Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (39 page)

Southampton would raise two memorials to those of the crew of the Titanic who wouldn’t be coming home. One was a classically inspired fountain dedicated to the stewards and other crew members, unveiled in 1915; in 1972 it was moved to the ruins of Holy Rood Church, where it remains in good company. The church, bombed-out by the Nazis in World War II, serves as Great Britain’s memorial to her merchant seamen who were lost in both world wars. The other, dedicated in April 1914, was a handsome monument of granite, with panels of bronze bas-relief depicting the engineers, which still stands in Southampton’s East Park.

Other cities would put up monuments as well—Liverpool, like Southampton, would honor the engineers, building a column near the city’s waterfront. During its construction the design was slightly modified to include a memorial to all the British merchant marine engineers killed during World War I. In New York, the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse, sited atop the Seamen’s Church Institute, was dedicated on the first anniversary of the sinking. In 1920, Belfast would unveil a graceful statue that depicts two mermaids holding up a victim before a standing figure representing the sea. It would be the summer of 1931 before the Women’s Titanic Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. A simple, moving sculpture of a man standing with arms outstretched, it can still be found in the city’s waterfront park.

Individuals would be commemorated as well. Captain Smith’s memory would be honored by a life-sized statue of him, erected near his home in Lichfield, England. A stone tablet commemorating the heroism of Jack Phillips was placed in the memorial cloister in Godalming, Surrey, England. In Comber, County Down, Northern Ireland, Thomas Andrews would be remembered through the efforts of his friends, who oversaw the construction of Thomas Andrews Memorial Hall; today the building is a primary school. In a park in Colne, Lancashire, a bronze bust of Wallace Hartley sits atop a marble pillar, the monument paid for by donations that came from all over England. In New York City, in the quiet shadows of Grace Church, a panel remembers Edith Evans, who gave up her place in Collapsible D so Mrs. John Murray Brown could return to her children; across town, at Broadway and West 106th Street, is a monument to Isador and Ida Straus that was funded by grieving Macy’s employees. A marble fountain was erected in Washington, D.C., dedicated to Colonel Archibald Butt. It was paid for from the private funds of President William Howard Taft, who dedicated it to the memory of his lost friend.

But for all the outpouring of love and grief and loss that caused these memorials to be raised, such monuments were beyond the means of most of the friends and families of those who died on the Titanic. For them, and for those who had gone down with the ship, all they would ever have would be a rusting hulk lying at the bottom of the North Atlantic, which would serve as memorial, gravestone, and tomb.

—Ezekiel 7:3

 

 

 

AS THE PUBLIC’S INITIAL SHOCK OVER THE MAGNITUDE OF THE
TITANIC
DISASTER began to fade, indignation took its place. It was almost impossible to grasp the concept, let alone the reality, that more than 1,500 lives had been lost in less than three hours. It was as if a battle had been fought and lost, or a small town had been wiped off the face of the earth. Newspaper editors, using charts, photographs, and any other visual aids they could find, tried to give some meaning to the number and to make the enormity of the casualty list comprehensible to the average person. But it was no easy task, for there had never been a maritime disaster anything like the loss of the Titanic. Compounding this sense of incredulity was the fact that ocean travel had seemed to be so safe: in forty years only four passengers had lost their lives on the North Atlantic. Within days of the news breaking about the sinking, government officials, newspaper editors, and the public were all demanding explanations.

Now the moment had arrived for one of the most unusual and unlikely figures to become part of the story of the Titanic to take center stage: the junior senator from the State of Michigan, William Alden Smith, a classic Horatio Alger “rags to riches” success story. Born in 1859 in tiny Dowagiac, a logging town in the southwest corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula, at the age of twelve Smith had moved with his parents to Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was with that city that he would ever after be associated. His early dream of becoming a newsboy-attaché on a railroad (which developed what would be a lifelong fascination with trains and railroading), had been thwarted by his family’s poverty. But like one of Alger’s “Luck and Pluck” series heroes, he turned adversity into a challenge, and within a year he had started his own business in Grand Rapids—selling popcorn of all things—and was soon his family’s sole means of support, making more than $75 a month, nearly double what the average American family of the day made.

For a while he moonlighted as a correspondent for the
Chicago
Times while serving as a page in the Michigan legislature and discovering the strange but indestructible links between the press and politics. At twenty-one, William Alden, as he was invariably known, returned to Grand Rapids to study law in the offices of Birch and Montgomery, and was admitted to the Kent County bar three years later.

Setting up practice with the offices of Smiley, Smith and Stevens, William Alden quickly became a recognized expert in railroad law. His firm was remarkably successful, and soon Smith was able to buy a small railroad of his own, then a second shortly after, selling them both eventually at handsome profits. At the same time he was laying the foundations of a political career, and 1886 saw him sitting on the Michigan State Central Committee of the Republican party. In 1892 he ran for the Congressional seat from Michigan’s fifth district, defeating a popular—and some said unbeatable—incumbent by 10,000 votes. He would represent the state of Michigan in either the House or the Senate for the next thirty-five years.

William Alden Smith was short, about five-feet-six, and had a curiously expressive face, capable of changing from fierce rage to warm affection in seconds. He possessed a great deal of personal charm, a remarkable memory from which he could pluck information almost effortlessly, and an oratorical style that was half persuasive, half coercive. Though he was nominally a Republican, within a short time everyone in Congress knew that William Alden was his own man, bound by no party dogma. He was the quintessential political maverick, and Smith gloried in the role.

