SOME OF THE PERTINENT EXPRESSIONS OF OPINION BY LEADING JOURNALISTS OF AMERICA
The trouble nowadays is that people wish to go with a rush. Subway trains whiz along through the tunnel at top speed; automobiles dash through the streets at a speed of a mile in two minutes, and ocean liners tear through the water, each striving to break a record. The Titanic was moving at a speed of twenty-one miles when she struck the iceberg which sent her down. So large and unwieldy was this ship that it could not be stopped inside of three miles. And yet it tore on through the night in the midst of ice fields. The passengers paid the penalty of speed. Not all the blame should rest on Captain Smith. It is not reasonable to suppose that he risked his own life, the safety of more than two thousand persons, and a valuable ship merely for the glory of making a record on a maiden trip. Not at all; Captain Smith went at high speed because every one was in a hurry; because the persons on the vessel wished to get to New York as soon as possible. The speed was deadly; and there is a lesson in this awful shipwreck. Do not rush when rushing imperils life.
—Morning Telegraph, New York
The seas have been swept by an epic that will live while the memory of man endures.
The world has had a new baptism of heroism and splendid sacrifice, and the race of men is consecrated anew by sublime example to chivalry and unselfish faith.
It comes timely to a carping age, this message of denial which the remorseless sea sends above its engulfing billows to this old world, said to be sordid, and thought to be hard and cold.
There were no distinctions of race or creed or culture in the altruistic heroism which from the sinking decks of the Titanic enriched history and inspired the world.
There stood the splendid Englishman at the wheel and there stood the splendid Americans on the deck. The stanch Catholic, the loyal Protestant, the gentle Hebrew, and even the gambler, without creed, mounted the heights of godlike heroism before they went to death in the sea.
Captain Smith was born in Surrey, Colonel Astor was born in New York. Isidor Straus, a great Jew, wrapped his arms about Ida Straus, a great Jewess, and they went smiling down to death together. Colonel John Jacob Astor was a man of millions, which are said to make men cold. He was a type of fashion, a master of cotillions, and a leader of the 400 in the brightest city in the world.
William T. Stead was a man of letters, a pale, patient student, in whose thoughtful veins the red blood of resolution might have been expected to go slowly. Henry B. Harris was a playwright and a master in the mimic world, where life’s passions and splendors are said to be unreal. And Archie Butt was born of the chivalric South, cavalier in manner and gallant in speech—the velvet-gloved and iron-handed Archie—perhaps the gentlest and knightliest soul of all that hero band.
“For there was neither East nor West
Border nor breed nor birth
When these brave men stood face to face,
Though they came from the ends of the earth.”
So that it was the race—the race of men who have blazoned in light and glory against the aurora of that solemn dawn, the inspiring, the glorious fact that neither greed nor gold, neither ambition nor power, neither fashion nor folly have corrupted or crushed the indestructible chivalry and sacrifice that lives in the hearts of men.
Take heart, oh doubter, and let cynic and skeptic go henceforth slow. The race is not degenerate, and the future of our country is secure. The Titanic, sinking, uncovered the universal heartbeat that can always be reached by life’s noblest appeal.
To protect the weak and to love your neighbor as yourself is the highest Divine and human law condensed through a thousand years of living.
In this high conception the stupendous incident may reach its noblest meaning. The Titanic’s heroes have not died in vain. It was worth the majestic steamship, and even worth two thousand human lives, if the world comes once more to believe in its better self—if the race is inspired and led to better living and to better dying—to greater charity and to nobler hope.
And so this vast iliad of the ocean may soften at last into the most serene and splendid epic ever writ on land or sea.
—John Temple Graves, Chicago Examiner
Newspaper boy Ned Parfett sells copies of the Evening News telling of the Titanic maritime disaster, outside the White Star Line offices at Oceanic House in London’s Cockspur Street, April 16, 1912.
America may make, as the London papers have said, “hasty and often cruel verdicts,” but in the Titanic case America is becoming daily more glad that the investigating committee of United States senators had the energy and vision to board the Carpathia before she docked. Else, who knows how little of the truth about the wreck we would ever have known?
