Wyn craig wade bio

Titanic endures. Long ago, she stopped being a ship; now she is a synonym for disaster.

Take the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Tuscany. Almost before the last lifeboat had been lowered (or dropped, or not lowered at all), survivors and newscasters were comparing the liner to the ill-fated Titanic (or the eponymous movie of the same), which sank in 1912, killing 1,500 people.

Despite the repetition of this theme, the similarities between the White Star Line’s Titanic and the Costa Concordia are facile at best, limited to the fact that both ships failed to reach their intended ports.

To wit: Titanic hit an iceberg in the middle of the great wide Atlantic; the Concordia struck a rock while showboating near land. Titanic went down by the head, on a relatively even keel; the Concordia developed a severe list (despite all the modern innovations, Titanic sank better) and eventually partially-capsized. Titanic left over half her passengers to freeze in the sea; on the Concordia, despite widespread complaints about crew ineffectiveness, over 4,000 people were saved. Titanic rests in the deep end of the ocean; the Concordia is beached, with half or more of its bulk ignominiously jutting out above the waves. Titanic’s inept commander went down with his ship; the Concordia’s inept commander was one of the first to escape (or he tripped, depending on whose story you believe).

Really, when you think about the manner of sinking, and the loss of life, the Costa Concordia has more in common – including Italian lineage – with the Andria Doria.

The point – other than the fact that I have a lot of Titanic knowledge that I’m dying to use – is that Titanic’s sinking has suffused our culture to an extent that she has become a cultural shorthand.

To that end, there have been enough narratives of the Titanic to sink the…well, to sink the Titanic. (Not that that proved too difficult).

When I picked up Wyn Craig Wade’s The Titanic: End of a Dream, I expected more of the same. I really only started the book because of a nagging compulsion to read everything there is to know about the ship, gone now for almost a century.

It was to my grateful surprise that End of a Dream is not really about the sinking at all. It is about the investigation into that sinking, specifically, the American Senate Inquiry held in New York City and Washington D.C. in the days and weeks after the disaster. It was this Inquiry that gave us – posterity – the first draft of history. End of a Dream is, in a sense, the story of the story of Titanic.

The book starts with a couple chapters on the design, building, and fitting out of the Titanic. And then, surprisingly, once the narrative has set out to sea, the story skips over the sinking completely, and picks up again with the rescue of Titanic’s survivors by the Carpathia.

At this point, End of a Dream takes time to give us the biography of a forgotten U.S. Senator, William Alden Smith from the adequate state of Michigan. This brief chapter tells the story of a decent, hardworking man, honored in his time but mostly ignored today. Though he worked on many projects, Smith’s lasting achievement was his convening of the Titanic Inquiry.

Smith’s decision to hold the inquiry, and to subpoena British subjects, was controversial when it was made. Indeed, the British press pilloried Smith mercilessly (a sarcastic, “what a surprise!” is appropriate here). They did such a good job quoting Smith out of context, that Smith’s reputation is still a bit shabby today. (Walter Lord, for instance, has a bit of fun at Smith’s expense). The reality was that Smith was a canny Progressive who saw an opportunity to advance some of his dearest causes, including corporate liability and radio regulation (pertaining, at the time, to wireless sets).

After the Smith biography, Wade jumps into the Inquiry itself. He doesn’t go through it witness by witness, but instead focuses on a few highlights, including the testimony of J. Bruce Ismay, the Managing Director of the White Star Line, who pulled an Italian-sea-captain by escaping on a lifeboat. Wade also demonstrates how much work and preparation Senator Smith put into the Inquiry, and how his sometimes naïve-sounding questions were actually well thought-out.

For instance, at one point during the Inquiry, Senator Smith asked Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, simultaneously the most heroic and most disingenuous of the ship’s officers, whether passengers had sought Titanic’s watertight compartments as a safe haven, the implication being that people might somehow still be alive on the Titanic, even as she rested on the ocean floor. The idea was ludicrous, of course, and Lightoller and the British tabloids made sure Smith knew of it. Wade shows that Smith knew it too; the reason he asked was because he was deluged with correspondence from relatives and friends of missing passengers, who were clinging to any shred of hope, no matter how flimsy.

This ties into a larger point about Senator Smith’s purpose: he wasn’t conducting the Inquiry for the benefit of seamen; he was conducting it for the benefit of landlubbers. Thus, all the sniping critiques of Smith’s seafaring intelligence (at one point, Smith did not seem to know that the “bow” and the “head” of the ship were the same thing) failed to grasp that Smith’s intention was to pierce the mystique of the sea, and the men who traveled upon it. After all, it was the seafaring “experts” at the British Board of Trade and on Titanic’s deck who allowed a ship to set sail with lifeboat space for half its passengers, and who then raced through an ice-field in the middle of the night, sideswiping an iceberg in the process. Smith was a rebuke to all those captains and deck officers who tried to hide behind the technical jargon and nomenclature of their jobs. He questioned their assumptions; he forced them to define their terms; and he brought an outsider’s common sense to the proceedings.

