Lessons From the Sinking of the Titanic
Three simple rules decided the grim fate of the richest men on the ship. What would happen today?
As the anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking approaches, it’s useful to remember how the passengers and crew on the doomed ship conducted themselves when consigned to one of two fates. Either they would die in the sub-freezing water or they would live and forevermore be haunted by the loss of their loved ones and the guilt of the survivor. Looking back at that terrible night, it strikes me that a catastrophe of this sort would unfold quite differently in the world of today where morality has become trumped, as it were, by wealth and position.
The passenger list on that maiden voyage of the Titanic, absurdly dubbed the ship “that God himself couldn’t sink” included a Countess, President Taft’s military aide, a schoolmaster, a perfume maker, dozens of families from Holland, Armenia, Italy and Ireland headed to America in search of a better life, and three of the richest men in the world.
Four nights into the voyage, at 11:40 pm, on April 14, 1912, the Titanic was 375 miles south of Newfoundland when an iceberg slashed open 200 feet of her vast hull and the sea began pouring into it.
As the ship was foundering in the small hours of April 15, Captain Edward Smith stood beside Lifeboat № 8 just before it was lowered to the calm, dark water sixty feet below. Knowing that he and fifteen hundred other men, women and children were about to die, the captain turned to the seaman he’d put in charge of that lifeboat. “Good-bye,” he told him. “Remember: you are British.”
For Smith, a husband and father, and member of the Royal Navy Reserve, this admonition had less to do with nationality than with an awareness of certain unbreachable rules founded in agreed upon ideals of conduct. Some of these rules were moral, God’s rules. And some were earthly standards that governed behavior: The captain goes down with the ship. Keep a stiff upper lip. Women and children first.
These rules determined the behavior of the three wealthiest men on board, none of whom asked for or were granted special privilege, all of whom would perish.
Colonel John Jacob Astor, manager of his family’s vast fortune, helped his 18-year-old pregnant wife onto Lifeboat №4, and walked away, a moment of existential choreography that had the effect of dividing the dead from the living.
Benjamin Guggenheim, the mining magnate, proceeded to his cabin where he and his valet changed into evening clothes and then returned to the increasingly tilting deck. “We’ve dressed in our best,” he said, “and are prepared to go down like gentleman.” To his wife he wrote a note and handed it a steward who would eventually deliver it to her. It read in part: “I’ve done my best in doing my duty.”
Isidor Straus, the founder of Macy’s, was 65 years old, a considerable age at a time when the average lifespan for men was 51.9. Another male passenger encouraged him to take a seat in a lifeboat, telling him, “I’m sure no one would object to an old man like you getting in.”
“No,” Strauss said, “I will not go before the other men.”
Mrs. Strauss followed her maid, Ellen Bird, onto Lifeboat № 8. Miss Bird stepped into the boat but Mrs. Strauss turned back and joined her husband. “We have lived together for many years,” she told him. “Where you go, I go.”
Then she went to the lifeboat and handed Miss Bird her Russian sable coat. “Take it,” she told her. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”
Could any of these scenarios play out today? Can you imagine the three wealthiest men on a sinking ship adhering to a system that entitled them to nothing more or less than the willingness to put the safety of others before their own and to opt for the greater good by sacrificing themselves in the name of an ideal? Or is it more likely that they’d be elbowing their way onto a lifeboat powered by the certainty that the only survival that mattered was their own?
Would the Captain honor his age-old duty to go down with his ship or would he be like the captain of the Concordia who, in 2013, fled his sinking vessel in a lifeboat, abandoning his 4,228 passengers to fend for themselves?
These days, when we bemoan the tribalism that besets and divides us, what we can learn from the men and women who died nobly on April 15 more than one hundred years ago is that there is another sort of tribalism which binds its adherents to rules and customs and ideals that can endow them with courage, humility and grace in the face of the unforeseen.
Elizabeth Kaye is the award-winning author of The New York Times #1 bestselling e-book Lifeboat № 8: An Untold Tale of Love, Loss and Surviving the Titanic.
