i thought i had. put away. the one is freezing and i want my to die down here. not a chance going to hit. and go to wipe away all the tears from their eyes. and there should be no more this. and thanks for joining us for the american history tv series congress investigates. in this series, we look at significant historical congressional investigations and what became of them. this week, our focus is the 1912 sinking of the titanic. it was on april 15th, 1912, the

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, we'll learn about the american congress's response. our guest, elise bean. she's 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, it's 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 ship's inaugural voyage and had survived the sinking of the titanic. and that's 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 didn't. the ship was traveling at top speed. they didn't slow it down. they didn't put out more lookouts. they didn't 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 that's 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. they're 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, we're 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 country's 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 didn't 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 it's going to legislate, spend money, taxpayer dollars, it's going to accept nominations, declare military actions, they need to work from the facts. and so they have to be able to investigate. and we've been doing investigations since 1792. that was the very first one under president washington. and we've 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 it's 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 weren't 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 re-ignited interest in the sinking of the ship in 1912. there's also an exhibition currently touring the country. we caught up with it in maryland, just outside of washington, d.c. and here's 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. that's 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 people's stories, i'd say, and of course very much about the titanic as well. but it's based on the humans side of the titanic story. there's 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 it's also the the time of the great emigration when people moved from the old world to the new. it's 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 so-called 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 it's it's safety first. and and luxury. that's 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 it's 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 titanic's 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 wasn't 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. it's 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, didn't 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 can't imagine what a beast it is. and and working in the turkish bath said that he has pains in his neck looking up the ship's 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 millionaire's 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. stewart's 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. that's that's 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 the good best advertising that could ever have these curtains were, of course, only for first class passengers, and the crew working there. stewardess and stewardess. and when you come out of this corridor, you see a sweet, which was the suite that helen baxter had together with her son and also china first class. china used in not only the dining saloon, but also in the other countries, front and cafe parisienne. and if you had if you only dined in the dining saloon, the food

was included in the ticket price. but then you could go to the restaurant in other countries and etc., but then you had to pay. and it's actually the same today in ships and the other car restaurant was run by a man called cathy ritchie. gusti from london, and he had his own staff there, his whole staff. so his more or less had chartered this area and this was the finest eating place on the titanic as the rain fell on the north atlantic on april 14th, the titanic cut a majestic figure cruising through the waters at a speed of around 22 knots. its captain had retired from the bridge at 9:30 p.m., leaving orders that he be informed of any incidents up in the crow's nest lookouts fleet and lee shivered from the cold. the waters were calm.

the night was dark. no one could imagine the events that were about to transpire. all of a sudden, at 11:40 p.m., the horizon in front of them darkened and they found themselves face to face with the silhouette of a giant mountain of ice. it was right there in front of them. fleet rang the bell three times and his ship mate lee grabbed the phone to call the bridge and raised the alarm. i can't. but first officer murdoch had already seen the severity of the situation when the ship's bow was headed straight toward the giant iceberg. he had a split second to decide what to do. he immediately gave the order to reverse the engines and part a starter in an attempt to turn the ship and avoid a collision. but there wasn't enough time. the massive ice struck the

starboard side with such force that the rivets holding the steel plates together began to rupture. water began pouring, and too many of the watertight compartments were now wide open to the sea. ava everhart described like this that moment, and she said at 10 minutes to 12, she felt a slight bump. she said it was just like a train pulling into a station. it just jerked. it was very slight. but she said she knew it was a stretch for something, and she wakened my father. you can see in my father said, no, i'm going up on deck again after the night before. 40 seconds passed between fleet raising the alarm and the ship hitting the iceberg. it is estimated that the lookouts didn't realize it was there until it was just a quarter of a mile away. this is how frank prentiss described those moments. smells.

i. i knew it because you can smell it. what do you mean? there's a -- in the air. there's some something about ice that you smell. i was talking to a pal of mine. he was sitting on my back. all of a sudden, she came to a halt. it was no fast. it was like putting a brakes on a car. and you guess they came to a halt. and i went all right. on the promenade deck. and i looked down. i couldn't see any any damage at all about the water line. what i did see was ice and the well deck the pirate. well, deck. and i thought, hello, we could hit an iceberg. and the titanic exhibit is currently at the national harbor outside of washington, d.c., and is touring the country.

