There was an unnecessary cost to this thoughtless haste. Rostron recalled his first winter crossing of the Atlantic on a Cunarder, the Umbria. “We bore into the heavy seas and I was staggered at the speed that was maintained in spite of the damage the weather was causing to the ship. But in those days speed was the be-all and end-all of the crack ships.”9 Damage costing thousands of pounds to repair would be sustained in a few minutes because captains would not lose a few hours. Lightoller, who joined White Star in 1900 and spent twenty years in the Atlantic service, also deplored the relentless driving of ships through gales. Liners lurching through heavy seas, with the propeller coming out of the water, were more stomach-turning than a passenger elevator plunging from an upper floor of a skyscraper; but junior officers dared not even murmur their objections. As liners grew bigger and faster, their captains were urged by their companies to reduce speed when necessary, but seldom did so.10
Crashing into storm waves was not the heaviest jeopardy. Cocksure attitudes by Atlantic captains and unimaginative complacency by Board of Trade regulators were worse. Crewmen and officers who had begun their working lives on vulnerable little ships of sails and rigging—blown hither and thither by winds, creeping slowly across the water’s surface as the natural elements ordained—felt impervious on these great steel liners that sped across the ocean so swiftly that they were called Atlantic greyhounds.
The elation of a working life under sail was lost to most seamen by 1912, and the sense of perils at sea had diminished, too. Yet on Atlantic steamships, sailors continued to work as lookouts, scanning for icebergs, derelicts, schooners, or the perilous little skiffs of Newfoundland cod fishermen. For the lookouts, a great Atlantic liner deep in the night seemed vast, uncanny, deserted: they felt alone with the steady onward drive of the screws,
. . . the beat of the off-shore wind,
And the thresh of the deep-sea rain.11
Part II
AT SEA
He explored the steamer. It was to him, the mechanic, the most sure and impressive mechanism he had ever seen; more satisfying than a Rolls, a Delaunay-Belleville, which to him had been the equivalents of a Velásquez. He marvelled at the authoritative steadiness with which the bow mastered the waves; at the powerful sweep of the lines of the deck and the trim stowing of cordage. He admired the first officer, casually pacing the bridge. He wondered that in this craft which was, after all, but a floating iron egg-shell, there should be the roseate music-room, the smoking room with its Tudor fireplace—solid and terrestrial as a castle—and the swimming pool, green-lighted water washing beneath Roman pillars. He climbed to the boat deck, and some never-realized desire for seafaring was satisfied as he looked along the sweep of gangways, past the huge lifeboats, the ventilators like giant saxophones, past the lofty funnels serenely dribbling black woolly smoke, to the forward mast. The snow-gusts along the deck, the mysteriousness of this new world but half-seen in the frosty lights, only stimulated him. He shivered and turned up his collar, but he was pricked to imaginativeness, standing outside the wireless room, by the crackle of messages springing across bleak air-roads ocean-bounded to bright snug cities on distant plains.
—SINCLAIR LEWIS, DODSWORTH
6
First Class
Complete freedom consists of being able to do what you like, provided you also do something you like less.
—ITALO SVEVO, ZENO’S CONSCIENCE
Monarchs and princes traveled in state but when journeying abroad for pleasure, staying at the local Ritz, disguised themselves under incognitos in order to limit ceremonial duties.1 Kings of finance also traveled in state but never cared who knew their names. Washington Irving’s account of early nineteenth-century Montreal moneymen attending the Northwest Company’s annual meeting at Lake Superior shows the imposing train and ostentatious comforts that they required. “They ascended the rivers in great state, like sovereigns making a progress: or rather like Highland chieftains navigating their subject lakes. They were wrapped in rich furs, their huge canoes freighted with every convenience and luxury, and manned by Canadian voyageurs, as obedient as Highland clansmen. They carried up with them cooks and bakers, together with delicacies of every kind, and abundance of choice wines for the banquets which attended this great convocation.” They were happiest of all if they could persuade “some titled member of the British nobility to accompany them on this stately occasion, and grace their high solemnities.”2
The stately progress of crowned heads and business chieftains demanded all that was costly and conspicuous. But whereas monarchs expected panoply that enthroned precedent, reverence, and continuity, the rulers of twentieth-century business spurned tradition: their voices were raised for speed, movement, novelty, instability. Their money went on sudden disjunctive choices that unsettled everyone else. Impulsive, peremptory decisions were expensive and thus a proof of power. They made a bonfire of other people’s arrangements so that the blazing resplendence of their own reputations would be seen for miles. To show the tempo of her protagonists, Edith Wharton included a last-minute dash from Paris on a White Star liner at the close of her novel The Custom of the Country (1913). The “billionaire Railroad King,” Elmer Moffatt, tells his ex-wife, Undine Spragg, whom he intends to remarry, that he is expected at a board meeting in Apex City and will have to cable for a special train to get him there from New York, “but I’ll have a deck suite for you on the Semantic if you’ll sail with me the day after tomorrow.”3 Sailing the day after tomorrow, or canceling a voyage leaving the day after tomorrow, was part of life’s satisfaction.
