Ray Cunneff
copyright 2012
Monday April 15, 1912
WIRELESS ROOM - CAPE RACE, NEWFOUNDLAND
The clock is still chiming midnight when the wireless operator receives a CQD from the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic. He confirms the call and additional operators frantically relay the news by telephone.
STEAMER VIRGINIAN - AT SEA
Allen Line steamer Virginian in transit from Halifax to Liverpool receives the signal from their Montreal head office and alters course. She is 170 miles from Titanic's reported position.
STEAMER MOUNT TEMPLE - AT SEA
Another Canadian ship, Mount Temple, also hears the distress signals and alters course, 49 miles from the reported position.
STEAMER CARPATHIA - AT SEA
Cunard liner Carpathia, bound from New York to Gibraltar, receives the signal as her wireless operator is about to shut down for the night. Captain Rostron orders the ship turned around and makes full speed toward Titanic. She is 58 miles from the reported position.
NEW YORK TIMES OFFICES - NEW YORK
At 1:20 AM, the eighteenth-floor wireless room receives a signal from Cape Race, the bulletin dropped down a wooden shaft where a copy boy rushes it to Managing Editor, Carr Van Anda.
"White Star Line steamship Titanic called CQD to Marconi station here and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said immediate assistance required."
Chewing on his cigar, Van Anda scowls at the slip of paper and phones the White Star offices and Times Canadian correspondents for confirmation of the unlikely story. He learns that steamers Virginian, Baltic and Titanic's sister ship Olympic have also received the distress calls and are racing to her aid.
Van Anda scans Titanic's passenger list: Mr. & Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Mr. & Mrs. Isador Straus (owner of Macy's department store), Mr. & Mrs. George Widener & son, Sir Cosmo & Lady Duff Gordon, Arthur Ryerson, John B. Thayer, Harry Molson, F.D. Millet (president of the Consolidated Academy of Rome), Charles M. Hays (president of the Grand Trunk Railway), Major Archibald Butt (president Taft's White House aide and confidant) and J. Bruce Ismay (chairman of the White Star Line.
Some of the richest and most influential people in the world are aboard.
WIRELESS ROOM - STEAMER VIRGINIAN - AT SEA
Virginian's operator receives a garbled and unfamiliar call from Titanic, three dashes-two dots-three dashes, that stops abruptly. Realizing what the new call is and unable to make further contact, he relays the news to all stations.
NEW YORK TIMES OFFICES - NEW YORK
Virginian reports having received what may have been Titanic's final distress call, the first use of the new S.O.S., "blurred and cut off with great suddenness". Van Anda scrambles to re-make the Morning Mail editions, the three-column headline pushing the Taft-Roosevelt primary battle to a side column.
"NEW LINER TITANIC HITS AN ICEBERG; SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT; WOMEN PUT OFF IN LIFEBOATS; LAST WIRELESS AT 12:27 A.M. BLURRED."
It is widely known that an unusually warm winter in the North Atlantic has littered the sea lanes with icebergs and several ships have recently reported encounters with enormous ice jams off Newfoundland's Grand Banks.
Van Anda reviews the newspaper morgue, somewhat reassured that no large ship in recent memory has gone down as a result of a collision with an iceberg. Yet the abrupt loss of Titanic's wireless signal convinces him that the ship has sunk and, playing his hunch, he prints the story that way in his City Edition.
STEAMER MOUNT TEMPLE - AT SEA
At 6 AM, Mount Temple arrives at Titanic's reported position, finding no trace of survivors or wreckage, only a vast barrier of growlers, bergs and field ice stretching across the eastern horizon. Unable to proceed, she stops her engines.
WHITE STAR OFFICES - NEW YORK
At 10:30 AM, Philip A.S. Franklin, vice president and general manager of IMM (International Mercantile Marine, White Star's parent company) is besieged with phone calls and visitors but resolutely optimistic. He chastises the Times for printing preposterous speculation and considers legal action against the paper, insisting there is no cause for alarm concerning the safety of the passengers. After all, the Titanic is "practically unsinkable".
At noon, Franklin receives the message he's been waiting for from Cape Race via Montreal:
"ALL TITANIC PASSENGERS SAFE. THE VIRGINIAN TOWING THE LINER INTO HALIFAX."
Franklin charters a fast train to Halifax so that the Titanic passengers can be conveyed to New York and cables the Canadian government for a ship to assist Titanic into port. Telegrams are sent from White Star's offices to anxious relatives that all are safe and arrangements are made for them to meet in Halifax, then plans change abruptly when a new message indicates the steamers Parisian and Carpathia have taken on all passengers and are returning to New York.