The testimony has taught us that even the wireless, the wonderful instrument for lessening the perils of the sea, may become in unworthy hands an instrument for capitalizing human agony instead of alleviating it. We have learned that this new force must be sternly regulated if it is to perform its due service to humanity.
—Chicago Evening Post
We call our age commercial, material. In a sense it is. But we are apt to carry our meaning far. Especially as regards women we imply that chivalry is passed. “A gentleman of the old school,” we say. Our epithets of courtesy are taken from the Middle Ages.
Of late years, with women among the workers, the keen edge of gallantry, we say, is lost. With suffragists demanding equal rights, there has been lament for the good old days of “woman’s sphere” and man’s gentleness in power.
And now—
“Women and children first!”—on the listing deck of the Titanic.
Stoker, valet, millionaire, responded true to the primal instinct—true, too, to the finest culture. Stories there are (probably true) of some frenzy, of some unmanliness. Let them pass. Cowards were of the brave Stone Age. Cravens were a reproach to knighthood. The large fact stands undimmed—women and children were the first care. Not many women were lost save by some act of devotion on their part, or some mischance. Few men were saved except by some good chance, or some rare fortitude.
The greatest sea tragedy of history is in the material twentieth century. More sacrificial idealism relieved it than any recorded incident of the Golden World affords.
We may cherish that and build high hopes on it. We may cherish it for what it means for the women and children of the race. Man still has the patriarchal impulse to protect his womankind. A tremendous incident disclosed it in tragic beauty. Less dramatically, the same impulse has shown itself as clearly to hearts of faith.
A civilization whose men of all individual types stand back from the lifeboats for the women and children is only superficially material. What of neglect and cruelty oppress its women and children will not endure.
It is written:
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The sacrificial love of the man race for the woman race, the child race—that endures.
—Kansas City Star
Most of the dead on the Titanic died heroically, yielding their lives both that the women and children of the ship’s company might live and that the lives of thousands of others totally unknown to them might be spared in the future. They perished for their fellows as truly as soldiers who give their lives in a nation’s defense, for the world can never forget what they did and suffered in the supreme crisis, and will be made wiser and better for their inspiring sacrifice.
It is a painful thought that some must die that others may be saved and many suffer that a succeeding generation may benefit. But that is the law of this imperfect world, slowly struggling toward distant goals of a moral and material betterment. Progress can seldom be accomplished without the martyrs whose sufferings stir the public imagination and set at work the influences which compel another forward movement. It is for the living always, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, to take increased devotion to the cause for which the dead have given the last full measure of devotion. The heroes of the Titanic will not have died in vain if by their sacrifice the perils of the sea are henceforth materially lessened and the recklessness with which those perils have been faced becomes a discreditable memory.
—New York Tribune
After the world had settled down to the belief that no lives had been lost by the accident to the great ocean liner, the Titanic, it learned with horror that more than 1,500 of the passengers and crew went to the bottom of the Atlantic in that ill fated vessel.
The shock of this terrible loss is accompanied by feelings of pride and admiration because the men on board, facing death, stood back and gave the women and children the places in the boats that were launched as the big ship settled down into its grave. There were heroes in plenty on board the Titanic, as well as men of great wealth and wide renown.
The human race mourns its heavy loss, but it accepts the boatloads of rescued women and children as a precious token of the high courage and the loving self-sacrifice of the men who took the plunge to the bottom of the deep that the weaker companions of the peril might live. Greenland’s glaciers, which in Melville Bay and elsewhere expose at the water’s edge sheer fronts of ice having a width of twenty-five to thirty miles, calved the icebergs that thronged the pathway of ocean vessels in the North Atlantic.
While the old deadly perils still haunt the sea lanes—perils that, as the unhappy Titanic has demonstrated, even the greatest ships cannot face with safety—the wireless is now available to summon help in any time of calamity. It is a bitter disappointment to learn that aid promptly extended did not suffice to save many hundreds of those on the Titanic. The one bit of consolation from the calamity is that the world has been enriched by another example of tender devotion to others on the part of men who were facing imminent death.
