Legends Of The Titanic The Sinking Took More Than 1,500 Lives And Created An Enduring Cultural Legacy

“Down With The Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster” by Stevem Biel (Norton, 300 pages, $25)

‘It was a cold, clear, moonless night. The stars shone like diamonds off the black, still Atlantic…” That’s from the full-page advertisement in last Sunday’s New York Times for a new musical opening on Broadway next April 10. If the date seems dimly familiar, that’s because it was on April 10, 1912, that the Titanic sailed from Southampton, England, to collide with an iceberg four days later and sink with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

And the new musical is … “Titanic.”

A musical? About the most famous of all sea disasters?

But why not? After all, the title Steven Biel has chosen for his study of the cultural history of the Titanic disaster, “Down with the Old Canoe,” is that of an African-American folk song collected in the 1930s from the singing of a group of cotton mill workers in South Carolina.

In this endlessly fascinating book, Biel, a writing instructor at Harvard who lives in Wakefield, moves far beyond the facts of the disaster to explore “how and why it took shape as one of the great mythic events of the 20th century.”

At the time - a critical period in American and European history with technology rapidly changing the way people lived - “Americans understood the disaster according to concerns they already felt, hopes they already harbored, beliefs and ideas they already held and were struggling to preserve.”

Well-known is the chorus of editorial and pulpit praise for the “women and children first” chivalry of first-class male passengers. But as Biel looks more deeply, questions arise. Was the “heroic calm” rather a complacent belief that the Titanic was indeed unsinkable? And how did the class issue play out? Was it “the wealthy proving their greater value by giving even the unworthy an equal chance to live”? Or were the reports (never substantiated) of steerage-class men attempting to seize a lifeboat a warning about “an immigrant tidal wave engulfing the United States”? Or was it a bit of both?

Biel’s discussions of the books and films (and an earlier musical) are useful, but of greater interest are his explorations of the less-well known responses to the disaster.

The major, and enduring, local response is, of course, Harvard’s Widener Library. Harry Elkins Widener, class of ‘07, heir to a fortune, was a serious rare-book collector and legend has it that he had run back to his stateroom to retrieve a rare edition of Francis Bacon’s essays, dying, as it were, for the love of great literature. The better-known Widener legend is his mother, who survived the sinking, demanded that Harvard require undergraduates to pass a swimming test - although, as Biel notes, how could “being a good swimmer matter in 28-degree water with the rescue ship Carpathia hours away?”

The Widener, Biel reports, is “an underground mine of Titanica,” but its construction as a memorial resulted in skimping on essential features - such as elevators, heating and cooling systems, shelving and book delivery systems - at the expense of marble and paneling in the memorial rooms.

Biel also explores the interest that the Titanic disaster held for blacks, which he suggests, was mainly religious, mirroring the interest it held for white Protestants. The interest may seem curious because it is virtually certain that more blacks were lynched in 1912 (61, according to NAACP records) than were lost on the Titanic (apparently none, nor apparently were there even any on the ship). But, Biel notes, “boasting about being nowhere near the scene of a disaster was a tradition of sorts in black folk songs.”

In addition to such folk songs as “Down with the Old Canoe,” there were popular narrative poems known as “Titanic toasts.” These were being recited well into the 1950s. Henry Louis Gates Jr., head of Afro-American studies at Harvard, recalls that a high school classmate, called on to recite a poem, began one of these toasts, but the teacher, “appalled by the poem’s explicit language, cut him off.”

Then, there is Titanic “buffdom,” as Biel calls it. A phenomena which may have reached its high (or low-) water mark this past summer with the expedition to recover a piece of the Titanic’s hull. That ended up as mock disaster (real only for those who had paid up to $5,900 for the privilege of witnessing the effort) as the piece slipped back into depths.

But for the disappointed, there is always the musical.