At the beginning of the month, my brother John and I visited this exhibition (which, incidentally, runs through September 1). The centennial of the doomed ship's sinking is only a few years away now, but so many are still fascinated by it, as demonstrated once again by the throngs who lined up with us to pass through this traveling exhibition.
If you're not a member of the museum, you'll pay $20 to see the exhibition—and that price does not allow you to see anything else in the Carnegie. (Even museum membership only gets you $6 off that price.) Particularly if you're bringing family members, you might as well pay Titanic-style accommodation costs, while you're at it! (We'll get to those latter costs in a moment.)
But, since the supposedly “unsinkable” luxury liner had as one of its passengers a grandaunt of ours (whom I discussed in a prior blog post), my brother and I felt we had to see this exhibition while it was in town (and equally important, while I was). We had our issues with the museum’s pricing structure in this case (don’t even get us started!). But after the exhibition, when all was said and done, we had better understood what our grandaunt, Hannah Riordan Spollen, had experienced as a 22-year-old woman on that terrifying maiden—and final—voyage.
I’ve read several books and watched several movies on the Titanic (including, yes, the blockbuster that induced thousands of Japanese teenage girls to attend “Leo Cry Parties”). But seeing the 260 artifacts on display culled, culled from over 5,500 recovered between 1987 and 2004, puts the catastrophe in a far different light than I’d ever known before.
But let’s get back to that issue of price, okay? No, not the museum’s—the boat’s. The exhibition confirmed, in pretty dramatic fashion, one of the truest aspects of James Cameron’s much-hyped multi-Oscar extravaganza: that class reigned supreme on the boat. My grandaunt and other third-class passengers paid about $30—over $600 in today’s currency—while a “deluxe first-class ticket” would have cost $48,000.
Upon entering the exhibition, my brother and I were each given a replica boarding pass for an actual passenger. At the end of the exhibition, we and other exhibition attendees got to see whether our passenger survived the trip.
I was delighted with my “passenger,” even though I already knew he had gone down with the ship. The poor fellow was triply unfortunate—not only the bearer of the name Archibald Butt, not only one of the ship’s victims, but an eyewitness, as a military aide at the White House, to another ongoing disaster he was powerless to avert—the split between his original employer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the latter’s handpicked successor-turned-rival, William Howard Taft. (We’ll see if President Medvedev of Russia disagrees with the predecessor who picked him, Vladimir Putin. If Vlad the Invader takes such policy divergence as personally as T.R., the danger to their country will be considerably graver than it was to the Republicans in 1912, who only lost control of the White House for eight years.)
I’ve been fascinated by Major Butt ever since hearing about him in the American Presidency seminar I took at Columbia University with Professor Henry Graff, who told us that the unfortunate major’s correspondence represented an important source of information on the Roosevelt-Taft split.
If you're not a member of the museum, you'll pay $20 to see the exhibition—and that price does not allow you to see anything else in the Carnegie. (Even museum membership only gets you $6 off that price.) Particularly if you're bringing family members, you might as well pay Titanic-style accommodation costs, while you're at it! (We'll get to those latter costs in a moment.)
But, since the supposedly “unsinkable” luxury liner had as one of its passengers a grandaunt of ours (whom I discussed in a prior blog post), my brother and I felt we had to see this exhibition while it was in town (and equally important, while I was). We had our issues with the museum’s pricing structure in this case (don’t even get us started!). But after the exhibition, when all was said and done, we had better understood what our grandaunt, Hannah Riordan Spollen, had experienced as a 22-year-old woman on that terrifying maiden—and final—voyage.
I’ve read several books and watched several movies on the Titanic (including, yes, the blockbuster that induced thousands of Japanese teenage girls to attend “Leo Cry Parties”). But seeing the 260 artifacts on display culled, culled from over 5,500 recovered between 1987 and 2004, puts the catastrophe in a far different light than I’d ever known before.
