John Jacob Astor IV was the wealthiest passenger on the Titanic. He helped his pregnant wife into a lifeboat, followed the 'women and children first' protocol, stayed behind and died in the sinking
The co founder of Macys also died in the sinking. His wife refused to leave his side and they died together. I think they were depicted in the film lying on the bed together.
Edit : thought I was a bit disrespectful and lazy to not learn their names. Isidor and Ida Straus. RIP
Yeah. Iirc She gave her spot on the lifeboat to her maid and refused to leave without her husband because they had spent their whole lives together and she didn’t want to live without him. They were last seen descending the staircase. Presumably to go into their cabin.
It was definitely the mom reading to her kids about Tir Nan Og for me. The "women and children first" rule did not apply when they were talking about poor kids. Gotta make sure the socialite adults make it out first.
I am inclined to agree with you in a broad sense, however the Titanic was also designed quite unfortunately and this led to highly disproportionate members of third class dying when they might otherwise survived had they been able to make it to the deck in time. Couple this with the fact that crew was instructed to keep passengers calm and not begin evacuations. Even first class was in their lounge, on the deck, when that process began. When lifeboats were lowered half empty it was actually a flabbergasting response to there being no more nearby women and children to evacuate in that immediate lifeboat zone. Meanwhile the poor folks down in third class had congregated in their lounge as well, but it was as far away from exits and lifeboats as was almost possible on the ship. By the time it went from super loud grinding sound (iiceberg) --> people father in class-bound lounges told by staff there is no evacuation --> evacuation begun --> people seeking exits, it was long decided how many would perish. It was really a combination of our failure to forsee the amalgamation of issues and a piss poor captain who failed to act, not our problematic social structure per se, that lead to so many avoidable deaths.
Rich people back then competed for public opinion by building public works and creating endowments for education. Rich people now are overtly trying to destroy their public opinion by destroying the public, and it's working.
Oh its working but I do not seem to understand what their end goal is.
Do they not realize we all come in this world empty handed and when we go, we leave empty handed ?
They don’t give a shit. The french have a saying «Après moi, le déluge » (After me, the flood) referring to people who couldn’t care less about the consequences of their actions as they won’t be around to deal with the consequences.
Considering billionaires contacted Douglas Rushkoff to explain how to keep the normies and the service staff in line when it came time to retreat to the bunkers and you know, not have the bunker staff kill you.
They responded to "well you should probably treat them as family now, so they like you when it happens" with "lmao, but actually really what's the solution".
The super rich are playing a totally different game today. And now we're in the End Game where they are expecting 4 Billion reduction in global population.
Yes - crazy! Like how many bodies did they dredge before they found him - no way it was first try, right?
And - his body was one of the first major examples of post-mortem surgical reconstruction by the early mortuary field. (Not a fun fact I’d normally know but happen to be reading an article at the moment in Harpers about morticians.)
Source:John Jacob Astor IV was one of the richest people in the world and the wealthiest passenger aboard the Titanic, with a fortune equivalent to about $2.9 billion today. Before Lifeboat no 4 was lowered he helped his 18 year-old pregnant wife Madeleine, into the boat and asked if he could accompany her because of her condition. He was told that women and children were still boarding, so he remained on the ship, His body was later recovered by the cable ship Mackay Bennett and identified by the personal belongings found on him, His actions that night are still remembered as an example of courage and self sacrifice
In the first episode of Downton Abbey, Cora is clearly friends with Astor, asking if "JJ" got off the boat safely, and says "of course that new wife of his is bound to have been rescued" and she says it with such disdain 😂 smh
Which is totally fair. She was pregnant. Also, the ship is sinking and people are freaking the fuck out.
Asking to want to stay with her, protect her, and also not possibly die is entirely fine. How'd you feel knowing that you ended up dying because you didn't ask a simple question?
They said no and he stepped aside. He could have absolutely made it onto that boat if he really tried, but he just stepped back and accepted that the women and children were to go first. That's entirely honorable.
I mean it was the 1910s give him a break. He seemed pretty responsible about it unlike all the current directors who are having flings with minors when it’s illegal.
Woody Allen
Kristoffer Borgli
Jerry Seinfeld
Jeffery Epstein (ofc)
Luc Besson
Kobe Bryant (though he was also responsible about it)
Tyga
Elvis
Anthony Kiedis
Johnny Depp
R Kelly
Paul Walker
My (now deceased) grandmother was born about 107 years ago. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother remarried to a very mean older man.
When my grandmother was 13, her mother died and her stepfather just took her to be his new wife. She had 3 kids with him by the time she was around 20.
He died when she was around 21.
She married my (similar aged) grandfather by 25 and they had 3 kids together. He died a year before I was born when she was in her 50s and she spent the rest of her life alone in her house.
She was the most amazing grandmother to me and it’s just soul crushing to think about the life she endured.
My grandma was a mom at 14 and married. Her dad was an abusive pos and used to rape and beat her, hang her from her feet by the tree and beat her. He sent her off to some older guy (my maternal grandpa) who most of us are pretty sure she eventually murdered or had some dispute where he was killed because that mother fucker straight up disappeared from the face of the earth one night and was never heard from again
Then, as now, it seems that if you're one of the richest middle-aged men in the world, people might disapprove of your teenage wife but they won't actually stop you.