Clay Frick, who visited Europe most years, traveling on Atlantic liners with his wife, children, and entourage, canceled his reservation of Titanic suite B-52 because his wife had sprained her ankle. Pierpont Morgan took over Frick’s booking, but then canceled because he preferred to oversee the shipment of his Paris art collection to America. George Vanderbilt canceled his booking for himself and his wife on the day before departure, although his servant Frederick Wheeler traveled second class with their luggage and perished with it. Milton Hershey, the Pennsylvania chocolate millionaire, canceled his reservation. Robert Bacon, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to France, had booked to embark at Cherbourg with his wife, but they were forced to defer their return as his successor had delayed his arrival. Frick and Morgan were two of the most hardheaded men in America, and Vanderbilt one of the most gracefully romping: they were united in their abrupt jettisoning of well-laid plans. There were others, such as John Weir, the retired president of the Nevada-Utah Miners & Smelters Corporation, wishing to travel from his native Scotland to inspect mining properties in California, who were forced to transfer to the Titanic because of the coal strike.
Many first-class Titanic voyagers embodied the beau ideal of upper-class manliness, which was to be frank, fresh, and sporty and to live with a modest swagger. These included William Carter, of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the thirty-six-year-old polo-playing scion of a Philadelphia family, who had taken Rotherby House in Leicestershire for the hunting season. Carter divided his time between Philadelphia, his estate at Newport, and the English hunting shires. His wife—formerly Lucile Polk of Virginia—turned heads in Philadelphia and Newport society by her daring costumes and four-in-hand driving. Husband and wife, who were prominent followers of the Quorn Hunt, traveled with their two children, plus a valet, lady’s maid, and chauffeur. On board, Carter hailed another broad-shouldered sportsman, Clarence Moore, master of the Chevy Chase hunt, who had been in England buying foxhounds. Moore was a Washington stockbroker who farmed in Maryland and owned land in Virginia. For sporting gentlemen like Carter and Moore, it was deadly to keep still. They always had to be on the move: riding, jumping hedges, tramping fields with a gun, clambering aboard yachts, strolling on bosky paths with a lady, circling the pockets of a billiard table with the men. The card table provided a permissible sedentary diversion. So, too, did the deep chairs of the smoking room with its array of bottles that brought a thumpin
g, resonant end to the men’s evenings.
A member of Caroline Astor’s Four Hundred described her set in the period before 1914. “Breathless rushes across continents—One country blending into another—journeys by car, by boat, by train—Paris—Newport—New York. Paris again—London—Vienna—Berlin—the Riviera—Italy. Champagne years, colourful, sparkling, ephemeral . . . Always entertaining, being entertained, the same scene in a new setting.”4 There was speeding bustle as they chased Italian masters, English butlers, Austrian musicians, French chauffeurs, Spanish dancers, and Paris dressmakers; but their vagrancy, like that of the Jet Set half a century later, was as aimless as that of tramps. They chattered about new motors, new fashions, new restaurants, new health fads, and new marriages in a stifling, airtight atmosphere. They scattered all the little words by which the rich recognized, comforted, and affirmed one another: Ballets Russes, Consuelo, Grand Duke, Grand Slam, Hollandaise, Poiret, Rumpelmayer, Sobranie, Standard Oil, the Uffizi, the Racquet, the Nile, Marconigram, Rolls, Olympic, Ritz.
