Parable of the Titanic
My family lore includes one of the most famous shipwrecks in history. Its lessons are worth revisiting.
A few years ago, my husband’s brother texted his siblings a photo.
“Who’s that?” I asked when Rich showed me the picture of a man standing on the deck of a gleaming ship.
“Jacques Futrelle,” he said. “On board the Titanic.” In Branson, Missouri, for work, Rich’s brother had stopped into the Titanic museum there.
“Wait, who?” I asked, my interest piqued. “Are you related?”
Yup,” Rich said. “Distant relatives.” Distant indeed, I realized when no one in the family could tell me exactly how they were related. And yet…I detected a family resemblance.
“How did I not know this?!” I demanded. I loved to nerd out on this sort of thing.
“I thought you did know,” said Rich with a shrug.
Before he finished his sentence, I was scanning the internet to see what I could learn about Jaqcues Futrelle and his family. To my delight, their lives were well-documented.
Jacques was an esteemed writer, a journalist who also wrote popular detective stories; the most famous was a series titled The Thinking Machine. His wife Lily May was also a journalist and novelist. After Jacques and Lily May met and married in Atlanta in 1895, Jacques took a job with the New York Herald. The couple relocated to Gramercy Park and spent time with the likes of Edith Wharton and O Henry. Later, burned out from covering the Spanish American War, Jacques moved the family from the bustle of Manhattan to the relative quiet of Massachusetts, where the couple’s success afforded them a new house overlooking the sea, a car, and plenty of international travel.
When Lily May published her first novel in 1911, Jacques was promoting his existing books and researching a new one. These endeavors brought the couple to Europe in early 1912, while their two children stayed in the US with Jacque’s parents.
At the height of their success, Jacques and Lily May were so well-respected that, for their journey home, the White Star Line gifted them a complimentary first-class suite for the maiden voyage of its new ship: the RMS Titanic.
Days before boarding, Jacques sent an eerie telegram to a friend: "Been all over Italy, Austria, Germany, and France,” he wrote. “Sail for home soon. Turn down a glass for me. Futrelle."
Perhaps Jacques was joking when he told his pal to turn down a glass–a customary way to mark a friend’s passing–but he seemed to have a premonition. He also sent powers of attorney to Lily May’s brother for the administration of their estate, directions for the future care of their children, and a list of banking houses where they had their money and securities.
The night before the ship set sail from Southampton, the couple celebrated Jacques’ 37th birthday in London with friends. The party went on until 3am. Jacques and Lily never went to bed, instead returning to their hotel to pack and catch an early morning train to Southampton.
For the next few days, the Futrelles basked in luxury and mingled with American royalty on board the Titanic–the Strauses, the Guggenheims, the Astors. The night the ship sank, they attended a lavish dinner with theater mogul Henry B. Harris and his wife Renee honoring the Titanic’s captain, Edward Smith, who was set to retire. Lily May later wrote of the evening:
The night was beautiful. The sea was placid and wonderful to look upon. Countless stars were reflected in all their glory in watery depths which gave no hint of the treachery lurking in them. Phosphorus gleamed upon the surface of the sea and reflected back its radiance from giant icebergs which were scattered over the face of the waters. There was not the slightest thought of danger in the minds of those who sat around the tables in the luxurious dining saloon of the Titanic. It was a brilliant crowd. Jewels flashed from the gowns of the women. And, oh, the dear women, how fondly they wore their latest Parisian gowns! It was the first time that most of them had an opportunity to display their newly acquired finery. The soft, sweet odor of rare flowers pervaded the atmosphere. I remember at our table, there was a great bunch of American Beauty roses. The orchestra played popular music. It was a buoyant, oh, such a jolly crowd. It was a rare gathering of beautiful women and splendid men…..I remember Jacques and Mr. Harris discussing at our table the latest plays on the American stage. Everybody was so merry. We were all filled with the joy of living.
Lily May wrote this in the vivid, two-part story she published in the Boston Post just days after the disaster. Perhaps it was shock that allowed her to produce such a formidable piece of journalism in the midst of her trauma. In my dive down the Futrelle-Titanic rabbit hole, I devoured the scanned copy of this article hosted on a newspaper archive site–at least what of it was still legible. Then, feeling protective, I copied the text into a Google Doc in case the original ever disappeared from the internet. (A judicious move, as it seems that Part 1 of her story, originally published April 21, 1912, indeed has since disappeared from the archive.)