Competitive newspapers up and down the east coast print the story and blast the Times for their irresponsible reporting, assuring that all the passengers are safe and editorializing on the lessons of the "near-disaster".
STEAMER VIRGINIAN - AT SEA
Virginian is only now approaching Titanic's reported position, finding a few other would-be rescue ships in the area, seeing no trace of wreckage or survivors, only a vast barrier of ice.
WIRELESS ROOM -WANAMAKER'S - NEW YORK
At 4:35 PM, in the wireless room atop Wanamaker's department store, 21 year-old David Sarnoff receives a faint but concise message relayed by the Olympic from Carpathia 1,400 miles at sea. There is no doubting its authenticity. RMS Titanic has foundered and her only known survivors, roughly 675 people, are aboard Carpathia bound for New York. Sarnoff immediately relays the report to press associations and newspapers. And all hell breaks loose.
TIMES SQUARE - NEW YORK
A crowd of hundreds, eventually thousands, gathers in Times Square outside the New York Times offices (the paper suddenly propelled to the forefront of American journalism where it will remain for the rest of the century) as hand-scrawled bulletins go up and new editions hit the streets, the enormity of the tragedy slowly becoming evident. The worst marine disaster in history, over 1,500 passengers and crew lost, a death almost too horrible for the post-Edwardian mind to imagine.
WHITE STAR OFFICES - NEW YORK
White Star's offices are inundated with messages from all over the world as crowds gather demanding news of survivors, some forcing their way in as police are called out to restore order. Franklin clings to false hope to the end, finally having to admit there has been a great tragedy. He says the money can be replaced but it's those who went down with her that make it so unbearable. By midnight, Philip A.S. Franklin is weeping. "I thought her unsinkable, I do not understand it."
SENATE OFFICE BUILDING - WASHINGTON D.C.
That evening, Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan is in his fourth-floor rooms, at work on an Alaskan railroad project, when he hears a commotion in the corridor. As the voices grow louder he goes outside to investigate and learns for the first time that the latest venture of American financier J.P. Morgan (chairman of IMM and White Star's owner), the "unsinkable" Titanic has gone down in the North Atlantic with a catastrophic loss of life.
He pulls from his billfold a piece of yellowed newsprint clipped in 1902, a poem about a shipwreck that had moved him at the time but that he'd nearly forgotten:
"Then she, the stricken hull,
The doomed, the beautiful,
Proudly to fate abased
Her brow, Titanic"
He'd carried that poem with him for ten years without knowing why.
Tuesday, April 16, 1912
GREAT BRITAIN
After the reassurances of the previous day, Britons awaken to their morning papers in stunned disbelief. Although details are still sketchy, there is no doubt that Titanic has met with disaster.
In Southampton, home port of the majority of the crew as well as many passengers, the news is greeted with shock and despair. In London, J.P. Alexander, member of Parliament from Manchester, drops dead upon reading the headline. Lord W.J. Pirrie (chairman of Harland & Wolff, builders of Titanic) is in poor health and those close to him withhold the news for several days.
Grief turns to anger in the British press, demanding an inquiry into the source of the falsely optimistic news and hinting at a darker motive than mere shoddy, sensationalistic journalism - that American business interests were trying to influence rates of reinsurance.
NEW YORK TIMES OFFICES - NEW YORK
Carr Van Anda has had little time to celebrate his paper's scoop as new evidence comes to light in time for the morning edition that makes the story all the more shocking. First, it the consensus among naval architects that the ship must have been making full speed at the time of the collision. Even more troubling is the report from the U.S. Hydrographic office in Washington that Titanic had received several ice warnings beforehand.
But Van Anda's research has yielded perhaps the most alarming fact of all, one that points blame right back at Britain and may explain why there are apparently so few survivors.
WHITE STAR OFFICES - NEW YORK
By 8:00 AM, the White Star offices are packed, the crowd outside becoming so huge and unruly that police reinforcements and mounted patrols are called out to control what is becoming a mob. Officers or the line appearing at the main doors are cursed and called liars.
The New York Times morning edition story, revealing that, in full compliance with British Board of Trade regulations, Titanic carried lifeboats for barely half her passengers adds to the crowd's outrage.
