Excerpts from: When That Great Ship Went Down: The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic -- --. -.-- GMW Wemyss Markham Shaw Pyle
Oct 24, 2014
Excerpts from:
When That Great Ship Went Down:
The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of
RMS Titanic
-- --. -.--
GMW Wemyss
Markham Shaw Pyle
1
From the Introduction:
… The myth set sail even as the great liner slipped into the
death-cold embrace of the North Atlantic. We know, a century
on, much that was not known in 1912: her true position, the
probable cause of her loss, and how much of the myth was false
in fact. It does not matter – in several senses. Perception again
trumps reality. For the purposes of this volume, it does not
matter that we know now what the Wreck Commissioners and
Senate subcommittee and courts of admiralty and House of
Commons did not know: for they acted upon what they knew
and upon what they believed to be true, without the benefits of
our after-knowledge; and this work is concerned with what they
did and why they did it: and that rests upon what they knew and
assumed, not what upon we have learnt since.
And as a potent symbol, a popular myth, Titanic and her loss
reck nothing of the facts then known or the facts known now.
Almost before the survivors reached New York aboard
Carpathia, the Titanic of myth had been salvaged and had
commenced her eternal journey. Fashionable preachers
denounced her as having, by hubris, invoked Nemesis, although
this intensely Greek concept was wrapt in the diction of
Protestant Christianity. African-Americans sang of her fate, as
punishment for not having allowed Jack Johnson to take passage
on her, an episode that simply did not occur: ‘Captain said, “I
2
ain’t haulin’ no coal”: Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well’.
Ismay was represented as having donned women’s clothing to
sneak into a lifeboat; the ‘rich would not ride with the poor’;
God’s mighty hand showed the world that boasts of her
‘unsinkability’ ‘would not stand: it was sad when that great ship
went down’…. Harland & Wolff, the myth has it, and their
Ulster Protestant workforce, gave the ship in the yard a number
of 390904, being, reversed, an approximation of ‘No Pope’ –
another outright fabrication. And of course, there are the contrary
myths – for myth is never consistent – of the band’s playing
“Nearer My God to Thee” and of the stoic gallantry of the (first-
class) gentlemen going down with the ship once the women and
children were away; the myths of ‘an Italian’ or ‘a Latin of some
sort’ attempting to force his way into the boats ahead of the
women and children, and being forced back at gunpoint; the
myths of fate and curses….
Leaving aside the curious theology of God’s drowning fifteen
hundred souls to rebuke scientific and engineering complacency
and other forms of mortal hubris, there remain the facts beneath
the myths of popular imagination. There was a huge loss of life,
by a cause other than a natural disaster such as storms or ocean
cyclones, an insurer’s ‘Act of God’; and it was upon a scale that
– two years before the Great War should bring casualties that put
Titanic’s death toll in the shade – was so vast as to be simply
incomprehensible. There was the fact that Titanic was owned,
3
ultimately, by a JP Morgan transatlantic ‘Trust’, which was to the
US Senate’s Progressives sin enough to bring condign
punishment by God and by the Congress. There was the fact that
she had been built in Belfast by Belfast Protestants – and the
countervailing political fact that the head of Harland &
Wolff was a Liberal, Ascendancy supporter of Irish Home Rule.
And there was the fact that the drowned emigrants from Ireland
and the Continent had been fatally segregated in steerage by
strict measures, cordoned off … to satisfy nativist, often
Progressive, US immigration restrictions.
…
4
From Chapter One:
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
THE SIXTY-SECOND CONGRESS OF THE United States numbered
ninety-six senators – where the Republicans had a narrow
majority – and three hundred ninety-four representatives in the
House, which was firmly in Democratic hands. This represented
four more senators and three more representatives than were
seated in the Sixty-First Congress, for at the beginning of 1912,
the last two contiguous states of the Union had been admitted:
New Mexico and Arizona. Both US Senators from Arizona were
Democrats; both US Senators from New Mexico, Republicans.
The single congressman from Arizona was likewise a Democrat;
New Mexico’s House members, one Democrat and one
Republican. Both parties, in the older states as in the new, were
rived through with internal divisions: the Republican Old Guard
were Not Pleased with the Republican Progressives: not even
with those of them who had not yet deserted the standard of
President Taft to support Teddy Roosevelt’s insurgency.1 Equally,
1 The former president – partly from a sense that Taft, his chosen successor, the Elisha on whom he had placed his mantle (TR thought in somewhat Old Testament terms), had betrayed the cause and become too friendly with the Trusts and ‘malefactors of great wealth’, and partly out of sheer boredom with life after office and deprived of the ‘bully pulpit’ – was challenging President Taft for the GOP nomination. In June, Teddy’s supporters would bolt the Republican Convention, and in August, create a third party, nominate TR as Bull Moose in Chief, and thereby ensure the election of Woodrow Wilson.
