Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  As the Titanic steamed away from Queenstown, schoolteacher Lawrence Beesley noticed how a little house on the left side of the harbor entrance continued to gleam white in the distance. He also observed the gulls who followed them and marveled at their ability to soar alongside the ship while barely moving their wings. Before long, the lighthouse on the Old Head of Kinsale, fourteen nautical miles away, was spotted and the Titanic then turned outward as it continued to follow the shoreline along Ireland’s southern coast. Years later, people in whitewashed cottages along the shore would remember looking up to see the huge new liner pass by, and recall what a splendid sight she was. At around four o’clock the white column of the Fastnet Lighthouse, planted on a small rocky outcrop off Ireland’s southern tip, came into view. From there, the ship turned westward to head out across the open Atlantic. As the Irish coastline retreated in the distance, Eugene Daly once again hoisted his pipes, walked to the stern railing, and saluted his homeland with a mournful dirge called “Erin’s Lament.” Seagulls wheeled over the Titanic’s wake as the distant hills grew dark in the lowering sun and became ever smaller, until they finally disappeared in the offshore mist.

  Passengers take the air on the second-class boat deck promenade. (photo credit 1.28)

  At the end of the afternoon a good number of the Titanic’s passengers were still out on deck. Margaret Brown described this time of day as one when “all take their exercise before descending to the dining hall … the women in luxurious furs and the men in heavy overcoats … and partly disguised in steamer caps.” The air was chilly but there was little wind and the sea was remarkably calm—like a “silver lake” as one described it. A few passengers were walking their dogs, John Jacob Astor quite possibly among them. Although Madeleine Astor was mostly keeping to her cabin, Colonel Astor was often seen walking Kitty on the boat deck. It is thought that the Titanic’s kennels were located there, behind a door just aft of the fourth funnel. Kitty, however, was frequently to be found in the Astors’ stateroom; they wanted to keep her near since she had recently gotten lost during their trip up the Nile, as Madeleine’s sister Katherine Force later related:

  She [Kitty] wandered away from Colonel Astor’s side one day at a landing and [he] was greatly distressed by the loss of the dog. He spent a great deal of time looking for her, and when he had to give up and start up the Nile again he employed scores of natives to look for her, promising a handsome reward for her return. Nothing was heard of Kitty until on the return trip [downriver] when, on passing another dahabea [boat], Colonel Astor spotted Kitty making herself at home on board. The Astor boat was stopped and Kitty found her master with joyous barks. After that, a closer watch was kept of Kitty on board the Titanic. She slept in Colonel Astor’s room [and he] took frequent walks and romped with Kitty a great deal.

  Frank Millet and Archie Butt, too, often opted for a walk on the boat deck at day’s end. On running into Astor on deck, both men would have greeted him, since they were social acquaintances, although the colonel was not a man for easy conversation. Astor’s military rank was a result of his outfitting a 102-man artillery regiment called the Astor Battery at the outbreal of the Spanish-American War. He had accompanied the regiment to Cuba in June of 1898 and had observed from a safe distance as his distant cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, and his Rough Riders made their famous charge up San Juan Hill. He spent only a month in Cuba but it was enough to earn him the honorific that became his chosen mode of address. The colonel did not accompany the Astor Battery when they were sent to the Philippines in 1899, but Frank Millet did, traveling across the Pacific with the regiment and treporting on the war for Harper’s Weekly. He later published his dispatches in book form as The Expedition to the Philippines.

  In early February of 1910 Archie Butt had been seated near Colonel Astor at a dinner-dance in the New York mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt III. It was a thrill for Archie to be invited to this function, since, as he noted to Clara, it marked “the first time a member of the Butt family has actually penetrated into the heart of the Four Hundred.” Archie was told that Astor had been placed at the head table under the watchful eye of the hostess for fear he might be “cut” by some of the guests due to his recent divorce from Ava. A society woman whispered to Archie that, while she did not object to John Jacob Astor’s morals, “she thought [he] looked like an ape,” and Archie wrote, “I had to agree with her.”