Inside, friends and relatives of passengers stand in grim lines waiting their turn for news at the clerk's window. Officials still suggest that Virginian and Parisian may have rescued other survivors from the water and images of loved ones clinging to wreckage or huddled atop icebergs only fuels false hope and adds to the anguish.
Franklin announces that White Star has chartered the cable steamship Mackay-Bennett out of Halifax to search the disaster area for survivors, staying as long as necessary. What they don't say is that the ship will carry a chaplain, an embalmer, a cargo of pine caskets and a hold filled with crushed ice.
CUNARD LINE OFFICES - NEW YORK
Things are nearly as hectic at the Cunard Line offices, White Star's chief competitor and owners of the rescue ship Carpathia. C.P. Sumner, Cunard's general manager, is as frantic as the crowd jammed into his office, everyone trying to learn if friends or relatives are aboard. Sumner has sent five messages to Captain Rostron, all of them unanswered due to the limited range of Carpathia's wireless (The Olympic having returned to its original course, its powerful transmitter now out of range). A new report incorrectly raises the number of survivors to 855, adding to the confusion.
THE WHITE HOUSE - WASHINGTON D.C.
Only hours after being trounced in the Pennsylvania primary by his former friend and benefactor Teddy Roosevelt, President William Howard Taft mopes about the Oval Office, his mind on the North Atlantic. Desperate for news of his friend and aide Major Archibald Butt, he awaits a response to a telegram he'd sent to P.A.S. Franklin at the White Star Line in New York on the fate of "our dear Archie".
When it becomes apparent that there will be no reply, Taft takes the uncharacteristically decisive step of dispatching two Navy scout cruisers, Salem and Chester, to contact Carpathia and inquire about Major Butt. When they are unable to get Carpathia to respond, an unprecedented rebuff to an official inquiry from the President of the United States, Taft merely sulks and seems incapable of further action while friends and foes alike speculate that Roosevelt would have turned out the entire fleet.
Hand-picked by Roosevelt to succeed him, the 320-pound Taft's competence is is undercut by his unwillingness, perhaps inability, to inspire confidence in his leadership. Apart from being a close personal friend, Major Butt serves as a bridge between Roosevelt and Taft, having served as an advisor to both men. (The European vacation from which Butt is returning to Titanic was the result of the strain he'd been under as the "man in the middle" of their deteriorating relationship.) Taft fears that his last chance of mending fences with T.R. has gone down with the ship.
SENATE OFFICE BUILDING - WASHINGTON D.C.
Senator William Alden Smith pores over the newspaper accounts spread across his desk. He studies the photos of Titanic's captain, E.J. Smith (no relation) and recalls when he and his son made a North Atlantic crossing six years earlier aboard the Baltic under E.J.'s command. They'd dined at the Captain's table and talked of railway regulation and steamship safety. E.J. had given them a detailed tour of the ship and William Alden had been impressed with the man. He was no fool, nor was he reckless as some papers were suggesting. What had gone wrong?
Smith calls the White House to learn what the president intends to do and is told that Taft will likely do nothing. Several bills are hastily being prepared in the House to require sufficient lifeboats on steamships, but William Alden despises "panic legislation" and comes to the conclusion that any efficient response will have to be undertaken by the Senate. More to the point, by himself.
The appropriate committee for dealing with the Titanic disaster would be either Commerce or Foreign Relations. Smith is a member of both but favors Commerce because of its authority over wireless, although his presence on the committee is the result of his expertise on railroads. He has admittedly no special knowledge or experience in maritime affairs. Nonetheless, he sits at his typewriter and begins drafting a Senate resolution.
Wednesday April 17, 1912
NEW YORK TIMES OFFICES - NEW YORK
The Times' morning edition extinguishes any remaining hope of additional survivors. The steamer Virginian confirms an earlier message relayed from Olympic. She had arrived on scene too late to be of any assistance. Parisian transmits a similar message, adding that due to extreme cold anyone clinging to wreckage would undoubtedly have died of exposure. The only survivors are aboard Carpathia.
WIRELESS ROOM - WANAMAKER'S - NEW YORK
Exhausted, David Sarnoff is still at the key taking down the list of survivors and the known dead relayed from Carpathia, one of President Taft's scout ships having finally made contact. The list is heartbreaking in its finality.
U.S. SENATE - WASHINGTON D.C.
