Theater Program Notes: Titanic

The RMS Titanic: At once a triumph of engineering and a metaphor for the the hubris of an era sailing at full speed
By Jake Stigers

The RMS Titanic was already a legend when it unmoored from terra firma and embarked on its storied first–and last–voyage across the Atlantic in 1912.

Weighing 46,328 tons, towering 104 feet high and built to accommodate 3,547 people–though only an estimated 2,224 people sailed on its maiden voyage–it was “the largest moving object in the world,” as chief naval architect Thomas Andrews declares with pride and an unmistakable air of hubris in his soliloquy prologue to the musical Titanic.

The second of the White Star Line’s three Olympic-class liners (the eponymous Olympic had launched in 1911 and the Britannic was just beginning construction with an eventual 1915 launch), Titanic represented an apotheosis of human achievement and pride: “At once a poem, and the perfection of physical engineering,” as Andrews boasts at the beginning of the musical and eventually the ship’s entire passenger manifest laments from a grim new perspective at the end.

Titanic and her Olympic-class sisters also represented a triumph in White Star Line’s luxury-liner race with rival Cunard, builders of the now dwarfed RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania.

But size, human achievement and Titanic’s catastrophic, conviction-defying demise–White Star Line never officially declared the ship to be unsinkable, but owner J. Bruce Ismay had reportedly declared that Titanic was so safe that it was its own lifeboat–weren’t the only catalysts that launched the ship and its wreck into the pantheon of disaster mythology. The culture that built it–and in many ways went down with it–also played a conspicuous role.

In 2004, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a wry, tongue-in-cheek special edition devoted to deconstructing the mythology and legend surrounding the Titanic sinking. It smartly–if not callously–summarized its perspective under a banner headline and multiple subheads that pulled no punches 90 years after the fact:

WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

Titanic, Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic

1,500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy

Well-to-Do Dowager Gets Hair Disheveled for First Time

Stewards Kindly Ask Third-Class Passengers to Drown

The seeds of Titanic’s hubris were planted two centuries before she set sail

The first Industrial Revolution began around 1760 with the discovery of new, more efficient, more affordable manufacturing processes for everything from producing textiles to generating power from steam. It slowly but surely transformed economies and population centers in Britain, throughout Europe and across the Atlantic in the newly established United States. Along the way, it raised the standard of living across almost all populations and demographics … while it also laid foundations for an eventual explosive growth of capitalist wealth and economic disparity that very measurably thrives to this day.

New discoveries and inventions for streamlining the mass manufacturing of steel in the 1850s kick-started what is now considered the second Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. This more efficient production of steel vastly improved developments in railroads, shipping and manufacturing and eventually spread to the developments of the electricity, chemical and petroleum industries. It continued to transform the ways people lived and businesses operated … but it also continued to broaden the growing chasm between wealth and poverty.

In 1873, American writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today to satirize the greed and political corruption wrought from a century of Industrial Revolution spoils in post-Civil War America. It shone harsh light and judgment on the nation’s deeply entrenched graft, materialism, and obsession with money and power. But perhaps more memorably, it gave a name for this period of dramatic, arguably obscene stratification between rich and poor.

Across the pond, Britain’s Victorian Era and France’s Belle Époque mirrored the Gilded Age’s remarkable innovations in technology, manufacturing, science, medicine and even the arts–all with improvements in the standards of living for many populations. And all without remedying the staggering economic disparities between the wealthy and the impoverished.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Edwardians–named for her successor, King Edward VII–started relaxing the social strictures and pieties of Victoria’s influence and ushered in what American author Samuel Hynes eventually described as “a leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag.”


Titanic brought this Zeitgeist to life in bold, statement scale

It was in this spirit of financial, cultural and social hubris that the massive ship Titanic was conceived of and born.

Taking inspiration from London’s 5-Star Ritz Hotel, Titanic’s designers finished First and Second Class staterooms and public spaces in a range of fashionable styles from Empire stateliness to the florid indulgences of Louis XV. A squash court, a Turkish bath and 24-hour telegraph service offered novel diversions.

Thomas Andrews even added a relatively unnecessary fourth smokestack to give the ship a more grand, imposing profile.

And into the good ship Titanic strode three stratifications of passenger ready to traverse the Atlantic in the circumstances their money–or lack of it–had made them accustomed:

First Class
Titanic’s First Class manifest was a venerable Who’s Who of Edwardian society and the keepers of the Western Hemisphere’s wealth and influence. At least a generation out from the Gilded Age forebears who built their family wealth and social status, the Titanic First Class passengers enjoyed lives of privilege and leisure tempered only by intricate and often labyrinthine social rituals that demonstrated good breeding, old money and civilized superiority to the lower, more vulgar classes.

That is not to say this population did nothing beyond living off the passive income of generational wealth. Many family patriarchs–and sometimes widowed matriarchs–still kept their businesses running efficiently and profitably, but they were also actively involved in exploiting the working classes, fighting unions, building monopolies, and heavily influencing the political and financial systems that kept their family dynasties in wealth and power.

It is certainly fair to say that these families and icons of business also contributed immense amounts of money to build museums, libraries, concert halls and other civic amenities, but not without preserving the wealth and privilege they and were accustomed to enjoying.

The men of First Class gleefully clarify this perpetuation of wealth and power in a lyric sung early in the Titanic musical: “Remarkable U.S. Steel is splitting shares at five to four! Monopoly makes the industry far better than before!”

Second Class
While the demarcations between Edwardian First Class and Second Class were absolute when buying tickets on a luxury ocean liner, they were far more fluid in the real world.

