Everyone Has a Crazy Titanic Theory

The Titanic sank 110 years ago and its sinking touched off a storm of conflicting theories, a maelstrom of wild accusations, and a tidal wave of urban legends.  Suddenly, everyone was an expert on nautical disaster simply because they watched a movie 25 years ago.  (Yes, it has been 25 years since Cameron’s movie “Titanic” came out.  We’re all getting old.)

One of the more outlandish theories is that the Titanic did not sink the night of April 12, 1912, but that the ship that foundered that night was the Olympic—the slightly older sister ship that had been damaged twice in accidents.  According to this absurd theory, the White Star Line staged a switch, substituting the older ship for the newer one, then deliberately ramming the iceberg to to sink her to collect the insurance.  

Exactly how you go about the massive sleight of hand of switching two ships (each over 880 feet long and weighing over 46,000 tons) is never quite explained.  Considering simply that the Titanic was being watched constantly by sightseers and news people, the switch would be impossible.  Nor were the two ships identical:  there were substantial differences between them and many of those which would clearly differentiate Titanic from Olympic have been documented on the wreck of the Titanic. 

Recently, another wild rumor has surfaced:  that the design of the Titanic was known to be flawed and that the ship’s owners deliberately let the vessel sail, anyway.  The ship’s owners supposedly knew that the Titanic could not be repaired and allowed the ship to sail to its doom in order to collect the insurance money.    This theory ignores the fact that the Olympic continued to sail until 1937, during which time the ship earned the nickname “Old Reliable”.

Recently, this last theory has received an update from the most unreliable source imaginable:  QAnon.   I’m not going to waste any time trying to explain these folks, but they have been pushing a rather wild tale that links the passengers on the Titanic to the United States Federal Reserve.  Crucial to this wild tale is that if you cut through the various layers of corporate identities, the real owner of the Titanic was the American tycoon, J. P. Morgan. 

Morgan, says QAnon, was behind the formation of the United States Federal Reserve.  Supposedly, Morgan knew  that the design of the Titanic was flawed, so he cancelled his reservation for the maiden voyage while allowing some of the wealthiest Americans to board at their peril because they were opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Okay, let’s apply a little reality to this crackpot theory.  Yes, J. P. Morgan did indeed own the Titanic and did support the formation of a central bank.  There is no proof, however, that the prominent millionaires on board the doomed vessel were opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve.  No one has ever been able to link passengers like Astor or Guggenheim to any opposition to the bank, nor would their opposition have done anything to stop the formation of the bank.  And for even Morgan, sinking a ship full of people was a little over the line.

I was surprised, however, to learn that the historians who follow all things Titanic have never been able to determine why Morgan cancelled his reservation for a luxury suite on the maiden voyage of a famous ship he owned.  So many prominent people had booked passage on the Titanic that it was being referred to as the ‘Millionaire’s Ship’.

I was surprised to learn that this was a mystery.  I think I know why he didn’t make the trip.

For an explanation, we must go to Honduras and move backwards in time a few years.  Honduras was a desperately poor nation that had almost no income other than the taxes it collected for imported goods as ships docked at a handful of port cities along the Gulf of Mexico.  Worse, the country was politically unstable, with revolutions occurring at a frequency  of less than every two years (seventeen administrations in twenty years).  While the country did export a few agricultural products—chiefly bananas—if the government attempted to tax their export, buyers would simply move up or down the coast to a country willing to sell their fruit at a cheaper price.

For decades, each new government had followed the same path:  banish your opposition, move the military into the customs houses, and then borrow money from Europe to pay off your revolutionary army, while pledging future tax monies collected at those vital customs houses against the loans.  With each revolution, the total debt climbed and the interest rate on new loans climbed ever higher.  You have to wonder at the intelligence of some of the people willing to loan additional money to a country that hadn’t made a debt payment in thirty years while having all those different administrations in twenty years.

The European holders of those Honduran bonds began pressuring their countries to do something about the outstanding debts.  England was discussing sending the Royal Navy to take over those customs houses and collect the taxes until the debts had been paid.  This obvious violation of the Monroe Doctrine was particularly egregious since England was the last European power to hold onto territory in Central America, British Honduras (Belize).  

President Taft and J. P. Morgan worked out a complicated scheme to prevent European intervention, to protect American financial investments in Honduras, and to promote political stability in Honduras.  With the eager acceptance of Honduran President Davila, the United States would send the U.S. Navy to protect the ports while Morgan’s bank would take over the customs houses in the ports.  Morgan would buy all outstanding Honduran bonds at the discounted price of 5%. Those who refused to accept five cents on the dollar would receive nothing and their bonds would be declared worthless.   President Davila would benefit by having his government protected by the U.S. Marines and the amount of tax money reaching the capital after Morgan took his cut would probably be more than his own dishonest customs collectors had been sending.  (This was exactly what happened when the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic and took over its customs houses.)