  Much of the resentment toward the Astors in New York was driven by the fact that they were, in effect, the city’s biggest slumlords. The first John Jacob Astor, a butcher’s son from Baden who landed in New York in 1784, had left behind on his death in 1848 the largest fortune in the United States. Astor began as a fur trader but cashed in his fur company in the 1830s to buy up large parcels of New York real estate. “If I could live all over again,” he once said, “I would buy every square inch of Manhattan.” He very nearly succeeded—his son William would be known as “the landlord of New York” for his vast holdings in the city. The Astors preferred to lease out their land to others who would then return the improved real estate once the lease was up. This also spared the family the unpleasant business of collecting rents from the tenements that occupied many of their properties.

  This 1898 magazine cartoon is captioned “A New Factor in Modern Warfare: The Jack-Ass(tor) Battery.” (photo credit 1.68)

  Astor-owned hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria and the St. Regis put an elegant gloss on the hard fact that three-quarters of the family’s income came from rents derived from New York’s poorest neighborhoods. In this, the Astors and the White Star Line had something in common; the Olympic and the Titanic would never have been built without the lucrative transatlantic immigrant trade to fill their lower decks. The accommodations the Titanic offered its poorer passengers, however, bore no resemblance to the squalid disease-ridden warrens that stood on Astor-owned properties. Descriptions of these by the crusading writer and photographer Jacob Riis in the 1890s had caused Colonel Astor to unload some of the worst of his holdings by 1900.

  FRANK MILLET HAD likely spent most of April 11 immersed in paperwork—shipboard days were good for that. He had a lecture on period costumes to give in early May, a progress report to write on the American Academy building on the Janiculum Hill, and he had to prepare for the pending Fine Arts Commission meeting regarding the Lincoln Memorial. Architect Daniel Burnham, the chairman of the commission, needed Millet’s persuasive gifts to keep the politicians who made up the Lincoln Memorial Commission from making a hash of their plans. Burnham, who headed a large Chicago architecture firm that had designed such Gilded Age landmarks as New York’s Flatiron Building and Washington’s Union Station, had become fast friends with Frank during the construction of the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1892–93. Burnham was the man responsible for conjuring up a city of grand boulevards, canals, and classical facades from some scrubby acres of Chicago waterfront, and Frank Millet’s unfailing good humor and gift for managing people under impossible deadlines had made him Burnham’s closest lieutenant.

  As the fair was about to open in May of 1893, Burnham asked Millet to become his director of functions and dream up events to boost attendance. Frank soon devised a host of parades, special days, and fireworks displays, but his most outrageous success was a gala evening called the Midway Ball. For this event, Turkish belly dancers and African and South Sea Island women from the Midway’s replica villages were invited to a formal dance attended by directors of the fair and other leading citizens of Chicago. The newspapers described men in white tie and tails “swinging black Amazons with bushy hair and teeth necklaces” around the dance floor. For the late-night buffet, Frank devised a menu with dishes like “Roast Missionary à la Dahomey” and “Boiled Camel Humps à la Cairo Street.” To the Chicago Tribune the ball was “the strangest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel.”

  Daniel Burnham and a model of Henry Bacon’s design for the Lincoln Memorial (photo credit 1.36)

  Nineteen years a
fter the Chicago exposition, Burnham and Millet were comrades-in-arms once again, on a project they knew was of great historic significance. Both had been young men when Lincoln was assassinated and had clear memories of the deep national grief that had ensued. For a memorial to the martyred president, Burnham had long supported a site overlooking the Potomac; he wanted the monument to be set apart from other structures and to extend the Mall, aligned to the Capitol and the Washington Monument. But Joseph Cannon, the gruff and influential former Speaker of the House known as “Uncle Joe,” was determined to keep the memorial away from “that God-damned swamp” by the river. He favored a site across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and thought that Southern members of Congress would support him. Burnham soon dispatched Frank Millet to seek out key Southern representatives and seed the notion that it would never do for the memorial to the “conquerer” to be placed on the land of the “conquered”—Arlington, after all, belonged to the sacred South.