On this morning, the usually dignified Senate is in turmoil as the enormity of the tragedy is grasped in Washington. William Alden Smith is privately pleased to see the old boys upset over something of real importance. After the chaplain's prayer, the reading of the minutes is suspended and the senator from Michigan is given the floor. Smith asks for unanimous consent to introduce a resolution to be read and referred to the Commerce Committee, that a special subcommittee be authorized to investigate the causes leading to the sinking of Titanic "with its attendant loss of life, so shocking to the civilized world".
The only objection comes from Smith's nemesis, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who argues that any prospective international treaty component belongs with his Foreign Relations Committee. Smith explains that, unlike Foreign Relations, Commerce is currently in session and can take up the matter immediately. Fearing another of the famous "clinches" between Lodge and Smith, New Jersey Senator Martine, who had withdrawn his own hastily-crafted resolution in favor of Smith's more comprehensive approach, proclaims himself utterly indifferent as to which committee it is referred to, as long as they do something. The Smith resolution is passed by unanimous consent, the compromise being the investigation will go to Commerce, the treaty it generates to Foreign Relations.
STEAMER MACKAY-BENNETT - HALIFAX
Embalming tools, tons of ice and more than 100 coffins have been stowed aboard Mackay-Bennett as she prepares to sail at noon from her Halifax pier. The all-volunteer crew under the command of Captain F.H. Lardner will receive double wages for their grim task, sailing into an area already branded "hoodoo" by other skippers and given a wide berth, littered with wreckage, corpses and ice. Mackay-Bennett sails from Halifax under the eerie light of a solar eclipse.
SENATE CAUCUS ROOM - WASHINGTON D.C.
The eerie light of the solar eclipse seems to underscore the mood in Washington as well. Following the morning session, William Alden Smith meets with Senator Knute Nelson who chairs the Committee on Commerce and Smith is immediately appointed chairman of the investigative subcommittee. A longtime foe of the trusts in general and J.P. Morgan in particular, Smith hopes to prove negligence and provide Americans with the right to sue Titanic's owners for damages under the Harter Act of 1898. However, Smith insists that he will try to be objective.
Nelson warns him that the job has its risks. The British are howling for American heads over the false news stories, and the American press seems intent upon making the Titanic a political issue of the people versus the trusts. Smith and Nelson decide that above all else, the committee must be politically balanced, three members from each party, a conservative, a moderate and a liberal - six potentially combative members few of whom were likely to have expertise in ships or shipping. In any event, the political risks could be enormous.
NEW YORK TIMES OFFICES - NEW YORK
For the moment, the American press seems to have found its scapegoat in J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line and president of J.P. Morgan's IMM trust, who is now returning to New York among Carpathia's survivors. Dismayed that an experienced captain like E.J. Smith would drive his ship at full speed into a danger of warned, angered that White Star's Montreal office had been alerted that Titanic had foundered many hours before the story broke, the press and public alike point to Ismay as the culprit - mostly because he has the bad taste to still be alive.
Van Anda damns him with innuendo, certain that in the forthcoming Senate investigation Ismay "who is now approaching this port, one of the few men saved from the Titanic, will be a witness". It is suggested, none too subtly, that since the success of ocean liners depends on their captain's ability to meet tight schedules, Ismay undoubtedly "pushed Captain Smith" headlong into the ice.
Ismay had clearly used his position to secure his own survival when hundreds of brave American men had gone to their doom. Even the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to ask, "Is there any passenger who should not have found a place in the boats before the greatest or least official of the line?"
Cub reporter Ben Hecht wrote in the Chicago Record-Herald:
"To hold your place in the ghastly face
Of death on the sea at night
Is a seaman's job, but to flee with the mob
Is an owner's noble right"
The American press is beginning to resemble a lynch mob.
STEAMER CARPATHIA - AT SEA
By early evening, Carpathia has come into wireless range of several New England shore stations, her sole operator Harold Thomas Cottam complaining that the frenzied attempts of amateur operators to make contact creates a "hissing mixture from which scarcely a complete sentence" is intelligible.
Cottam believes that one of his contacts is legendary operator Jack Binns, hero of the 1900 wreck of the Republic, now aboard the tug Mary Scully dispatched by the Hearst syndicate, but clear transmission cannot be established. Finally, Cottam makes clear contact with Cunard's Franconia and reported Winfield Thomas of the Boston Globe. He reports (incorrectly) that there are 713 Titanic survivors aboard and they will be arriving in New York Thursday night.
Thursday April 18, 1912
SENATE OFFICE BUILDING - WASHINGTON D.C.