we're joined by elise bean of the levin center now, this being, can you give some examples of the testimony that the senate committee heard from witnesses? there was some interesting testimony about how difficult it was for the titanic to get any help once they had been struck by the iceberg. so they used a bunch of different methods. they sent out wireless calls. they used electric lamps to send morse code. and they even set off some distress rockets. but they didn't get a lot of help. the nearest ship, the californian, said that they sort of saw those rockets, but they didn't really know what they meant. and so they took no action. a ship that was farther away, the carpathia did see the rockets, interpreted them correctly, and decided to te the very difficult step of maneuvering through the ice in

the water at night. and they went there and rescued a lot of people, either huddled in boats, even clinging to debris in the sea. and they were one of the boats that one of the ships that transported a lot of people, a lot of the survivors to new york city harbor. it was very interesting testimony about how one ship didn't help and the other ship did. eventually, the senate issued a resolution thanking the captain of the carpathia for his efforts for being so courageous, quick thinking and having such empathy for the people who were drowning in the sea dark at night, in the freezing waters. was being what was the public's reaction to the sinking of the titanic and the media reports about the hearings. well, there was a dramatic public reaction to the hearing and the facts that came out. the facts were so startling.

this ship had been painted as state of the art, chock full of new technology. was described as unsinkable. and then it sank. and a lot of people died. d the public has had a fascination with those facts and that drama and that tragedy ever since. and now from the c-span archives, it was in 2008 that c-span covered an event with shipwreck investigators and the author of the book titanic last secrets. they share their theory about why the ship sank so quickly. most of us have seen james cameron's wonderful film and were all drawn to that horrible moment when the two main characters are holding on to the back of this huge ship. as the stern rears out of the water and then breaks in half, and then titanic sinks. that's pretty much what i

thought was the story of titanic. when i got into that mere submersible. but the steel that we found says that simply didn't happen. the steel says that the ship broke apart at a very, very gentle angle. nothing like 45 degrees, more like 11 degrees. well, what is the difference? what is the difference? that night or 1500 people stayed on board titanic. they did not get into the lifeboats. the lifeboats pulled away very calmly with 500 empty seats. people made decisions that night as the ship slowed, slowly sank into the water. do i stay here on board titanic and wait for the rescue ships, or do i get into the lifeboat? when you're on a ship that's only bending at 11 degrees, it seems like you've got a long time to go before that ship is going to break apart or sink. as a matter of fact, the idea of the ship breaking apart was never in their mind.

but that's exactly what happened. while the ship was flooding, she started to break apart. if we look at it, most people have understood the story of titanic. to be that titanic set sail on a maiden voyage and then on a clear, calm night, struck an iceberg, sank and broke apart. the pieces of steel that john and i documented, say the titanic struck an iceberg, then broke apart and sank. an incredibly different human experi insight for the people that night. also, the steel and the way that the hull broke apart means that the timeline line is remarkably different. instead of it being about a half of an hour, it's about 5 minutes. so in one five minute period, people went from listening to the band, having a drink in the warmth by the bar, and in 5 minutes being in the cold north atlantic. when we started to hear these

stories, one of the questions that came back to john and i was was titanic a weak ship? so we commissioned engineers to look at the design and commissioned also a flooding study, something that had never been done before, where a computerized was generated to allow water into the many compartments of titanic and see what stresses the hull could take. we wanted to prove something that was nearly impossible for the builders because they didn't have the technology. but we have the technology and we wanted to find out was indeed titanic a weak ship? at the same time, we wanted to get to know who the people were that built the ship. what were some of the concerns that they had? and in our research, we found out something even more amazing that in the days that followed the titanic disaster, there were other people that were concerned. there were other people that were worried that they had built a weak ship, which is giving