“Ritzonia” was the epithet coined by Bernard Berenson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. “Ritzonia,” he wrote in 1909, “carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.”5 Feverish movement provided the tempo of Ritzonia, as Edith Wharton told Berenson. “Yes, it’s very nice to be petted & feasted—but I don’t see how you can stand more than two or three weeks of that queer rootless life. I felt my individuality shrivelling a little every day, till I had somehow the feeling of being a mere ‘jeton’ [counter] in a game, that hurried & purposeless hands were feverishly moving from one little square to another—a kind of nightmare chess without rules.”6 Henry James in 1904 described life in the hotels, liners, and marble pleasure palaces of Ritzonia. “Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers.”7 It was with this impregnable spellbound assurance that first-class passengers boarded the Titanic.
Overdressing, said Ben Hecht, was the only art that Americans ever perfected. Each spring American plutocrats wrested the latest dresses and hats from their Paris makers. Only spring fashions mattered to the women of Ritzonia: within months the latest trends had been so meticulously detailed in American women’s magazines, such as Butterick’s and the suggestively titled Elite Styles, that every Main Street dressmaker and amateur seamstress was purveying a version of Rue des Pyramides modes. The Paris spring fashion of 1912 was a voluminous looped silk overskirt called a pannier, which if carefully cut and drawn in tightly about the feet could make a woman look more slender than the reality. “It is a clever deceit,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Paris correspondent on April 13. “Never has the fashionable woman worn less. She wears her chemise, a dainty silk affair, so thin that it takes scarcely any room beneath her corsets. The corsets are long enough to insure protection against the cold, and so she wears with them only a bust supporter of English eyelet embroidery, which ends above the waistline, and then a tiny pair of knickerbockers generally in white or pale pink China silk, which are fitted closely at the waist-line.”8
The couturier and Titanic passenger Lady Duff Gordon, with shops in Paris, London, and New York, was a pioneer in using panniers as concealing draperies. She recalled Paris in 1912 as a city where the “luxury trades were kept alive by the princely expenditure of American millionaires and Russian grand dukes.”9 Charlotte Cardeza, who occupied a suite with its own promenade deck, was one such Croesus. She traveled with fourteen steamer trunks, four suitcases, three crates, and a medicine chest. These contained, with other items, seventy dresses, ten fur coats, ninety-one pairs of gloves, and twenty-two hatpins, with a total value of £36,567. Mrs. Cardeza was the daughter of the industrialist Thomas Drake, who in 1866 founded the Fidelity Trust Company. Having divorced her rich husband, she lived in a stylish house, Montebello, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She was returning from Hungary, via Paris, with her bachelor son, Thomas Drake Cardeza, an unobtrusive director of his grandfather’s Fidelity Trust Company, who had trained himself to mimic other men’s airs of distinction but had neither contours nor colors of his own. For Charlotte Cardeza, there was no thrill in buying life’s mundane necessities, but it was a voluptuous joy to buy Paris luxuries that she did not need.
There were Canadian counterparts to the Cardezas called the Baxters. Hélène Baxter was the widow of “Diamond Jim” Baxter, a Quebec financier who had built the first shopping mall in Canada before his imprisonment in 1900 for embezzling large sums from his bank. She had protected most of her husband’s fortune and, after staying with her son and daughter at the Elysée Palace Hotel in Paris, was returning with them to North America. Their tickets were among the most expensive. Her twenty-four-year-old son, Quigg Baxter, had been a star hockey player, was full of animal spirits, and, traveling in B-60, quietly installed his girlfriend in C-90. She was a Belgian cabaret singer called Berthe Mayné but was traveling under the name of Madame de Villiers—a name taken from that of a previous lover who had enlisted in the Foreign Legion.
George and Eleanor Widener had gone to Paris with their daughter to buy her trousseau for her forthcoming wedding. Although she remained in France, they carried her purchases with them. Eleanor Widener was an inveterate Paris shopper, and twenty-five years later died during an expedition to a Paris boutique. Men, too, traveled with great trains of luggage. The American presidential aide Archie Butt, who visited Europe for six weeks, took seven trunks. As well as his Renault car, Billy Carter lost sixty shirts and twenty-four polo sticks when the Titanic sank.
