Sinking of the Titanic: The Greatest Disaster At Sea

"Marshall’s book is the opposite of sober. It reports every crazy story imaginable. Marshall’s real name was Logan Howard-Smith. He was a hack writer from Philadelphia. He liked to churn out books in no time at all about newsworthy events. And so he threw this one together, and he based it on anything he could find. Any news report, no matter how unsubstantiated and fantastic, including the story of a Newfoundland dog that supposedly swam for three hours to guide a lifeboat to the Carpathia, the rescue ship. But what I find most interesting about it is the ways that it echoes the main version of the story that was told in the American press—and I think to a large extent the British press—at the time, which is the story of first-cabin heroism, of ‘women and children first.’ He celebrates what he and many others at the time called ‘Anglo-Saxon heroism.’ To contrast with that heroism, he tells a story of two wireless operators, working as long as they could to get messages out, calling for help. When the surviving wireless operator told the story, he said that they were disrupted by a crew member who tried to steal the other operator’s life preserver. According to his story, which he embellished a bit at a later date, they knocked out this thief. In Marshall’s hands, the intruder becomes a ‘negro stoker’. And instead of knocking him out, they actually kill him. They lynch him. And so it becomes a story in which the villain of the Titanic is described in racist terms. That then connects to some curious things. When I was first getting into this, I was wondering why Leadbelly would have written a song about the Titanic in which the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson wants to get on board and gets refused passage by a racist captain, and then celebrates because he isn’t there when the ship goes down. The refusal to let him board the ship ends up keeping him alive. Why would there be a black American folk song about this? But, then, when you see stories like the one that Logan Marshall told, celebrating the lynching of a fictional black stoker, you get a sense of how the Titanic resonated with the racial tensions of the time and why there would be this extensive black folk tradition of Titanic songs and spoken-word poems. There was a standard narrative at the time, and it doesn’t really even matter what newspaper you’re talking about. This was in everything from the New York Times to the more scandalous papers. You get this story that the rich and famous men of the first class had a monopoly on heroism, and that there were ‘swarthy’ steerage passengers rushing the boats, who had to be ‘shot down like dogs’ in a phrase that appeared all over the place. Another apocryphal story had Archie Butt, who was an aide to President Taft, and a first cabin passenger, shooting down rampaging Italian men who were trying to save themselves ahead of even their own women, the women of steerage. This standard narrative insisted that women-and-children-first and chivalry was a class and racial characteristic that wasn’t shared by the people who inhabited steerage. Obviously, in the immigrant and socialist press, in the black press, and in the feminist press, you get a very different version of what went on and the implications. The way that any number of anti-suffrage voices held up the Titanic as evidence that women shouldn’t agitate for the right to vote because they were best off accepting the chivalric protection of men is remarkable, and this didn’t go unchallenged by suffragists."