In Memoriam of the Titanic: The Edwardians vs. the Post-Moderns

“Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep: O LORD, thou preservest man and beast.” (Psalm 36:6, KJV)

Per Scriptum E. Wesley Reynolds

Soli Deo Gloria

Introduction:

In my heart, I yearn to be with Rev. Philips and his commemoration of the Titanic, but God has called me to the great task of throwing down the enemies of Christ behind the lines in the academic establishment: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringeth into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” (II Cor. 10:5). Deconstructionism has often plagued the academic historical establishment with an inability to most accurately organize and explain historical data which incorporates Christian presuppositions of truth in its original source base. The stark post-modern revisions of the Titanic prove that deconstructionist approaches to historiography cannot contain the immense power of Providential history, as a testimony to the reign of God and of His Christ: “His work is honorable and glorious: and His righteousness endureth forever. He hath made His wonderful works to be remembered...” (Psalm 111:3-4). The scholar of Providential history is duty bound to remember the Divine significance of every era: “The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein” (Psalm 111:2). Yet rather than searching for God's meaning in history or even evaluating the significance of interpretations from eye witnesses, post-modern historians are obsessed with dismantling every perspective into a collection of contradictory biases and controversies between races, classes, and genders. Even their process for relativistic analysis has degenerated into unintelligible relativism. As Daniel T. Rodgers argues in The Age of Fracture, “The categories of race, class, and gender, after sweeping into academic discourse in the early 1980s, turned less distinct, disaggregated into subcategories and intersections of categories, or slipped into quotations marks. Historians talked less of structure and more of narratives and consciousness – if not of the end of history and the disappearance of its powerful dialectical pincers altogether.”¹ After an intellectual history of chivalry, this post will include two parts; first, an attempt at rendering the Titanic disaster into a Providential historical understanding and comprehending the primary interpretations of contemporary accounts, and second, address the post-modern revisionist histories of the Titanic.

Preface on the Development of Mercantile and Maritime Chivalry:

Edwardian gentility existed in an age of lavish concert halls, formal evening attire, Strauss waltzes, and a touch of modern consumerism from industrial and urban development. Nationalistic composers took folk tunes from the countrysides and turned them into orchestral masterpieces, while men like Sir Edward Elgar and John Philip Sousa composed imperialistic and patriotic marches with a thunder unmatched in the history of Western music. Also popular music, Vaudeville, minstrelsy, and mass sport and leisure culture offered new urban pursuits to not only the wealthy but also to working families. Edwardian life existed in a world of whirling change, and yet it still largely maintained its Victorian moral structure.

Chivalry connotes medieval, and while the word itself derived its origin under knighthood as a code of honor for lords and landed gentry, it's medieval forms were far too distant and brutal to connect to the softer form of a more recent and polite chivalry dominating the code of honor for the Titanic. With the Reformation, knowledge and Biblical rationality transformed the world along humane lines which in turn threatened the dominance of the landed medieval aristocracy. However, since men are not by nature egalitarian, a new aristocracy soon began to take its place; one built on commerce and the wealth of newly developed trade routs. By the early to middle eighteenth century, philosophers began noticing the difference, and chronicled the new order and codes that followed it. The coffeehouse became the center for a code of polite conversation, provoking Jonathan Swift to write an essay entitled Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation. He proposed that conversation ought to be conducted in a more genteel way among fellow gentlemen without offense or injury. He even recommended ladies entrance into such spheres to encourage gentlemen to refine their speech.² In 1724, Daniel Defoe defined the the new English tradesman as a gentleman in his own right in the twenty second chapter of his book entitled The Complete English Tradesman, and explained that the older landed gentry were being displaced by this more productive sect. Far from degrading the established code of nobility, tradesmen constructed a more deserving aristocracy:

Trade is so far here from being inconsistent with a gentleman, that, in short, trade in England makes gentlemen, and has peopled this nation with gentlemen; for, after a generation or two, the tradesman's children, or at least their grandchildren, come to be as good gentlemen, statesmen, parliamentmen, privy-counselors, judges, bishops, and noblemen, as those of the highest birth and the most ancient families; as we have shown. Nor do we find any defect either in the genius or capacities of the posterity of tradesmen, arising from any remains of mechanic blood, which, it is pretended, should influence them; but all the gallantry of spirit, greatness of soul, and all the generous principles that can be found in any of the ancient families, whose blood is the most untainted, as they call it, with the low mixtures of a mechanic race, are found in these; and, as is said before, they generally go beyond them in knowledge of the world, which is the best education.³

The perception of the new English gentleman was also witnessed across the Atlantic and particularly in France, where the philosopher Voltaire contrasted English tradesmen with the stale and idiotic courtly nobility of France. He believed the superiority of the tradesmen over the old nobility as almost axiomatic, “I will not, however, take upon me to say which is the most useful to his country... whether the powdered lord, who knows to a minute when the king rises or goes to bed... or the merchant, who enriches his country, and from his countinghouse sends his orders into Surat or Cairo, thereby contributing to the happiness and convenience of human nature.”⁴ Gentility, civility, and politeness soon became the Enlightenment principles of the new gentry, and Romanticism brought back at least a rhetorical lineage to the medieval. Yet, far from medieval, the code for nineteenth century gentlemen included honesty and gentleness, as any casual reading of the novels on manners during the Romantic and Victorian eras may demonstrate. As England grew, its influence more and more dominated the seas in a quest for global empire, and imperialism pervaded much of the trade, investment, and military ventures of Victorian Great Britain.

The H.M.S. Troopship Birkenhead disaster in 1852, sparked yet another international interest in British gentility, this time, as maritime chivalry. After running aground, the sailors and soldiers of the Birkenhead under the leadership of Captain Salmond and Colonel Alexander Seton of the 74^th Highlanders, organized the loading of all the women and children safely onto the lifeboats, while the men went down with the ship into shark infested waters. Not one woman or child was lost, and the story became a classic among tales of British valiance. Even the king of Prussia took interest in the tale, and popularized it among his army. Indeed, it seemed the perfect example of bravery that imperialistic ventures required, as one survivor described it, “Yes, that-all conquering discipline – for of all the women and children not one is lost.”⁵ By 1912, the rule of women and children first was taken for granted as not only maritime law but also a universal law governmening human nature. Survivor J. Bruce Ismay described it as “the natural order,” and when questioned by the United States Senate inquiry whether following the rule resulted from the Captain's orders or a rule of the sea, Second Officer Lightoller answered by claiming it was “the rule of human nature.”⁶ Archibald Gracie also echoed Lightoller's sentiments in his first hand account.⁷ Even smoking and over descriptive language of the death toll were frowned on, as Gracie commented, “When asked if the Carpathia would come and pick us up he replied: 'No, she is not going to pick us up; she is to pick up bodies.' This when said to wives and mothers of the dead men was needlessly brutal.”⁸ As a further study of the Titanic will prove, this code of gentility governing respectability and valiance for Victorian class, and I mean the generic definition of class as sophistication rather than as a category based on incomes derived itself from Christian principles.

Titanic as Providence and the Difficulties of the Edwardian World:

The Titanic displayed the Victorian Christian dedication to the virtues of sacrifice and honor, and also stands as an endless testimony to the inability to build a technological Babel above God's power.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked...” (Gal. 6:7). Both points were picked up by contemporaries. Ronald Macfie's poem The Titanic: (an ode to immortality), portrays the Titanic as a disaster unpredictable by man and known only to God. However, God features simply as an uncontrollable force of pessimism:

Why did God choose

That you should tortured die?...

Behold! The hands of Fate

Wise and deliberate...