5
the Democrats comprised a bewildering and mutually hostile
congeries of factions, Progressive, conservative, urban, agrarian,
pro-finance, Bryanite, Wall Street, economically radical, Wet,
Dry, New South, Old South, outright Bourbon-Confederate,2 pro-
tariff, anti-tariff, anti-Klan, pro-Kluxer, moralistic, and frankly
corrupt.3
Things were fractious enough in the Senate that the
Republicans, let alone both parties, could not agree on who
should be president pro tempore of that body (a problem that
would become more pressing later in the year when the Vice-
President of the United States, James S Sherman, should die,
leaving the Senate without its presiding officer ex officio for its
third session, until the new, Democratic Vice-President took
office in March 1913): they had to rotate the office between one
Democrat and four Republicans.4 In the House, Speaker Champ
Clark of Missouri was fortunate to be a quick learner: Speaker
only since 1911, he was forced to mollify, cajole, threaten, oil,
2 In the second session of the Sixty-Second Congress – the session sitting in April 1912 – there were in the Senate alone five Union Army veterans (one of whom, Senator Warren, Republican of Wyoming, had won the Medal of Honor) and six Confederate veterans – including the senior Republican Senator from New Mexico, Thomas Benton Catron.
3 It was his skill in appearing to be all things to all men that was to allow Woodrow Wilson, the Southerner who happened to be governor of New Jersey at the time, to slip in between Speaker Champ Clark, Ohio governor Judson Harmon, and anti-Klan, anti-Prohibitionist Congressman Underwood of Alabama, and emerge as the Democratic nominee in June.
4 Sen. Augustus Octavius Bacon, Democrat of Georgia and former Confederate staff officer; Sen. Charles Curtis of Kansas, Republican, Herbert Hoover’s future Vice-President, the first known Native American to attain such high office; Republican Sen. Jacob H Gallinger of New Hampshire, the homeopathic senator; Eli Senator Frank Brandegee, Connecticut Republican from Skull and Bones; and the Massachusetts Republican Brahmin stalwart Henry Cabot Lodge.
6
and sell his unruly charges to preserve a Democratic majority
that was much less impressive in the chamber than on paper.
There seemed sometimes to be any number of Democratic
Parties at large in the House, all of them at odds with all of the
others, in a Hobbesian state of nature.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
ON 10 APRIL 1912, THE House of Commons concerned itself with
Naval and marine insurance matters – the First Lord, Mr
Churchill, being absent – with Welsh Disestablishment, local
schools in Birkenhead, the RFC (with reference to the Italian use
of air attacks in Italy’s ongoing little war with the Ottoman
Empire), imperial trade, district nurses and National Insurance,
the Army estimates, punishment for Other Ranks found to have
fathered bastards, and new buildings for the Board of Trade.
The sclerotic Board of Trade, so lately headed by the now
First Lord, Mr Churchill, in succession to the current Chancellor,
David Lloyd George, might move its offices; otherwise, it was
not noted for much in the way of movement. Schoolchildren in
Birkenhead and everyone on either side of the Mersey, including
that Liverpudlian QC and jurist Lord Mersey, knew that perfectly
well. Certainly it had offered no real scope for the energies of the
First Lord when he had been President of the Board of Trade, nor
yet for those of that most signally disestablished Welshman, the
7
Chancellor, who was singularly fortunate that fornication and
adultery were not regarded as offences against Parliamentary –
as they were against military – discipline. The Front Bench were
concerned with National Insurance, in an off-hand fashion, and,
far more, with the coming fight for Home Rule – and the
consequences of the Parliament Act 1911 which, by
emasculating the Lords, allowed a Home Rule bill to have some
sort of chance.
As for imperial trade and foreign affairs, wars and rumours of
war, these were the concerns of the First Lord and the
Chancellor, the latter of whom had profited handsomely from the
decision to create, as had long been contemplated, the Imperial
Wireless Chain … and to award it to Marconi’s Wireless
Telegraph Company.
The departure, at Noon on 10 April, of RMS Titanic from
Southampton, bound for New York via Cherbourg and
Queenstown,5 went unnoticed, unless perhaps for its celebrity in
the popular press, the curious incident of its wake tearing SS
New York from her moorings and nearly drawing the American
ship into a collision with Titanic, and, in the First Lord’s case,
possibly a dim recollection that, when New York had been the
British Inman Line passenger liner City of New York, she had
been ‘christened’ by Lady Randolph Churchill, the First Lord’s
New York-born mother.
5 Now Cobh, in Ireland.
8
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
IN WASHINGTON, BY 10 APRIL 1912, Congress had defeated an
amendment to a bill authorising additional aids to navigation in
the lighthouse service (the amendment should have taken away a
provision for using appropriations to feed and clothe survivors of
shipwrecks), and had reduced the duties on wool and woollens.
The Senate had also increased the mandatory retirement age for
US Navy dentists. Now the Senate was debating whether to
amend a House bill concerning the carrying of concealed
weapons in the District of Columbia, and whether to amend a
House bill on Army appropriations which had served to reduce
the size of the US Cavalry.
The sailing of Titanic for New York was a matter only for the
social pages of the newspapers, not for legislators.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
IF THE IRISH MEMBERS HELD the Liberal government firmly by the
bollocks, Labour were grasping the hem of the Liberal garment.