  Burnham had also asked Millet to write a report containing the Fine Arts Commission’s recommendations, and by August 10, 1911, the Memorial Commission had accepted its main points and had agreed to hire architect Henry Bacon of New York to draw up a preliminary design. Only a few weeks later, however, Joe Cannon persuaded the commission to engage architect John Russell Pope to create a competing design for two sites other than the one by the Potomac. By December both Bacon and Pope had models ready for display. Bacon’s Doric temple design had many symbolic elements and featured a statue of Lincoln inside with two chambers on either side carved with words from his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses. The design from John Russell Pope seemed rather pedestrian by comparison—a statue of Lincoln surrounded by a double row of columns—and the proposed sites for it were not particularly distinguished.

  Frank Millet returned from Rome for the decisive meeting on February 3, 1912, when the Potomac Park site had finally won the day. But “Uncle Joe” and some of his cronies were still dissatisfied and angling to change the design. So Millet no doubt took time on the Titanic to gird himself for his next encounter with the fractious members of the Lincoln Memorial Commission.

  Daniel Burnham would not be present at that meeting. On Saturday, April 13, the architect was leaving for Europe with his wife and daughter and son-in-law for a grand tour that would run into the summer. The ship he had chosen was the Olympic, and after dinner on Sunday night he would think of his old friend Millet, traveling in near-identical surroundings in the opposite direction. Burnham would summon a steward and write out a Marconi message to Frank Millet on the Titanic. He would not receive a reply.

  AT 6 P.M. on Thursday, April 11, the sound of the Titanic’s bugler was heard on deck, indicating it was time for passengers to dress for dinner. The dress code had been waived on the first night at Cherbourg but from then onward “full dress was always en règle” as the Washington aristocrat and amateur historian Archibald Gracie noted approvingly. For Gracie and the other first-class men, this simply meant donning white tie and tails or a tuxedo, a standard part of any traveling wardrobe. Archie Butt had slightly more sartorial choice since his seven trunks were packed with both his regular and dress uniforms along with civilian evening wear. (At the White House, Archie often changed clothes six times a day.) For this first formal evening he may have simply chosen his regular uniform or even civilian mufti, reserving a show of gold lace for later in the voyage. Most of the women, too, had a different gown packed in tissue paper for each night of the crossing but were saving their most splendid apparel for Sunday or Monday night.

  The beauty of the women on board “was a subject both of observation and admiration” according to Archibald Gracie. This display of loveliness, however, took considerable effort, making the “dressing hour” a stressful time for ladies’ maids. The array of undergarments alone would baffle a modern woman, beginning with the corsets that most upper-class women still wore. The formidable whalebone devices of the Victorian era were a thing of the past, as were the padded S-curve corsets that had pushed the bosom forward and the derrière backward in the style so favored by King Edward VII. After 1907 a longer, slimmer look was in fashion and corsets had elastic gusset inserts that were supposed to make them less constricting.

  But in 1912 a rebellion against the long reign of the corset was beginning. American debutantes had adoped a “park your corset” fad that year, where the constricting undergarments were shucked and left in dressing rooms at dances and parties. Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, had introduced a corsetless gown in her spring 1912 collection, and in the current issue of the fashion magazine Dress, which some first-class ladies had probably brought on board, it was noted: “Quite as important as the more frivolous bits of underdress is the brassiere for the woman who wants to look pretty and be comfortable.”

  Yet the brassiere would not find wide acceptance till after World War I, by which time the corset had finally had its day. On this spring evening in 1912, therefore, only a few of the younger, more fashion-forward women on board, such as Edith Rosenbaum or Madeleine Astor, would have dared to shed their corsets for a brassiere and chemise. Most of the first-class women were helped into their corsets by their lady’s maids, after which they stepped into the various layers of knickers and petticoats that followed. The elegant rustle of undergarments was part of the allure of a well-dressed lady in 1912, and each evening this sound was heard on the Titanic’s grand staircase during the procession down to dinner.

