LIFEBOAT ETHICS

...on the port side only ninety feet away, a cult of chivalry developed under which no men were permitted in the boats under any circumstances—yet another reason so many lifeboats were launched half-empty...

...Had the weather not been absolutely perfect for sea travel, the crashing surf around the bottom of the black iceberg would have made it visible...

...The drama of the Titanic rests in its passengers' need to make snap decisions about survival, duty, and justice, with only imperfect information at their disposal...

...Of the 2,228 passengers who boarded the ship for its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912, only a third survived...

...The Titanic's hold was divided into sixteen watertight compartments, and the ship could have survived the flooding of any three...

...To Cox's thinking, such "ingenuous busybodies" do nothing but harm...

...and if you have morality, you are very probably low on cash...

...And that's what literature does...

...Had the ship's first officer William Murdoch simply rammed into the iceberg rather than turning, two hundred people in the front holds would probably have been killed, but the ship would have stayed afloat...

...The accident, that is, was a fluke...

...And second, on July 24, 1915, the Lake Michigan pleasure cruiser Eastland capsized under the weight of its Seaman's Act-mandated lifeboats, killing 844 passengers and crew...

...Benjamin Guggenheim, who had been rushing home to his nine-year-old daughter's birthday party, spent the two hours scampering around the boat helping other people's children, then returned to the deck in dinner jacket with his secretary and said, "We're dressed up in our best, and are prepared to go down like gentlemen...

...In fact, with exceptions, the rich behaved considerably better than the poor as the Titanic went down...

...What is astonishing is that several sharply diverging micro-societies came into being, complete with customs, rules, and manners, in the two hours and forty minutes it took the ship to sink...

...And this is not even to mention some stunning examples of wholly anonymous nobility...

...The most delightful of dozens of delightful footnotes concerns two American towns called Ismay that mulled changing their names: "Ismay, Texas, did change...

...One exception to the rule of gentlemen behaving as such was the British aristocrat Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon...

...I said to him, 'Why don't you put the oar in the oarlock?' He said, 'Do you put it in that hole...

...Because it's not slumming, according to Cox...

...It is simply unbearable...

...Fourteen upper-crust women rowed their lifeboat back to the ship as it foundered, searching for survivors even at the risk of swamping their boat...

...Then he swam away and drowned...

...On the starboard side, men were allowed onto the lifeboats as soon as they were filled with all the women and children who could be found...

...So his fellow progressive, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, passed the onerous Seaman's Act of 1915, which had two effects: First, costly regulation put American transpacific passenger ships out of business, destroying what, on the eve of the act, had been a near-monopoly for the United States...

...He even shows rare forbearance towards the Smith hearings' whipping boy, the White Star Line's managing director Joseph Bruce Ismay...

...He replied, "That is all right, boys...

...There are more comprehensive treatments of the Titanic than this new book, but none that better conveys why we should now care how a couple thousand people spent two hours in the middle of one hellish night in the Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard...

...and a ragtime band kept playing on the steepening deck until the ship pitched them into the freezing water that killed every last one of them...

...All of these men escaped under the pretense of being oarsmen," Mrs...

...What proves Cox's point about the Titanic as a literary story is its illustration of the irrepressibility of human difference: Isidor Straus (part-owner of Macy's) and his wife refused repeated urgings to board the lifeboats, choosing instead to meet their end walking and chatting together on the deck...

...Only 700 of the 1,178 lifeboat places wound up occupied...

...The conduct of survivors and dead provide us with chances to ask what we would have done in similar conditions of extreme duress—particularly moral duress...

...Keep cool...

...Nine million passengers had made transatlantic crossings in the two decades before the Titanic sank, with only eighty-two deaths...

...1 (which could have seated forty), with his wife, their retinue, and a few crew members, and rowed away a quarter full—not because they had anywhere to go but because they were trying to "stop the sound" of the drowning passengers' screams...

...There are many reasons for this waste of life, but a chief one is that, even as the ship went down, not everyone wanted to get in the lifeboats...

...Stead, the mystical author, chose to spend his final hours reading, which he did with exquisite calm and concentration...

...LIFEBOAT ETHICS The Enduring Fascination of the Titanic By Christopher Caldwell Stephen Cox, a literature professor at the University of California-San Diego and a Titanic buff, makes no apology for this little bout of intellectual slumming...

...Cox is contemptuous of those who, in the wake of such an ironic disaster, sought to pluck politically convenient scapegoats out of a run of bad luck...

...I never saw a finer body of men in my life than the men passengers on this trip—athletes and men of sense— and if they had been permitted to enter these lifeboats with their families the boats would have been appropriately manned and many more lives saved...

...The man who rowed me took his oar and rowed all over the boat, in every direction...

...J. Stuart White, which Cox excerpts at length...

...White and several other first-class women and their children, many of whom had left their husbands and fathers on board the Titanic to drown, suddenly found themselves sharing a boat with a half dozen roughneck stewards...

...None of the boat's designers, builders, or crew could imagine any kind of collision that would have taken out more than two...

...North Atlantic eighty-seven years ago...

...God bless you...

...For Michigan senator William Alden Smith, who launched a congressional inquisition into the matter, the problem was "laxity of regulation...

...As it happened, the Titanic didn't "collide" with anything...

...The passengers' assumption that the boat was "unsinkable" was reasonable, Cox shows...

...They told him sharply that they had no room...

...Was it unreasonable not to have planned for such a scrape...

...Because he had boarded a lifeboat on the Titanic, Ismay became for months the most reviled man in the world...

...The Titanic has endured," Cox thinks, "because it presents the great problems of morality . . . in the exacting form that one expects from a great work of artifice...

...The most appalling memories come from the testimony of society matron Mrs...

...Not at all, says Cox, because there was no record of any such accident in all the annals of transatlantic travel—which was extraordinarily safe to begin with...

...Cox is right...

...White remembered...

...The iceberg opened a 300-feet-long zipper of pockmarks that flooded six compartments on the boat's starboard side...

...Gordon commandeered Boat No...

...A man treading water swam up to a crowded lifeboat and asked the survivors if he could board...

...The 1997 movie Titanic is similarly reductionist—with its suggestion "that if you have money then you are very probably deficient morally...

...Ismay, Montana, . . . heroically resist-ed—until 1993, when it renamed itself Joe, Montana, in honor of Joe Montana...

...It brushed by an iceberg so lightly that very few people on board even felt it...