Voyagers of the Titanic (32 page)

Against Ismay, then, Americans pitched annihilating abuse and maledictions. Isidor Rayner, Democrat from Maryland, demanded on the floor of the Senate that Ismay be hauled before Congress like a wanted man “to explain how he, the directing manager of the company, the superior of the Captain, and not under the Captain’s orders, directed the northern route which ended so fatally and then left hundreds of passengers to die while he took not the last boat, but the very first boat that left the sinking ship.” Every phrase in Rayner’s preceding accusations was untrue. “Mr. Ismay claims . . . that he took the last lifeboat,” cried Rayner. “I do not believe it, and if he did, it was cowardly to take any lifeboat, for the Managing Director of the Line, with his board, is criminally responsible for this appalling tragedy. I have not the slightest doubt that the northern route was taken in obedience to Mr. Ismay’s direct orders, and that with full warning he risked the life of the entire ship to make a speedy passage.”
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President Taft believed initial reports that the passengers were safe and heading for Halifax. On Monday evening, he went jauntily to see Avery Hopwood’s comedy
Nobody’s Widow
but became “frantic” when he returned from the theater and learned the truth.
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The president wept when he knew that Butt was lost. He moped about the White House, feeling bereft, longing to see Butt’s smile or to hear his cheery voice. He rejected suggestions that he recognize the country’s somber mood by issuing a national proclamation, but agreed to order that flags be put at half-mast. Presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt, however, sent telegrams and issued condolences that caught the country’s excited temper. Political Washington grieved over Taft’s dead aide. “In little back offices, littered with paper and adorned principally by typewriters, in bustling news bureaus, in the press room of the White House, and in the War, State and Navy Building—wherever newspaper men foregathered—the name of Maj. ‘Archie’ Butt, once synonymous of laughter and jest, now suddenly half understood, symbolic of heroism, was repeated last night while eyes blurred and voices became queerly strained,” reported the
Washington Herald
. “Everywhere in this city the newspaper men sought to get word through New York of the fate of Maj. Butt. The oldest men on the Row and the youngest cub reporter, the correspondent with the classic eyeglasses, and the be-whiskered man who remembers the Civil War—on through a list of men who had met Maj. Butt while covering their stories or who had helped him to cover his own—all these remembered . . . his unfailing kindliness, his friendship to newspaper men whom he barely knew, and, above all, his paramount gentility. The older men talked of him as ‘Archie,’ the correspondent. The younger remembered gratefully how, when terrified by their first assignment to a presidential function, he had helped them out. They summed up all with this oft-repeated phrase: ‘He was a good, square man—too good a man to die.’”
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Washington was distracted from the momentous news that Roosevelt had trounced Taft in the Pennsylvania primary on April 13. “The confusion and consternation here are startling,” wrote Henry Adams on Tuesday. “Through the chaos I seemed to be watching the
Titanic
foundering in a shoreless ocean. By my blessed Virgin, it is awful! This Titanic blow shatters one’s nerves.” The next day Adams was yet more agitated. “We have been, and still are in gloom such as I, who am gloom itself, cannot get down to. People go about, choking . . . Honestly I am scared! Everybody seems to be off their heads.” A week later, dining with George Cabot Lodge’s wife, Adams was maddened by her repeating stories of the wreck. There had not been a more “grim and ghastly” week since the crushing defeats of Union troops in the Civil War. “The sum and triumph of civilization, guaranteed to be safe and perfect, our greatest achievement, sinks at a touch, and drowns us, while nature jeers at us for our folly.”
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He had been due to travel on the return voyage of the
Titanic,
transferred his passage to the
Olympic,
but was so worried about sailing that he suffered a disabling stroke.

