Miss Mo,
Get better and come on back. I know what you mean by under the weather. I just got over a horrible case of hives! I look like I've been through a blender!
And Jason,
Have you read Wyn Craig Wade's "Titanic: End of a Dream?" (NY: Rawson Wade Inc, 1980). It's one of my favorite books on the Titanic as much for Wade's intelligent style as for his unique angle.
Much of what he says in his epilogue bears out what I've been trying to say here - though he makes his point far more eloquently - but he backs up a lot of what you, Ing, & Jim have been saying, too.
Here are a few excerpts:
(pp 318-319) "...There could be no doubt that things had changed, that something had passed by; but it would take many years to know what and how much. In retrospect, we can see that with the foundering of the Titanic an era had passed that had been spawned by the Second Industrial Revolution - an age of stolid complacency and effulgent materialism. Gone was the national stability that had been maintained by a rigid structure of social caste. Gone was the optimism and smug self-assurance that had been sustained by a dream that technology would materialize heaven on earth. Technology would not restore Eden. Instead, the trials and tribulations of mankind would always be. It was bitter fruit, this loss of innocence, this painful reacquaintance with human limitations. And as Anglo-Americans grappled with it, cetainty gave way to doubt; optimism hardened into vigilance..."
(p 319) "...Whether fortunately or not, the meaning of the disaster would not yet have to be pondered to its fullest, for the intervention of war spared the English-speaking world from a complete integration of the Titanic...Three years later, the
Lusitania went down - another British ship carrying Americans. The rage that had barely been contained over the Titanic erupted with a vengeance. This time it was no "Act of God" but an act of "godless Huns," and Britain and America forgot their differences as they rallied against a common enemy. They also forgot the Titanic..."
(p 319) "...Consequently the meaning of the disaster has been bequeathed to the latter half of the century where we are far enough to gain a perspective on it, yet close enough to see its relevance to the world of today..."
Wade believes - and makes quite a convincing argument - that the women's movement as well as the black civil rights movement was directly impacted by the disaster. The former was hindered (the "women & children only" rule causing widespread controversy ashore), the latter furthered (through folklore and literature).
(pp 316) "...What the Titanic disaster revealed (re: suffrage)is that, when it came to the issue of men bearing the burden of physical risk, male chivalry - or chauvinism - was endorsed equally by the sexes. The issue still provides knotty problems for feminists today..."
(pp 316-317) "...Although the thrust of women's emancipation was blunted by the disaster, the consciousness of American blacks was raised by it...Given their skein of problems, one wonders what possible significance the loss of the Titanic would have held for blacks. The black intelligentsia ignored it... In the ghettoes, however, black response to the disaster was one of enthusiasm - cautious enthusiasm, certainly, but as heartfelt as the burden of their oppression. Just as black heavyweight Jack Johnson had recently trounced the "Great White Hope" in the person of Jim Jeffries, so had inexorable fate sent the white man's "practically unsinkable" ship to the bottom of the sea. Symbollically the millionaires' lily-white liner was Jeffries on a colossal scale: The Anglo-American Dream had gone down far more dramatically than the Great White Hope, revealing the myth of white superiority and its fallible epicenter, technology, in the most blatant and embarrassing way imaginable..."
Wade goes on to document a number of folksongs and one poem which proved "a milestone in underground black literature" called the "Titanic Toast" which survives today in more than fifteen versions. Wade says that the influence of the "Titanic Toast" represented "a seminal stage in black pride and is a portent of the true course of black freedom in the 20th century."
Wade elsewhere makes good cases for the Titanic's direct influence on the advancement in communications via the New York Times' rise to prominence owing to its exceptional coverage of the Titanic, RCA's formation by David Sarnoff who had risen to the fore through his pivotal role in reporting the first news of the disaster, and the emergence of Marconi's wireless as a viable media which eventually led to the invention of modern radio and TV. (Owing to the phenomenal rise in Marconi stock, the company, within three days of the sinking, effected a merger with Western Union for an almost total monopoly of the world's wireless communication)
Of course, Wyn Craig Wade touches as well on the valid points, stressed here by Jason, James, & Inger, of modern "obsessive concern with the disaster's mundane mysteries, a romantic glorification of the Titanic's hyperbole, and a near-religious appreciation of her mystique... (p 319)"
Whatever our differences on the issue of the Titanic's historical value, perhaps we can all agree on Wade's poignant evaluation of her undeniable mystique, something to which we have each surely fallen prey:
(p 321) "...When the Dream ended in a nightmare, the material world lost its credibility and for a moment in passing time, myth became reality. The Titanic's mystique is therefore a poetic realm, in which her maiden voyage expresses the blind justice of Greek Tragedy and the allegorical warning of the medieval morality play. Here, the Titanic is an eternal symbol: She was, is, and will be. She was the Titans' struggle against Jove, the Babylonians' ziggurat to heaven. She was Lucifer's fall from Grace, the "Night Sea-crossing" of the medieval alchemists, and the moment of truth realized too late by the tragic hero whose aspirations led him fatally beyond his limitations. She is not mere history, but a parable to the effect that the mighty of each age must fall. In a word, she is Hubris..."
(p 322) "...As long as this self-same Hubris is with us, the Titanic will continue to be not just a haunting memory of the recurrent past but a portent of things to come: a Western apocolypse, perhaps, wherein the world, as Western man has known and shaped it, is undermined from within, not overcome from without; and ends not in holocaust but with a quiet slip into oblivion..."
Randy
