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 5th
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.