The families of Philadelphians aboard the mammoth liner relied on conflicting generalities until on Monday evening the dire news hit Philadelphia with a resonant and jarring crash.
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From early Tuesday morning until late at night, crowds thronged in front of newspaper offices, scanning and rereading the bulletins giving the latest details of “the most disastrous marine catastrophe the modern world has ever experienced . . . many expressions of sorrow and grief could be heard, and to hundreds the appalling tragedy seemed incomprehensible.”
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Several renowned Philadelphia names were on the passenger list. William Dulles was an attorney whose family had been eminent in the city since colonial times. The banker Robert Daniel and physician Arthur Brewe were distinguished there. Most prominent of all, though, were the Carters, Cardezas, Thayers, and supremely the Wideners.

Lynnewood Hall had been built as a house of imperturbable grandeur, yet by Monday night all was distraction there. On Tuesday morning, Peter Widener shuffled along a platform in Broad Street Station and was helped aboard a New York train. Grief and anxiety were stamped on the old man’s face, and his faltering steps showed the blow that had hit him—the probable loss of his elder son and golden grandson. At his elbow was his younger son, Joseph, whose concern for his father was evident as he supported him with an arm. Peter Widener was a founding director of IMM, and reaching the White Star building in New York, the Wideners were ushered past the counters manned by harassed clerks and desks with awestruck stenographers into Franklin’s private sanctum, with its big shiny desk and comfortable chairs laid out like a furniture showroom. There they listened to the hum and rattle of the wireless apparatus as it received one name after another of the survivors.
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On Wednesday, after a long day of waiting and a sleepless night of foreboding, old Widener, looking weary and dejected, was taken back to Lynnewood Hall by Joseph, who then returned to New York to meet the
Carpathia
. But the millionaire, to the dismay of his family, would not rest. He spent Thursday in his office in the Land Title Building awaiting news, and broke down several times on receipt of discouraging messages from Joseph in New York. He was not reconciled to the fact that his son and grandson were dead. Repudiating advice, he went on Thursday afternoon in a private carriage to Jersey City, from whence by private ferry to the dock where the
Carpathia
was expected. His surviving grandchildren, Eleanor and George Junior, accompanied him. He insisted on being at the dock when the survivors landed because he had not lost all hope.

Just as Taft had been duped by false reports and Peter Widener clutched at illusory prospects, so many English newspapers were cruelly deceptive. Many of the liner’s crew were Liverpudlians, whose relations were given spurious comfort by the “Stop Press” announcement in the
Liverpool Daily Post
of April 16 quoting White Star’s local manager: “
Titanic
has foundered, but . . . no lives have been lost.”
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In Liverpool, the dreadful truth came on Tuesday. “In street and mart, in household and hostelry, on ferry-boat and on the riverside, in tramcar and in railway train, men and women talked with bated breath of the tragic tidings to hand. It was an all-absorbing topic . . . which appealed equally to all classes—rich and poor, young and old. The public were nonplussed with the magnitude of the disaster, and many people found it impossible to grapple mentally with the intelligence that the newest and biggest vessel in the world—a floating palace, a vessel declared to be practically unsinkable . . . lay thousands of fathoms deep in the Atlantic Ocean.”
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Similarly, in Southampton, where most of the crew lived, the
Southern Daily Echo
offered cheating reassurance. “For some hours, great anxiety prevailed, but fortunately more reassuring tidings reached us this afternoon, when all passengers were reported to be safe,” it reported on the evening of April 15.
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Next day the same newspaper told a different story: “Dismay and incredulity struggled for the mastery of the faces in the anxious crowd as, regulated by the police, they pressed forward to read the fateful bulletin.” The rumor that a tramp steamer had reached Halifax carrying survivors “raised drooping hopes a little, but did little to dispel the forebodings that gripped every heart.”
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In the afternoon, women arrived with babies in their arms and toddlers hanging on their skirts. The crowds increased after dusk. Streetlamps shone on hundreds of wan gray faces. The dense crowd intermittently made way for a grief-stricken relation to enter the office asking for news. Each time the answer was negative, and the supplicant returned outside with head bowed in despair: “women sobbed aloud, while tears glistened in the eyes of rough and hardy sea-faring men.” Southampton was sunk in mourning: the haggard faces of townsfolk showed “the dull, listless apathy of helpless misery.”
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Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic extolled the heroism of Astor, Guggenheim, Straus, and other gallants of first class, who stepped aside so that women and children might be saved. “The touch of nature which makes the whole world kin levelled all classes,” editorialized the
Western Morning News
. “Every man did his duty worthily in the supreme moment . . . All Christendom mourns. Rulers and peoples of all nations have given vent to their grief at this unparalleled calamity.”
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Such sentiments were no solace to the bereaved families of Southampton. The majority of its 900 crew lived in the city: almost 700 of them died. At a single school, 125 children lost a father, a brother, or an uncle. What place, in these eulogies of chevaliers beyond reproach, could be allotted to the Southampton husbands, fathers, and sons who had perished by the order “women and children first”? Their deaths seemed neither heroic nor uplifting. No misfortune of such magnitude had happened since the French sacked the town in 1338, nor was to occur again until the German bombing raids of 1940. Despite the bright April sunshine, shops put up shutters, blinds were drawn in houses; flags on hotels and public buildings were put at half-mast.

