Authors: Greg King
Churchill didn’t mention specific ships, but
Lusitania
had been named in newspapers, and most assumed that the guns were in place. Early that Sunday morning, passenger Michael Byrne took to her decks with a specific purpose: he wanted to see if he could spot any of the rumored guns. As it happened, this was his thirteenth Atlantic crossing; familiar with
Olympic,
Mauretania,
and
Imperator,
he now walked up and down the decks. “I took particular notice to see if they had any guns mounted or un-mounted,” he wrote. “There were none.” He “inspected every deck above the waterline, but found no guns of any description.”
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Byrne was unable to find anything because there was nothing to be found. At some point, disguised gun rings were installed on the ship’s foredeck, concealed beneath coils of rope, but their contingent of artillery was not.
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Her size and her immense consumption of coal, the Admiralty decided, made
Lusitania
unsuitable for duty as an auxiliary cruiser.
A few passengers might blithely dismiss the idea of a possible submarine attack but they couldn’t ignore recent history. Anyone who doubted the potential danger of traveling aboard a British liner through a declared war zone had only to recall an event earlier that spring. On March 28, a German U-boat had caught the five-thousand-ton British liner
Falaba
off the Irish coast. Passengers and crew had been evacuating when
Falaba
’s captain launched distress rockets and called for help. Afraid that armed assistance would soon arrive and counterattack, the U-boat torpedoed the liner, and
Falaba
sank within ten minutes. Of the 242 people aboard, 104 perished, including mining engineer Leon Thrasher, who became the Great War’s first American victim.
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From London, United States ambassador Walter Page warned his countrymen to avoid traveling to England unless they had “urgent business.”
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The fear cut into Cunard’s revenue. In April, after dreaming of disaster at sea, Gilded Age heiress Elizabeth Drexel Lehr canceled her planned passage aboard
Lusitania
. Her friends ridiculed her fears but she finally managed to convince them to join her on an American liner. Such cancellations worried an image-conscious Cunard Line. Having lost six socially prominent passengers, its New York office sent a representative to plead with the group to reconsider. “Think what an effect it will have on our reputation when the papers learn you would not sail with us!” the agent declared, but to no avail.
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Cunard’s worries extended not merely to bookings; now the company heard stories that several passengers, including Vanderbilt and Frohman, had actually received personal warnings not to travel aboard
Lusitania
. Such warnings suggested something more concrete than the vague threat implied in the German notice, demanding that Cunard and the Admiralty exercise every caution and use all measures to see the ship safely arrive in Liverpool. Late Saturday night, Cunard had cabled Captain Turner, asking if any passengers had indeed been warned before boarding the liner. Inexplicably, Turner replied: “No one received telegrams of the kind indicated.”
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The only consolation to those now traveling aboard
Lusitania
was the belief that, once she reached the waters off Ireland, the British Admiralty would provide a Royal Navy escort. When buying his ticket, Charles Lauriat had specifically asked a Cunard official if a military convoy would escort
Lusitania
through the war zone. “Oh yes!” he was told. “Every precaution will be taken.”
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Though worried about the voyage, Theodate Pope had “comforted myself with the thought that we would surely be conveyed when we reached the war zone.”
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Complaisant, lulled into a false sense of security,
Lusitania
’s passengers could only hope that the Admiralty and Captain Turner would protect them, that the great liner would indeed be able to outpace any nefarious German submarine. At sea, they were largely cut off from the world, unaware of a troubling interview one German official gave in New York City a few days after
Lusitania
had departed. “The British flag,” he predicted, “will shortly be driven from the seas by Germany. As for the
Lusitania,
we will get her surely. She is not as fast as some of our latest submarines.”
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An exhausted Theodate Pope wakened from a fitful sleep that Sunday morning in her cabin on D Deck. She’d hardly slept. “There was a very noisy family next to me,” she wrote to her mother.
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The noise had come from the Crompton family: Paul, his wife, Gladys, and their six children, ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen months. They might be devoted and jovial—Crompton often took them along on business trips—but they were a bit too boisterous and loud for the middle-aged woman from Connecticut. Unwilling to endure another sleepless night, an irritated Theodate cornered the purser that morning: First Class was not fully booked, and soon she was on her way to an empty cabin on A Deck.
Overcoming difficulties—the woman born Effie Pope in 1867 knew something about that. The only child of millionaire industrialist Alfred Pope and his wife, Ada, she had always felt out of place, at war with expectation and the traditional limits imposed by her sex. She inherited her father’s charm and love of art, and her mother’s iron will. At a time when obedient conformity was a cardinal virtue, Effie openly questioned her teachers. With dark blond hair, blue eyes, and an angular face, she was not unattractive, but the empty social life of the era left her cold.
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Effie found redemption in travel. She loved the trips to Europe, where her father began collecting Impressionist paintings by Degas, Cassatt, Manet, Monet, and Whistler. Architecture, though, was her greatest discovery. “For years,” she explained, “I have been keen on architecture and felt that the ugliness of our buildings actually menaced my happiness.”