Even now, Mr Asquith’s majority was dependent upon support
from Mr Redmond’s Irish Nationalists and Ramsay MacDonald’s
Labour members. Asquith himself had been overmastered by
events, drink, vanity, social climbing, and sexual obsession: once
9
Campbell-Bannerman’s forensic and silken ‘sledge-hammer’ in
Commons debates, a free-trader and a Classical, Gladstonian
Liberal very much of the Rightmost wing of the party, he had
been forced already to abdicate much of his power. The Naval
crises with Wilhelmine Germany, the Irish Question that had
bedevilled the Liberals since the end of Gladstone’s second
ministry, the rise of Labour, and his own personal failings, had
left him shackled hand and foot to Mr Redmond, and at the
mercy of his chancellor, Mr Lloyd George.
The Lords had badly and inarguably overreached themselves
in 1909 by rejecting the Budget in a way that violated
Parliamentary convention and placed them irreparably in the
wrong; but they had been provoked and indeed almost forced
into doing so by a deliberately outrageous ‘People’s Budget’
crafted by Lloyd George expressly to provoke the crisis it did
provoke. With the consequent loss of the Lords’ Veto, there was
no longer any excuse for delaying a Home Rule bill – an excuse
Liberal prime ministers had not been above using in the past –
and no bar to further experiments in social welfare spending put
up by the Chancellor (less out of conviction than to dish Labour).
Home Rule for Ireland had become The Project, the
indispensable, inexorable goal with which nothing was to be
allowed to interfere. It was a political necessity for the Liberal
Party so far as the Liberals wished to remain in government.
More dangerously, it was a personal obsession of the PM’s. If he
10
was shackled to the Irish members, he had participated in
riveting the fetters. Asquith was one of the few, proud members
of Commons – ‘the remnant’ – who had been members in
Commons what time Gladstone had made his last, heart-breaking
attempt to put Home Rule through, and he was determined that
neither the repeated refusal of the people to give him a mandate,
nor any other cause, should prevent him in succeeding where his
old chief and idol had failed. Home Rule was The Project, and
nothing – not the deaths of hundreds, not corruption in the
Cabinet, not his Chancellor’s cherished schemes – should be
allowed to divert from it his path.
David Lloyd George had begun his ascent as the voice of the
valleys, the tribune of Welsh Nonconformism and the incarnation
of the Nonconformist conscience. Certainly by 1906 at the latest,
he had lost whatever conscience he had had, and was simply
corrupt and on the make. At the same time, he cultivated, and, on
one side of his notably complex nature, seemed yet to feel
compassion for, the poor, and particularly the Welsh poor.
His ally in putting up the Budget of 1909 had been the then
President of the Board of Trade, that enfant terrible Winston.
Winston sensed that he was not destined to remain long at the
Board of Trade, and his sights were even then set upon the
Admiralty, which was always to be his first love. The ‘People’s
Budget’ not only sought to tax the rich to assist the poor, it
sought to tax the rich to maintain Naval superiority, particularly
11
as against Tirpitz and the Kaiser. And, too, Churchill was always
easily captivated: by Joe Chamberlain, by Lloyd George, by
Jackie Fisher, by Monty….
Lloyd George, who portrayed himself, to great political
advantage, as having been born to poverty and struggle (he
hadn’t been, and he certainly made certain he did not remain
long bereft of the world’s riches), disliked dukes as a class and
delighted in twisting their tails. Winston’s exasperation with
dukes was not class-based, but individual, and proceeded from
his knowing them all too well and being related to most of them.
Between them, they created a social revolution, a political crisis,
a Liberal coup, and very nearly – averted only by the outbreak of
war in 1914 – a civil war.
For the position that Squiffy Asquith had managed to get
himself into was more than difficult.
Between the triumph over the Lords and the failure to win a
majority in two successive general elections, he had now to
make good on the cheque he had written (and crossed) to the
Irish Nationalists. Without them, he could not have broken the
Lords; having broken the Lords, and being reliant upon the Irish
members for his control of the Commons, he must now get
Home Rule through. And Home Rule was in any event The
Project, and he a True Believer.
And it was already becoming obvious that – whether or not it
was right – Ulster was prepared to fight. Mr Redmond, like not a
12
few of the leading proponents of Irish Home Rule (including
even some of the many Protestants who had led the movement),
was one of the Anglo-Irish, and, in his case, not one of the
Ascendancy, but rather one of the Old English, the pre-
Reformation, pre-Tudor, Hiberno-Cambro-Normans who were
Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis, more Irish than the Irish. The Ulster
Protestants and Unionists throughout Ireland, regarding Home
Rule as treasonous, believing that ‘Home Rule was Rome Rule’,
in turn considered themselves more loyal and more Unionist and
more British than the British Government. By 1914, both sides
were to tread perilously near to treason, arming themselves
against a civil war they were thereby provoking.
