Titanic Research Week 3 Blog

Titanic Research Week 3

            My research has went pretty well this week, I have ordered five more books, only one of which has arrived so I will be focusing on it for the purpose of this blog and looking forward to the historiography assignment. The title of this secondary source is Unsinkable: The Full Story of RMS Titanic, by Daniel Allen Butler. Butler gives a full history of the Titanic in this book, starting from right before it set sail and ending with the judicial inquiries about its sinking. Butler is a quirky writer contrasting this book with other Titanic books which are often dry and serious, or overly-dramatic. For example in the introduction he stated that Titanic is the third most recognizable word in the world after God and Coca-Cola.

            This book is going to be helpful to my research regarding social class aboard the Titanic. Butler includes a lot of detail about the differences among the social classes. Part of his argument relates to my topic, he wrote “It must be remembered that the Titanic was lost at a time when prejudices were an accepted fact of life, class distinctions were sharply drawn and sharply enforced… Whether the beliefs, attitudes, and ideas of this era were ultimately right or wrong is immaterial: what is essential is to remember that at the time they were accepted as valid, and people’s actions were determined by that validity” (Butler 3). This is important to remember because it is so easy to compare modern standards of equality and ideas about social class to this era, but that would not be fair. (As Dr. Wolbrink has always reminded us “be past-minded”) Butler’s statement refutes the idea that the people who lived during the Titanic era were naive. He argues that modern historians should not judge the people in 1912 against any standard except those standards already existing in Edwardian society. For example, for forty years before the sinking of the Titanic, only four people had lost their lives aboard passenger ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps this is why so many people felt safe boarding the Titanic and claiming it “unsinkable”, not because they were being naïve or arrogant.

            Lastly, in this brief blog I want to discuss the importance of Butler’s argument in the context of other Titanic historians. Last week I wrote about Steven Biel who has argued that the event of the Titanic’s sinking was significant but it was not a turning point in American society, the end of an innocent age, something that orthodox historians have maintained. After reading excerpts of Butler’s book, I have concluded that he is in alignment with the orthodox view. Although he analyzes and debates some new questions, I have categorized him this way because in his last chapter, he basically came to the same conclusion as previous orthodox historians. He stated “The same energies that powered the Edwardian age would, like a flywheel spinning too fast, soon tear it apart. When the waters of the North Atlantic closed over the Titanic’s stern that cold April night, something changed in the western world, though no one knew it at the moment. Attitudes, beliefs, and values that had endured for hundreds of years were shaken, overnight as it were, and would remain unsettled a century later” (Butler 235).