Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World Read Free

showcasing of American paintings and sculpture at the Chicago exposition spurred the idea of creating an academy in Rome where American artists could soak up classical inspiration. Charles F. McKim, one of the partners in the famed architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, spearheaded the academy project, and Frank Millet agreed to be the secretary of its first board. With all the funds for the American Academy having to be privately raised, McKim sought out the greatest moneyman of the age, J. Pierpont Morgan. On March 27, 1902, McKim breakfasted with the financier at his home at 219 Madison Avenue and came away with more than he had expected. Morgan had agreed to give financial support to the American Academy but had also asked McKim to draft plans for a private library to house his collection of rare books and manuscripts on land next to his Madison Avenue brownstone. “I want a gem,” Morgan declared, and McKim’s Italian Renaissance design for the Morgan Library still stands as one of New York’s architectural treasures.
    J. P. Morgan traveled and acquired for his collections constantly, but at sixty-five showed no signs of lessening his business interests. “Pierpont Morgan … is carrying loads that stagger the strongest nerves,” wrote Washington diarist Henry Adams in April of 1902. “Everyone asks what would happen if some morning he woke up dead.” Among Morgan’s many “loads” at the time was a scheme to create a huge international shipping syndicate that could stabilize trade and yield huge returns from the lucrative transatlantic routes. By June of 1902 he had purchased Britain’s prestigious White Star Line for $32 million and combined it with other shipping acquisitions to form a trust called the International Mercantile Marine. In 1904 Morgan installed White Star Line’s largest shareholder, forty-one-year-old J. Bruce Ismay, son of the line’s late founder, as president of the IMM. The second-largest shareholder was Lord William J. Pirrie, the chairman of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders responsible for the construction of White Star’s ships. Pirrie had been the chief negotiator with Morgan’s men and was placed on the board of the new trust.
    The British government had acceded to Morgan’s flexing of American financial muscle in the acquisition of White Star but had also provided loans and subsidies to the rival Cunard Line for the building of the world’s largest, fastest liners, Lusitania and Mauretania —with the proviso that they be available for wartime service. By the summer of 1907, the Lusitania had made its record-breaking maiden voyage, and Pirrie and Ismay soon hatched White Star’s response. They would use Morgan’s money to build three of the world’s biggest and most luxurious liners. Within a year Harland and Wolff had drawn up plans for two giant ships, and by mid-December the keel plate for the first liner, the Olympic , had been laid. On March 31, 1909, the same was done for a sister ship, to be called Titanic . A third, initially named Gigantic , was to be built later.

     
    (photo credit 1.67)

     

     
    Lord Pirrie (top, at left) and J. Bruce Ismay inspect the Titanic in the Harland and Wolff shipyard (middle) before her launch on May 31, 1911 (above). (photo credit 1.33)
    There is a now-famous photograph of J. Bruce Ismay walking with Lord Pirrie beside the massive hull of the Titanic shortly before its launch on May 31, 1911. The tall, mustachioed Ismay, sporting a bowler hat and a stylish walking stick, towers over the white-whiskered Pirrie, who wears a jaunty, nautical cap. Missing from the photo is J. P. Morgan, who had traveled to Belfast with Ismay and would shortly join him and other dignitaries on a crimson-and-white-draped grandstand. To the crowd of more than a thousand onlookers, Morgan would have been instantly recognizable from countless newspaper cartoons depicting him as the archetypal American moneybags—his walrus mustache and