The 'good' old days: romance v. reality at sea

By Roy Rydell

This article was reprinted from the January 24, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

The movie blockbuster Titanic, and the Broadway musical by the same name, about the sinking of the "unsinkable" ship after it struck an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, has unleashed a wave of sentimentality for the "good old days" prior to the start of the First World War.

The only positive effect of that sinking - with a loss of 1,517 lives - was that maritime law was finally changed to require that every vessel have sufficient lifeboats to provide room for every seaman and passenger who might be forced to abandon ship. The lifeboat capacity of the Titanic was only sufficient for a little over half the passengers and crew aboard. According to the film, the owners thought the decks looked too "cluttered" with all those lifeboats - which were "unnecessary," anyway, because the ship was unsinkable - and so reduced the number by half.

The construction of ships like the Titanic and the equally ill-fated Lusitania, torpedoed off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915 with a loss of 1,195 lives, were part and parcel of English imperialism's drive to dominate the seas - and to show the world that they were number one.

There were very few American-owned passenger ships in the trans-Atlantic service after World War I. During a hearing of a government investigating committee in 1937 it was revealed that English ship owners had a standing agreement with the International Mercantile Marine Co., later known as U.S. Lines, which severely limited American participation in the lucrative North Atlantic trade. English ships in that traffic were all recipients of big subsidies paid to shipping companies for carrying U.S. mail. The subsidy for carrying only one sack covered the cost of fuel for a complete voyage of the ship.

Life below decks

As the theatrical stories make clear, life was good for the first class passengers: beautifully decorated dining rooms with menus a mile long, winding staircases, orchestras, expensive paintings and fabulous suites.

But for the crew? Living conditions for them were hell. Ships like the Titanic and Lusitania, and every other passenger ship of their time, burned coal. It took many men to shovel tons and tons of coal into the ship's boilers to make the steam that turned the engines that drove the propellers.

The watch engineers on coal-burning ships were often picked on the basis of how handy they were with their fists, just in case some fireman couldn't keep the steam valve close to popping off - or some coal-passer lagged in keeping the firemen supplied with coal.

In The Hairy Ape, Eugene O'Neill depicts his coal-burning fireman character as a big dumb misfit, awestruck by the beauty of the society woman who tours the firehold of the ship. Many writers, even those like O'Neill who actually went to sea, stereotyped firemen similarly.

But the fact is that those firemen, and most of the other seamen who worked on these ships, were class-conscious workers who could easily see the class differences so sharply visible to those working on these "floating palaces."

In 1921, U.S. shipowners broke the strike of the old International Seaman's Union (ISU) and from 1921 until 1934, sea-going unionism on U.S.-owned ships was practically non-existent. The Marine Workers Industrial Union, under the leadership of Communists like Al Lannon and Roy Hudson, kept the spirit of trade unionism alive and led the fight to rejuvenate the ISU. When that proved impossible, they organized seamen into the National Maritime Union of the East Coast.

After the strike and until the National Maritime Union (NMU) was organized on the East Coast, wages for seamen were as low as $30 a month in the stewards' department and $40 to $50 a month for an able-bodied seaman, or AB. The companies devised all kinds of gimmicks and were able, because of high unemployment, to get young people to work for as little as $15 a month by signing them on as cadets, supposedly to learn enough through practical experience to pass the exams for ship's officers. In reality they worked maintaining the ship's bridge and wheel house and checking cargo. They worked all hours of the day and night, and for them the word "overtime" did not exist.

Making life harder

A big problem on American passenger ships, before the NMU was established in 1937, was company-sponsored racism. The Clyde Mallory Line operated passenger ships between New York and Florida. The deck and stewards departments were all African American. There was also a large group of Black seamen who were from the Dutch West Indies. They were crackerjack sailors who spoke a language called Paplamiento. On Clyde Mallory ships, if the deck department was all Black, the engine room would be composed of white workers or vice versa - anything to keep the workers apart and divided.

The United Fruit Company also owned combination passenger- cargo ships and followed the same policy: Filipino seamen in some jobs and many Gallego seamen from the North of Spain in other jobs, playing one group against the other to prevent any attempt to unite and organize against the company's policies.

On all U.S. passenger ships, living quarters and conditions for the crew were indescribable. The largest portion of the crew, the stewards department, lived in what was called the "glory hole." On some ships, even after the union was reorganized, a glory hole could consist of as many as 75 bunks, double decked to serve as living space for 75 men. If you wanted a bath you got hold of a bucket, put it under a steam line to heat and took a "bucket bath."

One of the first ships I worked on was the President Roosevelt. I was the ordinary seaman on the 12-to-4 watch and lived up in the bow of the ship. Young as I was, I didn't realize that the heavy round pipe that ran right alongside of my bunk was part of the hawsepipe, until one night the ship came to anchor. When the anchor dropped, the chain ran out through that pipe, making a noise like the end of the world and scaring me half to death.

First class passengers who had their rooms made up three times a day and were served three full meals plus afternoon tea and midnight buffet, were fed and catered to by men who were paid $30 a month and who could lose their job at the end of the voyage if they didn't pay off the head waiter or the chief stewards, or didn't bring the port steward a bottle of duty-free Scotch. Those were the "good old days" and the "beautiful people" on the passenger ships.

Going down with your ship

On all passenger ships the captain is responsible for the safety of the passengers, the ship and its cargo - in that order. Some skippers took it all in their stride and didn't seem to get carried away. But not all. One skipper I sailed with was a labor-hating nut. At the end of World War II, when the Master Mates and Pilots union launched an organizing campaign, he held a press conference aboard the ship and told the reporters that in England the master of the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth are made Knights of the British Empire "but here in New York they want to give me a picket sign!"

While all these ships are laid up or out of service, there are still thousands of seamen, many from so-called Third World countries, working under slave-like conditions on ships operated under "flags of convenience." In the 1930s a leading passenger ship operator was the Dollar Line, running between the U.S. and the Orient, carrying out trade with China and Japan. This company actually had a dollar sign as its insignia painted on the ship's smokestack. The president of the company was quoted as saying that no seaman was worth more than a dollar a day.

On the seas today

Companies like Holland America and Carnival Cruise Line and other companies whose ownership is obscured by a mishmash of interlocking transnational companies, operate modern vessels - some as large as 100,000 tons displacement - which are disasters waiting to happen, given the combination of a ship carrying over 2,000 passengers, and crews which are overworked and underpaid. It would be well to keep in mind the sinkings of the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Morro Castle and the collision between the Stockholm and the Andrea Doria.