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

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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,

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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.

…

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From Chapter One:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

…

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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,

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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….’

…

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… 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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… 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.

… _ _ _ …

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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.

…

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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.

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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

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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.

…

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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.

…

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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

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as mentioned to the Congress, the House of Commons, and the

Wreck Commissioner, Lord Mersey, the enquiries were perfectly

free and above-board.

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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.

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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

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– 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.

…