Shaped to a strange device

The murderous bit of ice...⁹

The roots of modern disillusionment were beginning to set in in this Edwardian understanding of the event, a prelude to April as the cruelest month. Dr. Ballard and Eve Heart and were nearer the mark in claiming that the entire affair attested to man's arrogance in naming it indestructible and not equipping it with enough lifeboats.¹⁰ The Victorian anxiety for the oncoming prowess of technology had little wide-scale confirmation until the Titanic disaster. Were would science lead? After the Titanic, science plainly seemed limited, and the horror of machinery as mass killing devises in the world wars would be around the corner. This naivety with technology increased into a blind faith, if an uneasy faith. The Titanic functioned as the first of modern disasters which called into question the Darwinian understanding of Victorian and indeed the even more progressive forms of Edwardian science. Hence, Filson Young in 1912 described the Titanic attempt, “like blasphemy,” and H. Rea Woodman in his 1913 poem In Memoriam, The Titanic Disaster framed the accident as a contest between the unconquerable sea and the finite inventions of man.¹¹ Here, Woodman makes a distinction between the arrogance of the shipbuilders and the innocence of the passengers, and constructs a more heroic contest between the chivalry of those on board with the cruelty of the iceberg:

Forever across the scarred waters,

Swept by your revenge and your hate,

Will echo that clarion music,

Of the dying before the Gate.¹²

In this sense, the Titanic included a deeper contest between disaster and the stalwart Victorian valiance of its passengers. Archibald Gracie's account testifies to the truth of such an interpretation. From the beginning, men attempted to keep the ladies composed and passed them over the ship decks and into the boats. Captain Edward Smith gave the all famous orders “women and children first.”¹³ When on various occasions some men rushed the boats, others maintained the protocol with their pistols. First Officer William Murdoch nobly loaded the boats with women and children before losing his only life on deck, and after as many women and children as possible had left, Captain Smith gave the orders, “Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more... Now, it is every man for himself.”¹⁴ Most women remained collected while the loading continued, demonstrating Victorian womanhood to the fullest submission and resolve. Both Young and Jay Henry Mowbray argued that class and nationality did not lead to distinctions in the efforts to save lives, and Gracie commemorated the coolness and courage of his manly friend Clinch Smith with Christ's words, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.”¹⁵

Nevertheless, Victorian manhood did not exist in an entirely Biblical framework. Both survivors and commentators attributed the valiance of the men to the Anglo-Saxon race. Gracie claimed to be proud of his race that gave him the composure necessary to withstand the pressure, and Mowbray summed up his version of the Titanic's significance by declaring, “It was the tradition of Anglo-Saxon heroism that was fulfilled in the frozen seas during the black hours of that Sunday night.”¹⁶ Their false sense of self-pride was obvious, not only in man, but in a racist definition of heroism.

However, Providence became Gracie's first interpretation of the disaster. He gave God the glory and put down man's effort to conquer nature vainly, “Had a kind Providence a guiding hand in this? Did our nation need so mighty a stroke to prove that man had grown too self-reliant, too sure of his own power over God's sea? God's part was the saving of the few souls on that calmest of oceans on that fearful night. Man's part was the pushing of the good ship, pushing against all reason... Risk all, but push, push on, on.”¹⁷ In the Edwardian contest between God and man, God had won, and salvation was His. Gracie points to the vain luxuries on the Titanic at the expense of life boats as the cause for fall. Materialism had literally picked up steam by 1912, and while entrepreneurship and higher Edwardian standards of living in many ways encouraged a more orderly protocol on deck, it came at a bitter cost. As Young summarized, “They were a poor remnant indeed of all that composite world of pride, and strength, and riches; for Death winnows with a strange fan, and although one would suit his purpose as well as another, he often chooses the best and the strongest.”¹⁸ Thanks be to God that both Providence and those on board chose the strongest to die that night over the weak! It would become the last great demonstration of Victorian chivalry before the Victorian collapse in the First World War, and first among the modern winnowing fans of “perverted science.” Technological complacency soon turned to mass devastation in the two world wars of the not too distant future.

