Final Thoughts on Titanic History

           Fellow researchers, I think that this is the ninth and final blog post for senior seminar which is both relieving and alarming at the same time. Relieving because we can now focus solely on writing our papers, yet alarming because it means we are getting closer and closer to that December 5^th presentation date. I wish you all luck in our final weeks of writing.

             During this past week, I have decided to focus only on the second class in my research paper, and have been concentrating on what sources to use to prove my thesis and replace the primary accounts from the crew. My revised thesis is “The testimonies of second class Titanic survivors are crucial to understanding Titanic history because they provide insight into why passengers aboard the Titanic believed it was unsinkable and why second class male passengers had the lowest percentage of survival.”

            This week I want to discuss two journal articles which I have found that relate to social class and the Titanic but are written by non-historians. I will not devote much of my paper to their results; however I do feel they are interesting, relevant to my research, and I like that other disciplines are concerned with Titanic history. Historians prove their arguments with historical facts and primary accounts, but it is easy to see why social scientists would also want to examine social class on the Titanic and the psychology behind survival.

            The first article is Intervention of Natural Survival Instincts and Internalized Social Norms Exploring the Titanic and Lusitania Disasters, written by Bruno Frey, David Savage, and Benno Torgler and published in the National Academy of Sciences in March, 2010. The purpose of the essay is to compare the sinking of both the Lusitania and the Titanic because they had a similar amount of lives lost, they occurred within three years of each other, and they had similar class structures. The authors wrote, “Many of the passengers on the Titanic may have (wrongly) believed that they would ultimately be rescued, those on the Lusitania may have learned from the experience of the Titanic. This may have led those passengers to change their behavior.” The authors determined that the reason why passengers of the Lusitania acted differently than those on the Titanic was because the ship sank much faster (under 20 min.) and people panicked and were only interested in self-preservation rather than complying with social norms such as the case on the Titanic. As revealed in the quote, they also contributed the change in behavior to passengers being aware of what happened on the Titanic and there not being enough lifeboats. The authors of this article made a mistake however when they wrote, “Social norms were much more influential in the case of the Titanic. Having more time on the Titanic also may have eased the restrictions on bargaining for lifeboats and facilitated information generating advantages, which may have benefited first class and second class passengers compared with third class passengers, with the crew favoring the rich and powerful.” This statement is fallacious, the second class men suffered more loss of life than any other group aboard the Titanic including the crew. The second class passengers were not rich and powerful, they were middle working class people. This study found that time was the only factor which contributed to adherence to social norms in comparison of the two maritime disasters. Gender and age prevailed over social class, but it also is considered to be a social norm.

            The second article is titled Social Class and Survival on the S.S. Titanic by Wayne Hall, a behavioral scientist. It was published in 1986 by Social Science and Medicine. In his abstract, Hall purported that social class and gender were the two determining factors of survival on the Titanic, similar to the findings of the previously mentioned article. The purpose of Hall’s article, he stated, is to analyze the differences between members of the social classes as well as to provide an explanation for the differences in their survival rates.  The study determined that “there was no overall difference between the survival of passengers and crew… the relationship between class travelled and survival depended upon the passenger’s sex; the difference between the rates of survival in first and third classes was more pronounced among women and children than men and fewer men survived in second than in first or third class.” The reasons that Hall attributed to low survival rates were the fact that the few lifeboats there were, were not full and did not go back to pick up people who were in the water. Also, he used Beesley’s account, one of my primary sources and pointed to the fact that there was a ship nearby that people thought would rescue them, many women would not leave their husbands, and many “passengers disbelief that they were in danger on the “unsinkable” Titanic. This source is the first that I have found that addresses the question of why second class men had the lowest percentage of survival and the smallest number of survivors total. Hall briefly addressed the question by stating that the second class and third classes were loading lifeboats in the same area, and so the men would have been allowing the women and children to go first. He does not explain how this theory should have meant that third class men had a similar percentage to the second class, but they had twice as many survivors than the second class.