In my course on imperial Germany this semester, I had my students look at survival demographics from the RMS Titanic as a pithy way of exemplifying attitudes and practices around social class and gender prevailing in the Western world at the end of the 19th century. This site by John R. Henderson, which compiles and illuminates the survival data, is one of the best. Here are the grim statistics in a nutshell:
- Class: 62% of first-class passengers survived, 43% of second-class, 25% of third-class
- Gender: 75% of the women survived, 19% of the men
- Intersectionality: 97% of the first-class women survived, 13% of the third-class men
In my view, the most interesting phenomena concern the second-class men. First, they survived at a significantly lower rate (8%) than their social inferiors, third-class men (13%); that fact runs counter to the expected intersectional trend, a circumstance that seems especially striking when you consider that there were no lifeboats dedicated to the third class, only to the first and second classes. Secondly, there is a great discrepancy between this 8% and the 32% survival rate of first-class men. This gap seems truly stunning, given not only that both the first and second classes had dedicated decks and lifeboats, but also a shared sense of being part of a social continuum of the “better” sort of people (both economically and morally), compared to the deplorabes in steerage. (One way this manifested itself concretely was that, as Henderson notes, the gates separating the third-class from the other passengers were locked). One might well have expected the survival rates of second and first-class men to be much closer together.
Although he discusses numerous complicating factors (having to do with lifeboat logistics) and phrases it cautiously, Henderson considers the possibility that the second-class men were simply “more gallant by far than the men from First Class” and may have given up a significant number of lifeboat seats to third-class women.
If that was true, it would be the most dramatic real-world example I know of one of the great truisms of European social history: that the bourgeoisie, in its effort to join and eventually replace the nobility as ruling class, emulated the latter’s lifestyle and internalized its ethos (or more accurately: what it took to be its ethos) to the point where it became the main bearer of the culture of honor and noblesse oblige. The literature of the 18th and 19th centuries (Laclos’s Liasons dangereuses; Lessing’s Emilia Galotti; Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro; La Roche’s Sternheim; Richardson’s Pamela: Goethe’s Elective Affinities, to name just a few famous examples) is filled with unscrupulous nobles who are ethically outclassed by upstanding bourgeois, all proving that “true nobility and honor is a matter of behavior and not of blood.” (A darker side of this dynamic is analyzed by Ute Frevert’s book Ehrenmänner/Men of Honor, which shows how during the 19th century the practice of dueling came to be dominated by middle-class men).
Now most Titanic first-class passengers were themselves bourgeois in origin (people like Astor, Guggenheim, Gracie, etc.). I haven’t yet been able to discover any male members of the historical nobility aboard (Lucy Noël Martha Leslie, Countess of Rothes, was noble, but was travelling without her husband, the 19th Earl of Rothes). [Correction: Cosmo Duff-Gordon was from a noble family]. Sociologically speaking, one cannot simply equate the fin-de-siècle monied aristocracy with the old European nobility. Still, there were probably similar socio-psychological factors at work in both formations, having to do with a sense of indispensability to society, impunity as masters of the world, and suchlike. Rationalizations of that kind may well have governed the behavior of many first-class men on board the sinking Titanic, while their second-class counterparts were showing true honor and nobility.
I’ll be continuing to read about the Titanic and will post on it occasionally.
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