Deconstructing the Deconstructionists:

The post-modern historians of our day have drastically perverted the story. Jay White in his article “God's Ark”: Subscription Book Publishing and the “Titanic” attacks the dime novel publication approach to much of the popularization of the Titanic in the following months after the disaster, and argues that such popularizing raised the Titanic disaster to mythical meaning through exaggerated eye-witness accounts and Christianization of the significance behind the Titanic.¹⁹ By deconstructing the perception of the Titanic in the rhetoric of its popularization, he may pick apart the principles of Christian chivalry in the Victorian era without ever having to bother about the real events. Nevertheless he also lodges a debate about facts, arguing that the British and United States inquiries more authentically represented the events, and that the statistics of survivors bear out a different story than women and children first. While the cross-examinations of the inquiries may be more accurate than the popularization of eye-witness accounts, White is in no way justified in disregarding these works as valuable historical documents or even accurate ones. Rather, their value lies in the fact that they give the symbolic framework for understanding the Titanic as an Edwardian event. Many of these publications bear the anxieties, hopes, and fears of the Edwardians as they existed on the verge of the modern world. Court proceedings may give the historian facts, but not as much cultural backdrop to the event as it was understood by its eye-witnesses outside of the rather unfeeling context of legal examination. Nevertheless, even the inquires reflected to some degree the very Christian and chivalric understanding of the Titanic that White finds so detestable in the popularization accounts. White has placed himself in a historiographical hard place; he must either deconstruct the whole and have little to rebuild any intelligible analysis of meaning, or admit the importance of the popularized accounts.

Statistically, White argues that 338 men survived the Titanic disaster while only 316 women and 57 children lived.²⁰ However, he insidiously hides percentages in his analysis; an indiscretion which bears out with the crew figures, particularly. In reality, 32.57 percent of adult first class gentlemen survived to the overwhelming 97.22 percent of first class ladies and 100 percent of first class children, 8.33 percent of adult second class gentlemen to 86.02 percent of second class ladies and many children besides, and 16.23 percent of adult third class gentlemen to 46.06 percent of third class ladies and some children besides. The crew included 862 men and 23 women; a discrepancy which surely throws White's perception off target. Out of 23 women, 20 women were saved, an amazing percentage, while only 212 men survived.²¹ The statistical facts do not bear out White's deconstructionism.

Stephanie Barczewski follows White's method of deconstructing rhetoric by claiming in her book Titanic: A Night Remembered that the press conveyed a story that should have been, but wasn't, and that the cruel facts of boat rushing were conveniently tucked aside. She writes, “Beginning on 20 April, the sinking of the Titanic departed – at least partially – from the realm of documented history and passed into a realm of myth.”²² True, yet Barczewski's preoccupation with rhetoric diverts her from piecing together a real story of cultural significance based on the Christian interpretations of survivors after the fact. She further argues that British accounts were clouded with patriotism more than American versions, although both were racist. However, if Gracie's book is any clue American patriotism colors that work as much as the call to be British. A valuable contribution from a factual standpoint is Barczewski's including feminist opposition to the Titanic rule of women and children first, but here again post-modern egalitarianism colors Barczewski's view: “the myth of the Titanic emphasized not only 'manly' but 'gentlemanly' conduct, associating with class as well as gender.”²³ Survivor Eva Hart would not have agreed if her interview with the BBC in 1987 is any indication. Regarding class distinctions on board, she argued, “...but I don't take any notice of that, because it goes on even today. You can book your fair in some luxurious liner if you're so minded, I'm not, but you can, and then there's a tourist bus... Well that's the division. That's all there was on the Titanic. It was simply that there were three classes. I'm not aware that it caused any friction of any kind...”²⁴ Andrea Broomfield in her article The Night the Good Ship Went Down confirms Hart's outlook on class by analyzing the diets served on board and inferring distinctions in meanings as cultural history. She summarizes, “Rather than compel people to 'feel their place,' cruise ships encourage them to 'see their potential,' offering them cooking demonstrations and meals by such celebrity chefs as Jacques Pépin and Daniel Boulud—a concept that the White Star Line helped to pioneer over a century ago, in its then-novel philosophy of attentiveness to the consumer.” This rejection of the typical post-modern class argument reveals a much more dynamic and interactive Edwardian society that had by the beginning of the twentieth century universalized concepts of gentility and opportunity, within the potential of every level of society.