Titanic’s Second Class passengers still spent a great deal of money and expected a great deal of opulence and privilege on their voyage. But for reasons extending from budget constraints to a modest lack of interest in the conspicuous pomp and circumstance of First Class, these passengers still enjoyed extravagant accommodations without extravagant costs–and still without encountering passengers of the Third Class.

That is not to say there weren’t curious lookie-loos and brazen social climbers peering around the metaphorical–and physical–walls dividing First from Second Class.

In a clever bit of narrative construction, the Titanic musical embodies this Second Class ambition in the character of Alice Beane. Based loosely on the actual passenger Ethel Beane, Alice breathlessly and without a trace of shame bombards her beleaguered husband with facts and gossip she’s memorized about the First Class passengers as they board the ship.

It’s a neat writing trick for a number of reasons: It very clearly illustrates the tacky social-climbing aspirations that many Second Class passengers had, it comically delineates the Second Class climbers from the First class noblesse, and it introduces a lot of information about a lot of passengers to the audience without forced or ponderous exposition.

And if Alice Beane’s brazen antics don’t fully establish this demarcation in the first act, John Jacob Astor IV spells it out explicitly in the second act: “A few too many climbers. … Lately I’ve noticed that anyone with a few million dollars considers himself rich.”

Third Class
While First and Second Class passengers traveled with varying degrees of conspicuous privilege and wealth, Third Class passengers traveled with a more urgent sense of purpose: escaping lives of poverty, crime and hopelessness in Europe (and beyond) and emigrating to experience the storied opportunities and dreams of living in America.

These European immigrants were traveling at the end of what historians now call the New Immigration wave, which started in the late 19th Century when President Benjamin Harrison designated Ellis Island in New York Harbor as a federal immigration station.

Earlier immigration waves established a cross-cultural tradition of coming to America to establish new lives, housing and income sources–usually in Irish, German, Jewish and other ethnic enclaves–and then summoning remaining family members to cross the Atlantic to reunite in the New World. With Ellis Island protocols and record-keeping in place, immigration became more efficient, and the numbers of reuniting family members surged well into the 20th Century.

Despite the dangers of tenement life and the poverty wages of Industrial Revolution employment, the spirit of American opportunity still lived in these immigrants’ hearts and imaginations. But as the decades around the turn of the century saw a growing establishment of business owners, professionals and even politicians rising from these enclaves, the lure of legitimate American opportunity became stronger and stronger, drawing more and more people through Ellis Island and driving the exponentially explosive growth of New York City and other urban centers.

And while the White Star Line built its reputation and socioeconomic iconography on the opulent accommodations it provided its high-profile, high-wealth passengers, its primary source of revenue was actually from its Third Class passengers. These passengers were far more economical to house and feed, and their accommodations were designed to maximize the number of people who could occupy any given amount of space.

That’s not to say they were in any way unlivable. To attract Third Class passengers away from competitors who also used this business model, the White Star Line outfitted Titanic and its Olympic-class sister ships with sleeping, eating and public accommodations that had never been seen or experienced by most of its passengers. There were flushing toilets, warm running water, steady meals, comfortable beds and even bathtubs–though the entirety of Third Class had literally two bathtubs: one for all the women to share and one for all the men to share.

Titanic’s Third Class passengers encapsulate this mix of excitement, awe and wonder in a moving set of lyrics as they board the ship at the beginning of the show:

Get me aboard
Call out my name
It’s to America we aim
To find a better life
We prayed to make this trip!

Let all our children’s children know
That this day long ago
We dreamt of them
And came aboard this ship!

These are the cultural waters–both metaphoric and literal–that Titanic navigated as she headed west into the Atlantic

History has given us an understanding of the mechanics and enormity of Titanic’s demise through newspaper accounts, books, movies, YouTube channels and devoted internet sites.

Titanic the musical takes us on a more introspective journey with the ship and its passengers and explores the very human side of the tragedy through a prism of privilege and want, hubris and awe, and shared dreams of a future that’s both collective and jarringly unequal.

SIDEBAR: Why do we use female pronouns for ships?

Throughout recorded history, people have referred to ships as she and her and grouped them with sister ships and sent them on maiden voyages and led flotillas on mother ships … but why?

The short answer is there is no clear answer. Or at least there are many possible answers, including these:

For centuries and millennia, sailors have traditionally been men who’ve often named ships after important women in their lives as a way to keep them symbolically close on long voyages.

Sailors have dedicated ships to goddesses and mother figures (like Christopher Columbus’ La Santa María and the now-retired RMS Queen Mary) to petition for safe passage on journeys.

Ships have been seen as metaphoric mothers caring for the sailor in her womb.

The Latin word for ship is navis, whose linguistic feminine gendering eventually translated to a more literal interpretation of seeing ships as feminine.

SIDEBAR: Cedar Rapids’ Brucemore Historic Site has a Titanic connection

George and Irene Douglas, who lived in Brucemore from 1906 to 1937, have a tragic connection to the Titanic sinking: George’s brother and sister-in-law, Walter and Mahala Douglas, and Mahala’s maid, Bertha LeRoy, were sailing home on Titanic after a three-month trip to Europe to celebrate George’s retirement and to buy furnishings for their Minnesota home.

Mahala and Bertha survived the sinking, but Walter–feeling an obligation to be a gentleman and not board a lifeboat–did not. His body was recovered (and identified by the monograms on his shirt and cigarette case), and he and Mahala are now entombed in the Douglas family vault in Cedar Rapids’ Oak Hill Cemetery.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His longtime fascination with the Titanic disaster and with Gilded Age-era history made the opportunity to write program notes for this production especially thrilling for him.