British Passenger Ship titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the north atlantic. More than 1500 passengers and crew died. The deadliest sinking of a single ship up to that time. After inquiries in the u. S. And the u. K. , major changes in Maritime Safety were made. In the next hour, well learn about the american congresss response. Our guest, elise bean. Shes the director of the d. C. Office of the levin center for oversight and democracy. Rms been how quickly did the u. S. Congress take up the sinking of the titanic in 1912 . Well, its really, really pretty remarkable. They took it up in four days. The ship itself went down on a monday night. 1500 people died, as you mentioned. Over 700 were rescued and transported to new york city harbor. By tuesday, word was out. The media in new york reported on the tragedy. By wednesday, the u. S. Senate decided that they wanted to investigate. They had even though the ship was british owned and it had gone down in international waters, they decided that because over 100 americans were among the dead and because the survivors were in new york city, that they had jurisdiction to inquire. So they directed the Senate Commerce committee to head up the investigation. They set up a special committee with three republicans and three democrat ites to actually do the inquiry. And it was chaired by senator william aldon smith, a republican from michigan. So they immediately jumped on a train because they wanted to catch everybody before they left town in new york. And they arrived on a thursday. And that was senator smith, a democrat, a colleague, a guy named francis newlands, who is a democrat from nevada. And they had a single staff member, a guy named Joseph Bayliss was brought along because he was a Deputy Sergeant at arms and could serve subpoenas and could also handle the logistics of setting up the hearing as soon as they arrived on a thursday. The senators met with an individual called jay bruce ismay. He was the president of the White Star Line that owned the titanic. But more than that, he had been on the ships inaugural voyage and had survived the sinking of the titanic. And thats how we got going. And they served him with a subpoena for a hearing the next day. So on friday, just four days after the ship went down, they held the first hearing at the waldorf astoria hotel. They were able to hold the hearings there because john jacob astor, a family member, 47 years old, was one of the people who did not survive the sinking of the titanic. So rms been what did we learn from mr. Ismay four days after this sinking . Well, they learned a lot of things. They called not only him, but officers from the ship, the crew, passengers from every class of Ticket Holder and also the rescuers. And one of the things they learned was that the ship had over 2200 passing jurors, but lifeboats that could seat only about 1200 people. They found out that there was very poor training of the crew. There had been only a single safety drill where they practiced lowering two lifeboats. But that was it. They found out that they had received warnings about ice in the water and had essentially ignored those warnings. They didnt. The ship was traveling at top speed. They didnt slow it down. They didnt put out more lookouts. They didnt take any other precautions when the ship hit the iceberg. They found that there was massive confusion and disorder and disorganization in trying to get people onto those lifeboats. There was confusion about how many crew members we needed in each ship, how many people could go on each ship. They ended up leaving over 450 seats empty on that on in the lifeboats. And they also found that they treated the different classes differently. We had the wealthier passengers that the first class passengers, 60 of them survived of second class, only 42 survived. The third class passengers went down to 25 and a crew of only. 24 survived. The sinking of the ship, the fact that it was four days after the sinking of the ship were some of the facts changed later on that they learned. Well, i think what happened by t hearings so quickly people, they were abgetumber of information while it was fresh and before the company could influence testimony or develop its own explanations. Of course, whenever you get information that quickly and from so many people, some of the facts are going to change. But i think basically they got a lot of the facts right. So what were some of the Biggest Challenges in conducting this investigation, particularly four days after the sinking . Well, it was a very challenging situation. The ship itself was gone. The rescues were chaotic. Nobody really knew what had happened. And thats why the Senate Investigation was so important, because they could talk to every body involved. A wide variety of people, get their personal experiences, what they knew and piece it together in a way to come up with a coherent explanation of exactly what what went wrong, and then use those facts to think about what kinds of reforms we needed to prevent that type of loss of life from happening again. Did that tragedy, ms. Bean, and the hearings that followed, have they impact did maritime law today . They had a remarkable impact. They affected both. How things are operate in the United States and around the world. Perhaps the most important thing they did is they created new Safety Standards for commercial vessels on the open sea. Theyre called the International Convention for the safety of life at sea, also called so last. And that required, for example, a sufficient number of lifeboats for these ships and safety drills. In addition to those new Safety Standards, they established a 24 hour radio system so that ships could use that radio system if they ever got into trouble on the sea, international waters. They also set up an International Ice patrol still run by the u. S. Coast guard to help ships when there are a lot when there was dangerous ice and icebergs in the ocean. And finally, they led to improved ship design