Conclusion:

The Christian conservative interpretation of the Titanic disaster not only most makes sense of the primary material, but also inhibits the adulterations in perceptions of scholarship of future ages, like post-modernism, from tainting the timeless truths of the Titanic; truths which the Edwardians saw only too well. God will not be mocked, and sacrifice in disaster deserves commemoration. Revisionism cannot add without taking away the holistic approach of the subject at hand, and if that approach accords with reality enough to be preserved, or indeed conserved, then the best way to record history is as the conservative of the original intent of its authors and eye-witnesses. The Edwardians were the best judges of the Titanic disaster, as they were the ones who most took its Biblical lessons to heart.

1. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 39-40.

2. Jonathan Swift, Hints Towards An Essay On Conversation (1713), accessed from Modern History Sourcebook on 2012-04-10, http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1713swift-conversation.asp.

3. From: Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (London, 1724), Chap. XXV as repreinted in Eugen Weber, ed., The Western Tradition: From the Ancient World to Louis XIV (Lexington, MA; D.C., Heath, 1995) pp. 476-481, accessed on 10 April 2012, http://www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/Defoe.html.

4. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire. A Contemporary Version, A Critique and Biography by John Morley, notes by Tobias Smollett, trans. William F. Fleming (New York: E.R. DuMont, 1901), In 21 vols. Vol. XIX. Chapter: ENGLISH COMMERCE, accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/666/81878 on 2012-04-10.

5. Douglas W. Phillips, The Birkenhead Drill, (San Antonio: The Vision Forum, Inc., 2002), 22-23, 25; Corporal W. Smith as quoted in Phillips, The Birkenhead Drill, 43.

6. J. Bruce Ismay, United States Senate Inquiry, http://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/AmInq01Ismay02.php; Lightoller as quoted in Archibald Gracie, The Truth About the Titanic (New York: M. Kennerley, 1913), 117.

7. Gracie, The Truth, 115.

8. Ibid, 134.

9. Ronald Campbell Macfie, The Titanic: (an ode to immortality) (London: E. MacDonald, 1912) 15, 21.

10. Eva Hart, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5J43Z9AWI&feature=related.

11. Filson Young, Titanic (London: G. Richard, 1912), 16; H. Rea Woodman, In Memoriam, The Titanic Disaster (Poughkeepsie, NY: Privately printed by the author, 1913), I, II.

12. Woodman, In Memoriam, XXII.

13. Gracie, The Truth, 18, 25, 30, 232, 285-286.

14. Ibid, 35, 37-38, 65.

15. Ibid, 34; Young, Titanic, 119; Jay Henry Mowbray, Sinking of the Titanic: Most Appalling Ocean Horror (Harrisburg: The Minter Company, 1912), 21.

16. Gracie, The Truth, 36; Mowbray, Sinking, 21.

17. Gracie, The Truth, 255.

18. Young, Titanic, 188.

19. Jay White, “God's Ark”: Subscription Book Publishing and the “Titanic” (Acadiensis, Vol. 28, No. 2 (SPRING/PRINTEMPS 1999): 93, 98, 102, 125, accessed 2 April 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30302765.

20. Ibid, 113.

21. “British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry Report,” British Inquiry, accessed 10 April 2012, http://www.titanicinquiry.org/BOTInq/BOTReport/BOTRepSaved.php.

22. Stephanie Barczewski. Titanic: A Night Remembered (New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 53.

23. Ibid, 54, 63-65.

24. Eva Hart, 1987, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0akUzKVKKs&feature=relmfu.