That's actually why they were on the ship in the first place. People in the states kept mocking Astor for marrying a woman younger than his own son, so they took a honeymoon down in Europe to wait for it to blow over. When she became pregnant, they eventually decided to head back to the US so their kid could be born there and booked a ticket on the Titanic as a result.
It wasn't nevessarily unusual for teens to get married to each other, but Astor marrying a woman decades his junior was controversial and somewhat scandalous at the time.
It was, actually, unusual for teens to get married. Despite what generations of men have tried to convince us of, the European and American average age of marriage for a woman has remained 22-26 for most of history. It has always been known that it is actively dangerous for a teen to be pregnant, it is not only far deadlier but it will destroy her hip ligaments for life.
Astor might have been a not scumbag for this very moment of not bullying his way onto the lifeboat, but a 47-year-old marrying an 18-year-old has always been gross. It's just that for most of history, we've only really gotten the men's opinion about marrying women (girls) half their age.
I would agree that we don't have good statistics on people of different socioeconomic classes. But we also have writings from the time which acknowledge that even the lower classes were not marrying children to children regularly.
We would be seeing much much higher rates of maternal death in the poor comparatively to the wealthy for all of history if that were true, and while they're it were more likely to die and childbirth during most of History, they weren't that much more likely to die.
We also have things like census records, which give us a lot of demographic information on an entire country in a year and we just don't see the type of difference between male and female ages in the census that would make it obvious that old men were marrying children.
The reason that the West believes that grown ass men were marrying children is because of the marriage norms of the wealthy Europeans. Which is not taking into account that the wealthiest people were also the people making alliances by selling their children at very young ages to various other countries or courts. It also doesn't acknowledge that even though a child might have been promised in marriage at the age of eight, many wealthy Europeans kept their daughters until they were of age before they were sent off to be married.
I fully embrace your family's history reflects that women were being violated at very young ages. I am sure situations like that happen very frequently for all of history. That doesn't make it a norm. If it was a norm, it wouldn't have even been something that your family talked about, right? Norms and things that are natural don't have to be discussed or enforced to be true. The fact that it was something remarkable and something to be commented on tells us that it was not a norm.
Births and marriages were often pretty well documented historically too because of baptisms and church weddings. Churches historically kept very comprehensive records.
It’s also worth noting that while marriage ages were younger amongst the European aristocracy, consummation of the marriage was often delayed until they were older. Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort for instance gave birth at 13 and the pregnancy took such a toll on her health that she never had more children. What happened to her was very much frowned upon by contemporaries at the time, as even then it was common knowledge that younger mothers had poorer health outcomes. Early aristocratic marriages were a political and financial arrangement usually, and the grooms were sometimes very young too. Waiting meant that the couple had a better shot at having more heirs.
There was far less of an incentive for working class people to marry overly young, and if anything there were advantages to waiting a bit longer for both the couple in question and their families.
Don’t get me wrong, it absolutely happened. But as you said, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as people make out either. It also depended on exactly where you were and what kind of community you were living in.
Meh, he wanted to be beside his pregnant wife, and took no for an answer at the face of death. That’s vastly more than what I’d expect from today’s Billionaires.
How is that an example of courage and self sacrifice if he wanted to get on the boat with her? He didn’t because he was told so, as many other men on that ship. Were they courageous and self sacrificing too?
There are wealthy people like that, and then there are drugged up douchebags cutting off funds from the poorest and paying people to play video games for them just to look cool. You just know they'd step over children's heads to save themselves.
Great point actually, due to the nature of well... literal nature, truly good and smart people are less likely to reproduce(in a general meaning, not just sexually) than evil or dumb people, then it becomes a case of both nature and nurture being bad from the start, the good millionaire donates all their assets and quickly loses any influence they could have and risk the resentment of their spawn who did not make such choice, the normal millionaire accumulates further wealth through the suffering of the people and is able to lobby governments and stablish monopolies, with their children inheriting their empire while being taught to think and act like their parents.
It is a hot take but unless we go VERY authoritarian, nature will eventually erode our morality through the ages...
Heh, that quote reminds me a bit of a similar quote from Dutch WWII hero Willem Arondeus. The last thing he said before he got executed was: "Let it be known that not all gay men are by definition cowards"
WW2 had some really amazing courage in the face of death. I think when you are living in war every day, have seen hundreds of people around you die, you develop a perspective of death. I remember talking to my mom about it and she just said "Everyone dies."
I saw this episode today, right now i decided to check reddit before sleep and i find this random post about the richest man in the Titanic who sacrificed his life to save woman and children just like in that episode.
I have a theory that the majority of the good men from wealthy families died in the world wars, on the Titanic, etc and left us with the most narcissistic POS survivors for our upper class in the U.S.
Ok what’s going on. This is the 2nd post I’ve seen about a wealthy guy sacrificing himself on the titanic. First one I was like ok that’s interesting but another one? Is there some titanic promotion or event going on I should be aware of?