  At 7:00 the ship’s bugler, a twenty-six-year-old steward named Peter Fletcher, reappeared to summon passengers to dinner with a jaunty little tune called “The Roast Beef of Old England.” By then, many passengers had already gathered in the wicker chairs of the Palm Room. On the second evening at sea there was a convivial, settled air on board, with table companionships well established and stewards addressing their clientele by name. Contrary to popular belief, there was no “captain’s table” where E. J. Smith would entertain a favored selection of passengers each night. Smith normally took his meals at a table for six in the dining saloon or in his cabin, served by his valet or “tiger” as the captain’s attendant was known.

  Entertaining duties largely fell to Chief Purser Hugh McElroy, whose Irish wit and genial table talk made him well suited to the task. Passengers dining alone were usually assigned to the purser’s table, and McElroy would then invite two additional passengers to round out the company each evening. W. T. Stead was asked to join McElroy’s table one night, as was his dining companion Frederic K. Seward, who later recalled that all present were “almost spell-bound by the humor, and beauty, and breadth of vision of Stead’s conversation.” At one point on the voyage Seward was taken aside by an English passenger who whispered in his ear regarding Stead, “My dear fellow, you know that he was a pro-Boer?” Opposition to the Boer War in South Africa had indeed been one of Stead’s contentious causes—in 1899 he had penned a pamphlet entitled “Shall I Slay My Brother Boer?”

  It is not known whether W. T. Stead and Frank Millet spent time together on the Titanic, though the pairing of two such celebrated raconteurs would have made for a lively colloquy. The ubiquitous Mark Twain was a friend in common—Stead had met him aboard ship in 1894 while returning from his first visit to America. (By coincidence, Stead’s ship on this crossing had been the New York, the same liner that had swung into the Titanic’s path while she was leaving Southampton.) During a storm at sea, Stead had kept Twain distracted by recounting one of his celebrated ghost stories. The two men had corresponded afterward, and exchanges of opinion between them had appeared in the Review of Reviews, the monthly journal Stead founded in 1890 after leaving the Pall Mall Gazette. On the same crossing, Stead had also met and befriended one of Millet’s closest friends, Charles Francis Adams, a Back Bay aristocrat and descendant of the two Adams presidents, and brother of the Washington writer and diarist Henry Adams.

  Given these connections, it’s likely that Frank Millet at least greeted W. T. Stead on the Titanic, though he
may have been wary of the old newsman’s reputation for spooks and séances. Millet might also have taken a dim view of If Christ Came to Chicago, the book Stead wrote after his trip to the 1893 exposition. Stead had been fascinated by Chicago and had spent several months there interviewing criminals, gamblers, corrupt politicians, and prostitutes and then describing the city’s underbelly from a viewpoint leavened with his unique brand of Christianity. When published in late 1894, If Christ Came to Chicago caused a considerable stir. It opened with an illustration of Christ casting out the moneychangers in front of the White City’s central Court of Honor, and in its back pages was a color-coded foldout chart of Chicago’s red-light district, locating all the brothels, saloons, and pawnbrokers to be found there. By unintentionally providing a handy guide to Sin City, the book became an instant bestseller.

  Archibald Gracie (photo credit 1.16)

  As Millet, Archie Butt, and Clarence Moore passed through the dining saloon that Thursday evening, a likely table to have received friendly greetings was the one occupied by Colonel Archibald Gracie IV and his two companions, Edward Austin Kent, a Buffalo architect, and a New York clubman named James Clinch Smith. The affable Gracie was the most outgoing of the three and had the polished manners of a man from an old and distinguished family. His great-grandfather, Archibald Gracie I, was a Scottish-born shipping magnate who in 1799 had built a large Federal-style home in Manhattan overlooking the East River that is now known as Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York.