The White Star stewardess Violet Jessop recalled embarkation day of an Olympic-class liner. “Everywhere there was tension,” she wrote. “As the passengers began to arrive, the volume of noise increased to a crescendo that seemed as if it could only end in madness . . . That babble even blotted out thought, as perspiring masses of smartly dressed, over-scented humanity surged together; yet here and there, a silent pathetic farewell was taking place. Everybody was totally oblivious of the distracted stewards vainly attempting to move enormous pieces of baggage through the crush. Those in charge shouted orders, and room bells rang impatiently for drinks, while stewardesses’ additional bugbear—flowers to arrange—arrived with the regularity of snowflakes. Boxes of every size were piled mountain-high.”10 Ida Straus, whose husband owned Macy’s department store in New York, found a basket of roses and carnations waiting in her cabin, a parting gift from Catherine Burbidge, whose husband’s family owned Harrods in London—“all so beautiful in color and as fresh as though they had just been cut.”11 Women passengers would receive over a dozen boxes of flowers on sailing day, and expect their exasperated stewardess to conjure eight or ten tall vases.
Many women in first class had abrasive grandeur: they spoke as if they always required special arrangements. Once on board, their faces set in an expression of unchallenged superiority, for they had only themselves to put first. In their cabins, they conned the passenger list, which was printed as a booklet, to see which of their friends and rivals were traveling on the same ship. Later, when two acquaintances met in the lounges or on deck, they could pretend to be amazed by the discovery that they were both on board, and entranced by the sound of one another’s voices.
First class was crammed with nouveaux riches. Edward Steiner, who on different Atlantic crossings sampled both steerage and first class, described first class as encumbered by shopworn men with unknown names. “The passengers were walking on tiptoe; many of them trying to adjust themselves to these labyrinthine luxuries,” Ste
iner noted. “Critically, almost with hostility, each passenger measured the other; the tables were buried beneath loads of flowers which were in the first melancholy stages of decay; so that all of it reminded me of a palatial home, to which the mourners have returned from a rich uncle’s funeral.” No one spoke to him. There was an atmosphere of aggressive insecurity. A man recoiled as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer when Steiner uttered a commonplace about the weather. “I learned later that he occupied a thousand-dollar suite of rooms and that his name was Kalbfoos or something like it. In choosing his seat at the table, I heard him remark to the head steward that he did not want to sit ‘near Jews’, nor any ‘second-class looking crowd.’ Mr Kalbfoos’s wish was impossible to accomplish. “More than a third of the passengers were Jews, and more than two-thirds were people whose names and bearing betrayed the fact that they were either the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves.” Under V, in the passenger list, Vanderbilt stood at the head, but with Vogelstein immediately under him. “Between such American or English names as Wallace or Wallingford, were a dozen Woolfs and Wumelbachers, Weises and Weisels,” Steiner recorded. “I need not tell you of the multitude of the Rosenbergs and Rosenthals there were in our cabin. Mr. Funkelstein and Mr. Jaborsky were my room-mates. First cabin after all is only steerage twice removed, and beneath its tinsel and varnish, it is the same piece of world as that below.”12
On the Titanic, German Americans and Jewish Americans were abundant in first-class accommodation although not beloved by their fellow passengers. Henry Stengel, principal of the firm of Stengel & Rothschild, leather merchants, from Newark, New Jersey; John Baumann, a New York importer of South American rubber; the young diamond dealer Jakob Birnbaum, originally from Cracow but based in San Francisco and a regular visitor to Antwerp; William Greenfield, the New York furrier; Samuel Goldenberg, the Broadway lace importer; Henry Harris, the theatrical producer; Herman Kleber, the hop merchant from Portland, Oregon; Adolphe Saalfeld, a perfumer based in Manchester; Abram Lincoln Salomon, the Manhattan stationer; Martin Rothschild, the garments merchant; and George Rosenshine, the New York importer of ostrich feathers, were among the passengers who reminded the class conscious that first class was only steerage twice removed. Some of these were showy spenders having their top moment: men who needed to put up a front to prove that they were never going to be kicked around again.
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 7