THE TITANIC STORY: HARD CHOICES, DANGEROUS DECISIONS, By Stephen Cox. (Open Court), 152 pages, $16.95.In 87 years, the story of the Titanic has been reduced to slogans and soap opera. The Titanic, we are told, was doomed from the start by arrogant certainty in technology and progress. It was a time when rich people got out and let the poor sink.
Stephen Cox doesn't buy this. Cox, professor of literature and director of the Humanities Program at the University of California at San Diego, argues modern moviemakers have radically simplified the Titanic story and essentially falsified it.
His new book, "The Titanic Story," argues the Titanic was well-engineered according to the knowledge of the time and was no more "arrogant" than a Boeing 747 is today. That it would hit an iceberg and sink was highly improbable. In the previous 20 years, 9 million passengers had crossed the North Atlantic, and only 82 had been lost.
The lessons drawn from the Titanic are more debatable than they are made out to be today, Cox writes, and in any case are not what make the story the cultural icon it has become. We remember the Titanic because it was a morality play. Ordinary people were forced to make "lifeboat" choices usually left to college philosophy classes. Cox's book lays out the questions:
"Do I have a right to take a seat in a lifeboat, if I can do so without denying anyone else a seat? And what if someone is denied a seat? Does it make any difference if I am male or female, married or single, rich or poor? . . . Do I have an obligation to help anyone else? . . . If I try to help, how hard must I try? And how long do I have to decide? Will the answers start to look clearer and clearer as the water comes closer and closer? What do I know, and what should I do? Because I must do something."
The captain, Edward Smith, chose to go down with the ship. The CEO of the shipping line, Bruce Ismay, stepped in a lifeboat. Neither took charge of the evacuation. Cox argues that it was the captain's duty, not the CEO's, and that it is not obvious that the CEO had a duty to go down with the ship. But it was not obvious that his crew did, either. Many of them died, including most of the engine-room crew and all the members of the band.
In terms of "discrimination," a term not used in its modern sense in 1912, the clearest line drawn was not by class but by sex. Women did not have the vote in most U.S. states, but on the Titanic, the rule was "women and children first."
"But what exactly did it mean?" Cox writes. On the starboard side, where Ismay was, it meant, "women and children first, then men." On the port side, it meant "women and children only." Some of the men who enforced that rule proceeded to die by it.
People who left in part-empty lifeboats faced other choices. Would they go back and rescue people in the icy water? Most didn't. People took huge risks with their lives on the ship, but once they got into the lifeboats, the calculus changed.
Cox is familiar with the theory of risk. What's fascinating, he writes, is that in the course of two and a half hours, so many people did not judge risks and make rational calculations. Many simply waited for orders. Others did what they thought was honorable and right. They were like the schoolgirl at Littleton who, when asked, with a killer's gun at her head, whether she believed in God, said she did, and died.