so that if there was a tragedy on the sea, if there was some sort of crash, the ship had a better chance of surviving and protecting life at sea. Well, were going to hear more about the titanic hearings shortly. But first, what is the levin center . Elise bean . The Carl Levin Center for oversight and democracy is a Nonprofit Associated with Wayne State University law school in detroit. Our namesake and founder was carl levin, who was a champion of congressional oversight. And our center focuses on one of its key missions is to improve fact based bipartisan oversight by congress and by the 50 state legislatures around the country. And carl levin, of course, was longtime chair of the Senate Armed Services committee, i believe. Did you work for us . Did you work for him on the hill . Well, i worked for him on the permanent subcommittee on investigations for nearly 30 years. Now, doing that, can you imagine holding a hearing for days after a tragedy today that would be so difficult . I think back then this was very early in the countrys history and they used hearings a lot more for fact finding. Today, what we tend to do, the fact finding off stage, and then once we figure out what happened, we then convey that information to hearing. But back then, they had 18 days of hearings, usually we only have one or two days of hearings on a particular topic. In 1912, did congress have Permanent Committees on investigations at that point . Well, they didnt have a Permanent Committee that did nothing but investigation. But all the committees back then then and now were authorized to do investigations. That authority is not recited in the constitution, but the Supreme Court has decided that if congress is going to do its job, if its going to legislate, spend money, taxpayer dollars, its going to accept nominations, declare military actions, they need to work from the facts. And so they have to be able to investigate. And weve been doing investigations since 1792. That was the very first one under president washington. And weve been doing them ever since. Levin senator dorgan, is the website for your organization. On that website is portraits in oversight. What is that . Well, we have about two dozen little vignettes of notable past congressional investigations. Sometimes we folw the history of somebody who was very involved in oversight. And its just to give people a sense of what congress has done in the past. And we do that, not just for the public, but also for congress itself, to realize how in the past they have conducted Pretty Amazing investigations and have really developed important reforms and improve the state of the union because of them as an investigator in your career in the congress. What are some of the investigations you worked on . Well, senator levin was a very active invest alligator. We did the financial crisis. We did enron. We did Money Laundering investigations. We did tax investigations of corporations that werent paying their taxes. We covered the gamut of a very complex financial investigation as well. The 1997 movie titanic, of course, was a blockbuster at reignited interest in the sinking of the ship in 1912. Theres also an exhibition currently touring the country. We caught up with it in maryland, just outside of washington, d. C. And heres the curator of that exhibit talking about the era and the famous ship. I wanted a story, a photo of a person and an artifact. Thats a combination. I worked with this city. Important parts. So i then went into our archive and talked to collectors and also lots of families, relatives of the titanic, passengers and crew. So in that way, we got together quite a lot during two arresting stories. So the stories actually about the humans, the difference of peoples stories, id say, and of course very much about the titanic as well. But its based on the humans side of the titanic story. Theres a lot of unrest. We look with nostalgia back to these years before the first world war, but it was a lot of unrest, a lot of political clashes, so to speak. Class divisions, lots of very poor people. And then incredibly rich people. It was enormous difference between the classes and this is reflected in the building of the titanic. And its also the the time of the great emigration when people moved from the old world to the new. Its around 55 Million People moved from europe. And the other parts of of asia and so on to the United States and to canada and therefore there was a lot of money to be made for the ship owners. That is a very good reason for the olympic titanic in britain to be built. The the emigration and the money that was made on these mass movement, their ideas was, of course, competition. The White Star Line was certainly fierce competition with the cunard line and the two german lines hamburg, america and the north german lloyd lines. So the cunard had had to launched the intercity near and then mauritania in 1907. And of course, the answer to that was the olympic and titanic and the lusitania and mauritania were a socalled express liners, high speed ships. And the White Star Line decided that they would not fight with the channel about speed. So instead they said its its safety first. And and luxury. Thats what they wanted. So the titanic was much slower than these cunard orders, but still they wanted to show something extraordinary and the titanic was much, much larger than the ten year the mauretania and of course, they wanted also to have the best food, the best interior, everything should be the best on these ships. So it was all very much question of of competition because there was money to be made. We have tools from a carpenter who worked on paneling, probably in first class, for example. There were about 3000 people working to build the olympic and the titanic. And it took about three years to build them. So they were more or less handmade, riveting and so on was done mainly by hand in all the interiors, of course, was handmade and the plaster was handmade, and the furniture that they were very crafted, people who could make, for example, the the chairs for first class dining saloon and so on and so on. They were very, very good at this. So there was there was a lot of people involved in building these ships. And that was, of course, in the Largest Shipyards in the world. Harland wolff in belfast. This meant, of course, a lot to the people there and a lot of pride, of course, went into building these ships. They were extremely proud of it. The photo of the propellers this is actually not the titanic. No, but its the same the same type of propellers. So therefore, it really shows vividly what the what they were like. They weighed about a hundred tonnes together. And one can actually see the rather that weighed 101 tons as well. So these were very, very big. And the ship itself was very big. The engines weighed about. 