The sinking of a British ship, built by a Belfast shipyard run
by sprigs of the Ascendancy and of the Presbyterian plantations,
and carrying Catholic, Irish emigrants to New York in steerage
class, was perhaps the worst possible eventuality for the
Asquith government.
Fortunately, this was a fantastic and all but unimaginable
prospect, a mere, baseless, passing nightmare that could not
possibly befall. The science of shipbuilding was, after all,
settled; the consensus was clear.
On 11 April 1912, at 3.5 PM, the Prime Minister rose, stood to
the despatch box, and moved the Government of Ireland Bill.
RMS Titanic had put out from Queenstown one and one-quarter
hours before, departing troubled Ireland for the promise of
13
America.
… _ _ _ …
14
From Chapter Two:
THE GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND BILL created, inevitably, its own
momentum: the ship of state, once set on that course, could not
readily be turned to avoid collision. And – as Titanic had done at
Southampton Docks – she drew unexpected company in her
powerful wake.
The ocean is not featureless, yet its features are not all of
them fixed: its very variety and changeableness make its surface
monotonous and indistinguishable. Equally unseen are the
submarine landscape, the deep currents, and the play of wind and
weather upon the oceans’ surfaces: and what is not seen is what
most matters.
When Titanic stood out to sea from Queenstown, she was not
entering uncharted waters, yet she did not foresee what she was
to find. When the Liberal government embarked upon the Home
Rule Bill, these also were not uncharted waters, yet these also
concealed fateful perils.
…
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
FROM MAY TO JUNE 1911, the Imperial Conference in London had
taken up arbitration issues; immigration within the Empire and
amongst the Dominions; cable communications; jurisdiction over
imperial appeals; merchant shipping; the ‘All-Red’ Mail Route,
15
the Suez Canal; and, on 15 June, wireless telegraphy.
New Zealand proposed that ‘the great importance of wireless
telegraphy for social, commercial, and defensive purposes
renders it desirable that the scheme of wireless telegraphy
approved at the Conference held at Melbourne in December
1909 be extended, as far as practicable, throughout the Empire,
with the ultimate object of establishing a chain of British State-
owned wireless stations, which, in emergency, would enable the
Empire to be to a great extent independent of submarine cables’:
which, on 15 June, was accepted by the Conference. Mr Samuel,
by then Buxton’s successor as Postmaster-General, was very
eloquent upon the subject in the Home Government’s behalf: ‘In
the opinion of the Government of the United Kingdom it is very
desirable that a chain of wireless stations should be established
within the Empire, partly for strategical and partly for
commercial reasons. Cables, of course, are always liable to be
cut in time of war. …[I]t should be a State-owned system. If it
were in the hands of a company it could not fail to be a
monopoly, and in an even higher degree than the cables are a
monopoly….’
…
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
… There, there, was the rift in the lute. The Irish might accept
this as a temporary and half-measure; but it was not enough, as
16
events were to show. It was to this unworkable compromise,
however, that the Government were committed, and nothing
could be allowed to impede the passage of the Bill, lest the
Government fall.
Not even the deaths of fifteen hundred souls, a judicial
enquiry, and a Cabinet scandal.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
THE IDEA OF AN IMPERIAL Wireless Chain, a long-wave broadcasting
system linking the Empire from colony to dominion to Home,
had been floated in 1910. Mr Sydney Buxton was then
Postmaster-General; in 1912 he was President of the Board of
Trade.
The Marconi Company had made the running in proposing
and seeking such a contract from HM Government; and HM
Government were prepared to make a deal. Even then, although
the conscious mind of most members of all parties in the House
recoiled from the prospect, the fear of war against Germany had
begun already to work upon the British subconscious; and for
military as well as commercial and political reasons, it was
argued that a chain of wireless stations should be far superior and
more secure than cables that might be cut or interfered with.
This was partly right – and wholly wrong. When August 1914
broke upon the world, the first and perhaps most momentous act
17
of Churchill’s Admiralty and the GPO cable ships was to cut and
dredge up the German transatlantic cables. What this in turn
meant was that Room 40 could and did then pluck from the air
the German wireless transmissions, and decode them: including
the fatal Zimmermann Telegram seeking to draw Mexico into an
attack on the United States that would force the Americans to
stay out of the Great War in which they were, to that point,
neutral. It had, of course, the opposite effect: decrypted and
handed to the Americans, it forced even Woodrow Wilson to
abandon neutrality, and to enter into the War on the Allied side.
Finis Germaniæ. Had the Marconi system of the proposed
Imperial Wireless Chain been in place in 1914, it should surely
have been in use: HMG were not going to pay for it and not use
it. Germany should then have been in the same position of
interception and decryption as Britain was to be vis-à-vis
Germany, despite the inability of the Kaiserliche Marine –
having no superiority at sea and being bottled up by the Royal
Navy – to have cut British cables at sea; and British cables on
land should have been and in the event were accessible to the
destruction or interference, or tapping, of the Central Powers.
