Sinking of Titanic Captured the World

The 20th century has witnessed far worse disasters than a 1912 shipwreck that killed more than 1,500 people. The loss was not even the worst tragedy at sea; several would prove more deadly before the century ended.

But the tale of the Edwardian Age voyage, with beautiful aristocracy above and struggling masses below meeting the same ill fate one dark April night, has captured the world’s imagination as few other catastrophes have.

What came with the destruction of a ship named for the strength of mythical giants, which the newspapers declared could not be sunk, was nothing less than a unifying event bonding generations of Americans and Europeans to an ancient story.

Some point to James Cameron’s 1997 movie as a reason for the most recent resurgence. Perhaps the film is more a symptom of a phenomenon, however, than a cause. In 1912, just a breath away from the Great War, a post-industrial society looked upon a new age of invention with limitless optimism.

At the end of the same century, as a post-Information Age society toys with allowing itself a similar giddy hope, the Titanic offers a reinterpretation of old fables about what happens when man’s hubris outweighs his humility.

In a concrete sense, what came out of the Titanic’s demise was the International Ice Patrol. New laws on radio procedure, lifeboats, public address systems and other shipboard functions also followed.

More important, though, the Titanic story left a contemporary epic worthy of its students’ daydreams as they ask what roles they might have played had they made that star-crossed voyage. Would we have been the gentleman heroes or the lowly scoundrels?

The basic story, of course, is older than Jonah and Odysseus, and with the same moral: Man cannot overcome nature, because doing so would bring him too close to God. Icarus’ man-made wings could not carry him to heaven, the Tower of Babel would never reach the sky, the Titanic was indeed sinkable. Some find that lesson reassuring: The world is as we think it is, and we aren’t in charge.

As bonuses, this version of the old story features sunken treasure, mumblings about curses, rescue opportunities missed, deadly mistakes made and a certain degree of Schadenfreude, the natural human relief and pleasure at a bad thing befalling someone else.

For many people, the Titanic offers another, very American lesson. Death, the Titanic seems to prove, is the great equalizer. Tuxedoed valet Victor Giglio, 24, perished, but so did his master, 46-year-old Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the wealthiest men in the world.

The Titanic-as-leveler myth persisted among rich and poor, survivors and spectators. Every year on the anniversary of the disaster, steerage survivor Anna Turja Lundi recounted her horrifying tale of near-death to her family, and every year she ended the story with the same thought:

“I can never understand why God would have spared a poor Finnish girl when all those rich people drowned.”

Of course, the Titanic demonstrates little evidence of equity in death. For every Guggenheim, there were more than two dead from the ranks of his valet and below.

Then again, the Titanic disaster can be used to argue almost any moral lesson.

Anti-suffragists in England saw it as a warning that women’s equality spelled death to notions of putting women and children first. To neo-Luddites, it was proof technology could wreak as much havoc as wonderment.

The poor could take from the disaster an interpretation that not all unattainable things are worthwhile, while the rich retold the event with themselves in the role of heroes, supporting their position as the rightful heirs of prosperity.

An African American folk tale of the time encapsulates still another sentiment. In this reconstruction, a black boiler worker named Shine saw the impending doom while the white people above laughed and played with iceberg bits.

Not softened by the life of luxury enjoyed by so many others on board and not privileged enough to be lulled into trusting a machine, the mythical Shine jumped into the water and made his way home on his own. “And Shine swam on,” the story says over and again, surviving the disaster by wits and grit.

To Eric Lott, an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, fascination with the Titanic disaster is reminiscent of an Alfred Stieglitz photo called “The Steerage.”

The 1907 image depicts people on the various levels of a ship, as the beautifully turned-out men on top gawk at the people on the lower decks, the literal class levels beneath them. It isn’t sympathy for those less fortunate that registers on the men’s faces, Lott said. It is relief that they are up top and not down below.