Steven Biel – American Disasters

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In the 1950s and 60s, the world had just suffered what are, arguably, the two greatest disasters in history: World War II and the Holocaust. However, this period is notable in America for its obsession with the Titanic disaster, with the wide popularity of the book A Night to Remember and the growth of the THS (Titanic Historical Society). The juxtaposition of these events is hard to imagine: a global war that took the lives of tens of millions against a relatively small tragedy that claimed just over one thousand. Nonetheless, Steven Biel uses the word nostalgic quite deliberately in the second half of Down with the Old Canoe to describe enthusiasts. Like AJ notes, Americans in the post-war world felt as though they were losing track of their values in the era of “women’s lib” and the end of “the Edwardian Age” (171). They sought to replicate the chivalry and noblesse-oblige that had “disappeared” in years since. (147) The problem is, would any of these enthusiasts with Titanic nostalgia actually put themselves on the boat if they had the chance? Biel doubts it. Then what is the root of this fascination? I believe that it is a distorted memorialization of the disaster. When the iceberg hits, the enthusiasts loved to think that the rich and powerful gladly accepted their fate for the sake of women and children. In reality, however, they were just following protocol.

Like many other disasters, the Titanic gives us a unique insight in deeper human nature. This is why we find disasters fascinating, why billionaires attempt to replicate the journey, and why James Cameron is a household name. When the barriers of order and class are broken down, we can get a glimpse of true human character. On the Titanic, the face of fate and death, the men stepped aside and allowed the saving of women and children. Chivalrous, right? This is the common distortion of the Titanic’s final voyage. Biel’s sources focus on modern perceptions of the disaster, from prominent novelists and filmmakers to “buffs” who are well researched on the subject. Many enthusiasts, from teachers to novelists to soldiers, formed the Titanic Historical Society to emphasize the “devotion to duty” and manhood of the Titanic’s fallen passengers. (190) However, I believe it is false to associate the saving of women and children with male chivalry. The policy was already established- women and children first- so that men were not give the choice themselves in times of crisis. The decision was not theirs to make, and, for the most part, they followed this protocol. But is that necessarily chivalrous?

To Biel, the use of the Titanic as a display of Victorian character has subsided in recent decades. References to the ship have largely become either political cliches or anecdotes about James Cameron. But the “democratic grave” at the bottom of the ocean continues to fascinate us (45). According to Biel, there’s deeper themes to be found in the Titanic disaster than just “overconfidence in technology” or “the mistake of arrogance”. (217) It’s the revelatory power of the disaster into human nature that keeps us wanting more.

As we’ve already encountered thus far in the semester, disasters often yield a variety of interpretations. From Father Pernin’s account of the Peshtigo Fire to the “seismic denial” of San Francisco’s leading capitalists, personal motives—whether economic, social, political, or religious—tend to color descriptions and blur otherwise clear observations of human catastrophe. For some, this phenomena would seem a real thorn in one’s side, obscuring the facts of a disaster. But for Steven Biel, it presents an exciting opportunity: the chance to disentangle a web of intersecting, conflicting, and overlapping personal stories, to make sense of a “diversity of meanings” (118). In Down with the Old Canoe, Biel tackles and interprets this web for himself and—as Dr. Shrout so often encourages us to do in class—”parses out” its various strands to weave a single, intelligible reading.

Well, not really. In reality, the various interpretations of the Titanic were a lot more convoluted and tangled-up than one might think. The disaster itself, Biel writes, was “historically not intrinsically meaningful,” and whatever historical meanings it did offer were “neither simple nor universal” (8). The conventional narrative of chivalric, first-cabin males was nothing but a “myth” in that it “located a disturbing event within routine structures of understanding” (24). The conventional religious interpretation, likewise, owed its existence to the “familiar moral vocabulary” of Protestantism (65). Convenience—whether in the form of a convenient gender or class hierarchy or a convenient religious language—it seemed, determined the Titanic’s various meanings.

But in nearly every instance, ideology also shaped interpretation. Biel notes that just as the conventional narrative reinforced conservative race, gender, and class hierarchies, so too did it undermine ‘traditional values.’ Feminists, for instance, “turned the chivalric myth against itself” (105). Socialists treated the Titanic as a symbol of Capitalism itself, the iceberg as the imminent threat of Proletarian revolution. African Americans, meanwhile, stripped the conventional ‘myth’ of its racist connotations to endorse a message of “universal brotherhood” (109). Such a ‘diversity of meanings’ suggested that, despite their advocates claims to timeless truth, interpretations were themselves products of their own time, rooted in an equally tangled social, political, and ideological web. The America of 1912 was “contested terrain” (100). It found itself at the ‘watershed moment’ of a revolutionary, transitional period of American history: the Progressive Era.

As disappointing as it may be to realize that even Harvard’s own Steven Biel can’t find the ultimate strand in this tangled web, the one and only absolutely without-a-doubt true meaning of the Titanic disaster, Biel’s point is an important one. The Titanic was certainly meaningful, but only in that it reflected the social and ideological complexities of a particular historical moment. As Biel points out, the Titanic really “changed nothing except shipping regulations” (24). Instead, it was the disaster’s role as a sort of blank canvas for American society that created the Titanic‘s meaning.

So, perhaps Nate should consider revising his statement from last week. He claimed that when people attempt to interpret human catastrophes, they tend “to skew their own interpretation of what happened,” thus obscuring the real meaning of the event itself. But what if a disaster, as Biel would suggest, is not ‘intrinsically meaningful’? Well, then it would seem that treating its various ‘meanings’ as a tangled web is futile. Maybe it’s more useful to think of them as a Gordian Knot. Just cut through it all and realize, like Biel did, that ‘meanings’ are historically constructed.

Tag: Steven Biel

A Distorted Disaster: The Titanic’s False Memorialization

A Gordian Knot or a Web of Lies?: Steven Biel and the Meaning of the Titanic