1000 tonnes each. And they had two engines and a turbine when combined with these two engines. So all in all, it was massive. It was very big. The engines were four floors high. For example. So she was as tall as the skyscraper, 11 decks, 46,000 tonnes. Of course, today we have much, much larger ships, but in those days, in 1912, she was at the center at the top of everything. She was the largest manmade object ever made in the world. Here you can see a life size replica of one of the titanics watertight doors. According to legend. The ship was believed to be the most unsinkable as surviving crew member Frank Prentiss would recall in an interview. Did you have any lifeboat crew . We had no lifeboat drill. Lifeboats were a thing. They were necessary. They. We were on a ship that was unsinkable. Of course, it was impossible to build a ship that was truly unsinkable. Even so, shipbuilder harland and wolff had gone to Great Lengths to make this series of ships one of the safest ever built. The key safety feature was the division of the hull into watertight compartment size 15 bulkheads cut across the ship to create 16 separate compartments in an emergency. Each could be sealed by watertight doors. This was actually a relatively common feature in ships at the start of the century. It certainly wasnt specific to the titanic. Nonetheless, the disaster drew attention to the soaked, old, unsinkable ships. The word unsinkable grows back many years and i have a catalog quote, unsinkable ships, which was published in 1906 by a company in london who produced watertight doors. And they said, if you use our system, the ships will become produced, actually unsinkable. The album has the title, unsinkable ships. But if you open the catalog, its ships are practically unsinkable in advertising. This word practically disappeared and suddenly these ships became unsinkable. But there is a great difference between unsinkable and cannot sink. Its a large difference between those two words in swedish advertising. The ships were sold as being unsinkable. But they say like the other ships in the shipping line because they have double bottoms and so the general public, i believe, didnt think so much about these more that the ships were so large, they were so huge, and it was unthinkable that Something Like this could just sink off the scratching along an iceberg and it. I have many accounts from people who saw the ship or traveled with a ship and they were amazed. One woman from from sweden wrote back to her brother, we have been down to see the monster. She says, and you cant imagine what a beast it is. And and working in the turkish bath said that he has pains in his neck looking up the ships sight and because it was so tall, it was huge. So it was for many people, they had never seen anything like this in their lives. It was just in credibly a big, large, safe and steady. Those who survived many of them spoke about how steady the ship was. She did not move for waves, just large as barnes somebody wrote afterwards. Captain smith was the highest paid seaman in the world, i believe, at the time, and he had not been in a serious accident in his whole life, except a collision with the olympic and the ship called think. But apart from that, he had no experience of anything serious, nothing. And he was very, very popular among the first class passengers. He was referred to as the millionaires captain, for example. And he, of course, loved it. Then he had the officers, the chief officer, while the first officer, william murdoch, that we know more about, because we have his two letters from the titanic in the exhibition and then the other officers there were the chief of supplies, six officers. This is like a big system, like a big society. The hierarchy, of course, and the lord just part of the crew. What were the would we call catering today . Serving staff. Those working in the kitchen. Stewarts insurance. But down below. There were 325 men working in the boiler rooms and engineers. 174 out of those were firemen. So was actually a lot of people working down below. And they were, of course, the reason for the ship moving. This is a typical third class cabin for for people with a ladder. Of course. And scandinavia. And passengers were told that they would not sleep in cabins larger than for eight people. And the white storyline tried as much as they could to separate the different nationalities. Very much so. I would say that, for example, a romantic male passengers were placed in sleeping lot, much, much larger sleeping quarters, as well as the irish. Thats thats my guess. A single man traveling on their own. They were lodged in the forward part of the ship and single women or families. They were lodged in the stern section of the ship. So there should be no mix. This is still the edwardian society, but there was of course, a long corridor connecting these two parts because they had the dining saloon, for example, on f deck. Once swedish survive, she was swedish american said afterwards that we were so well looked after and we had nothing to complain over. Everything was so good and the food was excellent, she said. Because when stalin knew that that pleased passenger was