away all the secrets. before i get to talk about two and a half, three years ago, i was happily working my way through a biography of jacques cousteau, which will be out next summer, by the way. and i got a call from a fellow who said, there are these two guys you got to talk to. they got this incredible story. and i said, well, what's the story about? and he said, titanic. i said, okay, i'm going now. i checked into it and i found out that only more words had been written about jesus in the civil war than had been written about titanic. and i wasn't really in the mood to get on the pile. and said, well, who are these guys? and he said, well, they were the heroes of this great book about a nazi submarine found off the coast of new jersey. and it was called shadow divers. and i said, well, you know, the second to the last thing i want to do is write son of shadow divers. i said, that sounds like a real career killer, but talk to them. so they told me the story that they just told you now about finding these pieces of steel on the bottom. and i thought i asked a number of questions right away. i said, what did the witnesses say? and the witnesses said many of them said that they were they

had their back turned to wreckage and they felt no wave. they turned back around and the ship was gone. you those conversations probably that we had. and i went out and met john and ritchie and found their story to be not only interesting, but sincere. they really did seem to want to find out what the truth was about the last 5 minutes of the ship together. what we agreed to do is try to gain some dimension on the historical characters who built the ship so that we could understand why they made decisions if in fact the ship was weak as as this architect was alleging. so we went to belfast, spent a few weeks in a miserable belfast, february, living in a holiday, and going to the people, the public records of northern ireland archive, looking at photographs, looking at steel records, looking at correspondence, meetings, minutes of meetings and eventually these the main characters began to emerge. the first who did was the man

who actually built the ship. his name was william peary, and he the mayor of belfast. he was the most honored irishman of his time, married to his cousin, as was common in those days, a giant, a shipbuilder control the largest shipbuilding operation in the british empire. and he was definitely the man behind the curtain. and the story of the wizard of oz. i mean, was he was controlling everyone at the time. the traffic across the north atlantic was incredible. the immigration rush was on. about 2 million people a year were crossing ocean and there was an enormous duel going, a mortal duel because shipbuilding is a very fragile industry. they build ships when they when businesses good and then they build too many ships and business goes bad. kind of like what? just happened in our own economy. anyway, peary negotiated a deal with jp morgan to sell the white

star line, of which he was a shareholder and convinces bruce ismay, who was the president of the white star line, that this was a good idea. ismay is the reprehensible character who we all know got in the lifeboat and left titanic. he was the one with the mustache and looking very furtive as he got into the last lifeboat leaving the ship. bruce's may was the son, the founder of white star. he was often mistaken for arrogance, but he was really very shy. he was timid. he wasn't forceful. imperial was able to control him. so in 1907, they realized they have to build bigger ships to compete with cunard. and they decided to commission three sister ships, olympic, titanic and britannic. olympic will be built first, then titanic, then britain. and they're going to be the largest objects, largest manmade objects that ever moved in the history of the world. and to design them, peary gives the job his nephew, his wife,

his wife's also also his wife's nephew. he gives the job to a man named thomas andrews, and he is the slaughtered in the story. he's the architect that everybody remembers standing in front of the clock as the ship is flooding, saying, rose, i'm sorry i didn't build you a stronger ship. well, it turned out that is my error. bruce thomas andrews did design a very strong ship and that when they showed the plans to bruce ismay and the white star executives because the board of trade regulations required one inch steel, they cut the steel from one and a quarter inches to an inch. they diminished the size of the rivets. and that and the specifications for 48 lifeboats were reduced to six. so originally the ship had been designed as a much stronger ship with more lifeboats. the decision was all white stars. they had they had to make the decision to save coal. saving coal was the the prime job of a ship, a ship shipping company manager, because it was everything depended out. there were coal strikes all the

time. so they make these decisions and this we're all we're finding all of this out at the ulster folk and transport and from people we met in belfast too, were familiar with it a lot more familiar than we were. we came to think of them all as titanic acts. they were people whose entire lives were consumed by titanic. what we found out was this is one last secret, was that when the ship sailed, they weren't at all sure the titanic was strong enough to survive even normal conditions on the north atlantic because her sister olympic had been there for six months and was already showing signs of cracking. so when the disaster occurred, these went back. reverse engineer realized that they realized that the ship might have broken up on the surface. and i'm telling too many secrets, so i'm going to stop there. do we want to open it up? yeah. yeah. well, we'll be happy to take questions from you. ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question, raise your hand, please, with microphones, we can. your question. one of the things that richie

and i found most compelling with this story and the thing that makes it extraordinarily relative to today and the thing that really kept us interested in bringing this to a resolution was the fact that we felt like we'd been we'd been conned. the public had been con the story of of titanic as a heroic ship was really a fabrication. we also found out that this issue of deregulate ocean there was a headline in a magazine story a few days ago about this book, and the headline was deregulation sank titanic and really that's what happened because these board of trade regulation, which were 15 years old at the time, are identity to the financial trading regulations that allowed what just happened.

