Dining Room:
Aiding
the Friendless
Margaret Brown in the Dining Room. Courtesy Stephan Hart Library, History Colorado.
The only known photograph of Margaret taken inside the house was in here the Dining Room. The Browns hosted many social events, often as fundraisers for their favorite causes. The Titanic was no exception. Margaret began raising money as soon as she was on board the rescue ship.
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Newspaper reports after the Titanic disaster put the wealthy passengers in the spotlight, including Mrs. Brown. They were the celebrities of 1912. This memory of Titanic focuses on First Class and leaves out the struggles of the lower classes and foreign passengers that Margaret helped.
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The Titanic was transport for hundreds of immigrants moving to the United States. People from China, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Syria, and Ireland, mostly traveling Third Class, had packed up everything they would need to build a new life in a new country – all of it would be lost to the sea.
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Arriving in America after such an experience, including losing their own family members, Titanic’s immigrants had to pick themselves up and find a way to start a new life in an unfamiliar place. Margaret said, they would be “friendless in a strange country” and needed more help than others. But some could never get that help. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882 and finalized in 1902, restricted the Chinese from immigrating to the U.S. The six Chinese men who survived the sinking never left Carpathia and were deported the day after arriving in New York.
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In an interview on the train home to Denver, Margaret’s story included her frustrations with the wealthy survivors who refused to help her aid Titanic’s immigrants and crew. When she approached these “nabobs,” as she called them, who “were stretched out at their ease on the lounges” of the Carpathia deck to ask them to support her relief fund, they assured her not to worry and that all would be taken care of. Margaret responded that the penniless immigrants and crew would “not have a Ritz-Carlton or a Waldorf to receive them.”
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Margaret was quick to dismiss the idea that a tragedy like that of the Titanic makes all humans equal across social classes. “Even in the face of death,” she said, “the ‘aristocrats’ held themselves apart.” She was criticized for this belief, and many years later she remembered things differently, saying there actually was "a social leveling” that took place.
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PHILANTHROPY AND ACTIVISM
Titanic's Survey of an Emigrant Ship Certificate for Clearance - National Archives, U.K.
Giving up on the snobs, Margaret added her own $500 to the fund, which she had pocketed before boarding her lifeboat. It wasn’t until she formed the Titanic Survivors’ Committee, and posted lists of those who had given money and those who had not, that she gained more support. By the time she disembarked Carpathia, she had raised somewhere between $5- and $10,000.
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Part of the fund was used to thank the Captain and crew of Carpathia for their heroism in caring for Titanic survivors. As head of the Survivors’ Committee, Margaret was asked a few weeks later to present Captain Rostron and his crew with a trophy and medals in a widely-publicized ceremony. You can see one of these medals on display here.