There was one fly in the ointment, however.  Sam Zemurray, infamous for the actions of the United Fruit Company when he owned it two decades later, had just bought a huge banana plantation in Honduras.  This plantation would be worthless unless Zemurray was able to bring in large amounts of heavy machinery and pumps to develop the plantation—something that couldn’t be done if Morgan was diligently collecting import taxes.  Zemurray appealed to Morgan for an exemption and was denied.  So Zemurray did what had come to be expected in Honduras:  he staged a revolution to overthrow the government of Honduras.

It was a great revolution!  In less than a year, Zemurray bought a surplus ship from the U.S. Navy, the Hornet, he hired six American mercenaries who were led by Lee Christmas, he bought a Colt machine-gun and a case of rifles, and he promptly collapsed the government of President Davila by seizing the only source of income to the Honduran government:  Lee Christmas seized the customs houses.

Zemurray installed his own president, Manuel Bonilla (the former president that then Vice-President Davilla had ousted), who naturally immediately agreed to allow Zemurray to bring in his equipment without the need for paying any taxes.  This brought a halt to the loan from J. P. Morgan.

Morgan was not about to forego the opportunity to make huge profits out of Honduras, which he now expected to be even larger because of the money generated by a modern banana plantation, so he simply restarted the negotiations with President Bonilla, who was more than happy to have both the money Morgan promised and the protection that President Taft could provide.  Negotiations were almost completed when President Bonilla suddenly died of a heart attack in late March 1912.

For the next two weeks, J. P. Morgan was busily communicating via telegrams with his agents in Honduras as negotiations were held with the newly-installed President Bertrand.  These negotiations meant that J. P. Morgan missed the sailing of the Titanic because he was busy protecting his future income from Zemurray’s banana plantation (later known by the trademark Chiquita Bananas).  

So, Christmas and Chiquita Bananas saved J. P. Morgan from dying on the Titanic.

The Street

There is a current controversy in our nation’s capital.  No, not the election, or inflation, or even about the two elderly—and perhaps mentally challenged—men who want to run for president.  It is about the city council’s recent decision to decriminalize public urination and defecation.

While the measure was intended to help the homeless and the mentally ill, I suspect that since both groups were already ignoring the previous restrictions, the only outcome of this legislation is that political protests are about to become bizarrely more interesting.  Perhaps everyone should immediately go to the Russian Embassy and take a dump just outside their gates.  (Conveniently located at 2650 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington DC.  Tell them I said, “Howdy.”)

But, the discussion about the streets of Washington did make me start thinking of a topic that I don’t think anyone has seriously written about.  The history of city streets and sidewalks.  If I were a history student thinking about writing a new master’s thesis, this might be fun.

I suppose that such a thesis would have to start with the Romans, who designed city streets complete with drainage, standardized street widths, and even with stepping stones set in the street at set distances so that carts could pass between them.  There is even some evidence that the set wheelbase the Romans established influenced the width of modern railroad gauges.  

The Romans did not have a systematic way of lighting their streets, but the wealthier citizens did light the front of the their houses with vegetable oil lamps or candles to help reduce crime.  There was even a special class of slave, the lantern slave, who was responsible for cleaning the lamps and insuring there was sufficient oil for the lamps to burn all night.  

In Western Europe, the fall of the Roman Empire meant an end to the orderly urban street scene for quite a while, at least until the late medieval period.  With the rise of the absolute monarch, there was also a tendency for the monarch to want to impose as much stability and order in society as possible.  A better way of putting it might be that once a monarch began exercising absolute power, he tended to use that power to regulate as much of other people’s life as possible.  

Some of the first regulations on the urban street concerned making sure that the thoroughfares were accessible to commerce.  The old medieval signs that partially blocked the street were removed by order of the monarch, with the new signs only extending no more than two feet from the side of the building.

Since orderly streets first appeared where there were absolute monarchs, it is reasonable that Paris was the site of all the modernizations of the urban street.  Early in the seventeenth century, homes and businesses were required to light the front of their buildings with oil lamps visible from the street.  The lamps were required to burn during the winter months or on moonless nights.  By the end of the century, these lamps were hung from cables between the buildings and directly over the street and the installation and care of the lamps were contracted out by the police, with the money provided by special taxes to the buildings.  If you were wealthy and wished to cross town at night, you could hire a torch bearer to guide you through the dark streets.  It was an open secret that these torch bearers operated as spies for the police, as they went everywhere and saw everything.

