“Taking up Space”: “Crazed” Italians, Syrians, and Jews

The Racial Politics of the Titanic Disaster

Marlene Tromp

20788. but that involves, it seems to me, putting the passengers in [very close together]
- It does my Lord. Perhaps I may explain that the number … was largely made up of third class passengers, who take less space than the first class.

~British Board of Trade Inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic

It is a rare cultural moment in which social values and their material impact are laid bare in a single, critical, life-and-death global snapshot. The Titanic disaster at the century’s turn is one of these moments. Powerful cultural rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic produced a narrative about the life-and-death events on board the ship. As the story goes, the only men who tried to board the lifeboats were “crazed Italians,” the primary factor preventing the rescue of people in the water by half-filled lifeboats were “hysterical women” who feared their lifeboats being swamped, and it was principally brave, self-sacrificing, rich men who went down with the ship (alongside John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim), rather than masses of poor—who, by their own testimony, were not prevented from entering lifeboats. The reality, however, is much different, and the story that persists did (and continues to do) particular ideological work with regard to keeping immigrants in their place and reinforcing economic structures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

While “women and children first” certainly played a role in the selection process for lifeboats, a greater proportion of first-class male passengers survived (about 36% were lost) than third-class children (nearly 60% were lost). Moreover, many of those third-class immigrant passengers who made it aboard lifeboats—like Berk Pickard, a Jewish immigrant from Poland—violated virtually every social code and every ship rule to make their way to the lifeboats. Others, leapt aboard lifeboats as they were being lowered and, in at least one case, disguised themselves as women, after having been refused an opportunity to board. These passengers were uniformly identified as “crazed Italians,” in spite of the fact that there were only two Italian passengers known to be aboard the ship. Indeed, one officer explained that he “saw a lot of Italians, Latin people, all along the ship's rails … and they lined the rails of the ship [as the last of the lifeboats were lowered], they were all glaring, more or less like wild beasts, ready to spring” (US 5, HGL 773). Most likely, these “Italians” were Syrians, Lebanese, and eastern Europeans, who were aboard the ship in great numbers. Characterizing them as “Italians” underscored their perceived social danger and justified the choices that left so many of them—men, women, and children alike—on board the ship as it sank and discouraged the lifeboats from returning to those struggling for life in the water once the ship went down. This tragedy, while an isolated moment, spoke to the larger social perceptions of the day. There was little space for non-white immigrants on the ship and none for them on the lifeboats but what they “stole,” sensibilities that would haunt these immigrants and their families into their new lives on land.