A reporter described the stricken districts of Southampton. “I have spent the day in widows’ houses, houses without food or fuel and in some cases without furniture. I have seen women fainting and heard children crying for food . . . During the coal strike many breadwinners were out of work, furniture was sold or pawned, and numerous families received notice to quit. Then came the
Titanic,
and firemen, greasers, and trimmers, who had known no work for weeks, eagerly joined the big ship to save their homes.” Haggard women in their early twenties were given emergency relief by a Catholic priest and nuns in the stricken district: one such was Jack Poingestre’s wife, believing herself a widow, who arrived there with four children, the eldest aged five, and fainted away. Women loitered outside the White Star offices to prolong their hopes: to return home would be to accept that their men were dead. “One drooping woman was leaning on a bassinette containing two chubby babies, while a tiny mite held her hand. ‘What are we waiting for, Mummy? Why are we waiting such a long time?’ asked the tired child. ‘We are waiting for news of father, dear’, came the choked answer, as the mother turned away her head to hide her tears.”
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Newspaper readers often try to enlarge themselves by dwelling on other people’s greater calamities. Calamity quickens the tempo of life. “The terrible news about the
Titanic
reached New York about eleven o’clock last night, and the scene on Broadway was awful,” a youngster wrote to his mother describing Monday evening. “Crowds of people were coming out of the theaters, cafés were going full tilt, when the newsboys began to cry, ‘Extra! Extra!
Titanic
sunk with 1800 aboard!’ You can’t imagine the effect of those words on the crowd. Nobody could realize what had happened, and when they did begin to understand, the excitement was almost enough to cause a panic in the theaters. Women began to faint and weep, and scores of people in evening clothes jumped into cabs and taxis, and rushed to the offices of the White Star Line, where they remained all night waiting for the news.”
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The city had not been so traumatized since 1904, when the paddle steamer
General Slocum
caught fire on the East River, within sight of land-bound New Yorkers, incinerating or drowning over a thousand women and children on a German Lutheran church picnic outing (the highest level of New York fatalities until the attack on the Twin Towers a century later).

Caroline Astor and other members of the Four Hundred had begun manipulating the society columns in their interests thirty years earlier. Now their descendants recoiled under a relentless, morbid scrutiny. Watched by eager-eyed journalists, Vincent Astor, the dead millionaire’s twenty-year-old son, sped to the White Star office in a touring car that Monday evening and begged for information. On Tuesday morning he appeared early in Marconi’s New York offices, distraught with grief, and cried out that he would give all the money that could be asked if only a Marconi operator would confirm his father’s safety. After a Tuesday visit to the offices on the second story of the White Star building, young Astor left sobbing with his face in his hands.
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