In London, with a more restrained monarch, there was no real attempt by the monarch to control the appearance of the streets.  There were no mandates for lighting, and while there were torch bearers for hire, it was an open secret they were taking bribes from the footpads and petty thieves who preyed on the unwary rich.  There were no organized police at the time, just a collection of inefficient watchmen and the occasional guard.  London was without organized police until Robert Peele created the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard in 1829.  (Which is why the London cops are still informally referred to as Peelers or Bobbies.)

It was in Prussia that lamps were first hung from posts specifically erected to hold lamps for lighting the streets.  These would slowly change over time into modern streetlights.  Then, as now, there was a constant fight over how far apart these lamps should be located.  Those worried about crime wanted more lamps while those concerned with the taxes imposed for the lighting wanted fewer.  

By the start of the 17th century, the lamps were producing much more light than a single candle.  Almost all lights for the street were burning oil and increasingly utilized reflectors and glass lenses to focus the light where needed.  In 1763, the Paris Police sponsored a contest to develop the brightest lamp, ultimately producing a multi-wick lantern with thick lenses that focused the light up and down the street, with a mirror above the flames to reflect the light downward.  This lamp, the réverbère, was quickly adopted across Europe.

At the same time, the Paris Police began contracting out the job of producing uniform paving bricks, each to be exactly nine inches square.  While these streets were still not as efficient as the old Roman streets, with each passing decade Paris became brighter with the new lamps, as well as the older lamps, torch bearers and the occasional building light lighting up the city.  Fully 15% of the police budget was spent on lighting up the night.  While Paris is called the City of Light because it was the home of the Enlightenment, contemporary accounts frequently linked the new age of reason with the brightly lit streets.

Since the lamps obviously represented order in Paris, it was simply human nature that smashing the new lamps became a small but dangerous sign of rebellion.  There is something perverse in the spirit of mankind that forever has Man pulling at the threads of his parachute.  Gentlemen walking home smashed the lamps with their canes when they could reach them.  When they could not, they cut the ropes supporting them, letting the lamps smash to the ground.

These rebellions against the King’s imposed order were treated as serious crimes.  If caught, the offender was sentenced to the gallies.  By comparison, in London where there was no association between street lamps and the authority of the King, smashing a public lantern meant the payment of a fine of only twenty shillings. 

The strict punishment in Paris only made the smashing of the lanterns even more attractive, and when the French Revolution began, the smashing became almost compulsory.  Perhaps this is why the French verb, lanterner originally meant to do nothing or dally around, but after a few years of the French Revolution, the verb changed to mean to hang a man from a lantern.  Years before the guillotine became de rigueur, the first two public executions of the revolution were the hanging of two representatives of the king from a lantern on the front of the Hotel de Ville.

Oh, I am tempted to go on and talk about the introduction of gas lighting and the furious debates that caused in London…. But, the original point of this lengthy, wandering diatribe was to talk about how public policy shapes protests on the city streets and how I think that the latest bizarre ordinance from the Washington city council will backfire on it and quite literally turn to shit.  The council needs to be careful as to what it turns into a symbol of its authority.

Wouldn’t it have been far easier and so much more sanitary to just construct a few public toilets?

The Army Picks a New Gun

There are a couple of dozen versions of this story floating around, most of which have the gist of the story correct.  An economics professor a couple of weeks ago told his class a version and got most of the points correct.  None of the accounts has everything correct, and since I’m going to try and put down my version of the story, I can’t help but wonder just exactly what I’m fornicating skyward.

Here's a simple account of what most of the stories say:

During the Spanish American War, the Army was using this lousy little .38 revolver that just didn’t have enough stopping power.  There were several cases where a soldier shot attacking Filipino natives, hitting them in the chest, and the lousy small bullet just didn’t stop them.  This scared the army so they went to the Chicago stockyards and shot steers with every handgun then commercially available and discovered that the Colt .45 automatic would kill more steers, and kill them faster, than any other gun then available on the market.  And that is why the U.S. Army used the Colt .45 for the next 75 years.

Some of the above is correct.  Most of it is nearly correct.  The real story is actually more interesting.

When the United States entered the Spanish American War in 1898, the standard service revolver was the Colt M1892 chambered in .38LC.  This was the first double revolver with a swing out cylinder adopted by the Army, which meant that the gun could be fired more quickly and reloaded faster than the previous single-action revolver the Army had used.  The downside of the gun was, however, the relatively weak .38 caliber black powder cartridge.

