This Day in Maritime History (Titanic and 9/11 in Irish-American Memory)

April 15, 1912—At 2:18 am, with its last lifeboat departed, the massive luxury liner Titanic split in half and began its rapid, dizzying death plunge. Many passengers may have still been alive in rooms in steerage class, but most of the 1,500 passengers unlucky enough to be on board died of hypothermia as they hit the ice-cold waters some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Lifeboat survivors heard first victims' cries, then a silence that reverberated in the night and haunted them for the rest of their lives.

The noise resumed in a major way when the survivors reached shore, as the media blared about the sensational tragedy and investigators on both sides of the Atlantic tried to ferret out what happened.

The noise from the media about the Titanic continues to the present, as the media weren’t wrong in betting that the public appetite for all things related to the doomed vessel would remain unsated. In writing this post, I thought at first of doing a summary of the more interesting  books and articles. God knows, there is a real need for this.

But then I thought it better to understand why the disaster retains its eerie fascination all these years later. It is not, to be sure, the conclusion that New Yorker contributor Daniel Mendelsohn derives in his otherwise estimable article from last week: “If the Titanic had sunk on her twenty-seventh voyage, it wouldn’t haunt us in the same way. It’s the incompleteness that never stops tantalizing us, tempting us to fill in the blanks with more narrative.”

If you want to know why, think of another tragedy within the experience of you and everyone else reading this post now, an event that, I am certain, will retain its fascination a century hence as surely as the Titanic has: 9/11. The World Trade Center did not collapse before it opened, nor even in the first attempt, in 1993, to bring it down.

You might argue that the World Trade Center is not strictly comparable to the Titanic, that, in fact, more fateful consequences for the world ensued in its wake: a decade-long War on Terror, as well as thousands of victims and endless controversy. Yet each event was recognized—even in its own time, and certainly in retrospect—as a watershed between quiescence and disorder. A modern wonder of the world, a seeming symbol of commerce, industry and reason invincible across borders, had been exposed as strikingly vulnerable, no match for human error.

Relatives, friends and longtime readers of this blog know of another, more personal reason for my fascination with the Titanic. As I wrote in a prior post, my great-aunt, Hannah Riordan Spollen, miraculously survived this trip from her native Ireland.

For me, her story is emblematic not just of the Titanic but of the World Trade Center catastrophe. Amid the wall of noise surrounding both events is a cone of silence—encompassing both those unable to tell their stories because of death and survivors too numbed by grief to voice their rage and sorrow. And, while both tragedies involved more than 2,000 people each from around the world caught on the boat or in the world’s tallest building, many of the most compelling stories involved Irish or Irish-Americans.

Titanic was built by Irish hands, in a Belfast shipyard, and designed by County Down-born Thomas Andrews. My Aunt Han was one of 113 passengers—mostly in third class—who boarded the great ship on its last port of call, Cobh (then Queenstown), County Cork. One town, Addergoole, in County Mayo, had 14 passengers, only three of whom survived.

Development of the World Trade Center came on the watch of Austin J. Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.  Many of the union workers who built the Twin Towers were Irish-American.

My Aunt Han’s silence about the “night to remember” was fierce—she would hang up instantly on reporters or historians calling about the event, or shoot even young relatives she adored with reproving glances if they brought this up. That silence dismayed many of us fascinated by the catastrophe.

Yet, as recent excavations and scientific reconstructions (detailed in the April 2012 cover story in National Geographic) suggest, that refusal to talk may have been an act of psychic self-preservation that enabled her to leave behind a ship whose final moments were extraordinary in their chaos, structural damage and anguish. Survivor’s guilt can seldom be easily shed. It was also in keeping with the enforced stillness of 1,500 who perished. (Third-class passengers were more likely to die, for these reasons: they were not located near the top deck, where they could have easily seen the lifeboats; many non-English speakers were unable to understand the instructions about the lifeboats; and and a locked gate between the second and third-class compartments prevented many from escaping.)

The World Trade Center, of course, also involved Irish and Irish-American victims and survivors. In keeping with the ascent of the ethnic group over the last century, many of these were far better known than Aunt Han and her companions on the Titanic—notably John O’Neill, the World Trade Center security head who, while with the FBI, had pressed U.S. Arab allies hard but unsuccessfully for leads on al-Qaeda, and Fr. Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain who became the first official victim of the bombing. Many members of the first responders from New York’s Fire and Police Departments were also of Irish descent.

Whether enforced by fate or ensured by inner repression, silence was the response of all too many in the two disasters. But it came at a price, leaving unchallenged the testimony of the powerful and privileged who could have helped avert the tragedies.

The opening of this post dwelled on the split in Titanic for a reason: its builders’ insistence that the ship remained intact bolstered their testimony that they had not knowingly countenanced design flaws. It took forensic studies generated by underwater photography in the wake of Robert Ballard’s 1980s exploration of the wreck to disprove them. Brad Matsen’s Titanic’s Last Secrets showed that Andrews originally wanted thicker steel in his design, and that Titanic's sister Olympic suffered cracking in early service. Moreover, we know, courtesy of metallurgists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty, that low-grade rivets used in the bow and stern would have ripped apart more easily during the collision, causing the ship to sink more quickly.

Similarly, the powerful have, to a large degree, escaped accountability for the lives lost on 9/11. As documented by John Farmer, the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, in The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11, witnesses before the commission were often less than forthright, whether it was Condi Rice spinning about who gave the authority to shoot down a civilian plane or Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, brazenly shredding documents.

For a world that beheld the events in horrified fascination, Titanic and 9/11 represented ruptures in the universe, a reminder that pride and error can undo decades of advances in commerce, communication and reason. For Irish and Irish-Americans such as my grand-aunt, however--with a rich oral history about the tragedies associated with the Potato Famine of the 1840s--the events only confirmed their powerful strain of Celtic fatalism.