the new instrument is new financial instruments and types of trades were able to flourish and basically bankrupt the system because there weren't regulations in place to deal with something like that. and that's what happened to titanic as well, that the white star line had their biggest year ever. the year after titanic went to the bottom, although the the story centers around us finding these huge pieces of steel, i think at the heart of it isn't about metal, it's about morals and that's a portion of an event from. 2008. joining us again is elise bean of the levin center. elise bean did the cameron movie. 1997 impact act. our understanding of the titanic sinking or was it a hollywood movie? well, i think it had a lot of tremendous information some of

the testimony that they got at the hearing back in 1912 was how different classes of passengers, different types of ticket holders were treated differently and. people on the ship claim that wasn't true. but the facts came out that for first class ticket holders, 60% of them survived were second class. only. 42% survived. 4/3 class ticket holders, half of that 25% survived. and for the crew, only 24% survived. and certainly that movie illustrate the differences in the classes and how they were treated differently. and that is in a line with the facts at the time. do you know, did the sinking, the titanic impact, shipping at that time and i think about the cruise industry today, 800,000 people employed, you know, hundreds of mega ships sailing with very few accidents. i think it did.

i mean, the passenger liner at that time and now those are luxury voyages for many people. and that ship was painted as one of the most luxurious jam packed with new technology, unsinkable. and then it sank. and i think that as a result of all the reforms that followed in safety standards and ship construction, that passenger liner ships today are a lot more safe than they would have been otherwise. and now let's return to the exhibit on the titanic, touring the country. here are some of the personal stories from those on board. we have letters and postcards written from a, for example, third class passengers. these are, for example, a postcard written swedish emigrant who sent it to his father. and it arrived when he was already dead. but here he writes very much about what the ship is like and

how fantastic it is. and he finishes a postcard by saying that had i known everything would go so well. honor could have come along that was his sister. and that was the last they ever heard of him. it we also have belongings from another swedish passenger that she had in her handbag. she survived in a boat sea, for example. her little bible that she carried and the inspection card she had to use when she would come to new york. things like that. we have, as i said before, the letters from first officer murdoch and a letter from a swedish first class passenger who was completely bankrupt and fled from sweden, actually, and he's writing to his wife from

the titanic, saying that i hope they can't understand where i am right now, that the envelope will confess anything. he traveled under a false name. so his name was lynd, about to travel down the name of lincoln. and therefore, the white stalin refused to say that, that he had been on the ship, disappeared. it took the family five years to prove that he had been there. i actually call this story the fellowship of the ring. it's very strange that it survived. the ring belonged to a woman called gerard lindell, south sweden. in the passenger list gave the confusion. later on, she was listed as evelyn north vietnam, but she had to names evelyn dead. she was third class traveling

with her husband, eduard, and they belonged to those who never got a seat in a lifeboat. and in the end they were close to boat a, which is one of the four collapse of the boat. it's a keel bottom. it's a wooden keel with canvas sides. and this was actually the last where first officer murdoch was seen because he tried to free this boat and only disappeared in the water. it landed in the water and they had no time to lift up the side. so it was much more or less a wooden floor that was floating away, filled with water and divide, managed to climb into the boat, but they were standing there with water up to their knees. and another man tried to hold and she was clinging to the side of this boat. but he said afterwards, it was so cold and he they didn't dare pollute into the boat because they feared it would turn upside

down. and then he lost her and she disappeared immediately. and i think that because of the intense cold, her fingers had frozen and because of that, they had to diminish somewhat. and the rain dropped down into the boat. it was a double welded golden ring and engagement and ring welded together. 12 people survived from the boat, but boat disappeared in the darkness and and was lost in the north atlantic on the 13th of may 1912. the boat was sighted by what started lines oceanic and they recovered the boat and when they searched the boat they found a golden ring at the bottom of the boat because neither of these couple survive. they died, both of them. the reaction in the world was