I reread this account recently for the first time in years. In the wake of the USAID shutdown, which decimated the field of global health, my ever-shrinking team at work has joked about our affinity with the band who kept playing for the passengers on the deck of the Titanic as it sank.
In addition to the loss of life, all of the research and writing Jacques and Lily May did in Europe–including Jacques’ new manuscript–sank to the bottom of the ocean in 1912 along with rare works of art, precious jewelry, textiles, machinery, foodstuffs, and more.
Today, an incomprehensible amount of research, data, and experiential and institutional knowledge generated by the global health sector (to say nothing of that of other sectors in similar peril) is in grave danger of erasure. We are trying to save what we can. But every time I see a headline about the dismantling of another agency tasked with upholding human rights–this week, the Department of Education, for example–I am filled with dread for those employees, the people whose rights they protected, and the science and evidence behind their efforts.
Most Americans alive today were raised with an inherent sense of our country’s invincibility. But we need look no further than the story of the Titanic to remind us that nothing and no one is immortal. A myth of unsinkability doomed the Titanic, killing 1,500 of her 2,200 passengers and crew in a tragedy that could have been prevented many times over. By heeding iceberg warnings and adjusting the ship’s speed accordingly. By stocking the ship with enough lifeboats to accommodate all passengers. By properly training the crew to fill the lifeboats to capacity and operate them effectively. And by properly stocking the lifeboats with essential supplies. (Lily May observed in her article, for example, that there was no drinking water in her lifeboat.)
Many wise people, from marriage counselors to activists, advise their audiences to think of concepts like love and hope as verbs that we must do rather than nouns that just are. If we do not work each day to nurture love, for example, it can dry up. So, too, should the Titanic’s designer, owner, captain, and crew have thought of its indestructibility as a verb–something that must be actively ensured rather than tested.
And this is how Americans should think of democracy. A passage from an 1838 address Abraham Lincoln gave in Springfield, IL, has been making its way around the internet. In it, Lincoln says of America, "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
If America is undone, he warns, it will be–as it was with the Titanic–by our own hand.
The Titanic offers a cautionary tale against hubris, against overconfidence in technological advancement at the expense of humanity. It lays bare the consequence of prioritizing a facade of might and decadence over actual human lives–especially given the glaring, growing gap between the ultra wealthy and everyone else. Most (62%) of the Titanic’s first-class passengers survived. Far fewer second-class passengers (41%), third-class passengers (25%), or crew (24%) lived. Despite the mandate that women and children board the lifeboats first, the starkest illustration of class disparity lies among the children who perished in the disaster: 1 in first class, 1 in second-class, 2 among the crew, and 57 in third class.
At this particular moment in history, it feels worth revisiting Lily May’s vivid dispatch from the aftermath of the disaster, conjured in a half-empty lifeboat amidst the icy waters of the Atlantic. So I will share her original Boston Post article in serial form over the month of April. While beautiful and informative, the writing is a product of its time, tinged with classism, sexism, and racism. One of the most profound passages, for example, is marred by a referral to native people as “savages.” These undertones strangely reflect current popular anti “DEI” sentiment and only serve to underscore the timeliness of this tale.
The sinking of the Titanic seemingly marked the end of the luxe, lax, Edwardian era and rang in a new and sobering age of World War, fallen empires, and deadly pandemics. In his 1940 memoir, Titanic survivor Jack B. Thayer–another first-class passenger and one of few who managed to survive by jumping into the frigid ocean–wrote of that moment in history, “There was peace and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake but woke it with a start keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind, the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”
In 2025, we again find ourselves in such a state of awakening. And I can’t help but imagine our ancestors watching, from the heavens, from the sea, wondering what we will choose to do now.
Sources
The Story of the Titanic by Mrs. Jacques Futrell. Boston Post. Sunday, April 21, and Monday, April 22, 1912.
https://titanic.fandom.com/wiki/Jacques_Heath_Futrelle
https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/premonition-came-noted-novelist.html
https://prettysouthern.com/2012/05/13/atlantas-titanic-survivor/
https://courses.bowdoin.edu/history-2203-fall-2020-kmoyniha/reflection/
https://titanicuniverse.com/victims/how-many-people-died-on-the-titanic/
https://blog.phillyhistory.org/index.php/2016/04/jack-thayers-demons-a-survivors-tale/
Liz—you did it again! Brilliant writing and commentary on the current times. Thank you for sharing your family lore and your poignant reflections!