Yet there was, as would emerge, more to the Marconi
proposal, and to the Cabinet’s acquiescence in it, than those
considerations.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
18
… And, suddenly, in this welter of Irish affairs, personalities,
and party politics, the fate of a future enquiry into the deaths of
numerous Irish people was sealed. ‘Wee Joe’ Devlin, hon.
member for Belfast West, setter-aside of bishops’ restraints,
betrayer of William O’Brien, distiller, yellow journalist,
Grandmaster for life of the Mollies, anti-Parnellite, deadly foe of
Redmond, spoilsman and jobber, interjected what seemed a mere
debating point.
‘Is the hon. gentleman aware that the head of one of the
greatest industries in Belfast is a Home Ruler?’
‘I am quite well aware of Lord Pirrie’s history. I am also
aware that in the demonstration that took place three days ago in
Belfast, his workmen turned out almost to a man to hear the
Leader of the Opposition.’
From that moment, the yard that built Titanic was politically
untouchable by the Liberal government that had moved the
Home Rule Bill.
… _ _ _ …
19
From Chapter Three:
Hello, ma baby, hello, ma honey
… SEND ME A KISS BY wire: baby, my heart’s on fire.
In April 1912, to have sent a kiss by wire aboard an Atlantic
liner was possible: indeed, passenger traffic and inane chatter
was the primary job of the Marconi operators aboard: but that
kiss (–.– .. … …) would have been transmitted as a series of dots
and dashes. Wireless communication at sea was in code, not by
voice.
…
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
AGAIN AND AGAIN IN THE investigation of Titanic’s loss, the role of
the Marconi companies and their commercial methods is
equivocal at best, and appears at every juncture of crisis. There is
a more than ample irony in the statement that, ‘[t]hose who have
been saved have been saved through one man, Mr Marconi and
his wonderful invention’: firstly because in takes no account of
the Marconi companies’ role in contributing to the loss of life,
and secondly because the tribute was that of Herbert Samuel,
Buxton’s successor as Postmaster-General and one of those
implicated in the Marconi Scandal.
20
If the Senate’s Commerce Committee, its investigatory
subcommittee, and the US Government generally, were
comparatively free of regulatory capture before the disaster, they
were unquestionably captured by Signor Marconi himself during
the course of the investigation.
His eminence as a practical scientist, his freedom – as an
Italian of half-Irish antecedents – from any perception of British
influence, his obliging nature and apparent willingness to assist
the subcommittee with his expertise, and his near-monopoly of
that expertise, inevitably allowed him to capture the regulators.
It is difficult to overstate the regard in which he was held in
1912: he was a greater and more celebrated applied scientist, in
the public mind, than Edison or Tesla (from the latter of whom,
amongst numerous others, he had stolen gleefully, as patent
litigation then and after unquestionably demonstrated); he had
the pioneering aura that should after attach to the young
Lindbergh; he was the toast of the Italian-American constituency
(and of the Irish). He had not yet become as he after did a
symbol of monopoly, crony capitalism, bribery, the theft of
intellectual property, and the full-throated embrace of a Fascism
that in 1912 had not yet been conceived. He was regarded as
being a Wise Man and a Public Benefactor on the level of an
Alexander Graham Bell.
As for the British Government, Signor Marconi, a distant
cousin of that educated and elegant officer Douglas Haig and
21
son-in-law of an Irish peer, was indeed not owned by HMG. In a
sense, he owned them. The Marconi Scandal had not come to
light; but it, and the whole tortuous – and tortious – series of
dealings that clustered around the Imperial Wireless Chain, had
already occurred. And it is not without interest that the
Postmaster-General in the Liberal Cabinet when, in 1910, the
idea of the Imperial Wireless Chain – and a Marconi contract for
it – was first bruited, was in 1912 the President of the Board of
Trade, the right hon. Mr Sydney Buxton MP, member for Poplar
in the Liberal interest.
…
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
THE MARCONI SCANDAL WOULD COME to have much of the same
dimensions as the Panama Affaire had had in French politics –
including giving new ‘respectability’ to anti-Semitism. The
revelations of what had occurred with and because of the
wireless operations aboard Titanic, and the already-envenomed
relations in the House that derived from such causes as the
Archer-Shee case and the Home Rule Bill, would make it so.
…
22
From Chapter Four:
RMS Titanic SANK IN NORTH Atlantic waters, not far from Cape
Race and the Newfoundland Banks, on the night of 14/15 April
1912, with the loss of fifteen hundred souls.
She had left Queenstown in distracted Ireland with all the
lifeboat capacity that law and regulation required, and the latest
in communications technology. Neither was adequate: even
without considering that, under a close reading of applicable
regulation, she carried more lifeboat capacity than required by
law. Rightly and inevitably, the cry went up, Something Must Be
Done.
The problem for the governmental enquiries that followed
was less what to do, than how to do what might be done without
condemning US immigration laws; exonerating the wicked
Trusts in the midst of an election year in which Teddy
Roosevelt was taking on the incumbent Taft for not busting
enough Trusts; exposing the Marconi Company in which
ministers of the Crown held illicit stakes; insulting
Ulster workers in a Belfast shipyard owned by a Liberal
supporter of Home Rule for Ireland, whose ship had just now
drowned any number of emigrating Irish Catholics; wrecking the
Home Rule Bill; queering the pitch for the Imperial Wireless
Chain; and bringing down His Majesty’s Government.
Within those limits, not a few of which could not be so much
23
as mentioned to the Congress, the House of Commons, and the
Wreck Commissioner, Lord Mersey, the enquiries were perfectly
free and above-board.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
THE LOSS OF Titanic WAS a tragedy; for the American government
as for the British, it was a potential political problem; and for not
a few American and British politicians, it was a political
opportunity.
For its owners, it was a disaster at best, and, at worst,
potentially, a doom. And it was who those owners were that
should make all the difference in the politics and conduct of the
British and American enquiries, and what justice could be, in
both senses, afforded.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
THE JUNIOR SENATOR FROM MICHIGAN, William Alden Smith, was a
railway attorney, a Great Lakes shipping proprietor, a Populist to
the extent politically necessary, a Progressive from conviction, a
Republican from ancestral inheritance (and, through that same
Yankee-gone-West heritage, a member of the Park, or First,
Congregationalist Church), and – like many Midwestern
Republican politicians and their counterpart Southern Democrats
24
– a newspaper proprietor (in his case, in Grand Rapids), telling
the community what it thought and confirming its notions to it in
windy prose.
As a Congressman, he had shown himself a master of
glutinous flag-wagging rhetoric, notably over the annexation of
Hawaii and America’s civilising mission that but resembled in
outward form lesser and baser-motivated imperialisms. He was
not in 1912 notably isolationist, save to the extent any
Midwestern politician was forced to be: the Senate had mainly
occupied itself in 1911 with three great causes: pensions for
Civil War veterans and their widows and children (Union only,
of course), protective tariffs, and the hard fight over international
arbitration treaties with the UK and France.
Senator Smith, when he voted – which was not nearly so
often as his colleague the senior senator from Michigan: William
Alden Smith missed well over half the votes in his Senate career
– had favoured arbitration and resisted wrapping himself in the
flag of numerous amendments proclaiming American
sovereignty and reserving certain issues, from immigration
policy to the Monroe Doctrine, from arbitration. His hand-picked
editor back in Grand Rapids, one Arthur Vandenberg, would
eventually become a tribune of isolation, and Senator Smith
himself was to be an opponent of the League of Nations in 1918
and after; but in 1912, he was not noted for any great degree of
isolationism. In fact, in 1912, although he, more even than other
25
members of the Senate and the House, thought himself
presidential timber (a delusion from which vanishingly few
senators and representatives are wholly free when they gaze
enraptured into their mirrors of a morning),6 Senator Smith
wasn’t noted for much of anything.
He was amiable, amenable, biddable, and at once boyish and
silver-haired in the conventional senatorial mode. He didn’t have
any particular animus against the shipping interest as such; he
didn’t have any prejudice against immigrant ships so long as
they didn’t sink: as was so for most politicians in the Upper
Midwest, much of his constituency was composed of
Scandinavian immigrants, Asplunds and Nilssons and Öhmans
and the occasional Peltomäki, who were precisely the
immigrants, along with the Irish, the Buckleys and Gallaghers
and O’Driscolls and Scanlans, most carried by the White Star
liners from Liverpool and Southampton. He didn’t have any
special detestation of the British, or of Anglo-American business
ventures … unless they were trusts. He was a trust-buster of long
standing, with a personal contempt for JP Morgan: and it was the
fate of White Star and Titanic to be part of an international trust
behind which Senator Smith knew and saw the hideous visage of
Morgan the Wicked.
The loss of Titanic was a tragedy, a sorrow, an event that
6 Senator Price Daniel, Snr, of Texas, comes to mind as one of the few exceptions, along with Harry S Truman of Missouri, who wished fervently not to become even Vice President.
26
horrified the most hardened; yet for Senator Smith and no few
others, it was also, however tragic and horrible, and however
sensible they might be of its pathos, a political windfall.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
THAT GUGLIELMO Marconi, the much-fêted, was also Sound on
Ireland was not to be forgotten by Cabinet. Much more pertinent
to the pressures upon the enquiries into Titanic’s loss, was that
fatal passage in Commons on 12 April 2012, as HMG moved the
Home Rule Bill:
MR DEVLIN (BELFAST WEST): Is the hon. gentleman aware that
the head of one of the greatest industries in Belfast is a
Home Ruler?
MR LEVY-LAWSON (MILE END): I am quite well aware of Lord
Pirrie’s history. I am also aware that in the demonstration
that took place three days ago in Belfast, his workmen
turned out almost to a man to hear the Leader of the
Opposition.
Lord Pirrie, it was not to be forgotten (least of all by Cabinet)
was the chairman of Harland & Wolff, shipbuilders of Belfast.
He was a Protestant, a Liberal, and a supporter of Home
Rule whose support – as a peer and a Protestant – it was
indispensable to pray in aid of the Home Rule Bill. In the
moment in which he was mentioned in the House, two days
27
before the ship his yard had built was to sink so terribly, the fate
of the Titanic enquiry was set.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
NO DOUBT THE TRAGEDY OF Titanic’s sinking and the loss of fifteen
hundred souls affected Senator Smith, as it affected all who
heard of it. It is pardonable nonetheless to wonder whether, had
she carried more Irish immigrants and a complement of Italians
or Greeks in steerage, rather than the Scandinavian immigrants
who made up so much of the Senator’s home constituency, he
should have been quite so quick off the mark in taking to himself
the investigation into her loss. Just as the so-far hidden influence
of the Marconi dealings and the debate over Home Rule affected
every aspect of the British enquiry, so also must it never be
forgotten that 1912 was a presidential election year in the United
States, in which the Progressive Republicans were at daggers
drawn with President Taft: and every action in American politics,
including the Titanic investigation, must be measured against
that rule. Human feelings or no human feelings, no politician on
either side of the Atlantic had pure motives in seizing upon one
or another position with reference to Titanic and her loss.
…
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
28
JP MORGAN – J PIERPONT MORGAN – was not a bad or wicked man.
He was an Elizabethan, born out of his proper time. Like another
famous Morgan, also, and like not a few of the other Welsh,
including the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1912, he was a
privateer when he could obtain letters of marque and a pirate
when these were sadly unobtainable. He was a churchman, a
good neighbour, cultivated, charitable, and – after 5.0 and before
9.0 the next morning – kindly. Nor was his besetting sin that of
personal greed: he fought his shareholders’ corner. He
considered, and not without cause, that he deserved well of his
country; he considered, and not without cause, that he had all but
single-handedly saved his country’s financial and banking
systems amidst Panic and Crash, when government was
paralysed and struck dumb. And he was a walking instance of
Adam Smith’s warning that businessmen do not so much as to
take luncheon together without conspiring in restraint of trade.
The only colourable argument against capitalism is the
behaviour of capitalists, as the argument against the Church is
the behaviour of Christians. In the first instance, at any event
(theology being outwith the scope of this work), the behaviour of
capitalists that brings capitalism into disrepute is precisely not
capitalistic behaviour. The great enemy of crony capitalism is the
true capitalist. Yet the un-capitalistic behaviour of capitalists –
heretical, as it were, behaviour – is the result of powerful
temptations, difficult to resist: and specially so for the larger
29
concerns, Big Business.
The larger the business concern, the more favourably it
regards, despite its loud but pro forma protests, governmental
regulation.
After all, the governmental regulations establishing a
minimum standard of behaviour or safety or what have you,
inevitably become the maximum standard, and a defence in law.
The politicians and bureaucrats who establish these regulations
are either nescient in the technical aspects of the matter, in which
case they are amenable to being guided and informed by the
expertise of industry, or, if they are themselves technically
informed, are amenable to remunerative positions in that
industry when they shall have left their ill-paying government
posts. In either case, regulatory capture is fatally easy for a major
industry and its larger concerns.
All regulation acts as a drag upon commerce: but there are
always loopholes, commonly inserted by the regulated industry
in the process of regulatory capture and political influence, and
they are carefully designed to be exploited and exploitable only
by the large corporations that possess the wherewithal to deploy
men of law, chartered accountants, and lobbyists by the dozen.
For a large corporation, government is an annoyance: it is not the
enemy. The enemy is competition, and particularly upstart
competition. It is with business concerns as it is with ships: size
matters. Even as Olympic and Titanic could upset smaller vessels
30
in their wakes, a large company can exploit regulation to cripple
a smaller. A large ship, of considerable burthen and draught, with
its centre of gravity well below the waterline, can pass through
currents and winds that lighter vessels are wrecked by. A
regulatory scheme that reduces a large company’s dividend by
tuppence can cripple and bankrupt three smaller firms, thereby
protecting the large corporation from their would-be competitors’
innovation, invention, superior customer service, and
competitive reduction in price.
Big Business also naturally enjoys the benefits of crony
capitalism, with the State in its pocket and contrariwise: a
commercial protection racket to which governments of a vaguely
Leftist stripe are peculiarly and specially prone. Of course Big
Business makes the appropriate noises, and rails and screams
against oppressive regulation … all the way to the bank.
In this is the genesis of all trusts and anti-competitive
arrangements.
…
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT WAS A jovial behemoth, and the friend of all
the world (bar, by 1912, Teddy Roosevelt): his paternal attitude,
untinctured by racialism, as Governor of the Philippines, had left
behind a barracks marching-cadence which US troops sang when
dealing with those Filipinos gun-totingly irreconciled to the
31
benefits of American rule: He may be a brother to Big Bill Taft /
But he ain’t no kin o’ mine. Yet when Titanic was lost, President
Taft’s only apparent concern was for the survival of, or news of
the loss of, his aide, Major Archie Butt. His lack of a larger
human sympathy was no doubt the retreat into minutiæ of a man
overmastered by grief at a personal loss; yet it had a number of
baleful effects, firstly in letting the Senate by default (and with
Senator Smith’s eye to the main chance) conjure and direct the
American investigation, and secondly by interfering, through a
barrage of harassing Marconi messages, with Carpathia’s
communications with the shore.
≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈
SENATOR WILLIAM ALDEN SMITH WAS a Progressive: with all that the
term implied. Part of what it implied was the ‘scientific’ racism
of the period, from eugenics to the notion of racial superiority –
specifically, and conveniently for his constituency, that of
‘Nordic’ races such as the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians and
Germans who were his electors. Southern Senators were in the
main concerned only with skin-colour: the Klan, in 1912, had not
yet re-formed as a non-sectional organisation (note hyphen: ‘re-
formed’: it has never, and in the nature of things, can never
reform): the South had traditionally not been nativist, anti-
Catholic, or particularly anti-Semitic, as a look at any roll of its
32
antebellum politicians and its Confederate leaders attests.7 It was
too obsessed with race, tout court, to concern itself with lesser
divisions.
It was left to the Progressive movement in America (as to the
Fabians in Britain) to promote eugenics, Prohibition, dietary
fads, the compulsory sterilisation of those they deemed ‘unfit’,
and preferential treatment in immigration law of ‘Nordic’ (and
preferably Protestant) immigrants.8 Even these, of course, must
not enter the Promised Land ‘unfit, given to the use of spirituous
liquors, diseased, degenerate, idiot, or likely to become a public 7 It had been in Charleston, South Carolina, that Francis Salvador had lived, after
coming to the colonies from London: the first Jewish-American soldier to die in the Revolutionary War, and the first Jew to sit in any American legislature. The first three Jewish US Senators had been David Levy Yulee of Florida, Judah P Benjamin of Louisiana, and Benjamin Franklin Jonas, also of Louisiana. All three were Democrats – Southern Democrats. Senators Yulee and Benjamin had been elected before the War. Senator Jonas had been elected after the War and Reconstruction: he had been a major in the Confederate States Army. Senator Benjamin, of course, had been the first Jew to attain Cabinet rank in a North American government – indeed, bar Disraeli, the first Jewish minister anywhere since the fall of the Norman kingdom in Sicily. Having several times declined appointment to the US Supreme Court before 1860, Judah P Benjamin had become Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State: in the government of the Confederate States of America, in the Congress of which nation the former US Senator from Florida, David Yulee, had sat. There was an evident, proud, distinguished, and considerable Jewish presence in the Confederate forces: General R E Lee’s staff surgeon was Bernard Baruch’s father, and Moses Ezekiel, the great sculptor, was a Confederate veteran. Native Americans and Hispanics fought for the Confederacy and achieved high rank in that service. Former United States Senator Stephen R Mallory of Florida, as Confederate Navy Secretary, became the first Roman Catholic, as Mr Secretary Benjamin was the first Jew, to sit in a North American cabinet, and there was a considerable antebellum Roman Catholic presence in the South that was reflected in a considerable Roman Catholic contingent under Confederate arms. Six Confederate general officers were Roman Catholics; after the War, James Longstreet converted to Roman Catholicism as well. There’s a good deal of irony in American history.
8 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jnr, had fought for the Union and for abolition and emancipation; but the great Progressive jurist was also to write the majority opinion in Buck v Bell, 274 US 200, 47 S. Ct. 584, 71 L. Ed. 1000 (1927), upholding a program of eugenics and compulsory sterilization of the ‘unfit’ that would have passed muster at a Nuremberg Rally. (The sole dissenter was to be Justice Pierce Butler, an Irish Catholic Democrat from Minnesota.)
33
charge’.
For this reason, US immigration law very explicitly required
the segregation of the aspiring immigrants on the passage to
America, a full and rather nosy dossier of each in advance of
arrival, and the liability of the carrier should any unreported or
misreported immigrants arrive to be turned away from the
Golden Door beside which Liberty held her equivocal lamp.
(Lawrence Beesley recounted the experience of filling out, on his
passage, a lengthy baggage-declaration form ‘for non-residents
in the United States’ and other fiddling, tiresome bureaucratic
inconveniences, and he was a respectable schoolmaster travelling
second-class.)
This had meant, to Titanic’s builders, her survivors, and
Carpathia’s master and his wireless operators, a number of
unintended consequences: an immigrant class who were impeded
in evacuation of the stricken ship by the imposed segregation,
with much attendant loss of life in steerage passengers, for one;
for another, the jammed airwaves, choked with outgoing details
of survivors so as to comply with US immigration law.
It meant something more to the Senate subcommittee Senator
Smith had conjured and chaired. It was politically mandatory,
full stop, that blame attach to the builders, the line, the trusts, the
malefactors of great wealth, the survivors, the dead, the Board of
Trade: even, if necessary, to the Marconi operators already being
celebrated as heroes: so that none attached to US law, US
34
regulation, and the United States government. Particularly where
the People are King, the king can do no wrong.
Far more so even than in Britain, even with the hidden
influence upon the British enquiry of what was to become the
Marconi Scandal and even in regard of the political imperative of
the Home Rule Bill, the fix, in the US investigation, was in from
the off.
…