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Arches, arcades, mullioned windows, thatched roofs, medieval chimneys—all whispered so evocatively to the young woman that, after a stint at the famed Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, she embarked on this most unlikely of careers.
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With her father’s money to pay for private tutors and lectures at Princeton and a determination that refused to be bowed, Effie plunged forward. She changed her name to Theodate: it not only recognized her paternal grandmother, but also sounded confusingly masculine at a time when very few women practiced architecture. Theodate was fortunate: independent women were just beginning to break free of expected roles, finding happiness and fulfillment on their own terms. Education and money opened doors previously closed, and Theodate set about seizing all the advantages her privileged background offered. After practicing ideas at her small country house in Farmington, she convinced her parents to build their own adjoining retreat.
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The job went to the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, but from the first, it was Theodate’s project. Rather than ask the firm to design the house, Theodate decided to send them
the plans that I have been working over at intervals for some years to draw to scale and make an elevation of in the event of our coming to a mutual agreement. Consequently, as it is my plan, I expect to decide in all the details as well as all more important questions of plan that may arise. This must be clearly understood at the outset, so as to save unnecessary friction in the future. In other words, it will be a Pope house instead of a McKim, Mead and White. In conclusion, I will say that I am not nearly as difficult to deal with as this would seem, for I am very tolerant of advice and always open to suggestions and good reasoning.
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Hill-Stead, as the completed building was named, was a rambling farmhouse clad in gleaming white clapboards, dotted with bay windows and adorned with a replica of the portico at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, which Theodate so admired. It became an architectural icon, called “perhaps the finest Colonial Revival house” in America.
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Guests like Thornton Wilder, Edith Wharton, and Henry James were stunned to find the rambling but deliberately unpretentious house filled with “wondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler.” Although James found the mixture of studied colonial simplicity and refined European art “of the queerest” taste, he deemed the effect “like the sudden trill of a nightingale,” startling and unexpected.
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Armed with newfound confidence, Theodate eventually opened an office in New York City and took on several commissions, including renovation of the Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut.
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Her style was a variant on the then popular Arts and Crafts Movement, harking back to medieval models in the search for comfort. She loathed modern architecture, deeming it too coldly clinical. “People,” she said, “are building nests. You can’t take that out of human nature.”
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These were difficult years, as Theodate not only struggled against professional prejudices but also attempted to rationalize her place in the world. Although her father’s money had opened doors and allowed her to enter a traditionally male-dominated career, she found the idea of great wealth distressing. The poor seemed more genuine to her, and increasingly she spouted political ideas that left her parents aghast. “If you don’t stop talking about Socialism,” her mother once warned, “your father is going to leave you out of his will.”
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More difficult was Theodate’s struggle to understand herself. She was horrified by the notion that one day she must follow convention and become a wife and a mother. Early on, she had developed an intense crush on a young woman at Miss Porter’s; ambivalent sexual feelings led her to reject at least one marriage proposal with the remark, “Perhaps I am not capable of loving a man.”
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Theodate had a brief but intense relationship with a woman she named only as Laura. “Will she ever love me?” she pondered in her journal. Then, Laura spent the night with her. “I only slept about an hour and a half,” Theodate coyly confided to her journal. “I am just so happy today, it has changed the whole tenor of my mind.”
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When the relationship ended, the emotionally fragile Theodate fell into a deep depression; at a particularly low point, she readily submitted to shock treatments, sitting in a tub of water while a wire with live current was thrust into the bath.
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Whether this was some misplaced attempt to “cure” herself of her lesbian tendencies or merely an effort to treat her persistent depression and insomnia, the regular counseling sessions led her to emotionally latch onto her male therapist. Convinced that she was in love with him, she again rejected another marriage proposal from a friend and patiently awaited one from her new crush, a proposal that would never come.
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Against this background of questioning and analysis, Theodate increasingly turned to a new interest that soon dominated her thoughts. She had always been something of a religious and philosophical seeker, and her ideas were, for the time, rather startling. Christ, she believed, had only been a mortal man though one imbued with a unique morality, while she thought of God as an indefinite force present in all living things.
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In 1900, she had joined the Unitarian Church, but soon she was drawn to spiritualism, and notions of the soul’s survival after death.
Spiritualism was then at the height of its popularity, as many intellectuals pondered the meaning of life and sought definitive scientific proof of life after death. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in England, attracted such luminaries as Arthur Conan Doyle, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. William James, brother of novelist Henry James, contributed to the movement by writing extensively on questions of clairvoyance, telepathy, and theology.
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Theodate studied the literature and, in 1907, when Professor James Hyslop of Columbia University formed an independent American branch of the Society for Psychical Research, she contributed $25,000 to help fund the cause.
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She began visiting England with some regularity, including meetings with Sir Oliver Lodge, a professor of physics at the University College in Liverpool, who had long been a member of the society and penned a number of popular works on communication with the dead. After William James died, though, she infuriated his brother Henry by passing along a medium’s claimed communication. “The
commonness
of it,” the famed novelist wrote, “simply nauseates.” Though he regarded Theodate as a person of “fine and true qualities,” he was horrified that she would “pass on such a tissue of trash” and believe it had come from his late brother.
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