Ready to Bite the Apple By James DeGrazia. “Ladies and gentlemen, you will hear from [a] young man who is about to set sail with [sic] the Titanic,” began an official account, posted online and used to train new stewards, waiters, and barmen on the ship. “He is going out as a steerage passenger in order to show the world how we treat our people. He believes in the good old rule ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. He is going to ask for no special treatment; he is going out there to perform a good action and he would like for you to do the same.” The young man in question was Jack Welsh, a 20-year-old Welsh coal miner who joined one of the last coal-laden liner journeys before the Titanic. Welsh believed that “the rich, the rich, they must understand what the poor go through every day, the terrible hardships and the horrible dangers.” This wasn’t a unique sentiment on board the Titanic; it was widely shared. A “great strike” at the coal mines in Wales that shut down almost every colliery in the county only weeks before was widely blamed for making conditions even harder. “My God! They're going to kill some of us. Some of us will lose our lives,” exclaimed a Titanic steward in a panic during a voyage. To many, this class war–style attitude expressed by Welsh summed up the spirit of the time. The age of great liberal reforms and mass industrialized labor was over. With the boom of the late nineteenth century came a boom in socialism, labor unions, and—of course—utopian engineering schemes, like the Brooklyn Bridge, a triumph of engineering that cost its first two builders their lives and the lives of others in its construction. Despite the best attempts of the workers to complete the marvel, the Brooklyn Bridge remained incomplete, due in no small part to the greed and inefficiency of the men working for the companies that hired them. Not long after, in 1890, the Titanic was commissioned by the White Star Line to ferry passengers across the Atlantic. “The ship,” said White Star, “was to carry between 3,500 and 4,000 passengers to and from America in a luxury cruise, with the ‘best of everything.’” It was billed as the Titanic—“Titanic” was an adjective describing all the pomp and grandeur on board. In reality, by the time it entered service, it had been redesigned twice, with each design raising the price per ticket. The British Board of Trade required ships to carry a certain amount of lifeboats, and therefore the ship had to be expensive; the Titanic was designed to hold more than two thousand passengers, costing around $2,000 per person for an inaugural voyage. The year the ship set sail, the number of people living in London was just over six million, twice the number of Americans who were living in that same city. (About seven million American citizens had emigrated to other countries, as you can see here.) The year the Titanic set out for New York, the United Kingdom would undergo a new wave of “free trade” policies, deregulating markets and ending protectionist schemes (you may remember that in America the Gilded Age was called this because of the immense fortunes created at the beginning of the age of industrialization; in the United Kingdom it was because its main economic driver was laissez-faire deregulation.) Though it started late, there was still time to pack things up. The Titanic left from Southampton on the 31st of May, and the ship hit an iceberg on the 14th of April. For the next four hours, the Titanic sank. The first class passengers were taken aboard lifeboats before the second and third classes, despite the fact that the former were only half as crowded. In fact, it was first class passengers who made an effort to help others. The more privileged members of the passenger class were able to assist the third class with the lowering of the ship’s lifeboats. The ship, as many predicted, was full of luxury and the rich sought to maintain that quality. The first class passengers on board had two rooms to themselves—one was shared between the first class women and their husbands, and the other was a luxurious suite, which, despite the threat of war, was often rented out at exorbitant prices. With luxury come lavish decorations, for example: one room was elaborately adorned with “elegant tapestries,” as well as “a bronze clock that stood on a heavy bronze marble pedestal.” One room on board had a fountain, a marble staircase, a bath house and separate toilet and bath rooms. On the Titanic the bathrooms were very elaborately decorated; one room had a “vase of fresh flowers” while another had “a basin that was encrusted with a mosaic of white lily of the valley,” and the “medallions were inlaid with mosaic work.” There was also a “double” bed in one room, with “bedclothes and a feather mattress” and a large white marble bathroom with “golden light and marble tiling.” This wasn’t the only lavish room on board. The suite was “surrounded by four rooms, each of which had a bathroom and separate toilet,” as one account explained. There were three hundred lavish bathrooms. The second class, however, could only claim a mere seventeen bathrooms, with only five bathtubs. There was also a laundry room on board, with “four ironing boards,” a place where the laundry could be done with clean water, something of great importance when you know what happened to the first class. The first class also had a special library—the one where that young man, Jack Welsh, used to go and read about labor-unions. This was one of the few places where members of the third class could find some comfort: “in one of the main corridors, the library of the first class had been turned into a rest room for those who were too tired to sit up in a bunk.” The third class was a room of horror; it was more so than anything seen before. For the passengers who boarded the Titanic in her third class cabins, the ship was already a hell. One member of third class was an Irishman by the name of Jack Smyth. He was so disgusted by his treatment by the ship’s employees that he wrote to the Illustrated London News (and they reprinted it in the Illustrated Weekly News). The man who complained—a fireman named William Murdoch—wrote: “On my second trip I saw a young fellow of eighteen with two children, four and six years old, shivering in his bunk all night on the wet and cold floor. Another man with his wife and children occupied the top bunk, which had been given up to another family, but his children were so ill with influenza that the woman had to nurse them on the floor. Two other families and myself occupied the lower berths, which were so full that there was not room to lie down. Three men were crowded into the top of one of the closets.” What made these conditions all the more infuriating was that the ship had ample storage room. Yet, what is more, the ship wasn’t even supposed to go out, as it had been canceled so that the company could conduct repairs. According to a crew member named Robert Sherard, after getting into a drunken brawl with a crew member, the captain, James J. Smith, decided to cancel the voyage in order to get drunk in peace. It was while this ship was being docked that its new and luxurious lifeboats were tested. The lifeboat had been on top of the Titanic since April, and one could not help but get the impression that it was really a luxury item. The Titanic was a luxury liner, after all. The Titanic even had a first class swimming pool, and in order to make the experience more enjoyable for the passengers, there was a floating floor, a sun deck, and a large lounge. In fact, the entire ship had a swimming pool, the Titanic being the first ship to have them. They had been installed on new luxury ships during the last five years, and as most of the ships in service had no lifeboats, it was the only “extra” room that was left on board. This is where the second class became a hell. Of course, first class was a hell, and the third class was a hell, but the second class was even worse. As one survivor told a reporter: “The steerage was like a cattle pen, and to be called steerage on a fine ship like the Titanic is more than I could stand. I’ll see the day when every company that has passenger steamers on the ocean will do away with steerage class passengers.” Another survivor from the third class, Annie Robinson, spoke of her experiences on board and described how she had lost her entire family: The men at the top were very good to us. When I went down to get my son, I put him in a seat, and when I came back to where my husband was, I put him in my lap. When he woke up, I told him that I would go back for my baby. “You cannot get up to your room,” they said. “It is two hundred and fifty steps. The ship has gone.” I could hardly speak. I could not believe what I was told. The other men took