This is a short book, far too brief to thoroughly cover the American Inquiry. Thankfully, for those of living in the Digital Age, the entire transcript of both the American and British proceedings are available online. (www.titanicinquiry.org) Beware going to this site, however, if you are a Titanic nerd: you will spend hours with the testimony, and people will make fun of you if you tell them what you’ve been doing.

As I mentioned before, Wade focuses on the mechanics of the Inquiry, as well as underlining a few specific themes. One of these themes, interestingly, is Wade’s indictment of the crew. One of the cherished myths of Titanic is the bravery and sacrifice of her uniformed members. To be sure, the engineers – who kept the lights on and wireless working – deserve all the acclaim and more, since theirs was a suicide watch. But the question remains: why did such a large number of crewmen survive, while so many steerage passengers (including women and children) perish?

The simple answer is that the crew was needed to row the boats. Wade demolishes this answer by focusing on the testimony of Fifth Officer Lowe, as well as a variety of survivors who were in the boats. This testimony establishes that most of the crew members were “crew” in name only. They were not, to use Lowe’s phrase, “boatmen.” That is, they didn't know the difference between an oar and their… Well, you get the point.

Speaking of Fifth Officer Lowe (the sine qua non of Edwardian Era racism, who almost refused to fish a Japanese man out of the water), one of the things I most enjoyed about End of a Dream (though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t meant to enjoy this) was Lowe’s insistence on calling everyone he disliked Italians. As an example, when Lowe was being lowered in his lifeboat, he saw a bunch of men on the railing, threatening to jump in. Lowe fired his pistol to keep them away. Later, at the Inquiry, with no evidence in support, Lowe referred to these men as Italians.

For some reason, I found this absolutely hilarious. In the days and weeks after I read this book, I kept trying out this bit on my wife. Whenever I failed to take out the trash, I blamed it on the Italians. When someone merged in front of us without signaling, I’d curse out the Italian who was driving. Eventually, my wife accused me of racism, which led to a lively debate about whether one’s Italian-ness was a race thing or a state of being. Anyway, Fifth Officer Lowe was eventually forced to write an apology to the Italian Embassy, which is funny in and of itself.

(For the record, and just to be clear, I have no animus towards the Italian people. I just find it endlessly entertaining that Italy, seat of the Renaissance in the 14-17th centuries, somehow became synonymous with "scary foreigners" in the early 20th century).

I did have a few criticisms with Wade’s book. First and foremost is the lack of citations. There are no endnotes or footnotes or notes of any kind. If you want to know where in the transcript a particular bit of testimony can be found, you are s**t out of luck. More frustratingly still, Wade intersperses his telling of the Inquiry with italicized paragraphs that narrate the sinking of Titanic. These paragraphs were little more than the sloppy seconds of Lord’s A Night to Remember. Moreover, due to the lack of notes, they can’t be trusted. At least in the Inquiry sections, the reader can assume the information comes from the Inquiry; in these italicized portions, there is no indication whatsoever concerning the provenance of the purported facts.

There are also a few nagging errors of fact, many of them due to the pre-discovery publication date. For instance, Wade repeats the old chestnut of the “300 foot gash,” when in reality, Titanic was most likely sunk by damage totaling 12 square feet.

Furthermore, Wade contends that Titanic sank intact, when it’s pretty clear she broke up on the surface. And even though there is a hastily-appended afterward for the 1986 edition of the book, which takes into account Bob Ballard’s discovery of the wreck, Wade still contends Titanic sank whole, and that she severed when she hit the ocean floor “stern first.” This despite the eyewitness testimony that she broke in two. Indeed, Second Officer Lightoller, the Great Perjurer himself, said the ship went down in one piece. That is all the convincing I need that the ship, in fact, broke apart before his very eyes.

These are small matters, though, and did not detract from my appreciation of Wade’s unique perspective on the disaster. So many Titanic books stick to the tried-and-true. And why not? The true, fully corroborated events of the night of April 14-15 defy the imagination. Fiction cannot get better than the nonfiction of Titanic. So it’s refreshing that Wade veered away from the obvious path, to explore the greatest shipwreck of all time from a different vantage point.

That vantage point is the creation of History.

By now, most of us know that witness perception is incredibly, breathtakingly inaccurate. The more stressful the event, the more inaccurate the memory. Furthermore, memory is dynamic, not static. A memory changes each time it is recalled.

The result: when you experience a stressful situation, your mind absorbs all these fragments – sights and sounds and the like – and automatically starts to bridge the dissonance, forming connections that might not actually exist. The brain, in a way, is a novelist, looking to create a seamless story. Thus, the longer you hold onto a memory, the more that memory changes. It gets reshaped into something coherent, if not strictly true. It is polluted by the memories and stories of others, so that their memories and stories become entwined with your own.

By holding the American Inquiry at the earliest possible stage after the sinking, Senator William Alden Smith was able to extract from the survivors their purest memories. To be sure, memories had already been altered. Lightoller, for one, most likely hunkered down with Ismay and the other officers to get their stories straight. But for the most part, and in relation to other historical events, Smith’s Inquiry was right on top of things. It was in the exceptional position to get the story while it was fresh.

The Titanic story we know today comes in large part from Senator Smith’s much-maligned American Inquiry. Thus, End of a Dream is not so much the story of Titanic the ship, as it is the story of the man who created Titanic the legend.