Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

by Daniel Allen Butler

  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=mc2; 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.”

  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-ol
d 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.”5

  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.6

  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!”7

  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 bee
n 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.