Concerned that the bitter divisiveness of the Taft-Roosevelt split in their home state could lead to violence at the Republican convention, William Alden Smith is dictating a letter to Michigan Governor Chase Osborn when he gets a call from the Navy Department. They have intercepted several messages sent to the White Star Line from Carpathia.
Signed "YAMSI", obviously "Ismay" spelled backwards, the messages convince Smith that Ismay intends to return to England aboard White Star's Cedric along with Titanic's surviving crew without setting foot on American soil. William Alden considers for only a moment, then calls the White House and requests a noon meeting with the president. He worries whether Taft can appreciate the urgency and importance of the situation since he has long believed that the man has "no political sagacity at all".
THE WHITE HOUSE - WASHINGTON D.C.
In the Oval Office, Smith is shocked at the president's appearance. The presumed death of Archie Butt and his humiliating loss to Roosevelt in the Pennsylvania primary have taken an obvious toll. Taft looks haggard, waxen and even heavier than when William Alden had last seen him. Although they have been frequent political opponents, the two men like each other personally. Smith is pleasantly surprised when the president expresses his "hearty sympathy" toward his resolution and his willingness to do "everything in my power to further the investigation".
William Alden questions the legality of detaining British subjects under subpoena, Taft expressing certainty about it so long as they remain in American territory. Nonetheless, he consults Attorney General George Wickersham, who agrees with the president's assessment. Smith asks that two men accompany him to New York - Charles Nagel, Secretary of Commerce and Labor, an immigration expert to expedite the handling of steerage passengers, and George Uhler, U.S. Steamship Inspector General, a maritime authority whose nautical expertise it is believed could greatly assist the investigation. Taft agrees to both.
William Alden has one final request, the use of a Department of the Treasury revenue cutter to intercept Carpathia before she docks so that there can be no chance of Ismay and the crew escaping U.S. jurisdiction. Again, the president agrees. Still smarting from Carpathia's refusal to answer his questions about Major Butt, the president suspects that Ismay was behind it and wouldn't object if William Alden nails him to the mast.
Leaving the White House, William Alden is besieged by reporters, his motives for leading the investigation already suspect. Smith gives them only a sketchy outline of the committee's plans, but it's clear from the peppered questions that he's being characterized as either a political opportunist or rabid trust-buster or both. It's not Ismay or White Star that Smith's after, they say, but J.P. Morgan.
SENATE OFFICE BUILDING – WASHINGTON D.C.
William Alden Smith calls to order his first meeting of the investigative committee. After telling the committee about the Ismay Marconigrams, he asks who wants to go with him to New York to subpoena and interrogate witnesses. Liberal Democrat Francis Newlands of Nevada immediately agrees, progressive Republican “wild-eyed” Jonathan Bourne of Oregon has campaigning to do but asks if he can join them later. George C. Perkins of California, an old sailor himself, will represent conservative Republicans. Moderate Democratic interests will be represented by Duncan Fletcher of Florida, however he and Perkins, who is in poor health, beg off the trip.
Moderate Republican Theodore Burton of Ohio, who brings with him considerable maritime experience, feels bound by other committee obligations in Washington. Conservative Democrat Furnifold Simmons objects to the whole idea. He says that “gallivanting across the country to subpoena foreigners” is not in keeping with “senatorial dignity”. William Alden roars, “My God, if this isn’t a time to let senatorial dignity go hang, I don’t know what is”.
But the underlying reason for the dispute is that Smith and Simmons are bitter political foes, Simmons a firebrand anti-populist, Smith a diehard abolitionist. Simmons had headed a movement to effectively deny most negroes the right to vote while Smith had acted as private counsel, gratis, for a negro postal clerk arrested while gathering names of witnesses to a brutal beating of a black woman. Simmons branded Smith the senator who "besmirched the honor" of the institution, declaring it a scandal that a U.S. senator would set foot in "nigger court", let alone have won an acquittal.
Smith calls Colonel Dan Ransdell, Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, and asks how he feels about serving subpoenas on British subjects. Ransdell is uneasy about it but will do it if he must, although he has never served a subpoena for the Senate, much less on foreigners. Fearing that Ransdell's nerve will fail him, Smith is delighted when his old pal and former game warden from Sault St. Marie, Joe Bayliss, now Sheriff of Chippewa County, drops in unexpectedly. Heading back to "the Soo" after some business in Washington, Bayliss is instantly deputized an assistant Sergeant at Arms. He sends a quick telegram home that he's been "kidnapped for a few days by William Alden".
(to be continued)