He was an American Midwesterner writ large, with all the altruism, naivete, dreams, hopes, fears, and prejudices of the American heartland. He was not a dupe, for before he became a politician he had been a successful lawyer and businessman; nor was he a rube, for though largely self-educated, he was a more-learned man than many of his colleagues. In no way was he merely an opportunist, for many times before and after his investigation into the loss of the Titanic, he was to fight lonely battles for causes many considered lost or hopeless. The Titanic inquiry would be Smith’s one moment to stand on the world’s stage, and he would make the most of it, not for his sake, but for the ideals and people he represented.
¹

When the news of the Titanic disaster reached Washington, Smith, like everyone else, was aghast at the enormity of the tragedy. Unlike most people, however, Smith’s analytical mind would not rest until he knew how 1,500 people could be left on the decks of the sinking liner. A quick review of the existing legislation regulating the passenger steamship lines on the North Atlantic showed that there were no formal regulations, and the shipping lines were run as
laissez-faire
operations. This situation appalled Smith, who had compiled a considerable record as the sponsor and moving force behind a great deal of the safety and operating regulations of the American railroads passed by Congress in the previous two decades. When he discovered the relationship between J. P. Morgan’s railroad interests and Morgan’s holdings in International Mercantile Marine, he launched an inquiry. He wasn’t sure if there was any evidence of negligence in the navigation, construction, or equipment of the Titanic, but if there was, he would find it. Quickly he pushed a resolution through the Senate that authorized the formation of a subcommittee from the Committee on Commerce, of which Smith was a member, naming him chairman. Smith carefully composed the subcommittee with members chosen to make it a politically balanced body, and he was careful to ensure that it possessed the power to issue subpoenas, including those for foreign nationals.
²

At 3:30 P.M., April 18, Smith, the other six members of the subcommittee, and two U.S. Marshals boarded the Congressional Limited at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and arrived in New York just in time to be rushed across the city to Cunard’s Pier 54 and meet the
Carpathia
as she tied up. While the
Titanic’s
survivors were making their way down the gangway, Smith, followed by the rest of the committee, rushed up it, and immediately asked the whereabouts of Bruce Ismay. Escorted to Dr. McGhee’s cabin, Smith brushed aside Philip Franklin’s protests that Ismay was “too ill” to see anyone and informed the chairman of the White Star Line that he would be expected to testify before the subcommittee at the soonest opportunity.

Ismay calmly assured Smith that he would cooperate fully with the investigation, and would appear promptly at 10:00 the next morning, when the subcommittee would begin hearings in the Waldorf Astorias East Room. Ismay was as good as his word, for when Senator Smith entered the East Room next morning, Ismay was already seated and waiting for him, apparently recovered from his ordeal.
³

At 10:30 A.M. Smith opened the proceedings and began by inviting Ismay to tell the committee what had happened, “as succinctly as possible.” Ismay responded by giving the figures for each day’s run on the crossing, then gave his version of the events of Sunday night: “I was in bed myself, asleep, when the accident happened. The ship sank, I am told, at two-twenty. That, sir, is all I think I can tell you.”

Smith didn’t believe that was all Ismay could tell him, so he began a lengthy and grueling cross-examination that eventually totaled some fifty-eight pages of testimony. Ismay found himself in the unenviable position of being both a hostile witness and a scapegoat. The faint smile that he wore during the entirety of his testimony seemed to many observers a bit condescending, although Ismay believed, and indeed declared in his opening statement, that he would cooperate fully with the committee. Senator Smith harbored some deep suspicions about Ismay, and the wireless message that Ismay had sent to New York holding up the
Cedric
so that he and the surviving Titanic crewmen could immediately sail back to England seemed to Smith a deliberate attempt to evade American jurisdiction. Ismay attempted to explain that he really had the surviving crewmen’s best interests at heart when he tried to get them aboard the Cedric to return to England. Many of these men had families, and since their pay stopped as soon as the Titanic sank, the only way they could support their families was to find a berth on another ship.

Ismay, though, did little to help his case. In addition to the smug air he held about himself while testifying, after being excused by Senator Smith, Ismay complained loudly to several reporters that he questioned the legality of the hearings, whether the American government had jurisdiction over the White Star Line, and the right of the U.S. Senate to subpoena foreign nationals. That the Titanic was owned and operated by an American shipping conglomerate, Ismay well knew, since he had sold the White Star Line to Morgan’s IMM himself, so there never should have been any doubt in Ismay’s mind about jurisdiction, nor should he have questioned the right of the committee to issue subpoenas to British subjects. Smith had made sure he was on solid legal ground before he left New York, receiving assurances from the attorney general that the committee had just such subpoena powers.

The result, in the United States at least, was that Ismay began to look a bit petulant. However much he thought his complaints were justified, he was only hurting himself: the public image of Bruce Ismay was undergoing an ugly transformation, and soon some very pointed questions were being asked in the press about how Ismay, of all people, managed to find a place in a lifeboat. Brooke Adams, a Boston historian of considerable repute, summed up the rapidly growing groundswell of feeling about Ismay when he wrote to Senator Francis Newlands, who sat on the committee: