"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde
Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Sunday, April 15, 2012

Titanic, Triangle Shirtwaist and the Inevitable Failure of Reform

John I. Taylor, owner of the Boston Red Sox, was just putting the finishing touches on a "lyrical little bandbox" to be named Fenway Park. The grand opening of the diamond for one of the eight charter members of Ban Johnson's still-new American League was supposed to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, news story for mid April 1912.

At the same time, a luxury ship known as the RMS Titanic was in her fitting out berth undergoing her own final touches. The keel had been laid three years earlier by laborers in Belfast, Ireland, many of them in the same economic class (third) as the immigrants who would occupy steerage below the water line.

James Cameron's classic has been panned for its historical inaccuracies, including the hit job on Mr. Murdoch's character (He was portrayed as a bribe-taking opportunist as the ship was sinking and the lifeboats separated from the davits) but we can be fairly sure he did his research in recreating the hedonistic behemoth as only CGI and trick photography can deliver.

As is all too well known, the RMS Titanic was supposed to be last word in not only luxury but also safety. The hubris of the ship builders, the White Star Line and its ultimate owner, JP Morgan, was such that only half the passengers and crew could be accommodated if the ship sank. The Titanic had enough space and davits to carry 64 wooden lifeboats, more than enough to save the 2200+ souls on board. However, the Powers That Be decided only 20 lifeboats (including four collapsible lifeboats) would be sufficient. The Titanic was unsinkable, after all. The lifeboats were mere window dressing. In fact, maritime law at that time stated that a ship at over 10,000 tons had to carry just 16 lifeboats. Ergo, Titanic actually had four over the bare legal minimum.


The ship's builder, J. Bruce Ismay, who would suffer social ostracization for his role both before and after the Titanic's foundering, decided to build an additional screen on Promenade deck A, thus making Titanic the largest ship afloat, larger than her sister ship, the Olympic. Even before her ill-fated maiden voyage, Titanic had injured nearly 250 workers, killing six. But such collateral damage was to be expected with a massive undertaking over a three year-long span of time.

Titanic had the capacity and resources to comfortably accommodate well over 3000 passengers and a full crew of nearly 900 but a coal strike just prior to her maiden voyage assured that only a little over half the berthing areas would be occupied. As the graphic shows, an estimated 78% of the crew perished after Titanic's starboard side hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, flooding five of her compartments.

The investigation that followed in Titanic's tragic wake found that J. Bruce Ismay, the ship's principal builder, exhorted Captain Edward Smith, then winding down his career, to fire Titanic's other engines and to flex her muscles so she could give some good copy to the worldwide press. Excessive speed was listed as the primary cause for the collision. But the real reason was hubris.

And it was hubris and callousness that accounted for the deaths of 1514 people of all social classes. It was overweening pride that led the builders and owners to think that Titanic could not be sunk (despite being made out of iron) and the lifeboats mere useless appendages, it was hubris that led Ismay to think they could blindly barge at over 20 knots through a part of the North Atlantic notoriously littered with pack ice at that time of year.

And another look at the graphic above shows that callousness resulted in a higher survival rate across the board of first class passengers. In spite of the Titanic's standing policy of "women and children first", one third of first class male passengers scrambled aboard the precious few lifeboats. By contrast, only a third of the 3rd class children were also saved. Males in second class suffered the most horrendous casualty rate: A full 92% of them perished, presumably because they insisted on honoring the ship's "women and children first" policy.

Realizing as the ship's five compartments began to flood and word spread around that Titanic would surely sink in two hours, the first thought was to lock down in steerage the third class passengers and casual crew who worked for as little as £3 10s a month so they wouldn't take up valuable lifeboat space. To cover the landed gentry with more glory, it was later discovered that several of the lifeboats were deployed with as few as a dozen survivors even though each one was built to accommodate 65. Even under those horrendous circumstances, elbow space for the wealthy was worth condemning people to die.

I'm sure, even as the 1% ("the better half", as Billy Zane's character Cal Hockley put it) were given precedence over the 2nd and 3rd class passengers and the rest were plunged into 28 degree water that killed them within 2-3 minutes, that not a single person was thinking of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that had occurred nearby, killing nearly 150 underpaid garment laborers barely over a year earlier. Just as the Titanic became the worst disaster in maritime history, so had Triangle Shirtwaist became the worst industrial accident in American history.

So many men, women and even children perished that day because all but one exit was locked by management to prevent presumed employee theft. Many of the Irish, the nationality that built Titanic, and other nationalities in steerage were locked belowdecks so they wouldn't "steal" their only means of salvation. The lifeboats that had been regarded superfluous just two hours before were now seen as the property and birthright of the landed gentry.

As is inevitable, many shook their heads and wondered how these disasters could've happened and reforms were swiftly put in place. Just as Triangle Shirtwaist brought about workplace reforms, the Titanic's sinking gave birth to SOLAS, which is still in use today, and maritime laws had been strengthened to better ensure the safety and survival of passengers and crew.

Today, Titanic owner JP Morgan's corporate heirs in the Wall Street bank that still bears his name is front and center of several other atrocities against working class people that have been made more notorious thanks to the spiritual heirs of the 2nd and 3rd class passengers who perished and live on in Occupy Wall Street.

JP Morgan, as with so many of their competitors/colleagues, is notorious for stealing homes that do not belong to them, in refusing to modify mortgages, in charging usurious finance rates and bludgeoning their working class account holders with excessive fees.

The reforms that had been swiftly erected in the wake of the Titanic and Triangle Shirtwaist were certainly very good things (although far too late in coming, thanks to self-interested obstructionism by the 1% that just as surely called the shots a century ago as they do now).

But reforms ultimately fail if they are not maintained and refreshed. Even child labor laws that were first enacted in Massachusetts in the 1830's are under attack. Women's rights are under attack as the landed gentry and right wing policy makers spend the entire 21st century trying to hurtle us back to the 19th. Pensions had long since been taken away from workers and risibly replaced with 401(k) plans that placed the burden of retirement funds on them. Workplace safety standards are under attack, the EPA and OSHA are mere shadows of their former selves and the 1% want us back in the pre-Titanic/Triangle Shirtwaist days when workers had no protections and, in worst-case scenarios, immediately deemed expendable.

Honest and well-meaning regulations, oversight and reforms are all good and well. But they are ultimately doomed to failure unless we reform the self-dealing, self-interested mindset of the sociopathic 1% that hold those who keep them in the catbird seat (or lifeboats both literal and figurative) in complete contempt. And how does one go about permanently reforming the mindset of the sociopath?
Bookmark and Share
7 Comments:
Blogger PurpleGirl said...
J. Bruce Ismay was the President and principle owner of the White Star Line. The ship was built by Harland and Wolf of Belfast (Ireland). Ismay can be called the builder in the sense that he ordered the ship from Harland and Wolf, which company built all the ships the White Star Line had.

Ismay also became a recluse after he returned to Britain.

Blogger jurassicpork said...
Actually, once word got out that he took a lifeboat, he was ostracized from British society. He rightly became a pariah.

Blogger Elizabeth Adams said...
Excellent piece.

Anonymous Anonymous said...
Great post. Unfortunately we can only contain sociopathic behavior by laws and regulations and when we continue to vote sociopaths into office they, of course, do away with all impediments to their goals.

Blogger Patricia said...
Amazing writing and loved the JP Morgan aspect. Looks like they never left their money encrusted lifeboat. Some things never change.

Anonymous Anonymous said...
"It was overweening pride that led the builders and owners to think that Titanic could not be sunk (despite being made out of iron) and the lifeboats mere useless appendages"

It wasn't pride that led to not enough lifeboats being available; it was failure to realize how radio changed sailing.

In the pre-radio era, there was a good reason for not having lifeboats for everybody. If a disaster happened in the middle of the ocean, it would take days, if not weeks, for people to realize that something had happened to the ship. The first indication of a disaster would have been the failure of the ship to appear. There was no way for the lifeboats to carry supplies for weeks on end. If people had managed to get on the lifeboats, they would have died of thirst for lack of drinking water.

Therefore, before radio, lifeboats were useful only if a sinking boat were close to land. In such a case, one could expect that the able-bodied should be able to swim a few miles, thus reserving the lifeboats for those who weren't able to swim.

The Eastland, which sank in 1915, had enough lifeboats for everybody. The presence of the lifeboats caused 848 people to die, as the boats made the Eastland more prone to rolling over -- which it happened to do in the Chicago River, only 20 feet from shore. Without the lifeboats, there would have been no capsizing, and hence no deaths.


The Titanic was the first major shipwreck of the radio era. Since there was a radio, other ships in the area could respond to a call for help, and the time one needed to spend in a lifeboat in mid-ocean was reduced from weeks to hours. Had a similar wreck occurred in the pre-radio era, there would have been no survivors, even if there had been enough lifeboats for everybody. Radio would change everything, but the White Star Line couldn't see how, and over 1500 died due to this lack of imagination.

I'm surprised that Fox News hasn't used the Eastland disaster as an argument against safety regulations.

Anonymous CC said...
That's a good observation about how radio had changed travel by water over long distances.

I've read a little about the Eastland. While the lifeboats added to its top-heaviness, I'd say that the number of people on board (almost 2,600 - more than on Titanic, which was a much bigger ship), many of whom crowded the upper decks, along with its poor design, were bigger culprits.