite a furor was caused determining exactly why and how the supposedly “unsinkable” Titanic foundered during its maiden voyage with the predictable finger-pointing and blame games that followed. However, most other sources focus on what happened leading up to the disaster and the attempts to get people off the ship in the harrowing two hours and twenty minutes before it plunged beneath the surface of the icy Atlantic Ocean. What most other accounts of the Titanic have not documented in detail are the lives of survivors and how they coped (or didn’t) in the years following the sinking. This makes Voyagers Of The Titanic by Richard Davenport-Hines of particular interest because it provides new perspectives not widely made public before.
Of course, politics also reared its ugly head in the wake of tragedies like the Titanic sinking – doing nothing to help the grave situation, but making it worse particularly because political posturing and negative press coverage would feed off each other in mutual self-aggrandizement while blaming the survivors for their predicament. The inquest which took place in New York on April 19, 1912 was five days after the sinking and one day after the rescue ship Carpathia disembarked the Titanic survivors. The US Senate inquiry was chaired by populist Michigan senator William Alden Smith who claimed to have the best interests of the “little people” at heart and loved to harangue against the evils of big business and elitists. According to Voyagers Of The Titanic, Smith was actually a windbag with lots of bluster and bravado who was only good at alienating those set to testify at the hearing, didn’t know what questions to ask, and arrived at swift judgements regarding the disaster – without giving much attention to the real facts of the matter.
Senator Smith was described by Voyagers author Richard Davenport-Hines as an “incoherent, unsystematic questioner, who hated the Demon Drink and hoped to elicit that Captain Edward Smith or other officers had been drunk.” (Pg. 294) Any insinuations of this sort that the disaster was caused due to alcohol impairment were patently absurd as it turned out, and apparently Senator Smith was unaware or didn’t care that he was veering dangerously into slanderous territory. He also tried to imply that possibly Captain Smith and/or Bruce Ismay (chairman of the White Star Line, which operated Titanic) and other officers placed bets on the speed of the ship and its arrival time in New York totally disregarding that the ship was speeding through a dangerous ice zone to break a record. All of these insinuations were found to be without merit. Senator Smith was only interested in casting the net of blame, without actual concern for the fates of those who perished and to relentlessly needle the survivors. Then, naturally, where unnecessary, inciting politicians barge into the scene, religious pretensions and judgments go hand in glove with that – and the aftermath of the Titanic was no different.
Davenport-Hines also mentions how clergyman Charles Parkhurst gave an over-the-top sermon castigating the “godless” builders of the Titanic on April 21st at Madison Square Garden, uttering such grand-eloquent silliness like the following: “Grand men, charming women, beautiful babies, all becoming horrible in the midst of the glittering splendor of a $10,000,000 casket!” (Pg. 292) Reading this, I thought how absurd it seemed, this implication that the builders of the Titanic must all be atheists who built this incredible, cutting edge, state-of-the-art feat of engineering for 1912, (and it was the largest moving object ever constructed in recorded history up to that time) just as a slap in the face to, or some triumph over god. All such pronouncements are outrageous without actually knowing anything about the people involved. Willful human ignorance spouted by the supposedly better educated political and religious elites eseemed to have no lack of boundaries then – and this is still annoyingly and sadly true today.
Likewise, in Britain the Bishop Of Winchester (Edward Talbot) droned on with more attention-seeking twaddle declaring that god caused this tragedy as a lesson against human folly. Talbot stated it was: “A mighty lesson against our confidence and trust in the strength of machinery and money and in the iniquity of hyper-luxuries…” (Pg. 293) No doubt many other “preachers” around the world added their two-cents as well, heaping blame on both the dead and the survivors as if they deserved what happened to them. While there certainly was a widespread outpouring of genuine grief from people around the world who were mortified by the tragedy – comments like the above mentioned are the worst kind of attention seeking, and pretentious mean-spiritedness from those in so-called respectable, responsible positions not setting a good example.
Berating victims for tragedies they’ve suffered and projecting self-righteousness onto others without being in or having been in their circumstances is a particularly curious and disturbing aspect of human nature. In addition to the criticism heaped upon Captain Smith, his officers, and the chairman of the White Star Line, there was a great deal of criticism heaped on the passengers of the Titanic because of their slow reaction to the ship’s collision with the iceberg, not grasping the gravity of the incident and then their attitudes towards evacuation of the vessel met with disapproval of many outside the incident. For instance, the lone Japanese passenger Masabumi Hosono was utterly vilified in the Japanese press for surviving the ordeal when others had died. He was also fired from his job as a civil servant and generally shunned by Japanese society. While it has historically been the rule at sea that women and children go into lifeboats first, the process of evacuating Titanic was so haphazard that some men were allowed into some of those boats (especially in the port side) when women and children were not present on that area of the ship’s deck.
With this in mind, it’s puzzling why the public should harshly judge someone and making them a pariah because they wanted to save their own life. People who never experienced such a dangerous situation have no right to criticize the actions of those trying to survive it. In similar fashion, other survivors such as Canadian businessmen Albert Dick and Arthur Peuchen were later crushed by public opinion and the wealthy Peuchen eventually lost everything and died as a pauper in 1929. Typically, many people who survive a tragedy feel guilty that they did – when others did not. Those negative feelings do not need to be exacerbated by public opinion – who, once again, were not in that situation and cannot say for a certainty how they would react and what lengths they might go to in order to survive. Most famously, English aristocrats Sir Cosmo & Lady Duff-Gordon’s reputations suffered terribly on both sides of the Atlantic because they survived the wreck and were falsely accused of bribing crew members to quickly evacuate.
In fact, the couple followed the protocols given and as author Davenport-Hines pointed out: “the fact is that they obeyed instructions at launch time and were not responsible for the actions of the crewmen who put lifeboat #1 on the water with a shockingly low occupancy.” (Pg. 230) From today’s standpoint, being wealthy and white is held against you and automatically seems to make you a bad person. While this may not have been the typical view in 1912, this was certainly the unfortunate case for the Duff-Gordon’s. Life became unbearable later for some survivors such as crew member Annie Robinson, passengers Washington Dodge, Henry Frauenthal, and Jack Thayer tragically committed suicide in 1914, 1919, 1927, and 1945 respectively. These are only a few of the tragic outcomes listed of the numerous sad stories Davenport-Hines relates in Voyagers Of The Titanic. This says nothing about the crew members who ended up as broken men who were never forgiven for their unwitting roles in the catastrophe. Davenport-Hines has constructed an amazing insightful account of the Titanic tragedy that wasn’t widely known before. All of this goes to show how terrible human nature can be when we self-righteously act as judge, jury, and executioner over others for their actions when we haven’t experienced it ourselves.