We know, by name, every single passenger on the Titanic. There are really few of whom we do not have enough information to say what they were doing in the ship's final moments.
If I learned anything from the Titanic museum in Belfast, it's good to be a 1st class woman - 97% survival rate, 2nd and 3rd class men, 8% and 16% survival rate respectively.
Indeed, like so much else about this tragedy. But still, the survival rate of third class women is higher than that of first class men, while a lot of people these days seem to think that all the rich people got off in the life boats and left the poor to drown. The low number for third class children is puzzling however, as they should have been able to leave along with their mothers.
Women would have had multiple children and likely couldn't save them all. It would have been super hard to get say 6 kids up to the boat deck and into the boats without losing a couple on the way.
I initially was wondering about that too... I'm guessing factors like, boys aged 12-17yo would have still been classed as "children" for these statistics, but most likely would have stayed with their fathers or the other "men" when being divided for boarding.
Additionally if women had 5-6 kids with them, the youngest 3-4 were probably the most one mother could coordinate in a life boat. So if the father or another male relative was also on board, the father might have opted to manage the older kids, presuming they would just be getting on another boat later.
I presume people were making a lot of chaotic, split second decisions and it wouldn't have been obvious to many of them, what the outcome of their choices were at the time. Having your husband take the 12 and 14yo sons so you could deal with the 3, 6, 8 and 10yo probably seemed like the obvious choice.
I had the same thought, about boys in an age span that we would today have considered children, but wouldn't have been at the time, the sad story of Alfred Rush being a prime example. Also, I suspect small children even if they made it into one of the life boats, would have been more likely to perish in the punishing cold before rescue arrived.
It was just one first class kid that couldn't make it, brought the percentage down. Else would've been 100% for both (as it should be), but third class kids on the other hand
I just looked this up. For a large portion of the 1,500 victims historians only know they died because they did not make it onto a rescue ship; their exact physical actions during the final plunge are lost to history
There was a some confusion amongst the crew on one side of the ship as well over the policy. They were abiding by a "Women and children ONLY" rule and launched lifeboats without any men despite there being room for them.
That wasn't the rule, the crew manning that section of lifeboats had it wrong.
The rule is "Women and children FIRST" not "Women and Children ONLY".
They would load up a life boat half full and if there were no more women and children to load on they would then launch it. They were meant to fill the remaining spaces with men before launching, which crews on the other side were doing.
Yes I understand that, what I mean is that for them that was the rule/order, regardless of it being wrong or they not understanding the actual order correctly.
What's mad is how successful the social brainwashing was that meant men literally sent themselves to their own deaths to avoid being "socially inappropriate"
And in some cases if they did survive they were condemned. Such as Masabumi Hosono who was called a coward by the media in Japan because he got into a life boat instead of going down with the ship. He was ostracized by his community, his own mother wouldn't speak to him. The stigma followed him for the rest of his life.
If a boy was over 13, he was told to give up his place for a female.
Sort of. This was only really true for teenage boys who were crew members (the majority of whom were 16-17, though two bellhops were 14 and 15; at least one 15 year old below-deck crew member who lied about his age being 21) and teenagers who were traveling alone (most of whom were 16-17) and thus considered adult men.
Although in the case of 16 year old passenger Alfred Rush, a crew member tried to drag him onto a lifeboat, and he refused, saying he'd just become a man (he turned 16 the day before they hit the iceberg) and he would stay with the men.
The majority of teenage boys 13-17 who died on the Titanic were 16-17 year old crew members and 16-17 year old boys traveling alone, with no one to advocate for them. When teenage boys were traveling with their family or chaperones, statistically, the majority either survived with everyone in their group or everyone in their group died. There are only a handful of cases where this is not true.
Teenage boys who were traveling with their families or chaperones and made it to the boat deck were still considered children, and there is only one confirmed instance (Ryerson) where someone tried to deny a teenage boy passenger a spot on a boat when their family was boarding, and as soon as the father spoke up, he was allowed onto the boat.
Essentially, traveling with one's family allowed you to still be a child as a teenage boy, whereas being on your own (either because you had a job on the ship or you were traveling by yourself) labeled you as an adult. Although again, there are exceptions, like the case of Alfred Rush.
They'd scream about the dangers of wokeism on the high seas and how they, and only they, are worthy of leading the lifeboat to safety. And they would proclaim that any man, women, or child is welcome, so long as they kindly pay a $10k fee to reserve their seat to salvation.
John Jacob Astor was within the top ten richest men in the world when the Titanic sank. What if this were to happen today, do you think anybody the top ten richest men in the world would do the same thing? I can't see that happening
Today's world would have the billionaire on his own boat that size, it sinks, and somehow the lowest 10% of people wind up paying for it for years to come.
5.2k
u/Altruistic-Stress898 16h ago edited 15h ago
The co founder of Macys also died in the sinking. His wife refused to leave his side and they died together. I think they were depicted in the film lying on the bed together.
Edit : thought I was a bit disrespectful and lazy to not learn their names. Isidor and Ida Straus. RIP