The firearm was used in the Spanish American War, but it was in Cuba, not in the Philippines.  Technically, although our Navy did totally destroy the Spanish fleet anchored in the harbor at Manila, no American troops were landed and no Americans fought on land before the armistice.  The Colt was used in combat during the fighting in Cuba, but the conflict was so brief that there wasn’t enough time to record more than a few reports of the firearm’s suitability.  

Following the war with Spain, the United States fought a second war—the Philippine American War—to stop the resistance by the Filipino forces that had already been fighting against Spain when the U.S. Navy arrived.  Of all the wars in which America has fought, this is perhaps the least remembered.  It was during this conflict that the shortcomings of the M1892 revolver were well documented, particularly against the Moro juramentados, fanatic swordsmen who made suicide charges against the American soldiers.  

Take the case of a Antonio Caspi, who attempted to escape from American soldiers from a POW camp.  When Caspi refused to stop, he was shot four times at close range with the M1892, including three of the bullets striking the escaping prisoner in the chest, perforating both lungs.   Caspi continued his escape, finally being stopped when a trooper struck him in the head with the butt end of a carbine.  I think it is fair to say that this kind of incidents scared the crap out of the Army, who began reissuing the venerable M1873 Single Action Army revolver in .45 Long Colt, a cartridge no one has ever said was too small.

The Army decided to assign the task of finding a better cartridge to two officers, Colonel John T. Thompson and Major Louis LaGarde of the Medical Corps.  In 1904, the two officers tested a variety of ammunition currently available for revolvers.  At this point, they were testing ammunition, not guns, confident that after they had selected the right ammunition, they could solicit bids from a variety of handgun manufacturers.  Among the cartridges tested were the .455 Webley, the .30 Luger, the .45 Colt, and the 9mm.  

The tests were done at a Chicago slaughterhouse where cattle and horses were shot and the results were recorded.  Despite the common myth, very few of the steers died because of the gun shots, as there is a reason people usually go hunting with rifles instead of handguns.  Most of the steers were dispatched with blows to the head with sledgehammers, that being the customary way then for slaughterhouses to kill animals before butchering.  Accounts of these tests rarely include the detail that similar tests were also performed on human cadavers.

The two officers concluded that nothing less than a .45 caliber weapon would give a reasonable chance of incapacitating an enemy with a well-placed shot to the torso.  These tests have been argued over for more than a century now, with well-known experts either confirming or denying the results.  The tests have even been repeated, with cattle, sheep, ballistic gel, and pine logs, resulting in experts both confirming and denying the selection of the .45 caliber bullet.  (I would point out that while the Army has used a 9mm cartridge since 1986, the ongoing arguments about the best handgun cartridge—at least for military purposes—is pointless.  In modern warfare, the usefulness of handguns is about as statistically important as the color of toothbrushes.)

In 1905, the Army sent invitations to several handgun manufacturers to produce working models at a selection trial to be held in two years.  In 1907, the Army began testing automatics by Colt, Luger, Savage, Knoble, Bergman, and White-Merrill, revolvers by Colt and Smith & Wesson, and an automatic revolver by Webley.  The pistols supplied by Luger in .45 caliber are of particular interest.  It is still uncertain whether one, two, or three of the guns were brought to the trials, but the existence of only one such Luger is known today, and it is generally recognized as the most valuable handgun in the world.  If you happen to find one of the missing Lugers at a flea market, it would easily sell for millions at auction.

The pistols were tested extensively by several Army officers, with over a thousand rounds fired.  At the end of the test, the panel of judges had rejected all but the Colt and Savage automatics, ordering 200 of each pistol for field trials from which suggestions for modifications would be forwarded to the manufacturers for a finished model.

In March of 1911, a final trial was held between the two pistols.  In the intervening years, John Browning—perhaps the best gun designer in history—had worked tirelessly to improve the functioning of his design that he had licensed to Colt.  At the final trials, over 6000 rounds were fired through both pistols.  The Savage had 37 misfires while the Colt had none.  Further, the Colt proved to be more accurate and easier to dismantle and clean than the Savage.  The M1911 Colt was the unanimous choice of the board, with the Army placing an initial order for 30,000 pistols.

Over the next 75 years, the U.S. military would purchase another 6 million M1911 pistols.

One more thing.  If the name Colonel Thompson rings a bell, he went on to design his own firearm, the Thompson Submachine Gun, that was beloved by everyone from the Mafia to Winston Churchill.  The gun is chambered for, of course, the .45 Colt.   