—Chicago Daily News
For the rest of the world, for the millions whom the disaster did not touch personally, the lasting thought will be this:
Every great disaster, every great affliction, rightly interpreted and rightly used, is a lesson and a help to all of the human race throughout the future.
No martyr, no hero, dies in vain. The safety and the progress of the world are built upon the afflictions and the sufferings of those that have gone before us.
The children of the men and women that died on the Titanic will find the last expression of their duty in Lincoln’s immortal words of dedication upon the battlefield of Gettysburg:
“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
Life is one great battlefield. This earth has been a field of battle through all the thousands of centuries of life here. And for many centuries to come it still must remain a field of battle.
Those that survive must find their comfort in the heroism of the dead. And the race must find its lesson and its growth in the experiences and the suffering of the past.
Far out in the Atlantic Ocean there is a dreary spot, with here and there, perhaps, a broken oar, or a floating body. Desolate and wide the ocean spreads beneath the dark sky, at the spot where the great ship sank.
But in all space that ocean and the planet upon which it rolls are but a speck.
Time is the real ocean, the ocean that has no limit to its depths and that has no boundaries.
The brave men and women of the Titanic are added to the heroes of that great ocean of time—the ocean that covers all the past, the ocean beneath whose waves brave men and women lie at rest, all the brave spirits that have lived honorably and died courageously on this planet.
It is a glorious thing for a man or a woman to have his name added to the list of those consecrated by time and by courage.
Every noble death does its good work. Other human beings will travel more safely and many thousands of lives will be saved as a result of the disaster so needless, so cruel.
—Chicago Sunday Examiner
The widow of Captain Smith, commander of the Titanic, wrote a pathetic message which was posted outside the White Star offices in London on the Thursday following the wreck. It read as follows:
“To My Poor Fellow Sufferers:
My heart overflows with grief for you all and is laden with sorrow that you are weighed down with this terrible burden that has been thrust upon us. May God be with us and comfort us all.
Yours in deep sympathy,
Eleanor Smith”
The Titanic’s length over all was 882 feet 6 inches. 182½ feet more than the height of the Metropolitan Tower in New York City, and 3 1/3 times the height of Chicago’s highest building. The Bunker Hill monument is one-fourth as high, and the Washington Monument itself 300 feet shorter.
Some of the statistics follow:
| Tonnage, registered | 45,000 | |
| Tonnage, displacement | 66,000 | |
| Length over all | 882 feet, 6 inches | |
| Breadth over all | 92 feet, 6 inches | |
| Breadth over boat deck | 94 feet | |
| Height from bottom of keel to boat deck | 97 feet, 4 inches | |
| Height from bottom of keel to top of captain’s house | 105 feet, 7 inches | |
| Height of funnels above casting | 72 feet | |
| Height of funnels above boat deck | 81 feet, 6 inches | |
| Distance from top of funnel to keel | 175 feet | |
| Number of steel decks | 11 | |
| Number of watertight bulkheads | 15 | |
| Passengers carried | 2,500 | |
| Crew | 860 | |
| Cost | $10,000,000 |
Every line was calculated to be a little more impressive than that on any ship previously built. The great steel plates used in the hull included some as long as 36 feet, weighing 4½ tons each. Some of the great steel beams were 92 feet long, weighing 4 tons.
The rudder itself weighed 100 tons and of course was operated by electricity. The center turbine weighed 22 tons, and each of the two wing propellers 38 tons. The big boss arms from which the propellers were suspended tipped 73 tons. Even the anchor chains contributed their dimensions to the amazing total, with each link tipping 175 pounds. The 3,000,000 rivets used in construction weighed in aggregate 1,200 tons.
A drawing comparing the length of the Titanic with the height of famous structures of the world, including the Great Pyramid and the Washington Monument.
1. Washington Monument, Washington, 555 feet high
2. Metropolitan Tower, New York, 700 feet high
3. New Woolworth Building, New York, 750 feet high
4. White Star Line’s Triple Screw Steamers Olympic and Titanic, 882½ feet long
5. Cologne Cathedral, Cologne, Germany, 516 feet high
6. Great Pyramid, Gizeh, Africa, 451 feet high
7. St. Peter’s Church, Rome, Italy, 448 feet high