But let’s get back to that issue of price, okay? No, not the museum’s—the boat’s. The exhibition confirmed, in pretty dramatic fashion, one of the truest aspects of James Cameron’s much-hyped multi-Oscar extravaganza: that class reigned supreme on the boat. My grandaunt and other third-class passengers paid about $30—over $600 in today’s currency—while a “deluxe first-class ticket” would have cost $48,000.
Upon entering the exhibition, my brother and I were each given a replica boarding pass for an actual passenger. At the end of the exhibition, we and other exhibition attendees got to see whether our passenger survived the trip.
I was delighted with my “passenger,” even though I already knew he had gone down with the ship. The poor fellow was triply unfortunate—not only the bearer of the name Archibald Butt, not only one of the ship’s victims, but an eyewitness, as a military aide at the White House, to another ongoing disaster he was powerless to avert—the split between his original employer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the latter’s handpicked successor-turned-rival, William Howard Taft. (We’ll see if President Medvedev of Russia disagrees with the predecessor who picked him, Vladimir Putin. If Vlad the Invader takes such policy divergence as personally as T.R., the danger to their country will be considerably graver than it was to the Republicans in 1912, who only lost control of the White House for eight years.)
I’ve been fascinated by Major Butt ever since hearing about him in the American Presidency seminar I took at Columbia University with Professor Henry Graff, who told us that the unfortunate major’s correspondence represented an important source of information on the Roosevelt-Taft split.
The military aide’s fate proved crucial in the aftermath of the sinking. The owners of the vessel, the White Star Line, stonewalled when pressed for details of the disaster, even after the President specifically wired for news about Butt. Their intransigence incensed the normally good-humored Taft, who then eagerly assented to a congressional hearing into the disaster that caused heart palpitations for White Star.
It’s become the fashion these days at museums to put out items that can be touched. A popular example at the Titanic exhibition was a simulated iceberg cooled to the same temperature of the water during the “Night to Remember.” People smiled as they touched the big ‘berg—though you can bet that nobody kept their hand on it for too long. You can definitely understand after that tactile experience why many more passengers on the ship died of hypothermia rather than drowning.
Now, as to the pieces themselves—they’ve been recovered rather than restored. That is to say, what you see is pretty much how the artifacts looked after being drudged from the North Atlantic floor. Remarkably, a set of perfume bottles even survived virtually intact. Each item, in its own way, tells a story—of the survivor/victim to whom it belonged, of the ship culture of the time, and of the larger society.
I wish the exhibition could have focused more on the reasons why the ship capsized. (A new theory, promulgated by TV deep-sea divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler in the upcoming book Titanic’s Last Secrets, by Brad Madsen, holds that the ship had fatal flaws even before it set sail—including weak expansion joints and not enough lifeboats—and that it was therefore vulnerable when it grounded on the iceberg, scraping the bottom of the hull and opening another hull.)
It’s become the fashion these days at museums to put out items that can be touched. A popular example at the Titanic exhibition was a simulated iceberg cooled to the same temperature of the water during the “Night to Remember.” People smiled as they touched the big ‘berg—though you can bet that nobody kept their hand on it for too long. You can definitely understand after that tactile experience why many more passengers on the ship died of hypothermia rather than drowning.
Now, as to the pieces themselves—they’ve been recovered rather than restored. That is to say, what you see is pretty much how the artifacts looked after being drudged from the North Atlantic floor. Remarkably, a set of perfume bottles even survived virtually intact. Each item, in its own way, tells a story—of the survivor/victim to whom it belonged, of the ship culture of the time, and of the larger society.
I wish the exhibition could have focused more on the reasons why the ship capsized. (A new theory, promulgated by TV deep-sea divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler in the upcoming book Titanic’s Last Secrets, by Brad Madsen, holds that the ship had fatal flaws even before it set sail—including weak expansion joints and not enough lifeboats—and that it was therefore vulnerable when it grounded on the iceberg, scraping the bottom of the hull and opening another hull.)
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