first confusion an then everybody was shocked. and then there was anger. my grandma there on my maternal side, she has told me when eight years old that she was standing here in stockholm by a newspaper kills with a lot of people reading the headlines. and she told me that the headline things were changed and suddenly there was like a shock wave going through this throng of people when everybody realized what had happened. i asked her a little later about this. i said, grandma, that can't you tell me again about the titanic. and then she got very angry and said this. she just said this was an accident and we must not speak about accidents. she had nobody on the ship. but it just reflects how people felt and thought that it was what was so shocking that a whole generation could hardly speak about it without feeling.

it's like today when you think of where were you when you heard about the twin towers or the murder of john kennedy or whatever? it's the same thing with the titanic, where they were when the realized what had happened. they've been historian on ford expeditions to the titanic. so i have been extremely privileged to be on this expedition vessel and to see the artifacts. in 94, for example, we retrieve over 1000 objects to photograph them, to hold them in my to investigate. i mean, it's it's an experience very, very few people have had in the world. in 96, for example, when the consummate just opened a suitcase. it's so private a person we don't know who he was, but there were his trousers and his socks and his shirts. everything was very neat and

anything that came up from the bollards and the the david to buttons. anything was a fantastic inter ist and and i'm happy. i've been there and seen this and done this. the legacy is, of course, that we we couldn't trust anything. in one of my books, i and the whole book by saying how i lost in the atlantic was 1496 people. the world's largest ship and the trust in a safe technology. that is one of the legacies. and there are many, many more. i would say there are many legacy systems are interested people and i'm an ethnologist and i study the interest in the interest. what i find highly interesting because you can find anything

anything with the titanic in ethnology we speak about a vessel and the vessel is could be a thought you load your thought or your wish or whatever with something so you load the with what you want to tell and you can tell anything with the titanic, just anything. when i students approaching me abthe titanic, i say, in what field would you like to do it? because the titanic is a universe of its own. when you see how much has been produced or published, there are books, their records songs, their musicals, their oprahs, their symphonies. there's just anything you could imagine with the titanic. so that makes it very interesting. yes, but it's also a story that touches a lot of people. then you must ask yourself, why does the story of the titanic touch you? what is it that that goes to

your heart? and then we back in the exhibition, because i believe it has do with identification. you can identify with these ordinary people. could be you and me could be anybody. possibly not the richest ones, but just ordinary passengers, the crew members working there or traveling on the ship. it could have been anybody. you can identify with them. you can understand them because they don't differ very much from us, do they? they don't. and that was a bit more from the titanic exhibition currently touring the country. we caught up with it national harbor in maryland, just outside of washington, d.c. so, elise bean, what did the final report out from the senate committee look like on the titanic sinking? well, they issued a final report on may 28th, 1912, just about a month after the ship went down.

and it made numerous, important factual findings that help that answered a lot of questions people had. for example it talked about the inadequate number of lifeboats for the passengers on the ship. it talked about the poor safety drills that went on, the negligence in responding to warnings about ice in the water. it talked about the ineffective communicate actions by the titanic after it was hit. after it hit that iceberg, it talked about the mismanagement of the lifeboats and the poor boarding system that was used to try to save people. and how so many of those lifeboats seats were left empty. and finally, he talked about the poor assistance that the titanic received from nearby ships. so it had a lot of factual findings that were very helpful for people to understand exactly what happened. and in addition, it had a number of recommendations, many of

which were later adopted. i think the legacy from that titanic investigation is a demonstration that congress can get to the. they can find out what happened and why even with a very big disaster, an unexpected event like that. and if you think about it, there aren't a lot of bodies out there that can conduct that kind of investigation. they can subpoena all the people that need to be questioned. and to present that testimony. and i think they did it in an effective and bipartisan way. it shows what congress is capable of doing, and that's an important message for all of us here today. elise bean of the levin center for oversight and democracy. thank you for being part of our series. congressman, investigate. thank you so