Fun with the City

This is New Mexico.  I live in a town when Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy once walked the streets, where Pat Garret used to be sheriff and where Pancho Villa came to buy supplies for his army.  Unfortunately, what used to be the Wild West is now the Mild West.

Our local government has decided that the citizens of this sleepy little burg need nannies and caretakers as we are all uneducated boobs.   (The latter might be hard to argue with if you look at the state’s ranking in education.) Our city council has passed regulations and ordinances covering just about any activity that anyone might find interesting. 

Some of the stupid laws on the books are statewide, such as the one that outlaws betting on camel and ostrich races, the statute against spitting on the floor of the state’s single opera house, and the one that prohibits riding a bicycle in a cemetery.  It is okay to play the national anthem or the state anthem in its entirety but playing only half of either song in a public place is punishable by a $500 fine.  

It is also a misdemeanor for a woman to change a flat tire or to pump her own gasoline.  We have a law that specifically states that it is against the law for idiots to vote, but it is clearly okay for them to run for public office.

Not to be outdone, the city has passed a few stupid laws as well.  For reasons that only the city fathers can understand, it is against the law to dance while wearing a sombrero or to walk down Main Street carrying a lunchbox.  I guess it could be worse, a town about an hours drive away has an ordinance requiring women to be clean shaven before appearing in public, but doesn't specify exactly what has to be shaved.

Of course, there are more stupid local laws.  I’m required to recycle, even though the contents of that blue dumpster are taken to the same dump where the rest of my trash goes, with practically nothing being recycled except the aluminum and other metals that were already being collected before the recycling program started.  The cost of this faux program is enormous, but the city claims that being ‘proactive’ will pay off in the long run if we ever succeed in finding someone to purchase all that ‘recycled’ crap.  

Recently, the city decided it was in our own best interests if we stopped using plastic grocery bags and that, if we received a paper bag from the store, we must pay the city a dime.  Research has shown that such laws do practically nothing to improve the environment, that reusable bags have to be used hundreds of times before you are actually using less plastic, and by that time the reusable bags have become so contaminated with food particles that they are too unsanitary to use.  The actual purpose of such rules is to make the city council feel better while it plays with our dimes.

It is only fitting then, that I should occasionally get to play with said employees.  I confess: I love messing around with the city employees and I should probably be ashamed of myself for hassling government employees, but I’m not.  After all, I, myself, am a retired government employee, and I freely admit that as a generalized group, government employees are about as industrious as stalagmites.  Besides, now that I’m retired, the doctor said I should take up a hobby.

A couple of years ago, the city decided to mandate that all homes have their street numbers painted on the curb and violators would receive a ticket from the codes enforcement police.  I promptly complied, even though my address was already displayed on both my mailbox and the side of my house.  Almost immediately, I had some idiot in a reflective vest ringing my doorbell.

“Your street numbers are wrong.”

“Why?” I asked.  “They are four inches tall and black on a white background, just as required.”

“Your curb says M-M-C-X-X-X-V.  That’s Roman Numerals!  The law says you have to use Latin script.”

“Latin as in Roman?”

“Eh…yes.”

“Roman Numerals are written in Latin script.”

“What if first responders can’t read your address?”

“If they aren’t smart enough to read it, they’re not likely to be much use when they get here.”

As it turned out, I had to have pretty much this same conversation more than once.  Over the next week, city employees arrived regularly at my driveway, and held small conferences regarding my street numbers.  Photographs were taken.  No citation was ever issued.  About a year later, the city rebuilt the curb for the entire block with enlarged curb cuts for wheelchairs.  They repainted the street numbers for the entire block, including for my house, in what is known as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.  (Yes, that is what it is correctly called.). 

When the paint fades, I’m going to rewrite it in binary, 100001010111.  The city ordinance does not specify which number base to use.

This week, I noticed a city crew in a pickup, slowly working up the block doing something to the utility poles.  I have no idea what the mission was, but the work took half a day per pole.  Long before they got to the pole at the corner of my yard, I had attached a small handwritten sign to it.  Knowing the city’s penchant for all things Latin, I even used the appropriate language.  As you can see from the photo at right, the little cardboard sign says “Polus Utilitatus”.

Today, they finally arrived at the corner of my yard.  After spying the small cardboard notice, another conference was held, then a supervisor in a city car arrived and helped the workers examine the notice.  I have no idea what the eventual decision was, but the workers skipped that pole and went on to the next block.

I cannot predict what will eventually happen.  As they say down in the Codes Enforcement Department, tempus narrabo.  However, while I wait for further developments, does anyone know the Latin for ‘fire hydrant’?