The devotion that Isidor Straus and his wife shared to the last as they went down with the Titanic is the stuff of legend. But among the victims of the Titanic disaster were several other notables with Georgia roots, whose roles in the tragedy illustrate some of the many broad themes that keep the story intriguing a century later.
MAJ. ARCHIBALD BUTT
A curiously ornate old bridge in Augusta carries 15th Street across a canal — and links Georgia to the sinking of the Titanic.
Dedicated two years after the disaster in 1914, the span commemorates native Augustan Archibald Butt, an Army major who was military aide to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Witnesses said his calm decisiveness helped maintain order on the boat deck in the hours before the ship went down — with him still aboard.
Butt came to the attention of Roosevelt because of his service during the Spanish-American War, when the future president established a reputation for derring-do. As military aide, Butt was one of the president’s closest daily companions during his final year in office, then continued in the same role serving Roosevelt’s chosen successor, Taft, elected in 1908.
The year of the sinking — 1912 — was shaping up to be a tough one for Butt. He was known for his loyalty to the presidents he served, yet it had become increasingly apparent that Roosevelt, who had had a falling-out with Taft after leaving office, was going to challenge his former friend for the Republican nomination at the convention in June in Chicago.
Perhaps sensing Butt’s unease over the growing divide — contemporary accounts say Butt had been feeling “unwell” — Taft urged him to take a cruise, and gave him an excuse by entrusting him with a letter to carry to Pope Pius X in Rome. Butt was returning to the United States aboard the Titanic with a letter to Taft from the pope.
Irene “Renee” Harris, wife of a New York theatrical producer, was on the last lifeboat to leave the sinking ship, and told The Atlanta Constitution of Butt’s heroic conduct after arriving in New York several days later. When the order came to launch the lifeboats, Butt, she said, “became as one in supreme command. You would have thought he was at a White House reception, so cool and calm was he.”
Butt also demonstrated physical prowess, restraining panic-stricken men who attempted to leap aboard boats loaded with women and children, she said. He stunned one man by banging his head against the railing and warning that if he tried to get on a boat again, “I’ll break every damned bone in your body,” she said.
Another woman, Marie Young, told the Washington Star that Butt, whom she knew from having served as music instructor to Roosevelt’s children, placed her in a lifeboat, then asked her to “remember me to all the folks at home” before stepping back aboard the Titanic.
Taft had grown attached to his aide, and seemed genuinely grief-stricken by his loss. He broke down at a May memorial service in Washington, saying Butt “leaves a void with those who loved him.”
A cenotaph pays tribute to Butt at Arlington National Cemetery, and on the second anniversary of the sinking, Taft was on hand as Augusta dedicated its memorial bridge.
Festooned with four stone lions and an equal number of sculpted eagles perched on pylons, the bridge carries traffic across the Augusta Canal, just south of the Savannah River. By the early 1980s, it had become an anachronism, too small to handle the traffic flow and creating a bottleneck with its sharply arched design, which forces drivers crossing it to slow down because they cannot see whether there are cars stopped ahead of them.
The Georgia Department of Transportation proposed in the 1990s to tear down the bridge and replace it with a modern span. But Augustans rose up and, with tongue in cheek but seriousness of purpose, waged a “Save Our Butt” campaign to preserve the old span.
Ultimately, a parallel bridge was built and the old one remains in service, albeit with a reduced traffic load. Its lions and eagles remain in testament to a man whom Adm. George Dewey, a Spanish-American war hero, called “one of God’s noblemen.”
JACQUES FUTRELLE
Another former Georgian remembered as a hero of the Titanic was Jacques Futrelle. A Pike County native and former Atlanta Journal reporter, Futrelle gained fame as the author of a series of short stories featuring a coolly logical detective known as the “Thinking Machine.”
He and his wife, Atlanta native and writer Lily May Futrelle, were dividing their time between New York and a summer home in Massachusetts when they took a trip to Europe and moved up their return trip by several days in order to experience the big, new ship. They planned to spend some time later in the spring in Atlanta and had already had their mail fowarded there.
As a first-class passenger, Jacques Futrelle was offered a lifeboat seat with his wife, but turned it down and urged her to get aboard, reassuring her that he would catch a later boat — though as May Futrelle later told the Constitution, both knew he was passing up his last chance to reach safety. She said that when she last saw him, he was standing on the deck smoking a cigarette with aristocratic financier John Jacob Astor IV, who had likewise turned down a seat in the boat with his wife.
May Futrelle went on to file a claim for $300,000 (almost $7 million in today’s dollars) against White Star Lines, the owner of the Titanic — one of many in a lengthy legal battle that left the Titanic survivors with paltry compensation but ultimately contributed to a rewriting of U.S. liability laws.
EMMA WARD BUCKNELL
Emma Ward Bucknell, the widow of William Bucknell, namesake of Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University, was leaving Europe to visit her son, Howard, a medical student in Atlanta, when she booked passage on the Titanic. She survived — thanks in part to her own determination to do so.
While a guest a few weeks later at the Georgian Terrace Hotel, she told the Constitution of the haphazard evacuation, the lack of functional lifeboats and the floundering of the crewmen, who didn’t know how to row in unison and seemed oblivious to the fact that if they remained near the Titanic, they could be pulled down as the ship went under. An experienced rower, she said she took her place at one of the oars and was joined by other veteran boaters among the women aboard as they made the arduous, nightlong journey in bitter cold to the RMS Carpathia, a liner that picked up many of the survivors.
“Practically the entire journey was made with 12 pairs of hands pulling the four oars, with each of the men assisted by two women,” she told the newspaper.
